He thought that one of the problems was that most cops were white men, and colored folks naturally resented that. He thought that maybe it would be different if a colored police officer were handling things.
He’d been wrong about that. His being colored hadn’t made a bit of difference. The people he had to deal with didn’t care if he was black or yellow or green. He was The Man. He was the badge. He was the guy who was going to put them in jail. They hated him. Worse, he hadn’t been able to help anyone that he could tell. Unless arresting some punk after he’d hit some old lady in the back of her head, and stolen her groceries and rent money and spent it on loose women, whiskey, or worse could be considered helping.
He had been bitter when he’d finally faced the truth about this, even considered quitting the cops, finding some other job. He didn’t know what other kind of job he could get—all he’d ever done after high school before he came on the cops was work unskilled labor jobs—but he thought there had to be something.
He had had a long talk about it with the Pastor Emeritus of the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, Rev. Dr. Joshua Steele—that fine old gentleman and servant of the Good Lord was still alive then, eat up with cancer but not willing to quit—and Dr. Steele had told him that all the Bible said was that if you prayed, the Good Lord would point out a Christian man’s path to him. Nothing was said about that path being easy.
“You ask the Good Lord, Woodrow, if He has other plans for you, and if so, what. If He wants you to do something else, Woodrow, He’ll let you know. You’ll know, boy. In your heart, you’ll know.”
Woodrow, after prayerful consideration, had decided that if the Good Lord wanted him to do something else, he would have let him know. And since he didn’t get a sign or anything, it was logical to conclude that the Lord was perfectly happy having him do what he was doing.
Which wasn’t so strange, he came to decide. While he wasn’t able to change things much, or help a lot of people, every once in a while he was able to do something for somebody.
And maybe locking up punks who were beating up and robbing old people was really helping. If they were in jail, they at least weren’t robbing and beating up on people.
Three months later, Woodrow met Joellen, who had come up from Georgia right after she finished high school. He never told her—she might have laughed at him—but he took meeting her as a sign from the Good Lord that he had done the right thing. Joellen was like a present from the Good Lord. And so was Woodrow Wilson Bailey, Jr., when he come along twenty months later.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Woodrow didn’t know if he could have handled Mamma Dear and Daddy being taken into heaven within four months of each other if it hadn’t been for Joellen, and with her already starting to show what the Good Lord was giving them: Woodrow Wilson, Junior.
That meant two more trips back home to Hartsville. Mamma Dear had told Daddy in the hospital that she had been paying all along for a burial policy, sixty-five cents a week for twenty years and more, that he didn’t know about, and that she wanted him to spend the money to send her back to Hartsville and bury her beside her Mamma, Granny Smythe. She didn’t want to be buried in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, beside strangers.
Four months after they buried Mamma Dear, Woodrow buried Daddy beside her. That was really when Woodrow decided he was going to come home to Hartsville, and when he told Joellen what he had decided, she said that was fine with her, she didn’t like living up north anyhow.
There was no work he could get in Hartsville that paid anything like what he was making on the cops, and they didn’t even know what a pension for colored people was in Hartsville, so that meant he had to stay on the cops, put in his time, and then retire to Hartsville.
That had been a long time ago, and at the time he’d thought he could sell the house that Mamma Dear and Daddy had sacrificed so much for, and maybe buy a little farm in Hartsville. Let somebody else work it on shares, not work it himself.
That hadn’t turned out. With the trash moving into the neighborhood, you couldn’t sell the place at hardly any price today. But he and Joellen had been able to save some money, and with his police pension, it was going to be all right when they went home to Hartsville.
Several times in the last couple of years, he had been offered different jobs in the Thirty-ninth District. Once the Captain had asked him if he wanted to help the Corporal, be what they called a “trainee” (which sounded like some kid, but wasn’t) with the administration, but he told him no thank you, I’d just as soon just work my beat than be inside all day. Another time, another two times, they’d asked him did he want to do something called “Community Relations.”
“We want people to start thinking about the police as being their friends, Woodrow,” a lieutenant
had told him, a colored lieutenant. “And with your position in the community, your being a deacon at Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, for example, we think you’re just the man to help us.”
He told the Lieutenant, “Thank you, sir, for thinking about me, but I’m not interested in anything like that, I don’t think I’d be any good at it.”
What Woodrow thought he was good at was what he did, what he wanted to do until he got his time in and could go home to Hartsville, South Carolina. He worked his beat. He protected old people from getting hit in the head and having their grocery money stolen by some punk. He looked for new faces standing around on corners and talked to them, and told them he didn’t like funny cigarettes or worse sold on his beat and that he had a good memory for faces.
The punks on the street corner could call him Old Oreo, or Uncle Tom, or whatever they liked, and it didn’t bother him much, because he knew he was straight with the Good Lord and that was all that mattered. The Bible said all there was to say about bearing false witness against your neighbor. And also because he knew what else the punks who called him names told the new punks: “Don’t cross that mean old nigger, he’ll catch you alone when there’s nobody around and slap you up aside of the head with his club or his gun and knock you into the middle of next week.”
He liked to walk his beat. You could see much more of what was going on just ambling down the street than you could from inside an RPC. A lot of police officers hated to get out of their cars, but Woodrow was just the opposite. He liked to walk, say hello to people, be seen, see things he wouldn’t have been able to see driving a car.
Officer Bailey was not surprised to get the call telling him to meet the Sergeant, but when he got there, he was surprised to see Lieutenant Foster H. Lewis, Sr., standing by the car, talking to the Sergeant.He and Lewis went back together a long time. He was a good man, in Bailey’s opinion. God-fearing, honest, hardworking. But Bailey was a little worried when he saw him. Lewis was assigned to the Ninth District.
What’s he doing here?
Maybe he’s been sent to talk me into taking one of those special jobs in Community Relations the Lieutenant had talked to me about and I turned down.
When the Sergeant saw Bailey coming, he shook Lieutenant Lewis’s hand, got back in his car, and drove off. Lieutenant Lewis stood in the middle of the street and waited for Bailey to drive up.
“How are you, Woodrow?” Lieutenant Lewis said, offering his hand.
“Pretty good, Lieutenant. How’s yourself?”
“We were riding around—” Lieutenant Lewis said, interrupting himself to point at the new car parked at the curb. Woodrow saw that it was an unmarked car, the kind inspectors and the like got, and that a black man was behind the wheel.
“—and we had some time, and I thought maybe we could have a cup of coffee or something.”