No Name in the Street by James Baldwin

Author:James Baldwin [Baldwin, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-4966-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

Between the night and the morning of April 3–4, in 1967, a Marine, Michael E. Kroll, was murdered on West 3rd Street, in Greenwich Village. He was killed, according to the newspaper stories, as a result of his intervention in a heated argument which a young sailor, Michael Crist, was having with two men, one white and one black. The black man is described as being about five feet, eight inches, and about twenty years old. (Tony was then twenty-seven, and is over six feet tall.) The two men, the black and the white, then walked away, but Kroll and the sailor apparently followed them and another argument ensued, which ended when the black man produced a sawed-off shotgun from beneath his jacket and shot the Marine in the head, killing him instantly. Then, the two men ran away. The claim was that all this happened because the black man had made an indecent proposal to the sailor.

“Can you see me doing that?” Tony asked. His face was extraordinarily vivid with the scorn he felt for so much of the human race. “Since when have I even talked”—his face convulsed as though he were vomiting—“to punks like that?”

And, truly, anyone knowing Tony, and hearing such a description of his conduct, would have been forced to the conclusion that Tony had suddenly gone mad. Tony barely spoke when spoken to by strangers—when we worked together, it was his unending complaint that I was “too nice to these mothers”; he treated nearly everyone not within his immediate entourage with a bored, patient contempt. It was impossible to imagine the arrogant Tony walking through Village streets accosting strangers. As for the indecent proposal, the only way that could be explained was for the sailor to have mistaken a curse for an invitation. But it was difficult to imagine Tony speaking to him at all, and also hard to imagine that the sailor would have accosted him. Tony looks dangerous. And Tony could not have engaged in such conduct even if he were drunk, for the very good reason that he could not get drunk—long before he got drunk, he got sick. In short, in order to believe any of this, it would be necessary to invent a Tony whom no one knew.

But that, of course, would pose no difficulty for the police or the jury or the judge.

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