Wheels (22 page)

Rollie Knight said grudgingly, "I tried one time. Some whitey fink said
no
.”

"Try again. Here
.”

From a tunic pocket the black cop pulled a card. It
bad been given him, the day before, by a company employment office man
he knew. It had the address of a hiring hall, a name, some hours of
opening.
Rollie Knight crumpled the card and thrust it
in a pocket. 'Vhen I feel like it, baby, I'll piss on it
.”

"Suit yourself," the black cop said. He walked back to the car.
His white partner looked at him suspiciously. "What was all that
.”

He answered shortly, "I cooled him down," but did not elaborate.
The black policeman had no intention of being bullied, but neither did
he want an argument-at least, not now. Though Detroit's population was
forty percent black, only in most recent years had its police force
ceased to be nearly a hundred percent white, and within the police department old influences still predominated. Since the 1967 Detroit
riots, under public pressure the number of black policemen had
increased, but blacks were not yet strong enough in numbers, rank, or
influence to offset the powerful, white
oriented Detroit Police Officers
Association, or even to be sure of a fair deal, departmentally, in any
black-wh
ite confrontation.
Thus, the patrol continued in an atmosphere of hostile uncertainty, a
mood reflecting the racial tensions of Detroit itself. Bravado in individuals, black or white, is often only skin shallow, and
Rollie Knight, inside his soul, was frightened.
He was frightened of the white cop whom he had unwisely baited, and he
realized now that his reckless, burning hatred had briefly got the
better of ordinary caution. Even more, he feared a return to prison
where one more conviction was likely to send him up for a long time.
Rollie had three convictions behind him, and two prison terms; whatever
happened now, all hope of leniency was gone.
Only a black man in America knows the true
depths of animal despair and degradation to which the prison system can
reduce a human being. It is true that white prisoners are often treated
badly, and suffer also, but never as consistently or universally as black.
It is also true that some prisons are better or worse than others, but
this is like saying that certain parts of hell are ten degrees hotter or
cooler than others. The black man, whichever prison he is in, knows that
humiliation and abuse are standard, and that physical brutality
sometimes
involving major injury-is as normal as defecating. And when the prisoner
is frail-as Rollie Knight was frail, partly from a poor physique which he
was born with, and partly from accumulated malnutrition over years-the
penalties and anguish can be greater still.
Coupled, at this moment, with these fears was the young Negro's
knowledge that a police search of his room would reveal a small supply
of marijuana. He smoked a little grass himself, but peddled most, and
while rewards were slight, at least it was a means to eat because, since
coming out of prison several months ago, he had found no other way. But
the marijuana was all the police would need for a conviction, with jail
to follow.
For this reason, later the same night while nervously wondering if he
was already watched, Rollie Knight dumped the marijuana in a vacant lot.
Now, instead of a tenuous hold on the means to live from day to day, he
was aware that he had none.
It was this awareness which, next day, caused him to un
-
crumple the card
which the black cop had given him and go to the auto company hiring
center in the inner city. He went without hope because . . . (and this
is the great, invisible gap which separates the "have-nots-and-never
hads" of this world, like Rollie Knight, from the "haves," including
some who try to understand
their less-blessed brothers yet, oh so sadly, fail) . . . he had lived so
long without any reason to believe in anything, that hope itself was beyond
his mental grasp.
He also went because he had nothing else to do.
The building near 12th Street, like a majority of others in the inner
city's grim "black bottom," was decrepit and unkempt, with shattered windows, of which only a few had been boarded over for inside protection from
the weather. Until recently the building had been disused and was dis
integrating rapidly. Even now, despite patching and rough painting, its
decay continued, and those who went to work there daily sometimes wondered
if the walls would be standing when they lef t at night.
But the ancient building, and two others like it, had an urgent function.
It was an outpost for the auto companies' "hard core" hiring programs.
So-called hard core hiring had begun after the Detroit riots and was an
attempt to provide work for an indigent nucleus of inner city people
-mostly black-who, tragically and callously, had for years been abandoned
as unemployable. The lead was taken by the auto companies. Others
followed. Naturally, the auto companies claimed altruism as their motive
and, from the moment the hiring programs started, public relations staffs
proclaimed their employers' public spirit. More cynical observers claimed
that the auto world was running scared, fearing the effect of a permanently strife-ridden community on their businesses. Others predicted that
when smoke from the riot-torn, burning city touched the General Motors
Building in '67 (as it did), and flames came close, some form of public
service was assured. The prediction came true, except that Ford moved
first.
But whatever the motivations, three things generally were agreed: the
hard core hiring program was good. It ought to have happened twenty
years before it did. Without the '67 riots, it might never have happened
at all.
On the whole, allowing for errors and defeats, the program worked. Auto
companies lowered their hiring standards, letting former deadbeats in.
Predictably, some fell by the way, but a surprising number proved that
all a deadbeat needed was a chance. By the time Rollie Knight arrived,
much had been learned by employers and employed.
He sat in a waiting room with about forty others, men and women, ranged
on rows of chairs. The chairs, like the applicants for jobs, were of
assorted shapes and sizes, except that the applicants had a uniformity:
all were black. There was little conversation. For Rollie Knight the
waiting took an hour. During part of it he dozed off, a habit he had
acquired and which helped him, normally, to get through empty days.
When, eventually, he was ushered into an interview cubicle-one of a half
dozen lining the waiting area-he was still sleepy and yawned at the
interviewer, facing him across a desk.
The interviewer, a middle-aged, chubby black man, wearing ho
rn
rimmed
glasses, a sports jacket and dark shirt, but no tie, said amiably, "Gets
tiring waiting. My daddy used to say, 'A man grows wearier sitting on
his backside than chopping wood.' He had me chop a lot of wood that
way
.”

Rollie Knight lo
oked at the other's hands. -You
ain't chopped much
lately
.”

"Well, now," the interviewer said, "you're right. And we've established
something else: You're a man who looks at things and thinks. But
are you interested in chopping wood, or doing work that's just as hard
.”

"I dunno
.”

Rollie was wondering why he had come here at all. Soon they
would get to his prison record, and that would be the end of it.
"But you're here because you want a job
.”

The interviewer glanced at a
yellow card which a secretary outside had filled in. "That's correct,
isn't it, Mr. Knight
.”

Rollie nodded. The "Mr
.”

surprised him. He could not remember when he
had last been addressed tb at way.
"Let's begin by finding out about you
.”

The interviewer drew a printed
pad toward him. Part of the new hiring technique was that applicants no
longer had to complete a pre-employment questionnaire themselves. In the
past, many who could barely read or write were turned away because of
inability to do what modern society thought of as a standard function:
fill in a form.
They went quickly through the basic questions.
Name: Knight, Rolland Joseph Louis. Age: 29. Address: he gave it, not
mentioning that the mean, walk-up room belonged to someone else who had
let him share it for a day or two, and that the address might not be
good next week if the occupant decided to kick Rollie out. But then a
large part of his life had alternated between that kind of
accommodation, or a flophouse, or the streets when he had nowhere else.
Parents: He recited the names. The surnames differed since his parents
had not married or ever lived together. The interviewer made no comment;
it was normal enough. Nor did Rollie add: He knew his father because his
mother had told him who he was, and Rollie had a vague impression of a
meeting once: a burly man, heavy-jowled
and scowling, with a facial scar, who had been neither friendly nor
interested in his son. Years ago, Rollie had heard his father was in jail
as a lifer. Whether he was still there, or dead, he had no idea. As for
his mother, with whom he lived, more or less, until he left home for the
streets at age ftfteen, he believed she was now in Cleveland or Chicago.
He had not seen or heard from her for several years.
Schooling: Until grade eight. He had had a quick, bright mind at school,
and still had when something new came up, but realized how much a black
man needed to learn if he was to beat the stinking honky system, and now
he never would.
Previous employment: He strained to remember names and places. There had
been unskilled jobs after leaving school-a bus boy, shoveling snow,
washing cars. Then in 1957, when Detroit was hit by a national
recession, there were no jobs of any kind and he drifted into idleness,
punctuated by shoo
ting craps, hustling, and his fi
rst conviction: auto
theft.
The interviewer asked, "Do you have a police record, Mr. Knight
.”

"Yeah
.”

"I'm afraid I'll need the details. And I think I should tell you that
we check up afterward, so it looks better if we get it correctly from
you first
.”

Rollie shrugged. Sure the sons-of-bitches checked. He knew that, without
being given all this grease.
He gave the employment guy the dope on the auto thef
t
rap first. He was
nineteen then. He'd been put on a year's probation.
Never mind now about the way it happened. Who cared that the others in
the car had picked him up, that he'd gone along, as a backseat passenger, for laughs, and later the cops had stopped
them, charging all six occupants with theft? Before going into court next
day, Rollie was offered a deal: Plead guilty and he'd get probation. Be
wildered, frightened, he agreed. The deal was kept. He was in and out of
court in seconds. Only later had he learned that with a lawyer to advise
him-the way a white kid would have had-a not guilty plea would probably have
got him off, with no more than a warning from the judge. Nor had he been
told that pleading guilty would ensure a criminal record, to sit like an
evil genie on his shoulder the remainder of his life.
It also made the sentence for the next conviction tougher.
The interviewer asked, "What happened after that
.”

"I was in the pen
.”

It was a year later. Auto theft again. This time for
real, and there had been two other times he wasn't caught. The sentence:
two years.
"Anything else
.”