During their duty hours on the streets the two young policemen had never attempted to formulate their own social philosophy even though from day to day the raw evidence was there clubbing them over the head that something was wrong. However, in the early winter days as they walked their beat they had tentatively begun trying to articulate their growing awareness that all was not well in City Hall. Howard had just said that he believed you only have to be a cop to understand the truth about life in the city when they noticed the boy with the big doll standing a few steps away on the corner of 125th St. and Lenox Avenue in the very center of Harlem. The thumb of his right hand was lodged in his mouth while his left arm cradled across his narrow chest a ragged doll almost as long as he.

Agents Derrick and Howard were amused by the contrast - the boy was coal - black with big staring eyes while the doll had a pale white face, heavily rouged cheeks, two dots for eyes and long blond hair, strands of which hung down the front of his corduroy jacket.

“Hey there, kid,” Howard said pleasantly, “where’d you get the doll?”

The boy turned his head toward the street cops, seemed to register Howard’s black color, removed a wet and shiny thumb and said, “Found it in de trash,” and sucked his thumb deep in his mouth.

“What are ya gonna do with it, kid?” Derrick asked with a big smile, as if about to tease the boy.

The boy looked over the second cop, a white man, fat but friendly looking, again took out his thumb, said, “Take it home and play with it,” and slipped his thumb back in its place.

“What your daddy gonna say, son?” Howard asked. “What’d you say your name is, boy?”

“It’s Sammy,” the boy said, his wet thumb hovering at the corner of his mouth. “He ain’t gonna say nothin. He don’t care none.”

“Oh I’ll bet he does,” Derrick said. “You just wait, Sammy. Uh, what’s her name anyway?” he asked, pointing at the doll.

“Donna,” he said softly. “Her name Donna.”

“Donna,” Derrick said. “That’s a nice name.”

“I give it her,” the boy said.

Howard and Derrick had worked over a year in the neighborhood and knew many of the people by name. Toward noon they usually bought sandwiches in Herbert’s store around the corner. Afternoons they chatted with the proprietor of the Zebra Club just down 125th Street or with patrons of the bar near the corner. They greeted by name women coming out of the brownstone houses and chatted with teenagers from the local school. Shopkeepers and street vendors called out to them by name and liked to exchange news and gossip with them.

Their beat, they said, was a quiet neighborhood. Its inhabitants were their joint responsibility. In fact for most people they were just “Howard and Derrick,” a source of pride to each of them and a promise of their personal security.

As the boy shuffled down the street toward the Apollo Theater, Derrick looked at Howard and shook his head in bewilderment. “That kid’s gonna have only trouble with that blond baby…. People are gonna think he just wants to be white.”

“Or be a girl!” Howard added. “Yep, however you look at it, his Daddy’s gonna be mighty mad.”

A couple days later little Sammy was standing on the same corner, thumb in mouth, a lonely look on his face, his arms empty. “Where’s your doll, Sammy?” Derrick asked. Obviously something was wrong here. “Where’s, uh, where’s Donna?”

“Jimmy, he steal her from me. And give her to his sister.” The boy had a distant look in his eyes, masking a silent accusation that he’d been wronged and unfairly punished by his world. He wore the air of an exile there on the corner of the street, isolated and abandoned by family and the entire neighborhood. Each morning his mother stormed out furious to the early shift at the supermarket. His father was always off in search of another of his odd jobs - or asleep. His two little brothers were at the nursery school at the church. He must have been confused by the disparity between his fierce world of loneliness and desperation and the promises of his dreams of soaring high to the backboards as a star for the New York Knicks.

Fearful of the wrath of Jimmy the bully, today he’d run out of the tiny apartment on the back street and, trying to be as anonymous as possible, quickly turned the corner, and once on the main street looked around in the hope of the miraculous restitution of his only playmate, the blond doll, Donna. But the streets were empty this morning. So for want of any other secure place to go he’d wandered back to the busy intersection.

“You want us to look for Donna?” Howard asked the boy paternally.

“Oh nosir,” Sammy said. “Jimmy git mad like Daddy mad.”

“Now don’t you worry bout that,” Derrick said. “We don’t tell him nothin. We work like secret agents. You just tell us where Jimmy lives and we’ll get your doll back - if you just have to have it.”

Shortly after, the two policemen knocked at the door of the rear apartment of a rundown brownstone a few blocks further uptown. “Police!” Howard called and grinned at Derrick when they realized that they both had their hands near their service revolvers. Who knows what dangers were concealed in the dark rear of the building? Derrick seemed to be thinking. What if they don’t open up? Howard wondered.

Instead the door opened immediately. They found themselves face to face with a tallish girl who said her name was Martha - she was twelve years old. She didn’t invite the agents in the apartment but she said, yes, Jimmy gave her a doll but their father screamed and yelled and made such a fit that she don’t be a nigger girl and grow up dreaming of white skin and puttin’ on white airs and did she wanna be a whore like her mother and weren’t she proud of her race that her mother Elizabeth go into a rage too and threw the white doll out the window onto the trash pile and a homeless ragman named Ole Oscar he grabbed it and he run away with it under his arm.

“Thanks for the information, young lady,” Derrick said crisply. Nudging his partner in the ribs, he said, “OK man, let’s go find Ole Oscar.”

“Have a nice day,” Howard said sheepishly to Martha. They both touched their service caps and turned back down the tenebrous corridor.

They hadn’t gone a block down Lenox when a wiry old man stepped out of an alley right into their path. “Hey, you,” Howard said spontaneously, “you know Ole Oscar? We looking for him.”

“I ain’t done nothin.” The old man backed off several steps as if to run away. “I ain’t done nothin. An I got money too,” he added, pulling a wadded up dollar bill from a pocket somewhere under his multiple layers. “Yo cain’t rest me! I ain’t no vacancy. I ain’t no vacancy.” The old man was so afraid the Mayor’s men would arrest him for being homeless that he proclaimed to one and all that he’d never even been south of Duke Ellington Square but that he couldn’t live in the Mayor’s shelters because his back hurt too much to work at forced labor and if he didn’t work they would ‘rest’ him.

In their year in Harlem, agents Howard and Derrick had adopted a geographical-based response to City Hall’s “class-based and race-based” crackdown - as Howard had begun calling it, quoting an article in THE NEW YORK TIMES about criminalization of the homeless. “Don’t go south of 110th Street,” they advised their homeless. Howard said, “What’s the Mayor wanna do, arrest them all?” “Man, if it’s a crime to be poor,” Derrick said, “we’re gonna have our hands full up here.”

They talked freely like that up in Harlem where nobody had ever been to the Plaza’s Oak Room Bar or the Morgan Library, where people didn’t know that two million people in the city were today celebrating Hanukkah, where people didn’t even realize that their city was the center of the universe. But their dissidence mellowed once they went back downtown.

“No, no,” Howard said, “we not goin to ‘rest you, Ole Oscar. We just want you to tell us where the doll is.”

“I don’t steal no doll. I finded her in de trash yesteday. But she done gone. I selled her to de store. Here’s de dollar old Smithy give it to me. So,” he said, now smugly, “I not be no vacancy. This be my assurance.”

A few minutes later the two agents were staring into the windows of Old Smithy’s store. “This is turning out to be a complicated case,” Derrick said. “I don’t see no doll here. God knows where it is now.”

Old Smithy, toothless bald skinny and jovial with bright bulging eyes, explained that the white doll wasn’t in the store more than ten minutes last evening before Rashun Smith - no relation, he explained - saw the blond beauty and bought it for his girl friend, Sharon. “For only two dollas! She live just cross the street and she at home now. A good-looking girl too, only bout 18 but she a woman. Sweet woman. A real flower. An she got three big brothers to protect her - Harold, Malcolm and Luther. Luther be the biggest and smartest - and meanest.”

“A piece of cake,” Howard said and rang the bell at the fifth floor apartment. “If private eye work is this easy we should retire from the department and open up our own agency.”

Both agents were leaning against the opposite wall when the door banged open and a loud “What do you want?” yanked them erect. The tall muscular youth, black as onyx, an African hairdo, scrutinized them both as if measuring the degree of the threat they posed. It was Luther. Apparently neither their uniforms, badges and holstered pistols on their hips nor Howard’s size impressed him. After a cursory glance at the white man, Luther ignored his presence.

“We wanted to speak with Sharon,” Howard said in as friendly a tone possible.

“With Sharon? What has she done now,” the other said in a precise cultured voice. “The prissy empty-headed little girl! Her problem is she never knows her limitations.”

“No, she’s done nothing at all,” Howard began suavely, involuntarily imitating the youth’s speech. “Well, it concerns a doll we’re trying to find - for a little boy in the neighborhood.”

“That blond doll? You want it for a boy? What on earth for? If he’s black why does he want a white doll? Sharon wanted it as a decorative piece for her room but my bothers and I discussed the issue and decided she could not keep it. It’s hypocritical, poor taste and is a reflection of the kind of subconscious desires that must be eliminated if African Americans are ever to achieve cultural and racial dignity.” Luther’s tone was intense, accusatory, its anger, its flame simmering just under his tongue, a voice that shouted that he didn’t want approval but respect.

“Right!” Howard said dismissively. He agreed, he believed, but he simply couldn’t bear the rhetoric. Too many grim years on the fringe of politics. You think you’re only a cop but try as you might you’re also involved in their dirty hypocritical - as Luther just said - political games. This reactionary Mayor whose every thought is climbing the political ladder. What’s he want anyway? The Presidency? Climbing over anyone’s body, over whole races and classes alike. One good political defeat and he’ll disappear - unless they make him Governor! What do they mean when they say the homeless have no right to sleep on the streets? And that they will be arrested if they leave the shelters but they’re forced to leave the shelters if they refuse to work in the Mayor’s workfare program. A vicious circle. It’s a crime to be poor. The black disease. And the Mayor says all this is the compassionate thing to do! I’m a cop but I think what this rich city needs is a good dose of old-fashioned welfare. It would do everyone a world of good.

“I myself threw the doll on a distant trash pile,” Luther said. “But not before I desecrated it - a symbolic act, I admit, but I felt much better afterwards. I’ll only tell you this much - the doll’s appearance has changed radically. Sharon is better off without it and it too is in a better world now,” he added with a sardonic laugh that seemed to underline his belief that order and everything of social importance in this country hinged on race and sex. Above all in his life counted black correctness.

“Now if that is all, I won’t hold you any longer,” he said, looking finally also at Derrick and gently closing the door.

“Well, I guess the case is closed,” Derrick pronounced as they sauntered back toward their favorite observation point on 125th Street.

“Luther’s right,” Howard said, “if we blacks don’t respect ourselves, do you think that fascist Mayor will?”

“The problem is he don’t esteem nobody,” Derrick said.

“Well, I’ll be goddammed,” Howard exclaimed as they neared the corner. “Isn’t that little Sammy there. And what’s he got in his arms? Another doll?”

“Another doll?” Derrick began as they approached the boy who they saw was crying. Pale tears were streaming down his face. He looked up at them and removed his thumb from his mouth to wipe his runny nose.

“What’s the matter, kid?” Howard asked.

“It’s Donna,” Sammy said and held her at arm’s length for them to see. Her hair had been cut short and her face and hands painted black. The boy’s eyes were a study in pathos. The eyes of an exile. They seemed to hold a great solitude that would stay with him for a lifetime.