The Baddest Dog in Harlem
The Baddest Dog in Harlem Summary
The narrator is hanging out with some friends on a rail talking about the best fighters.Willie Murphy was there making the conversation stale and making everybody mad thinking he knows better than everybody about who the best fighter is.It gets even staler when Mr. Lynch comes into the conversation arguing about some old fighter.
The situation actually gets worse when the cops arrive to interrogate them. They just had a report that somebody in the neighborhood had an automatic weapon. Crowds come wondering what’s happening. One kid exclaims they see somebody up at a building. The narrator and his friends duck and crawl into the Eez-On-In restaurant while the police hide behind their cars and aiming at the high levels of the building. The narrator tells Mamie, the girl working there, the situation and tries to protect her. One of the cops outside slip on dung and accidently shoots into the inside of the restaurant, shattering the glass, and alarming the cops enough to start shooting at a window up on that building. After the shooting, some person yells out the cops allegedly caught some Arab with the automatic weapon.
Mary Brown comes along and complains to the police officers for shooting at her room, or specifically her curtains. The cops try to take her up there to check her apartment, but not without the narrator who reluctantly comes. Mary would only come up with them if she had some black man with her. The cops push them up there first with seemingly no regard to their safety. When they get to her place, the narrator sees a room full of so many holes from the bullets they shot. In the middle was Mary’s dog shot and dead. Mary starts crying threatening to sue the city, but the cops lose their tension and make jokes about the dead dog.
They seem to be all done until they spot a room slightly opened. The officers are tensed again and routinely come into the room ready with their guns. When they come out quietly, they seem sick and depressed. The narrator goes into the room to see what it was. There was a little boy bleeding and apparently shot to death.
Mary goes downtown to receive a statement from the police, and the narrator is glad to be the one to tell his friends of the dead boy and hear them grieve with him about it. Willie asks about the shot dog. The narrator doesn’t even bother telling him what else happened.