I've been to Cleveland and back with the novel, a reading at Case (formerly Case Western Reserve, where I was officially a student at Flora Stone Mather College for Women). I read in Guilford Hall, once my dorm, in a parlor with colorful period wallpaper and heavy woodwork, very much as I remember it. Visited my darling room, the one with a walk-in closet and a dormer window. There are no longer phones on the stairwells. The view from the porch is crowded with the Gehry building, but otherwise much is the same: the wonderful trees are still there, color fading this time of year.
In the audience was a former colleague of Louis Masotti, the professor who led the investigation of the Glenville firefight (or rebellion or insurrection, depending on how you saw it) July 23, 1968. Originally, I told the audience, I was going to write something close to what happened on campus the following spring, as the word leaked in to students: Ahmed Evans, on trial for killing policemen, was almost certainly innocent, whereas the police themselves were culpable. We also learned that the Masotti report, written for the National Commission on Civil Disorders (I think that's the correct name) had accurate details that were NOT being admitted as evidence. Injustice had never come so close. We wrote broadsides, demonstrated, occupied Adelbert Hall, and talked incessantly; I'm glad I didn't write this version.
For the novel, my protagonists had to come close to the action, so I put them on the scene in Glenville; the Masotti report (a paperback titled Shoot-Out in Cleveland) was a key source. It is indeed full of relevant details. The scenes I wrote are accurate, except for the presence of my characters, and pretty gripping.
Masotti's colleague remembered with dismay the furor on campus, including the trashing of Masotti's office; we guess activists were hunting the report. That must have happened in the fall of '69, after I'd left Cleveland. The other professor moved all his research home. Masotti's two student assistants, both brilliant and energetic, both headed for Harvard, both ended up badly: one ran afoul of the law. The other went "off his rocker," wrote an incendiary anti-Obama book and is now in Kenya causing trouble. Nothing ends once and for all.
A woman in the audience was a nurse on July 23, 1968, in an emergency room dealing with a wounded policeman in one bed, a black nationalist in the bed next to him. She and her husband were stopped as they tried to drive home to their apartment on Superior hill. Like the professor, she is still traumatized by the memory; her body was rigid with it.
I loved being there close to those memories, one of those gray afternoons with the leaves in their last throes of being incandescently golden. Listened to Joan Baez on the way home: "... we both know what memories can bring; they bring diamonds and rust."
