Letters

“Get in the car, Todd,” Drew ordered me. “If we get it, you get it too.”

I considered. Trooper James Harris had sent Polly backing to her slot and now walked our way, shaking his head. Ignoring Drew’s threat, I saluted him by name, told him that these people had an important funeral to get to: could he get them around and off the bridge fast?

“Jesus H. Christ,” the young officer replied, and in three glances sized up ourselves, the hearse, and the still-empty space in the line it had pulled out of. “Come on, then, swing your ass around here. You with them, Mister Andrews?”

I shook my head. “Just fishing, Jimmy. Much obliged.” And I turned my back on all of them, not knowing whether they or my banging heart would let me regain the second lamppost.

They did, and here are five postscripts to the anecdote:

1. Both bridges still stand, across which so much traffic moves from Baltimore and Washington to the ocean that the state is constructing new ones beside the old to accommodate the flow: 90 % white, though the cities from which they stream are more than 50 % black. Had our quarter-hour drama occurred on a summer Sunday night, the Route 50 traffic would have been backed up for a dozen miles. I despise this saturation of our Eastern Shore enough to wish sometimes that all the bridges were blown; but I take at last the Tragic View of progress, as well as of insularity. These 1960’s have been a disaster; the 70’s will be another — but the 50’s don’t bear recollecting either, not to mention the 40’s, 30’s, 20’s, 10’s. History is a catenation of disasters, redeemable only (and imperfectly) by the Tragic View.

2. The young men in the hearse went home, revised their plans, and fetched in H. “Rap” Brown to liven up the movement’s oratory and focus the media on their grievances. Arson ensued. But so far from “burning Whitey down”—for any serious attempt at that they’d have been massacred — the incendiaries were Effectively Contained in the Second Ward. When alarmed black families then appealed to have the white volunteer fire department sent in to deal with the blazes, they were told, in effect: You brought that bastard to town; put out your own fires. And so the sufferers from the riots — and from the crudest second-person plural in the grammar books — were all black. But this is not news to you. Only the Tragic View will do, and it not very satisfactorily. Must one take the tragic view of the Tragic View?

3. Some while after, when Mr. Brown had been arrested and his venue changed, Goatee, Tank-Top, and possibly Sy the timer man blew themselves inadvertently sky-high, as follows: I had considered reporting to Jimmy Harris the contents and objectives of both the Pontiac hearse and the Chevrolet pickup; but though I believe profoundly in the institutions of justice under the law, I can manage at best no more than the Tragic View of their actual operation. Therefore on second thought I considered reporting neither. But while the bark of both the black militants and the red-neck vigilantes was worse than their bite, the former were a threat much more to property than to people, the latter vice versa, and one’s BLTVH sympathies are of course all with the hearse in this matter (even though, to complicate things, some of those red-necks are friends of mine: good-hearted, high-principled, even lovable people except where certain prejudices are touched. And at least one of those blacks happens to have been a hopeless sociopath. The Tragic View!).

Thus it was the Pontiac, not the Chevy, I’d intercepted and tried to reason with; thus it was the Chevy I reported, by telephone from Joe Reed’s office to the Easton state police barracks when Joe closed the draw. That evening I informed Drew that I’d done so, and that the red-necks in turn, if questioned, would surely identify the hearse, its occupants and intentions, as would I if interrogated under oath as a witness in the matter. Drew and company prudently thereupon changed vehicles and left town, resolved to dynamite any courthouse where their hero was to stand trial. But as in the field of cesarean sutures, for example, big-city expertise in the field of high-explosive terrorism is less readily available to us home folks: Sy’s timer (or something) misfired outside a little village across the Bay as the group — minus Drew, temporarily outcast for his co

“Goatee,” their leader, was, I then learned, Dorothy Miner’s son, Yvo

4. My bait had been taken by a fair-size croaker, or hardhead, increasingly rare in these waters where once they abounded. A fellow fisherman had thoughtfully unwound my tackle from the lamppost and played him for me through the foregoing. Now he returned the gear to me and stood by with his companions for the reel-in. As sometimes happens in bridge fishing, where the game isn’t caught until it’s in the basket, my prize, well hooked and played, flipped itself free midway between river and roadway and splashed home.

“That a heart-buster now, ain’t it?” my colleague commiserated, and went back to his own lamppost.

5. But it wasn’t, as my survival to this sentence attests; no more than the Argo

So I saw, retrospectively, with sharp sudde