The Heart of Hate

Novelist and Journalist John Hersey has dealt with lofty subjects: death by holocaust (Hiroshima), extremes of heroism (The Wall), a man against the sea (Under the Eye of the Storm). So, at first glance, a sordid shooting in a seedy motel during last summer's Detroit riots hardly seems potential material for him. Yet out of these unpromising ingredients, Hersey has fashioned a book, The Algiers Motel Incident (Knopf; $5.95) that measures up to his better work. "This episode," he writes, "contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the U.S.: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by 'decent' men who deny that they are racists; the societal limbo into which so many young black men have been driven ever since slavery; ambiguous justice in the courts; the devastation in both black and white lives that follows violence."

The case centered on the killing of three Negro youths. By the time Hersey arrived in Detroit last September, the affair had become something of a local cause celebre. Both the Detroit News and the Free Press had published accounts, and three policemen involved had been suspended from the force. Hersey had planned to write on the riots in general, but he found them too diffuse to handle and decided to focus on the single incident. Even so, the episode, as he describes it, "is so complex, the cast of characters so huge, that I simply could not assume the author's usual stance of divine omni science." So he tells the story mostly in the words of the witnesses and makes his own observations in the form of ironic subheads. It took him about six weeks to win the confidence of the participants. The time was well spent, for the subjects ultimately revealed to Hersey much more about what happened --and about themselves -- than they probably intended.

Overwrought Message. The Algiers Motel shooting occurred at the height of the rioting of July on Detroit's central thoroughfare. Police had been subjected to sniper firing, and one cop had already been killed. Consequently, nerves were strained when an overwrought National Guardsman sent word of shots being fired from the area of the motel with its largely Negro clientele. The police dispatcher relayed the message: "Army under heavy fire." Actually, only a few shots had been heard, and Negro witnesses later claimed that these had come from a blank-cartridge pistol; no gun of any kind was ever found at the motel.

Nevertheless, some 16 state and local police and National Guardsmen converged on the motel. A Negro youth, Carl Cooper, was shot to death just inside the door. Police then dragged seven or more occupants from their rooms and lined them up against a wall. After that, accounts diverge. The Negroes, whose stories shifted rather erratically, reported they were all beaten. A policeman, said one Negro, "pointed to the body and asked me what did I see, and I told him I seen a dead man. And he hit me with a pistol and told me I didn't see anything." Later during the incident two more Negroes were killed, Auburey Pollard and Fred Temple.

The book poignantly captures the disjointed lives of the volatile black youths --their periodic fits of rage, their more normal sullenness, their fierce loyalty to one another. Just as absorbing is the anguish and frustration of their parents, their fury at the police and the courts, tempered by the knowledge that they could not do much about it. Above all, one could scarcely find, in journalism or in fiction, a more revealing portrait of a certain type of policeman. David Senak, 24, known as "Snake," served for a year and a half on the vice squad, and he apparently enjoyed his work. It seemed as if his career had consisted of one case after another in which a man or woman had confronted him with some obscene gesture or lascivious remark. Senak admitted to Hersey that a "bad aspect" of his work was that he had never fallen in love with a girl before he joined the force. His arrest of some 175 prostitutes had given him, he said, "a sort of bad attitude toward women in general. I know all women aren't prostitutes, but I think subconsciously it affects me. I go out with a lot of real nice girls and I just can't seem to, you know, get really attached to them." When Hersey asked him if he thought women are "essentially evil," Senak replied: "Who gave who the apple?"

Charge of Harassment. What particularly seemed to enrage the police at the Algiers Motel, according to the Negroes Hersey interviewed, was the presence of two young white prostitutes. Senak, said a witness, ripped the clothes off one with the barrel of his shotgun and ordered the other to undress before the officers. He demanded to know why they preferred Negroes as clients. "What's wrong with us, you nigger lovers?" Another cop then chimed in: "We're going to fill up the Detroit River with all you pimps and whores."

At first the police denied knowing how any of the three had been shot. Subsequently two cops changed their story and admitted shooting two of the Negroes. Charges of murder were brought against two of the police, though not against Senak; one case was dismissed and one is pending trial. Last month Senak, two other cops and a Negro night watchman were all indicted by a Federal grand jury for conspiring to deprive the victims of their civil rights. Most of the witnesses to the shooting, as well as members of their families, told Hersey that they have been constantly harassed by the police. Some have been jailed, some beaten.

Though he was suspended from the force, in a sense Senak still is on the job. Last October, he was driving in Detroit with two prostitutes--one white, one black. He says they jumped into his car before he could stop them; they say he invited them. Whatever the case, all occupants of the car admit that a fight ensued. Senak pulled a knife, and both girls ended up badly cut. They reported the incident to the police but refused to press charges. "The reason I got in trouble all over again," Senak told Hersey, "was because I was overzealous. It was my instinct of a police officer--though I was suspended."

Hersey treads carefully amid the welter of conflicting stories about the killings; he gives all the participants, as it were, their day in court. But he leaves no doubt as to where his own sympathies lie. The Negro youths, he asserts, were "executed" not for being snipers but for "being considered punks, for making out with white girls, for being in some vague way killers of a white cop, for running riot--for being black young men and part of the black rage of the time."

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