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thinned to a pink wash on the front of his shirt, her father had ordered him to leave. He screamed at
Dooley and said it was his fault, that he had given her the sickness like a venereal disease. And Dooley
had left crying, feeling his heart get thick and hardening the way her blood had.
Maybe, after all, that was when the hate had hardened for good.
She d been one of the first civilian cases there, though of course it had been raging through the barracks
on both sides, with the military authorities covering it up. All of a sudden the war had just stopped, mainly
because there wasn t anyone left to fight it anymore. Half the soldiers had been killed in three months.
Dooley had stayed in France until 1920, because the army was afraid to bring the survivors including
the half-million Negro soldiers who had never gotten sick home.
But finally they did come home. Dooley went back to Chicago. The sickness was just starting there, but
Dooley ignored what was happening and went back to fighting. In 1921 and 22 he had 130 fights, and
he lost only ten of them, half that number on crooked decisions against white opponents. That was why,
when they were white, he always tried to knock them out. They couldn t take it away from you when you
had them laid out cold on the canvas. He was making a name for himself as a heavyweight, and then he
broke his right hand and it never set right, not for punching, anyway. When Dooley realized he couldn t
fight the way he wanted to, he quit.
Anyway, he d been married two years by then, and had a couple of boys. That was in the beginning of
25. The year all hell broke loose in Chicago.
Hun was killing everybody that year, and there were riots, big ones, almost every night. People banded
together and looked around for someone or something to blame, and went after it. The Negroes got it
bad, back then. They were accused of being carriers, or worse, of deliberately poisoning the whites to
get back at them. There was this preacher, the Reverend Omer Jonses a motherfucking bughead
name if you ever heard it calling down fire and brimstone on the city, pretending that Chi was the only
place Hun was hitting, and that it was hitting them because it had committed the sin of miscegenation.
Jonses whipped the city up, and of course there had been the Klan, rising up after the war, and on the
Negro side the fiery Muslim from Detroit who called himself Wali Farad who preached that it was not
enough to let the white devils die on their own.
So many people died. You could smell the death even in the winter. That s when the cows in the
stockyards got it, and the pigs, too, the animals dying as fast as they brought them in. The companies
packed them anyway, until the government made them stop. And then, in the summer of 26, the whole
South Side burned down, and that was the end of Chicago. Willson wasn t around to see it happen,
though. He d been approached by a labor agent for the city of Milltown. They were recruiting army vets
like him, for jobs in the factories, and out in the farm towns, too. They were getting organized up there,
the agent said. They weren t about to let what had happened in Chicago happen to them.
So Dooley had moved Momma and Daddy and Della and his own kids up north. They d found a cheap
place down in Bohemian Flats, right on the river underneath the Washington Avenue Bridge. At the time
the city fathers wanted to confine the Negro immigrants to the out-of-the-way places. Dooley had
worked for North Star Flour in their mill just up the river from the flats. Then he heard there were
positions for Negro patrolmen opening up in the Milltown police department.
Daddy had been a military policeman during the years in the Philippines, making an impression that his
son had never quite forgotten, seeing him dressed so sharp with the gold-braid lanyard and puttees and
camp hat worn just above the hard eyes so that his face had been all jaw and hat brim, with the eyes
burning between. Dooley wanted his kids to remember him that way, too, and so he had joined the force
in the spring of 27. At first his beat was restricted to the old colored neighborhoods in the flats, the
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