“An’ I ask you, are we goin’ to let them do that to us?” The sudden increase in the power of the speaker’s voice awoke Rasmussen to the fact that he had not been listening and that something had been said which he should have heard. A roar of response came from the crowd, and with it a wave of movement. An unmarked car drew up behind the station wagon and Tibbs got out.
“We pay our taxes in Pasadena, but we ain’t citizens of Pasadena,” the speaker went on. “You know this is a rich man’s playground, but it’s rich white men! Every year they crown a pretty white Rose Queen an’ have big parties while we’re crowded into ghettos. And that ain’t right!”
“Know him?” Rasmussen asked Tibbs.
Virgil shook his head. “He’s not one of the Negro community leaders, he could be from outside, or just someone who wants to sound off.”
The crowd reaction was mounting, the speaker sensed it, and he responded in turn. The sense of caution which he had been evidencing began to vanish; his words took on a new bite and any sense of restraint was swept away.
“This town is a symbol of the white man’s world, the white man’s dying world. He ain’t goin’ to be in charge much longer. This boy, this Willie Orthcutt: I’m telling you he was better than any white kid in this here whole town. And who killed him? A white boy killed him. A sneering white boy pointed a gun at poor, unarmed Willie, pointed it right at his guts and shot him dead. He didn’t even know him, but he shot him dead because he was black!”
A wave of ugly sound ran through the crowd. Rasmussen looked at Tibbs quickly, searching his face for a clue as to what he should do. Virgil revealed no expression at all, he was simply listening intently to the speaker’s words.
The speaker paused and read his audience. There was a steady stirring now, an undercurrent of mounting tension which charged the air. He had his listeners with him and he knew it. Suddenly he felt the power; understood that if he were bold enough, he could rouse the people before him into action. He drew a deep breath and made his gamble.
“Well, are we just gonna stand here and talk about it, or are we gonna do something? It’s time they were afraid of us, it’s been the other way too long. I say that we go now, like they did in Watts, and give ’em hell until every brown-nosed cop gets down on his knees out of FEAR every time he sees a black man’s face!!”
Virgil thrust the public address microphone into Rasmussen’s hands. “That does it,” he said abruptly. “Put out the riot act-fast.”
Rasmussen gulped air and held the microphone before his lips. “This is Sergeant Rasmussen speaking,” he declared. “I am a peace officer of the State of California and of the City of Pasadena. I declare this to be an unlawful assembly and command you in the name of the people of this state to disperse immediately. All those remaining present will be subject to arrest.”
The speaker heard and understood the formal words, but he had worked himself into such a condition that he no longer cared. “An’ is it lawful,” he roared back, “to commit cold-blooded murder? You go catch that white boy and leave us alone.”
“Take care of your men,” Tibbs said. “I’m going in after him.”
“No!” Rasmussen said.
Virgil laid a quick hand on his shoulder. “Thanks, Ted, but in my case it’s different-I’ve got a black face. Stand by.”
He began to weave his way into the mob. As he worked forward he heard the speaker’s voice cutting through the air. “Now there’s a white man back there who says that we all gotta go away. Just because he said so. Have we got rights, or haven’t we?”
As he worked forward as fast as he could, Virgil Tibbs tried to understand what the speaker was feeling. Raw in his own mind were memories of his childhood in the deep South when he had been called a pickaninny among other things, of his growing years when he had had to be afraid, particularly at night, of cars filled with three or four young white men just because he had a black skin. He remembered bitterly the hundreds of times he had been made to step off the sidewalk because a white man wanted to pass and then he could see himself in the position of the man who was still talking, seeking to escape from the trap into which his racial heritage had thrust him.
As he moved he tried to block out of his mind the risk he was taking, and the limited chance that he would come out of this rebellious crowd with both the man he was after and a whole skin.
He wormed through the tightly packed front row of listeners, walked to the side, and climbed up onto the small platform from which the speaker was still talking. His voice was beginning to fail him now and a decided hoarseness tinged his words. When he sensed that he was no longer alone, he turned, faced Tibbs, and said, “Whadda you want?”
“I’ll take over,” Virgil said. “Your voice is gone.”
“You think you can?”
“Damn right.” Without knowing yet what he was going to say Virgil Tibbs took over the microphone and faced the crowd. He sensed at once that to reason would be out of the question; he would have to pick up where the other man had left off and somehow direct things from there.
He raised his own voice, therefore, and deliberately put a bite into it. “How many of you come from Mississippi?” he demanded.
He got a small wave of response.
“Alabama?”
Some hands shot up, some voices answered.
“Georgia?”
Again, a limited reaction.
“Well that’s where I come from. That’s where we locked the doors nights, not because we had anything worth stealing, but because we were afraid of white men.”
A bigger reaction this time-a swelling volume of sound and motion.
“I know what it means, brother,” Virgil went on, “because I’ve been there! I washed cars for three years and saved my money so I could come to California. I heard I could go to school here and they’d let me. I wanted to come; we lived in a shack where my mother cooked our food, when we were lucky enough to have any, over a wood stove. A white man built the house for us colored to live in and he didn’t bother to put in any bathroom.”
They were listening to him now. Very few who heard his words had any idea who he was, but they knew that he had taken command in a decisive manner, and that he was black. So they waited to find out what he would do or say next.
“Willie Orthcutt was a wonderful boy,” Tibbs went on. “I never met him, but I know all about him and I can tell you this-he would have made his mark in the world.”
He leaned forward until the tension now in his being could be seen and felt. “I don’t know the white boy who shot Willie Orthcutt, but I’ll promise you something-I’m going to find him. And when I do, justice is going to be done and you can depend on it!”
He was an enigma to the crowd; he was telling them what they wanted to hear, but he was speaking to them with the voice of an educated man-a man who might have been white. He could easily have put a Southern slur into his speech, he had talked that way all through his childhood and had never forgotten how. It had taken him long hard work to overcome it. But he would not do it; he talked to them as he was now and made no apology.
“They did let me into school, as I was promised, and I washed dishes in a fraternity house until I graduated.” At that moment he sensed that he must make his move. “Now I’m working for you,” he went on without a break. “I’m going to catch that boy; take all the bets you can get on it. I’m a police officer and that’s my job!”
The man who had been speaking thrust himself forward and took possession of the microphone. “You know who he is?” he demanded. “He’s a white man in a black man’s skin!”
Before Tibbs could respond to that a youth darted out of the crowd and leaped up onto the platform. He had a fanatical glint in his eye, but he seemed to know what he was doing. Virgil recognized Charles Dempsey. The crowd was on the fence now and it could go either way. He decided to let Dempsey go ahead-because to prevent him from doing so might be fatal.