“Please pass the knife,” Dawson said in French. He was kneeling at the railing. His old bowie knife lay on a table by the door. Hélène handed it to him, the long blade gleaming.
“Pas comme ça!” said Dawson. Not like that! “You must always pass a knife by the blade. You must hold it by the blade, you give the other person the handle. C’est le code ancien de la chevalerie,” he told her. The ancient code of chivalry. “It’s a matter of courtesy. You must offer the other person the chance to attack you.”
“But I will not attack you, Captain,” she said.
“I hope not,” Dawson said cheerfully. He began to splice the new rope onto the old, tying and braiding the strands.
“I want to ride in the basket,” Warrington called.
“He’s too big, Papa,” called Ethel. “Tell him he can’t.”
“I’m going to ride in it first,” Dawson called to them. “I’ll be the test.”
Hélène pulled at the heavy coils, her head down. He was watching them. She could feel his eyes, voracious.
* * *
THAT AFTERNOON, in his office, Dawson heard Chief Golden’s ponderous step on the stairs. He stood up to receive him.
“Chief Golden.”
“Captain Dawson.” Golden was slightly out of breath. He was double-chinned, with blue jowls and a red mouth. He took out his handkerchief and ran it meticulously across his upper lip. He sat down facing the desk.
Dawson handed him the letter. “This came last week.”
Golden read it slowly. “D’you know who wrote it?”
“No idea,” said Dawson.
“It is always an interested party,” said Golden. “Maybe the man’s wife.”
“We don’t know who the man is.”
“What would you like me to do?” asked Golden.
“Have the young woman followed,” Dawson said. “See if she’s meeting anyone.”
Golden nodded. “We can do that.”
“She leaves our house every morning at about nine fifteen, to take the children to school,” Dawson said.
“I’ll have someone there on Monday,” Golden said. He leaned forward, setting his hands on his knees to push himself up.
“Ask your man to be discreet,” said Dawson. “If the letter’s false, I don’t want her shamed.”
32.
A Wife-Murderer Refused a New Trial.
On the 26th of September, 1886, Jasper N. Davis, of Anderson, brutally assassinated his wife. The details of the murder and the subsequent trial were fully published in The News and Courier. Davis had deserted his wife and children, and Mrs Davis being unprotected in her own house spent the nights at her brother’s, a short distance from her house. On the night of the 25th of September Davis visited his wife, but she refused to be reconciled to him on account of his bad behavior. The following morning as Mrs Davis and her children were going to their home Davis, who was in ambush on the roadside, shot his wife dead.
—THE NEWS AND COURIER, JANUARY 6, 1888
March 11, 1889. Charleston
AFTER SUPPER Dawson sat at his desk, writing. Sarah was in the red chair, mending a torn paisley shawl. The lamp cast a glow on the shawl, on its rich ochres and scarlet. She’d torn it, catching it on a door handle.
“What are you writing about?” Sarah held the shawl up to the light to see the tear.
“Pickens.”
Of course he was. The whole state was talking about Pickens County.
Last year, right after Christmas, a thirteen-year-old girl called Lula Sherman had been at home one afternoon with her eight-year-old sister. Their parents were sharecroppers, and they were both out just then, her father at work, her mother helping a sick neighbor. A local man called Manse Waldrop, who worked on a neighbor’s farm, was seen out walking near the Shermans’ house. People noticed him because he had a shotgun but no dog. That was a strange thing, because you couldn’t hunt without a dog. Waldrop came to the Sherman house and knocked on the door, and the girls let him inside. They were wearing their new Christmas dresses. It was a small place, only a two-room cabin, so the younger sister saw everything. When Lula put up her arms against Waldrop he used the stock of the gun, battering her arms and face. Then he pushed her down on the floor beside the flour barrel and lay on top of her. She had stopped making any sound by then. When he stood up she lay still. She was bleeding. She’d been torn inside. To stop the bloody seeping, Waldrop stuffed a wad of cotton up inside her before he left. When her parents came home Lula was too ashamed to tell them what had happened, though she was bruised and in pain. The back of her head was pale with flour dust. She said nothing that night. The dirty cotton stuffed inside her was breeding infection, and her bloodstream was turning septic. The next day she was clogged with poison, her veins thick with it. Failing, Lula told her parents what had happened. She died that afternoon.
At the inquest the doctor declared criminal assault. Manse Waldrop was brought into the courtroom and Lula’s sister pointed at him. That’s the man, she said. Waldrop was arrested. By the time everything was over it was late. Some people urged the sheriff to wait until the next day, but he was determined to get Waldrop in jail. He and a deputy set out with Waldrop, his hands tied behind him, in a mule-drawn buggy. The sheriff and Waldrop sat on the seat; the deputy said he’d walk. It was midnight when they started. They hadn’t gone a mile before a man stepped out of the darkness and took the mule by the bridle. You can’t make a mule go if someone’s holding the bridle; they were stopped dead. There were six men with guns. They told the sheriff they were taking Manse Waldrop. They made him climb down from the wagon. In the morning he was found hanging from a tree.
Lynching was common enough. It was rough justice, handed down from the old vigilante system, when the people took the law into their own hands. It had something to do with the Border countries, the dangerous frontier between England and Scotland, something to do with the code of honor. People were lynched for murder, for arson, for any serious offense, but especially for what the press called “the usual crime”: the rape of a white woman by a black man. That was considered an abomination, and punishment for it was considered outside the law, a necessary act. Which meant that no one was ever prosecuted for lynching. In the courts, lynching seemed not to exist. It drifted through the legal system like mist.
Until the Pickens case. The thing about Lula Sherman was that she was black, and her attacker was white. Five of Waldrop’s six attackers were black. This had never happened, black men lynching a white man. For the first time, lynchers were being prosecuted by the law, and four of them had been sentenced to death. One of the lynchers was Cato Sherman, Lula’s father.
This had caused a ruckus. A petition for clemency had roared around the state, gathering three thousand signatures. The first trial had been declared a mistrial. At the second trial a new verdict was reached: two colored men were still condemned to death, but Cato Sherman, two other colored men, and the white man would all go free. The press was divided on the issue. The Greenville News called it outrageous to punish black men for a crime that was committed with impunity by white men.
“What will you say?” Sarah was making small stitches, coaxing the fabric across the tear. The lamp cast highlights on her hair, on the ruffle on her shoulder, her pale hands.
“That I disagree with the Greenville News.” Dawson enjoyed disagreeing with other editors; he liked to set the record straight.
“Why?” asked Sarah. “Certainly they’re right.”
“This is a chance to raise the issue of lynching,” Dawson said. “All lynchers flout the law. No one should be above it.”
“And so?”
“Someone has to take the consequences,” he said. “If there are white lynchers, there will be black ones. Whites set the example by lynching in the first place, and now blacks are following it. If the black men are punished, it will establish a precedent. And that will deter the whites.”
“So you think they should all be hanged, as a matt
er of principle?” asked Sarah. “Frank, this man is her father. His daughter has died.”
“The father’s been acquitted,” he said. “He won’t be hanged. But these men have committed a serious crime. There must be consequences.” He looked at her. “You understand that. The rule of law.”
She said nothing.
“Lynching is barbaric,” he said. “People can’t take the law into their own hands.”
Sarah frowned, looking down at the shawl, slipping the silver needle in and out.
“Well, Waldrop should have been punished,” she said. “He killed that girl.”
“Punished by law,” Dawson said, “not by lynching.”
Sarah didn’t answer. She thought he should be punished not only for murder but for the other crime, the one she wouldn’t name. The idea of it was horrifying. The mixing of the races was an abomination.
She thought of her black maid, Mary, who’d left service when she became too pregnant to work. After the baby was born, Mary came back to show her baby to the household. Ethel came running upstairs to find Sarah. Come down to the kitchen, she said. Mary’s brought the baby!
Mary was sitting at the table with the servants, a basket set before her. As Sarah came in Mary stood up to greet her, embarrassed, deferential. She was smiling, but she kept her eyes cast down. The baby was in the basket. It was a sweltering day, the air thick and humid, but the basket was covered in a heavy veil. Take off the veil, Sarah told her. It’s too hot for that.
Mary didn’t answer. She was a pretty young woman, long-limbed and graceful. She didn’t look at Sarah. After a moment she lifted the veil.
Sarah leaned in to see the baby’s tiny face, soft and rosy. Rosy pink: the baby was white. Sarah felt the shock of it in her body; it was like the sight of a crime. The baby raised her tiny pale fists and beat them in the air. Mary’s eyes were lowered; Sarah couldn’t speak.
Sarah went on setting tiny stitches into the shawl. Dawson went on writing, his pen making a quiet rustling sound. He wrote fast, crossing out phrases, writing over them, his pen hurrying across the page. When Sarah had drawn the torn fabric back together she finished off the stitching, then took out her sewing scissors and snipped the thread. The scissors were vermeil, and in the shape of a stork. Her mother had given them to her. She held up the shawl against the light: the hole was gone. She folded the shawl into a square.
She went over to Dawson, at his desk.
“I’m going to bed,” she said. She stood beside his chair.
“You don’t agree with me,” he said.
“I don’t,” she said. “It’s horrible.”
“Lynching is a horrible crime. I want to have it banned.”
“It’s still horrible to advocate hanging those men,” she said.
“It’s not that I want them hanged,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “It’s principle. Tell me something. Are we moving to St. Louis?”
Dawson leaned back in his chair. “It seems harder and harder to think of leaving here.”
“During the war we had to leave everything,” Sarah said. “Over and over. We had to walk out of the house, not knowing if we’d ever come back. The day of the bombardment I let my canary out of its cage.” She remembered him fluttering up to the rafters on the galerie. “And when we finally went to Brother’s, when we arrived in New Orleans we had to swear allegiance to the Union. Which was a foreign country.”
He waited.
“You left your country to come here,” she said. “If we leave here it will be all right.” She put out her hand and smoothed his hair. “We’ll be all right. We can always learn German.”
“We’re not leaving,” he said, as if her touch had made him certain. “We’ll stay here, fight it out. When we leave it will be for France.”
“All right, then,” she said.
She went into the other room and he heard her moving about. The creak of her chair as she sat to take off her shoes. The click of the armoire door opening, the tiny thud as it closed. She would be in her nightgown now, voluminous and white. Taking down her hair, braiding it for the night. Then the metal creak of the bedsprings. She called in to him.
“Good night, chuck-chuck.” She nearly whispered, so the children wouldn’t wake.
“Chuck-chuck,” he whispered back.
Dawson’s pen strode across the page. “Lynching taints every man who acquiesces in it,” he wrote. “It has proved wholly ineffectual to prevent the crime for which it is its punishment.”
The house was silent. The night had closed around it like a soft fist. The children were nearby; he could feel them sleeping. The dark pressed against the window, and a screech owl gave its ghostly whinny. He was alone, awake, the steward of the sleeping house. It was like night watch, looking out on the moonlit ocean as the ship slid through the heaving surge.
He thought of Ethel, the way she used to pose in the staircase niche. There were two of those niches hollowed out in the stairwell. The children used to stand in them like little statues. Ethel stood on tiptoe, arms raised, head lifted. Her raised arms were so thin, like matchsticks. She was the same age as Lula Sherman.
He felt he was fending off something.
“The world is horrified by a black man attacking a white woman,” he wrote, “but not by a white man attacking a colored woman. This is ugly but it is true.” He meant the white world.
The owl called again, nearer now. Who cooks, who cooks for you, she called. He must set this straight, this wrongheaded notion that the Pickens lynchers should go free.
“There is no safety for a community outside of the law, under any circumstances.”
In the darkness he felt the world was turning, the light moving away from him. He felt the steady loss of subscribers, like the tide drawing out. His debts piling up. He remembered, with amazement, as though it were someone else who had done it, that he had told Sarah to order a whole grove of trees, as though they were rich, and could afford it. Now he felt the house balanced on his shoulders. Three of his best journalists had left for the World, and though most of the time—during the daylight hours—he believed he would fix all this, there were times, like right now, when he wasn’t sure he could. There were times when it felt as though the path beneath him, which had been solid rock, was now crumbling away beneath his step, as though he were about to fall into deep space. He wrote fast to keep his footing, to hold his place in the world. His thoughts were important. He needed to set them down, to put them in order.
“There are signs of a better life,” he wrote.
He’d done this before, fought his way back up from the bottom. He wrote swiftly, filling up the page. He wrote to explain the world to itself.
* * *
ON SUNDAY it was raining, a steady drumming on the roof of the carriage. The sodden horse plodded stolidly through the streets. Periodically she shook her head, as if she could toss away the whole rainstorm; silver strings of water were flung from her ears. They were going to visit Mrs. Fourgeaud’s grave. She’d died while Sarah was in Washington; Frank had arranged the funeral. She was buried in St. Lawrence, the Catholic cemetery next to the Anglican Magnolia.
Celena Fourgeaud lay now between the stained marble stones of her husband and her daughter. The living Dawsons, sheltering beneath big black umbrellas, stood dutifully before the graves. Miss Celena’s was only a sunken rectangle of sodden earth. There was no headstone.
Shivering, Sarah looked at the three graves, the end of a family.
“I’m glad I said goodbye before I left,” she said. “Was it a good funeral?”
“The service was,” said Frank, “but during the burial there was a torrential rainstorm. People could hardly drag their feet through the mud. You couldn’t hear the priest.”
“You could only hear the rain,” Warrington said.
“I hope that doesn’t happen at my funeral,” Dawson said.
“I won’t be there,” said Sarah.
“Don’t talk about your fu
neral.” Ethel put her hands over her ears.
“I can hardly walk,” said Sarah. Her boots were smeared and heavy with pale clay.
When Virginia had died Dawson bought the adjoining plot for himself; the two families would be united forever. She and Frank would lie there someday. Their last child was already there, Philip Hicky Dawson, who’d died of the heat at six months old. Sarah didn’t want to think about Philip Hicky. She could feel his small hot body heavy in her arms, arching away from her, head thrown back. She didn’t look directly, though she saw the small white stone from the corner of her eye. She felt a current of cold rise inside her, as though she were passing over a spring in a lake.
The children fought over who should hold the umbrella. They jostled, muddying their boots. The horse stood still, her head low, her ears laid back, her coat dark with rain.
* * *
ON MONDAY AFTERNOON Dawson read the police report by Sergeant Dunn.
At 8:56 Hélène had dropped off the children at Miss Smith’s School, then walked on downtown and met another young woman. They went into several stores, then separated. Hélène walked to Nunan Street and went inside a house for a few minutes. Then she walked back home. She met no one else. Apparently she attracted a great deal of attention on the street on account of her dress.
Dawson read it carefully. It was distasteful to him that she should attract attention on the street. She was a member of his household. He thought of the way she had stood in the parlor, hands folded demurely.
He wrote Golden, asking to have her followed again the next day.
33.
A MIDNIGHT MURDER.
THE DREADFUL DEATH OF MR WILLIAM MUNZENMAIER.
Slain in the Vigor of his Young Manhood—A Death-dealing Razor—The investigation To day.
A homicide, atrocious in its perpetration and sickening in its details, was committed within the first quarter of the first hour of this Sunday morning. William Munzenmaier, a young man well known in Charleston and who has for years been engaged in honorable employment, was killed … but a short distance from his own home …
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