New Jersey Noir by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

nodded, satisfied. “Yes, I believe that’s very good.”
    Though she wasn’t one for excitement, come Friday morning Miss Crawford was just a little bit wistful that she wasn’t a fly on the wall in that basement hole Bigmouth called his headquarters. She wasn’t positive what the NPD had planned, but it involved special officers, not the usual ones on these blocks, who were still deep in the pockets of the drug dealers and everybody knew it but no one could prove it. Miss Crawford did go out and sit on the stoop across the street early in the morning, so she saw C-4 and his boys coming around the corner. She was interested to see that the officers who swept them up were in plainclothes, so C-4 and his boys wouldn’t scatter nor throw their guns away, while the ones who pounded on the headquarters door just after so they could grab Bigmouth and his crew getting set to head over to C-4’s territory, they were in uniforms. One of them in uniform was Officer Joyce, which gratified Miss Crawford. She was also gratified that the whole operation was so cleverly planned that no shots were fired at all. Though still, it was a good thing it had happened in the morning, while the children were at school. No use having them in danger, hanging out on the stoops and all. There was no need for them to see it, they’d hear all about it by suppertime, C-4 and Bigmouth and all their boys in jail.
    Miss Crawford went home and turned on the radio while she baked a sweet potato pie. She listened to WBGO because of the old-school jazz they played, which she and her Teddy had always enjoyed, and then the news came on. It told about the alleged gang members arrested, most of them in possession of weapons, just that very morning. The police suspected these young men of dealing drugs, though they couldn’t prove that yet. All very well, thought Miss Crawford as the radio went back to music, but those guns every one of them were carrying was the real problem for those boys, and that problem was very bad. Being caught with a gun like that was a sentence for sure. How long it was going to be, well, that depended on if you had anything to say that the police wanted to hear. Those boys would be racing to sell each other out, starting already.
    The timer dinged and Miss Crawford took the pie out of the oven and set it to cool. Then she settled herself in front of the TV with the cat on her lap. The new mayor was going to be making a speech, about how the people of Newark were taking the city back. Miss Crawford wanted to hear it.

NEWARK BLACK: 1940–1954
    BY C.K. W ILLIAMS
    Vailsburg (Newark)
Black coal with a thunderous shush
    plunging into the clearly evil-inhabited coal bin.
    The black furnace into whose maw
    you could feed paper to watch it curl to black char.
    The hats women wore with black, mysterious veils,
    even your mother. The “mascara” she’d apply
    more meticulously than she did anything else.
    With her black lashes she was almost somebody else.
    The incomprehensible marks on blackboards at school
    you conquered without knowing quite how.
    The black ink in the inkwell. The metal pens
    with blots that diabolically slid from their nibs.
    Black slush, after the blizzard had passed
    and the diesel buses and trucks were fuming again,
    but you still remembered how blackly lovely
    the branches of trees looked in new snow.
    The gunk on the chain of your bike.
    The black stuff always under your nails.
    Where did it come from, how to get it out?
    Even between your toes sometimes there was black.
    The filthy tires hung on hooks in the garage-store
    we had to pass through to get to our shul.
    Black Book of Europe , first proof of the war on Jews—
    illicit volume, as forbidden to Jewish children as porn.
    Black people the states in the South began to send up,
    keeping what they needed for cheap labor and maids
    and exporting the rest: a stream of discarded humans,
    with the manufacturing plants just then closing down.
    The photo of black