“Tell Sy to start the timer,” Drew suddenly decided. “We’ll blow this one instead.” Tank-Top, to whom the order was directed, hesitated a moment, looking to Goatee for confirmation. They’d be blowing themselves up for nothing, I argued quickly: Ocean City traffic would merely be rerouted, and their self-demolition reported as a murderous accident by inept amateur terrorists. How this honky know so much? Goatee demanded angrily of Drew. Polly Lake backed up to stop the patrol car a few hundred feet away; went into her Fuddled Lady act with the irritated trooper, whom with relief I recognized. Again Drew urged immediate demolition. I pointed out that all the fishermen and many of the waiting motorists were black; exhorted them to retreat, regroup, replan: the red-necks wouldn’t spring their trap in full view of the state police on the other side of the draw, but would certainly make their move in the hour’s drive between the Choptank and the Chesapeake Bridge — which (I lied) was by now surely guarded by troopers alerted to the event.
“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
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
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!).
