The Trial of Watson Black - A Novel

Here is an interesting novel from blogger Francis L. Holland at the Police Brutality blog.

A NOVEL OF SCIENCE FICTION

Watson Black was on his way home from his dry cleaning job when he noticed a police car behind him. Watson, a mentor at the local high school and a member of the the Whitesville Chamber of Commerce was used to obeying law, having never been charged with any offense civil or criminal in his 32 years of life.

Still he knew the danger police posed. His mother had told him since he was a child that he should never believe he could do what whites did and get away with it, if only because whites would point the legal finger at him if anything went wrong.

Even as he drove at the speed limit and stopped well before the corner at the next stop sign, he felt ill at ease. Just three months prior Whitesville police officers pulled over a car driven by a Howard University students, with two classmates and, for some reason that was never fully, explained, two Whitesville police officers had shot fifteen bullets into the students' car before even approaching them or running their license plate numbers.

Although no one could prove it, most local Blacks considered the incident to be yet another color-aroused assassination by police, while whites who were 81% of Whitesville, believed the students must have done something wrong, even if police could not say convincingly what it was. Two of the students had died before they reached the hospital while the third was paralized from the neck down.

The knowledge that Samuel Bill Sye would never walk again burned deep in the hearts of Black people, in a place that whites could not see or conceive. In fact, since that day Whitesville had become a tinderbox awaiting a match, a bolt of thunder or just a cigarette carelessly thrown from the window of a Whitesville squad car.

What distinguished Whitesville from other towns across America was that most of its sons and daughters had found no jobs in the local area and had instead enlisted in the US Armed services, returning home with a few dollars toward college and the best munitions and target practice training that the United States Armed Services could provide.

Encouraged by Alex Oldhead, a fiftyish ex-Black Panther who had seen the group annihilated in the early seventies and only escaped himself because he was doing time for armed robbery, returning veterans from both Gulf wars had obtained gun permits and given each other new Glocks and high-powered rifles as Christmas presents. They established a de facto Blacks-only shooting club, hunted together on weekends and shot bull's eyes on weeknights. Only they knew whose faces their minds' eyes superimposed over the red and white cardboard.

Compose

Blacks in Whitesville never talked of their weekend and evening activities with their white co-workers and friends, and no one asked. With gun laws watered down statewide like cheap liquor, there was no firearm they couldn't buy at Wal-Mart, at a weekend flea market or over the Internet. At the age of eleven or twelve, young men and some pig-tailed young girls snuck romantic looks at one another as they decimated targets that seemed miles away from their pre-pubescent fantasies.

Behind Watson Black, the flashing red and blue lights began furiously blinking on and off, for no reason that Watson could comprehend, except his skin color, which in Whitesville was reason enough. Watson pulled his Buick carefully over to the curb, put his hands on the top of the steering wheel and waited what seemed like an eternity for the police officer to exit his car and sidle up behind Watson's driver's side window, with his hand on his sidearm as if he were expecting a shootout. Read more HERE

AAPP:  No need for a novel, this is happening everyday in America. But then again... Great novel.