They turned to hasten away, but the general chaos of the dispersal of the crowd caused the woman in canary yellow to be standing directly in my path. The two, the big tough soldier and the small, chubby woman, clashed eyeballs for a moment. Then the woman looked down at my polished boots and with a jerk of her head, spat on them.
    Such a woman possessed no great skills at expectoration and mostly she missed, but I glared and clenched his fists. But I couldn’t go through with it, no one could have. I was trapped in a paralysis of inaction. The woman did not utter ‘harrumph’ as she turned and strode away triumphantly but she might as well have. Further off could hear the voice of Mrs Buckland.
 “Tommy? I’m over here, Tommy.”
Bucky had me by the arm and towed me around the corner and away.

“The suspect is wearing hard leather heels,” Tibbs continued, “and he has steel plates on them to make them wear longer. In those shoes every step he takes is noisy and he couldn’t possibly have made a surprise attack with them on.”…
    “You’re pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you Virgil,” Gillespie retorted. “Incidentally, Virgil is a pretty fancy name for a black boy like you. What do they call you around home where you come from?”
    “They call me Mr. Tibbs,” Virgil said.
    On a hot night in a southern town in USA, a local murder occurs and the circumstances contrive that a black detective be placed in charge of the investigation, much the chagrin of the sheriff, his deputies and the whole town in general. In the Heat of the Night was a superior work by the otherwise mediocre John Ball in which the racial tension layers the skin as does the sweat, and the redneck sheriff is obliged to question his time-honoured beliefs. It was made into an excellent atmospheric film but that was only because the book was very faithfully adapted. It was one of the first broadly accepted works supporting the civil rights movement.
    Sidney Poitier had already won an best actor academy award for Lillies in the Field in 1963, but in that he played a traditional black character. History revisionists place the weak comedy Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? as the moment when Sidney brought the civil rights issues to Hollywood, but really it was In the Heat of the Night, made in the same year—both won several Oscars but Poitier didn’t get any of them. The difference was that here he played a character who was socially superior to the whites, the homicide detective in charge of the murder investigation, which is roundly resented.
    But all of that lay in the future at the time I saw the film as a soldier and read the book as a civilian. For I saw the movie on a rare visit to the outdoor cinema at Nui Dat in Vietnam, where I would be brought into close contact with negroes for the first time in my life. The US army—at combat level—is mostly negroes and Hispanics. I am certain it would have been much harder to treat them as equals had I not had this film to guide me. The truth was that at first I found them so big and energetic that I was afraid of them. Later, we learned to steer clear of them from a tactical point of view because, as one might expect of the least educated strata of any society, they weren’t very bright and their carelessness was a threat to us. But they remained good fun in secure situations.
    The only racist incident we encountered occurred when we watched a white US officer dressing down his men who were all negroes, and using the most overt prejudicial slurs in doing so—the blacks didn’t seem to mind but the officer was promptly butt-stroked by the nearest Australian—which probably saved his life because those further away were slipping rounds up the spout. The word of this incident spread quickly and southern whites were careful to hold their tongues when there were Aussies about after that. The matter was underscored by a Queenslander in our ranks who commented at the time: “Shit, I wouldn’t even talk to a coon like that.”