Number Six

Number Six is the private designation that Maddie Schwartz uses for Ferdie Platt, the Black Baltimore police officer with whom she carries on a clandestine affair in 1966. The name appears as a chapter heading in the novel, and it functions as a kind of code, a way of naming a man who cannot be publicly acknowledged. Ferdie is a patrolman in a segregated police department, a man of ambition and pride who is nonetheless confined by the color of his skin. His relationship with Maddie, a white woman who is separated from her husband, is illegal, impossible, and yet deeply felt, and it becomes one of the central emotional engines of the book. Through Ferdie, the novel explores the brutal arithmetic of race in mid-1960s Baltimore, where love across the color line is not merely scandalous but criminal, and where a man's dreams are measured against the color of his uniform.

Identity and Background

Ferdie Platt is introduced to the reader not through his own name but through the chapter title "Number Six," a designation that suggests both his place in a sequence and his status as a numbered, catalogued presence in Maddie's life. He is a Negro police officer in Baltimore, a city whose police department is strictly segregated. As he tells Maddie, "The department's segregated, Maddie. Negro cops walk patrols, maybe do undercover in narcotics. We can't use cars. I don't even have a radio, just a call-box key." This is the material reality of his professional life: he is a cop, but he is a cop without the tools of the trade, a man who walks his beat while white officers drive. He is also, by his own account, a man who wanted to be a detective, a goal that Maddie ultimately costs him. His age is never stated precisely, but he is described as younger than Maddie, and in one scene he is referred to as having "at least six or seven years" on a baseball player he admires, suggesting he is in his early thirties. He is compact and athletic, with a body that Maddie inspects under the sheets, noting his circumcision and his large, bumpy outie navel. He is a man of good manners, "not a coarse man," with a snowy white shirt and a barbershop-close shave, a man who dresses with care even as his job denies him the dignity of a car or a radio.

The Affair with Maddie

Ferdie and Maddie meet when she stages a false burglary at her apartment on Gist Avenue, burying her engagement ring in the dirt of a potted African violet and running into the street screaming for help. A Negro patrolman rushes toward her, and that patrolman is Ferdie. Their relationship begins from this act of deception, and it is built on a foundation of secrecy and transgression. He calls before he comes, so she can sneak down and leave the lower door unlocked. He arrives after dark and disappears in the early morning hours. He always wears his uniform. They eat Chinese takeout or pizza, often cold, in bed, between slugs of foamy beer. He likes Ballantine's Ale, so she keeps it on hand and drinks it with him, although she prefers wine or vermouth. Sometimes he bends her over the sink in her bathroom, and while he keeps his eyes tightly shut, she is mesmerized by their images in the mirror, seeing herself as she has never looked before: pale and tiny. Before Ferdie, she had thought of herself as dark. Their lovemaking is frequent and intense, two or three times a night, and Maddie wants someone to hear, to know that she is having sex, even if it is just her motley assortment of neighbors. She is not loud before Ferdie, but with him she wants to be heard.

The affair is not merely physical. Ferdie takes Maddie to a ball game, which he later calls his happiest day of the past year, even though he cannot hold her hand or put his hand at the small of her back as they move through the crowd. Some people know they are together, he tells her, and he can tell by their looks. They fool most people, but they cannot fool everyone. He tells her he loves her, and she tells him she loves him too, but she also tells him it is impossible. When he asks if it is because he is black, she thinks: yes and no. It is illegal because he is black. But it is impossible because he is younger, because he is a cop and she is Madeline Morgenstern Schwartz, and she is not going to be a newspaper clerk forever. She could go out in public with Sidney Poitier, Andrew Young, Harry Belafonte Jr., but Ferdinand Platt is impossible on many levels, and race is only one of them.

Race, Segregation, and the Limits of Ambition

Ferdie's life is defined by the color line. When Maddie is hurt by the callousness of the men at the Star over a missing Black woman, Ferdie laughs at her and explains, "Because she's a Negro, Maddie. That's why it wasn't a big deal when she went missing." He is not naive about the world he lives in; he knows exactly how it works. When Maddie asks a white man why no one would attend a Black woman's funeral, the answer is simply, "She's colored." Ferdie understands this reality from the inside. He is a man who has internalized the rules of a segregated society even as he chafes against them. His ambition to be a detective is thwarted not by lack of ability but by the color of his skin, and Maddie, however unintentionally, costs him even that. The novel suggests that his desire for her, and her presence in his life, is a kind of trap, a relationship that can only end in loss. He is a man who wanted to be a detective and who ends up with nothing, a man whose happiest day is a ball game where he cannot touch the woman he loves.

The Baseball Dream and the B'hoy World

Ferdie's story is also connected to the world of Black aspiration and achievement. In a chapter titled "Number Six," the narrative shifts to the perspective of a Black baseball player, Paul Blair, who is living the life Ferdie can only dream of. Blair sits in his car, a '65 Dodge Dart, and signs autographs for the kids who swarm him, telling a boy that dreams come true, that he is proof. Ferdie Platt approaches him, a man a little older than Blair, and asks only to shake his hand, saying, "You are living the life." He calls Blair "Mister," even though he has at least six or seven years on him. The moment is a study in contrast: Blair, the Black man who has made it, and Ferdie, the Black man who has not, who can only admire from the sidelines. Ferdie's dream of catching a baseball and giving it to a kid is a small, wistful fantasy, a wish that he could have been the one to catch it, that he could have had that moment of glory. The novel uses this scene to measure the distance between what Black men are allowed to achieve and what they are denied, and to show Ferdie as a man who understands his place in the hierarchy even as he yearns for more.

Change and Ending

Ferdie's trajectory in the novel is one of diminishment. He begins as a man with a secret love and a dream of becoming a detective, and he ends as a man who has lost both. Maddie, looking back as a grandmother about to turn fifty-seven, reflects that all he had ever wanted was to be a detective and that she had cost him that. The affair, which was never sustainable, dissolves, and Ferdie fades from her life. His story is a tragedy of circumstance, a man whose ambitions and desires are both thwarted by the color of his skin. He is a flat character in the sense that he is defined by a single, overwhelming predicament, but he is also a round character in his capacity to surprise, to love, to hope. The novel does not give him a happy ending; it gives him a quiet, painful one, a man who wanted to be a detective and who ends up as a memory, a number, a chapter title in someone else's story.