A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger Page A

what—when you move ’em them I’ll let ’em be moved,’ so I looked around to see where he was at and when he wasn’t payin’ no ’tention I was on him. I jump over the seat and tried to knock his face off, but I didn’t know what I’d grabbed; he just stood up and I’d grabbed a paratrooper. Man, he was so much bigger ’n me, I could feel all that weight, and I can’t turn him loose now, and then his friends all get into it, and they turned the lights on and everything, they pulled me offa him and kicked me out. Roy said, ‘Let’s go back in there,’ and I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ That’s the way Roy was.”
    In Natchez, Mississippi, in the mid-1930s, a black murderer named Phil Williams was executed by the state for killing his wife and father-in-law. Contrary to custom Williams refused to repent, ask forgiveness, or address the Lord. He simply requested chickendumplings and cigars for his last meal and went to the gallows without apology or remorse. It was an act that infuriated the white establishment but secretly pleased some of the blacks, who saw it as a rare act of defiance. Three sociologists in Natchez around the time of the execution interviewed a black man who explained Williams this way: “He wasn’t much good at livin’, but he knew how to die.”
    That would have been a good description of Roy, except that he wasn’t dead yet. By his midtwenties Smith had served time in one of the worst prisons in the country, had been fired from innumerable jobs, had no steady line of work or steady relationship, didn’t own property, didn’t even own a car, and had a predilection for bar-room fighting and petty theft that suggested at least a minor drinking problem if not outright alcoholism. Going back to Oxford was clearly not a good plan, and it was only a matter of time before he got himself into real trouble in Chicago. It was a measure of his situation that he decided his best option was to reenlist in the military—this time, the army. Even that didn’t go well; barely a year into his service Roy was dishonorably discharged for what his prison records described as a “fraudulent enlistment.” Other documents recorded that he had gone AWOL, noting that he was also hospitalized in Jacksonville, Florida, with a broken jaw. It was not hard to imagine that alcohol, the broken jaw, and the AWOL charge were somehow all connected on a long bad night in the bars of Jacksonville.
    Roy Smith was not one of those people who left much paper behind him; leases, electric bills, car notes are invariably in someone else’s name. The one thing he did show up regularly on, though, was police reports. If Roy Smith was anywhere for any length of time, the police seemed to know about it. Smith took his discharge in New Jersey in January 1955, and before the month was out he gotinto trouble across the river in New York. He was living in Harlem and working as a deliveryman for the Bailey Green Button and Buckle Company, and on January 29 he was arrested for trying to kill a woman with a pistol.
    According to his arrest file, Roy had been drinking with three friends in a Harlem apartment when he started to get out of control. His friends pushed him out of the apartment and locked the door, which prompted Roy to pull a pistol out of his pocket and empty several rounds into the door. The gun was a Smith and Wesson .32-caliber “Victoria” that he bought for three dollars from a friend. Failing to shoot his way back into the apartment, he went down to the street and walked about a block, until he arrived at a shoe store at what was then 2031 Seventh Avenue. The time was ten minutes to seven. There was only one person in the store, a woman named Sally Wright, and Roy pulled the revolver out of his pocket and asked if she knew what it was.
    In fact Sally Wright did not know what it was—the gun was so small she