“All that money you spend on booze, how do you take care of your family?”

Smith moved his head and shoulders behind the wall in a gesture that might have been a shuffle.

“When was the last time you gave something to your wife?”

“Last Friday.”

“You’re a liar. Your wife’s been on the City for years.”

“I help,” said Smith, quickly.

“You help, all right. You help her raise her belly and her income every year.”

The old men in the second row snickered and the Judge eyed them in a threatening way. They began to stifle their chuckles. Willie Smith smiled.

“If she has one more kid she’ll be making more than me,” the Judge observed. But he was not saying it to Smith. He was looking at the old men.

Then he looked down at the now bashful, smiling Willie Smith. “You want some time to sleep it off or you want to pay?”

“I’ll take the time.”

“How much you want, Willie?”

“I don’t care.”

“You want to be out for the weekend, I guess.”

Smith smiled again.

“Give him five days,” the Judge said to the Clerk. The Clerk wrote in his papers and then said in a hurried voice: “Defendant Willie Smith, you have been found guilty by this court of being drunk in a public place, of loitering while in this condition, and of disorderly conduct. This court sentences you to five days in the House of Correction at Bridgeview and one month’s suspended sentence. You have, however, the right to appeal, in which case the suspended sentence will not be allowed and the sentence will then be thirty-five days in the House of Correction.”

“You want to appeal, Willie?”

“Naw sir.”

“See you next week,” said the Judge.

“Thank you,” said Willie Smith.

A black fellow in a very neatly pressed Army uniform came on next. He stood immaculate and proud and clean-shaven with his cap tucked under his left arm while the charges were read. The prosecutor was a hard-faced black police detective, tieless, very long-haired in a short-sleeved white shirt with wet armpits. The detective was tough but very nervous. He looked at his notes while the Clerk read the charges. The Judge, bald and wrinkled and drooping in the face, still paced behind his bench, his nose twitching from time to time, his arms locked behind his back. The soldier was charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon on a police officer; he remained standing erect and silent, looking off into the space behind the Judge until his lawyer, a plump, greasy black man in his late fifties, had heard the charges and motioned for him to sit. Then he placed himself beside his lawyer and put his cap squarely in front of him on the table.