New Orleans, Juneteenth, 1987. Freedom Day. Ex-cop Thibaut Bourgeois looked up at the sky and saw redemption coming down like a gift from God. He blinked back tears and reached out his hands to seize it.
To understand how Thibaut – his name was pronounced “Tee-boe”– got to the point where he needed a second chance, you have to go back seven years. You have to go back here, to Semmes Street, in the William J. Fischer Housing Development in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans. You have to go back to the third Friday in August 1980, the 22nd, to be exact, the hottest day in the city’s history.
The temperature reached 102° that day, but Thibaut would swear it was even hotter in the Fischer Projects where he and his partner, Tunner, were on patrol. The redbrick buildings of the housing project functioned like a stone-fired oven, trapping heat and driving its residents out-of-doors. They gathered on their porches and their front stoops; children cavorted in the street under the spray of an uncapped fire hydrant.
Thibaut and Tunner eyed the scene warily from the front window of their Ford LTD Crown Vic. Normally, they wouldn’t be here. The Fischer was so crime-infested, as dangerous during the day as it was at night, that even the police stayed out, leaving the residents to deal with the rapes and murders, the robberies and the muggings by themselves. But the N.O.P.D. had a new chief now, a reformer from Birmingham, Alabama, who had helped to clean up the police force there, and was intent on replicating his success in the Big Easy.
The chief had formed a task force to address the drug epidemic that was sweeping Algiers and projects like the Fischer. The task force was named for the stuff the chief wanted off the streets, a heroin substitute called “‘T’s and blues” – the ‘T’ was for Talwin, a synthetic painkiller, the “blues” for the color of the antihistamine tablets that were mixed with it, dissolved in water, and injected intravenously to produce a high.
Thibaut and Tunner weren’t members of the T and Blues Task Force, but the chief wanted a visible police presence in the Fischer at all times, which was why they were sitting here, on Semmes Street, next to LaBeouf Court, the virtual center of the Algiers drug epidemic. Dealers and users huddled together in the so-called “breezeways” that connected the low-rise buildings of the Fischer to each other, and the breezeway near LaBeouf Court was the worst of the lot, teeming with illegal activity.
It was stifling in the car. The A/C in their Crown Vic was blowing hot air instead of cooling it, and Thibaut and Tunner felt like they were going to combust. The heat was especially hard on Tunner. At 48, Patrol Officer IV Thomas “Tonnage” Turner – “Tunner,” for short — was twice Thibaut’s age and nearly double his size. A big, fleshy man, he weighed 275 pounds, or so he said – Thibaut thought he looked much heavier – and had recently been told by his doctor that his heart was enlarged and he was pre-diabetic. From Thibaut’s perspective, Tunner was old and fat and slow, but Tee loved him anyway, and wouldn’t trade him for another partner, not even for one of the young women who had recently been hired to correct gender imbalance in the ranks and make up for the shortage of police officers, a chronic problem in New Orleans where cops were historically underpaid.
“You’ve got better legs than Antoinette,” Thibaut had quipped to Tunner, referring to one of the new female hires, but his affection for the senior officer was based on something approaching mutual respect: Tunner, for example, had never called the Arcadian junior officer a “coonass,” not even behind his back, unlike most of the other officers on the force who had no compunction about belittling the black-haired, dark-eyed Thibaut to his face. Thibaut had been born in the Bayou, but grew up in New Orleans and didn’t have a Cajun accent, but that didn’t keep his fellow officers from affecting one to mock him, sprinkling their speech with “dis,” “dat,” “dese,” and “dose,” with a hearty helping of “chers,” thrown in. He got none of that from Tunner and was grateful.
“You could be in Alaska right now drinking salmon-flavored vodka with the Eskimos if you had sense enough to retire,” Thibaut told his sweating partner. He half expected Tunner, a “blue collar” intellectual and everyman ethnologist, to lecture him about slighting indigenous people like the Inuit, but the senior officer only grunted. Tunner fanned himself with a newspaper, and kept his eyes fixed on the street outside their Vic.
Tunner and Thibaut watched as a drug dealer stepped out from the shadows of the breezeway and sold a set of T and B’s to a customer on the street. “What the h–,” Tunner said. “It’s not like he can’t see us.”
“No,” Thibaut agreed, “he’s taunting us,” a fact made obvious when the dealer, a thin, mustachioed man with a bright yellow durag on his head, took a little baggie of blue pills from his pocket and waved it at the officers.
“Worse still,” the senior officer said, “he doesn’t have any fashion sense.” Tunner put down his newspaper and opened the door on his side of the Crown Vic.
Thibaut followed his partner. The heat struck him like a blow to the head the moment he stepped out of the Vic; it staggered him, nearly knocking him over, and he couldn’t help but wonder what the wave of superhot air must have felt like to the big man. Tunner looked completely unfazed by the temperature as he strode purposely down the street, handcuffs at the ready and his baton in hand.
He took maybe five, six or so more steps before he stopped, dropped his baton, balled his fists and began to strike his chest with them. Tunner raised his head and roared at the sweltering sky. From Thibaut’s perspective, he looked like he was doing a Tarzan impersonation, bringing a smile to Thibaut’s lips, one that quickly faded when Tunner suddenly keeled over.
He was flat on the pavement by the time Thibaut got to him. Tunner’s face and neck were swollen and his color was turning blue. As Thibaut bent over him, Tunner’s chest thumped and his eyes bulged forward like they were trying to escape from his head. Thibaut had never seen anyone having a heart attack before, and he wasn’t sure what to do. He was about to go back to the car to radio for help when the fallen officer took one long gurgling breath and died in Thibaut’s arms.
As Thibaut sat in the street cradling his dead partner, he heard peals of laughter chiming from a corner of the Court. He raised his head and saw the mustachioed man in the velvet yellow durag laughing, clearly laughing, at Thibaut and his fallen partner. Anger commingled with Thibaut’s tears. He leveled his eyes at the dealer; the man extended a middle finger in response before turning his back and disappearing into the shadows.
***
Later, after the ambulance came and took Tunner’s body to the morgue, after Thibaut’s shift was over and he changed out of his police blues into a dark hoodie and a pair of jeans, the Arcadian junior officer went back to the Fischer projects to assuage his guilt and pain. He went looking for the man who had laughed at him and Tunner. He went looking for the man in the yellow durag.
He found him where he expected he’d be, in the breezeway off Labeouf Court.
The dark-skinned Arcadian blended in with the night, and he was almost on top of his adversary before the dealer saw him. Thibaut slipped brass knuckles over the fingers of his dominant left hand and hit the dealer squarely on the jaw with them. He heard the crunch of broken bone and watched the dealer spit blood and teeth into the air. Thibaut hit him a second time, breaking the man’s nose.
The dealer dropped to his knees and Thibaut kicked him. He reached down and pulled the yellow durag off the dealer’s head and waved it in the air above him like a fan at a Saints’ football game. As he stood over the dealer, a crowd began to congregate. Thibaut gave the man one last kick before taking his police badge out of a pocket of his hoodie and displaying it to the faces in the crowd, using it to move the people back and assert control. Thibaut muscled his way through them and past them, walking defiantly away from LaBeouf Court and out of the Fischer Projects.
A few days later, his victim filed a complaint against him, and Thibaut was taken off his beat. The N.O.P.D. launched an investigation into his conduct, and he was suspended, with pay, while the inquiry went forward.
Thibaut didn’t expect the inquiry to last long or that he would face any serious consequences. Police brutality was woven deep into the fabric of the N.O.P.D., and no one ever lost his job for it. What’s more, he felt justified for what he did. The man shouldn’t have laughed at his partner. It was like dancing on Tunner’s grave.
***
Things didn’t go quite the way Thibaut expected. His victim asked the D.A. to bring charges and was threatening a civil suit. Then a fellow officer was found lying in a ditch outside a tawdry Algiers bar named Touch of Elegance. There was nothing elegant about the scene. The officer had been shot in the neck and bled out from his wound before help could arrive. No one knew why he had been shot or who had shot him, but rumors abounded, and it depended on who and what you were – a cop or a member of the community – which story you believed.
The cops assumed the officer had happened upon a drug deal in process and got killed for it. Residents of the Fischer Projects believed he was no innocent and had been dealing drugs himself.
Some, a few, both within the force and in the projects, speculated that the officer had been killed in retaliation for a beating that had been inflicted on a Fischer resident by another cop.
Thibaut blanched when he heard that. He didn’t think the officer’s death had anything to do with him. But he got blamed. His fellow officers wanted nothing to do with him, and members of the Algiers community wanted him off their streets for good.
***
The next few weeks and months were a blur for Thibaut Bourgeois. Thibaut had never been much of a drinker, but there wasn’t much to do with his time during the quarantine that had been imposed upon him by the department, and he found that copious amounts of alcohol helped to ease him through the day. The alcohol intensified the fog he was experiencing. He was dimly aware that a war was raging in Algiers – the N.O.P.D. had declared war on the Fischer Projects, and the Fischer had declared war right back – but it was nothing like the battle raging in his soul. He felt that he had sinned against his own nature, both by failing to help Tunner and by lashing out at the man who had laughed at them in the street. Heavens knows his partner was a heart attack waiting to happen, but the least Thibaut could have done was to cajole him to do something about it before it was too late; at the very least, he could have prevented his partner from stepping out of the car that August day to perish under a sweltering sky. As for his assault on the drug dealer? Thibaut wasn’t a thug, and he didn’t need to act like one. It wasn’t like he was going to bring Tunner back by putting someone else in the hospital.
***
While Thibaut engaged in self-recrimination, the N.O.P.D. embarked on a program of retaliation for the death of the officer whose body was found outside the Touch of Elegance bar. The department’s homicide squad rousted residents of the Fischer Projects from their apartments and lined them up against the redbrick building walls, pushing them, shoving them, screaming at them, threatening and cajoling them to name names. Somebody cracked and made up a story, causing four people to die in predawn raids, one of them a woman who was cut down by a hail of police bullets while she was in her bathtub. Later, angry demonstrators marched in the street while snipers took aim at police cars from a perch on top of the Fischer’s only high-rise. Later still, a firebrand named Mark Lane of Rush to Judgment fame came to New Orleans and fanned the flames. Lane, who had most recently served as counsel to the Peoples Temple and the Reverend Jim Jones, was retained to represent the family of one of the homicide squad’s unfortunate victims. He worked the press as deftly and effectively as he managed the courts, forcing the resignation of the police chief and winning indictments against seven of the officers involved in the pre-dawn raids.
Thibaut wasn’t a part of that, but he was meat to be thrown on the grill: the D.A. charged him with aggravated assault in the beating of the drug dealer, and he was fired from his job the moment the charge was announced. He was eventually allowed to plead to a lesser charge, but he still served time in the lockup and was unable to find a job upon his release. His victim’s civil suit, coupled with Thibaut’s mounting bills, drove him into bankruptcy – and deeper into an alcoholic stupor. Before he came out of it, he had lost his home, his reputation, and his self-respect.
He went on welfare and qualified for subsidized housing, and by a winding route came home, to this very spot on Semmes Street where he had watched his partner die. He was living, if you could call it that, in an apartment in one of the low-rise buildings that circled LaBeouf Court like a Wild West wagon train. No one knew, or cared to know, who he was, what he had been, or what he had done, and his skin color was almost dark enough (but not quite) to fit in to a community that was largely African-American.
Thibaut avoided contact with his neighbors. He kept his head down and his guard up. He moved slowly, warily, au-tom-a-ton-i-cal-ly, to coin a word, like some mechanical device made in imitation of a human being.
That’s what he was doing now, in LaBeouf Court on Semmes Street, reconnoitering like he was in a minefield, watching his step while listening for anything incoming overhead, on his way to the liquor store to buy a bottle of cheap booze and self-medicate back to Zombieland, the only place he felt comfortable.
For Thibaut, in short, it was just another day, another day in purgatory, although from the temperature, the sizzling heat of a New Orleans summer day, it was possible to think that he was somewhere else.
That’s when redemption came calling.
That’s when he sensed, heard, saw the child falling from the sky.
***
Some guy had flung the child from the balcony of a third-floor apartment unit. Thibaut didn’t know who he was or why he had done it. Thibaut didn’t have time to take it in. He only had time to react.
He raced to a spot below the balcony and watched the child plunge toward him. The child was a girl, a tiny, black girl, with pink ribbons in her hair. They fluttered as she fell.
The impact knocked him over. Thibaut caught the girl and cradled her in his arms, just like he had cradled Tunner. She was breathing hard, but she was breathing, breathing blessedly.
He was still cradling her, holding onto her for dear life, her tears wetting her cheeks, his dripping onto her face, when the man from the balcony emerged from the apartment building.
He took one look at Thibaut and said, “I killed her mother, and I sure as hell hope she’s dead, too.” Then he broke into a run.
Thibaut examined the little girl. She seemed fine. She looked okay. Her breathing was regular now, and nothing looked broken. He handed her to a female bystander, and took off after the man.
Thibaut was slower than he had been. He wasn’t in great shape, not anymore, but he barreled after the man, remembering the way Tunner had lumbered after that drug dealer seven years ago. Unlike Tunner, Thibaut didn’t falter; he didn’t stumble; he didn’t stop. He didn’t fall. He caught up with the man and sent him sprawling to the ground.
The man hit him as Thibaut struggled to get on top of him. He hit Thibaut hard. Staggered, Tee reeled back; a swarm of dots crossed his field of vision. When his vision cleared, he saw a brick on the sidewalk. Thibaut picked it up and was about to smash the man’s face with it when memory intervened. Thibaut remembered hitting the man in the yellow durag, remembered hitting him so hard he nearly killed him. He remembered the blood on the drug dealer’s face, the fear in his eyes, and it sent a chill through him.
Thibaut put down the brick and let the man up. The man started running away again.
He didn’t get far before a couple of Fischer residents tackled him, brought him to the ground, and held him there until the police arrived. A gathering crowd cheered the residents as heroes, and a news photographer had them pose with the bystander holding the rescued child. The photographer snapped their picture for the evening paper.
No one asked for Thibaut to be included in the shot.
No one bothered to tell the media that Thibaut had saved the girl.
He didn’t care. It didn’t matter.
It wasn’t about the credit or the blame.
by 
Michael Zimecki
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