Palisades Park (38 page)

Jack spoke up: “She’s only standing up for what you always told us, Dad. People are people.”

Toni, surprised, said, “Thank you, Jack.”

“You’re welcome,” Jack said grudgingly.

Eddie had never been prouder of her—or more frustrated with her, either.

“I’ll ask Mr. Robinson if I can picket at the main gate,” Toni told her father, “so you won’t be tempted to split any melons.”

Eddie wasn’t happy at her decision, but realized it was
her
decision. God knows at her age he had already left home and done even more reckless things.

The next morning, after Eddie and Jack left for work, Toni was at loose ends—her summers had always revolved around Palisades. Worse, from Undercliff Avenue she could hear the distant rattle and creak of the roller coaster as the cars ascended, then the falsetto shrieks of passengers as they plunged earthward. This sound, oddly, used to lull her to sleep at night with the comforting proximity of a place she loved; but now the scales of the music it made sounded remote, lost, forbidden. For the first time she began to wonder what would happen if the desegregation didn’t succeed—could she ever show her face at Palisades again? Would she ever want to?

She jumped on her bike and rode as far north as she could, up Henry Hudson Drive and past Hazard’s Dock, pedaling under the western tower of the bridge before finally stopping at the old Alpine Beach, its sand long ago stripped away by the wind. For several hours she shared the waterfront with a flock of gulls pecking the ground for food, calming herself by watching the Hudson, only a light wind riffling its surface today.

Around noon she started getting hungry—and then it hit her: It was Tuesday. She was supposed to have lunch today with Slim.

At the
park
!

Oh God, she thought in a panic, jumping back on her bicycle. She pedaled in a frenzy, racing as fast as she could with her heart keeping pace. She knew that by now Slim might have already gotten to the park, gone inside—gone to the pool, where he expected to see his girlfriend sitting there in her white lifeguard’s outfit, perched on a red lacquered chair …

She biked madly up the snaking horseshoe curves of Route 5, huffing and puffing by the time she reached Palisade Avenue. She biked to the visitors’ parking lot, weaving amid hundreds of cars until she spied the familiar ’39 Oldsmobile—and Slim walking out of the park, toward it.

She braked, jumped off the bike. “Slim! I’m sorry, I forgot—”

Forgot what? Forgot to tell him she had quit her job, and why? But she didn’t need to finish the sentence—the disappointment she saw in Slim’s eyes as he drew closer told her he knew everything.

“Toni,” he said, “what the hell is
wrong
with you?”

His judgmental tone wasn’t unexpected, but it still hurt. “There’s nothing wrong with
me,
” she replied stubbornly. “What’s wrong is what they’re doing at the
park.
”

“Go back in there right now and tell them you’re sorry and you want your job back,” he said in a tone she had never heard from him before. Those beautiful blue eyes of his had turned hard and disapproving.

“I … can’t do that,” Toni said.

“You mean you won’t do it.” He shook his head. “Christ on a crutch, Toni, what are you thinking? Giving up your job so some dirty coloreds can take their bath in a pool meant for white people?”

She felt her stomach cramp, tasted bile at the back of her throat.

“They’re people, Slim. Just like you and me.”

“They’re not like us, Toni, can’t you
see
that? Just look at them!”

All Toni saw was the memory of the boy she had loved, ghosted over, like a double exposure, the face of this stranger.

“I thought I knew you,” she said softly.

“I thought I knew
you.
” His tone was edged in resentment and contempt. “I guess you are a nigger lover, after all.”

She saw red at that. He turned away, and she wanted to lash out and hit him for his words, for not being what she wanted him to be.

Instead she jumped back on her bike as his car engine coughed into life, and she careened out of the lot, down Palisade Avenue and Route 5—keeping her tears at bay all the way home to Edgewater, where in the privacy of her own room she finally let them flow.

*   *   *

Sunday morning, Toni met the group from CORE at the Edgewater Ferry Terminal and asked if she could picket with them. An unassuming man with several cuts on his face—the one Patrolman Bruns pinned from behind while a park guard slugged him—introduced himself as Jim Peck.

“If you do,” he told her, “you have to play by our rules. That means that no matter how you’re provoked—verbally or physically—you
do not
fight back. If they punch someone next to you, just keep on picketing. You yield the moral high ground when you engage in the same violence they do. If they grab you and start dragging you away, let your body go limp. Don’t fight, but don’t make it easy for them to get rid of you, either. Is that clear?”

Toni agreed, and Peck gave her a brief demonstration of what he meant, how to let your body fold up when seized. Later, when their bus reached the summit of the Palisades, she was stationed along with six others, men and women, at the park’s main gate. There they were to picket as well as to distribute leaflets, which urged people to boycott the park.

The Cliffside Park Police Department was positioned menacingly on both sides of the street, standing or watching from cars. Chief Borrell stood in front of Duke’s restaurant, drinking a cup of coffee. The seriousness of what she was doing sank in—she could go to
jail—
and her hands trembled a little as they picked up a handful of leaflets and her picket sign.

The young woman next to her, who looked to be about twenty-five, noticed Toni’s nervousness and asked, “You okay, honey?”

“Oh, sure.” She tried to sound casual and grown-up. “I’ve … just never been arrested before, that’s all.”

“I was scared too, my first time. I was marching in an Easter Sunday Peace Walk down Fifth Avenue—protesting the bomb. I was arrested along with my friend Marion. Believe me, I was terrified when they marched us into the Women’s House of Detention.”

Toni had a horrifying presentiment of her future self: haggard, drawn, dressed in drab prison coveralls, scrubbing clothes on an old washboard in the prison laundry. And her life had held such promise!

“We were out in three days. It was no big deal. I’ll be right there alongside you, like Marion was for me, okay?”

Toni felt, if not exactly relieved, then at least not so alone. “Thanks. My name’s Toni, by the way.”

“Vivien Roodenko.”

“How long ago did this happen?”

“About four months back,” Vivien said. Toni’s eyes popped. Vivien laughed. “See? You’ll be an old pro at this in no time.”

Toni laughed nervously. As the Palisades gate prepared to open, the man in charge of the group told them all to take up their positions. Toni proudly held up her picket sign, prepared to distribute the leaflets in her other hand, and began marching in step with her CORE compatriots.

They hadn’t even made a full circuit of the block before Chief Borrell walked up to one of the men in the group and announced, “Your group is engaged in disorderly conduct. You are ordered to disperse immediately.”

“What?” the man said. “What’s disorderly about it?”

“You’re causing a nuisance—obstructing passage on a heavily trafficked street.”

“We’re not obstructing anybody. And may I remind you, the Supreme Court has upheld the right to peacefully picket and distribute leaflets?”

“Not in my town,” Borrell said cheerfully. “I refuse to recognize your so-called rights, and if you insist on asserting them, my men
will
arrest you.”

“We stand by our legal rights,” Vivien said doggedly. “We’re not going anywhere.”

“Wrong again. You’re going to jail.” He signaled his men and they moved in, seizing the demonstrators, snatching away their signs and leaflets.

“Hey! That’s our property!” someone objected.

“Didn’t think you folks believed in personal property, comrade,” Borrell said with a chuckle.

Toni’s right arm was being held in a vise grip by a patrolman and her first instinct was to pop him in the nose with her free hand. But she saw the other picketers go limp as the cops tried to lead them away, and Toni forced her body to relax into something like a 120-pound bag of concrete.

“Not her!” Borrell called to the cop holding Toni. “Let her go.”

The patrolman obeyed, letting go of Toni’s arm, which only infuriated her. “Why
not
me?” she demanded, stepping toe-to-toe with Borrell.

“You’re not a member of this pinko organization, are you, Toni?”

“That’s bull. Uncle Irving doesn’t want me arrested and making bad publicity for him.”

“I just follow the law. You’re free to go.”

“What if I decide to stay here and picket?”

“With what?” Borrell asked with a grin.

She saw a patrolman loading the signs and leaflets into a police car.

Stubbornly, Toni marched up and down in front of the burgeoning line of customers queued up at the ticket booth.

“Don’t get cool at the Palisades pool!” she exhorted them, her voice trembling a little. “Get your relaxation where there’s no discrimination!” But the customers were looking at her in amusement, not enlightenment. Clearly, you needed props for this sort of thing—and company helped too.

As her friends were herded into squad cars, Toni—feeling guilty and angry at her freedom—skulked away to the nearest bus stop.

*   *   *

Picketing continued for the next two Sundays, with Chiefs Borrell and Stengel quickly and violently rounding up the demonstrators in flagrant violation of their constitutional rights. On the second Sunday, as the arrests began, Toni watched Vivien boldly go up to Irving Rosenthal and begin talking to him in a language she didn’t recognize. They actually had quite an extended, almost cordial conversation; after which Vivien returned to Toni’s side. “What language was that?” Toni asked.

“Yiddish. Turns out the Rosenthal family comes from the same part of the Ukraine my family does. We talked about the war. He tells me, ‘Look, I know what persecution is—I have relatives who were put in concentration camps, even killed, by the Nazis. I’m not like them, I’m not doing this because I hate anyone, it’s just business. Now won’t you please go get your friends and try to persuade them to get out of here?’”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him there were probably some German businessmen who didn’t hate Jews but only thought they were bad for business, too.”

Minutes later, the whole group, minus Toni, was led off to jail.

Feeling solidarity with her friends, Toni attended their trials in the Cliffside Park courthouse, though “kangaroo courthouse” might have been more apt. The prosecution labeled the protests “a Communist-inspired attempt to force admission of minority groups” to the pool. Chief Borrell paced back and forth in front of Recorder Valentine C. Franke and every time CORE’s lawyer brought up the issue of Jim Crow, Borrell objected as if he were an attorney: “This is just a plain case of disorderly conduct!”

Unsurprisingly, Recorder Franke found the CORE members guilty and fined them each twelve dollars. CORE’s lawyers immediately filed appeals.

The next Sunday, August 31, nineteen demonstrators from CORE showed up at Palisades, splitting into two groups, and this time Toni insisted on being part of the stand-in at the pool. They found themselves ringed by both park guards and Fort Lee police, with Irving Rosenthal the glowering ringmaster. When he saw Toni, he told Chief Stengel, “Get them out of here,
now.
No arrests, just put them all on a ferry back to New York!”

“What about the Stopka girl?”

“Send her too. Maybe it’ll scare her into giving up this nonsense.”

As the arrests and beatings began, Eddie ran over from his stand in time to see Toni, her body limp as a rag doll, being dragged off to one side, though not being abused in any way. This was more than could be said for the other CORE members, who were being manhandled roughly as usual.

One of them, a Negro named Albert Morris, tried to take a photo of the scene. To Morris’s astonishment, Irving Rosenthal stalked up and grabbed the camera away from him. When Morris tried to snatch it back, Rosenthal told Stengel, “Arrest this man for assault!” Stengel did so.

As long as Toni wasn’t being mistreated, Eddie held back from action, as she had asked him. But it wasn’t easy for him.

Now she and the other protestors were taken out of the park and onto a bus destined for the ferry terminal. Defiantly, CORE members leaned out the open windows, shouting “Stop Jim Crow!” and other slogans.

One of the police officers walked up to where Jim Peck was leaning out of the bus, spat in his face, then walked away.

The police made sure they were on the next ferry to 125th Street in New York, and Toni at least felt a perverse satisfaction that she was being treated like her fellow demonstrators. She came up to Jim Peck, leaning over the ferry’s railing as the salt spray of the Hudson washed away the blood from the cuts he had incurred, and asked, “So what do we do now?”

He looked at her and smiled. “Go right back, of course! What else?”

When they reached Manhattan they got more signs and leaflets from their offices, then eighteen CORE members, plus Toni, marched onto the next ferry bound for Edgewater. In less than an hour they were back on the picket line in front of the main gate on Palisade Avenue.

This momentarily flummoxed the ticket takers and security guards at the park entrance, who were hardly expecting a second wave of protest. Chief Borrell and his men were quickly summoned and they just as quickly began arresting the eighteen CORE members.

Word of the second protest outside the gates flashed across the park within minutes. When he heard, Eddie tore off his apron and jumped the counter of his stand. “Stay here!” he ordered Jack, but Jack snapped, “Hell if I will!” He dropped the awnings and locked up the stand, even though there was a line of customers waiting to order French fries. He raced after his dad, running toward the Palisade gate.