Jonathan, Diana, and I were dumped at the police station. We were told to sit in a line of benches that felt like pews in the Church of Stink and Wallow. All around us were moans, men peeing themselves and women so spent with tears they were hiccupping. I ached everywhere, my eye throbbed, blood had dried on my dress, my face hurt, and I hoped my nose wasn’t broken. Diana was a nonstop fountain of curses. Jonathan kept hollering through his bloodied lips, Do you know who I am! Do you know who my father is? until some cop came along and told both of them to shut the hell up.

“You can’t tell me to shut up. You can’t hold us,” cried Jonathan. “We haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Resisting arrest.”

“We weren’t resisting arrest. We got in a fight with photographers.”

“It was a drug raid. They had drugs.”

“That’s not true.”

“That’s what they told me.”

“We are important people. You will regret this.”

“Not as much as you will. Look at that lip! Now shut up or it will get a lot worse.”

We could see that was true. White people swept up in the raid streamed into the station, some the worse for wear, but few were badly bloodied. The Negroes shambled in, pushed with nightsticks, their clothes stained with blood, their heads too. Many limped or leaned on one another. Men and women who just hours before had seemed so graceful, so joyous, so in command of the Comet Club and their music, shuffled in, abject. They were told to sit separate from the white people across an irregular aisle. Jaylene Henderson was not among them. Terrence was one of the last. His right eye was swollen shut and bloody, and his shirtfront was red. The cop nudged him with the nightstick to the small of his back. He moved forward, but without haste. He glanced at me, and looked away.

From down the hall a voice bellowed out, “My horn! My horn, gimme back my horn, goddammit!”

Two cops thrust Booker in front of them. He was badly beaten. Terrence jumped to his feet and started toward his brother till a cop blocked his path. Diana leapt up and cried, “Motherfuckers! Dirty bastards! Sonsofbitches!” She kept swearing and shouting till they led Booker away, down a long hall.

Terrence sat down, bent over, his head in his hands. I rose and started to hobble toward him till a cop roughly took my arm, marched me back to Jonathan and Diana, and told me to stay put and shut up. Jonathan put his hand over mine.

“This is Irv Rakoff’s doing,” Diana said, her voice thick with rage and pain. “This is his revenge. I should never have . . .”

“Fired him?” I asked. “Of course you should have fired him! Look what he was doing to you every time you wanted a new role!”