Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  “You, preacher,” the Red Shirt said. “I know you.”

  The preacher didn’t even look up from his Bible. “I doubt it.”

  “Don’t be back-sassing me, boy. I seen you in Tennessee, last year it was. Trouble in Johnson County, and you smack-dab in the middle of it.”

  “Sir, you are mistaken.” Now, he looked up straight into the man’s eyes, challenging him.

  The other two Red Shirts moved up the aisle and stood behind the first man. “You trying to pass? Trying to make fools out of us, nigger?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” the preacher said. Sam was transfixed by the man’s calm demeanor—he himself would already have shoved a fist into the Red Shirt’s eye. A sober man could always knock down a drunk.

  Gray Ellen squeezed Sam’s arm and whispered, “Do something.”

  “None of our business—local stuff.”

  “Help him, before it gets out of hand.”

  “Let it go by.”

  But instead, Gray Ellen turned and rose half out of her seat.

  The Red Shirts grabbed the preacher by the coat and hauled him into the aisle. “You ought to be riding in the colored car, boy—didn’t your mama ever learn you your place?” The preacher’s hat fluttered to the floor and was lost under boots.

  “Sam!” Gray Ellen whispered urgently.

  The Red Shirts were manhandling the preacher up the aisle. Gray Ellen suddenly moved to block them. “What’s going on here?” she demanded. “This gentleman, he was just minding his own business.”

  “That’s right, ma’am—and you just mind yours.”

  Another of the Red Shirts said, “He’ll just have to hoof it the rest of the way.”

  “You can’t just throw a man off—”

  One of the Red Shirts clutched her arm. “You best not—”

  “Take your hands off my wife.” Sam was standing now, and he edged out into the aisle, crowding Gray Ellen. The river flashed by through gaps in the trees, hung with gray Spanish moss. The Red Shirt released her arm, uncertain what to do. Sam was tall and lanky, but he had a reach. The Red Shirt looked him in the eye, then looked away.

  Other people in the coach were craning their necks to see what was going on—they murmured and pointed. Sam couldn’t tell whose side they were on.

  “Gentlemen. Ma’am.” It was one of the soldiers who had been sitting up front. Now, he loomed over their shoulders. Spreading his arms, he gathered Sam and Gray Ellen together like children. Gray Ellen smelled whiskey and horse sweat, mixed with cigar smoke, bay rum, and another odor she couldn’t quite place.

  “Just please take your seats, folks.” He pressed a big hand onto Sam’s shoulder and practically forced him into his seat. With Gray Ellen, he was gentler. “Please, ma’am,” he said. He reminded her of pictures she’d seen of Colonel Roosevelt with the Rough Riders. She relaxed and sat—something about his touch made her defer to him.

  “Now, boys,” he addressed the Red Shirts, “this ain’t the time or the place. The preacher here may not be aware of our customs.”

  The way he looked at the gray-suited preacher, hung between two Red Shirts like laundry, made it plain to Gray Ellen that the soldier didn’t believe for a second what he was saying—he was just trying to keep the peace.

  “Where’s your manners?” he said. They bowed jerkily and murmured an apology to Gray Ellen. “That’s fine. Now, boys, go on back to your seats.” He slapped a hand onto the preacher’s shoulder. The Red Shirts melted toward the back of the car, grumbling. The conductor squeezed by the soldier and disappeared into the forward vestibule.

  The big soldier guided the preacher into his seat, handed him back his crushed hat, and winked at him without smiling. To Gray Ellen, he said, “Ma’am, I’m sorry as I can be. Some folks just get carried away.” He grinned wryly, looking even more like Colonel Roosevelt, moustache and all. He was older than she’d first thought—his hair was silver, brush-cut. His broad nose was a florid map of whiskey nights. But he looked fit—deep-chested and blocky in the shoulders. He held out a big red hand. “Captain Bill Kenan, ma’am. A pleasure.”

  “Likewise,” she said, then introduced herself and Sam.

  He glanced at the many bags in the overhead rack. “Coming to settle in our town, are you?”

  Sam said, “We’ve heard there’s lots of opportunity.”

  Kenan nodded. “So they tell me.”

  Gray Ellen said, “Would they really have thrown him off a moving train?”

  “Don’t let this give you the wrong impression. It’s a good town.”

  “Are you just back from the Cuban war?” Sam asked to get off the subject. He might as well find out if the man knew about him.

  Kenan laughed. “My war was over years ago. Now, I train the state militia.”

  Sam relaxed. “What’s your specialty?”

  Kenan beamed. “Guns,” he said happily. “Ordnance.”

  That was the other smell, Gray Ellen realized: gun oil. Her father kept silver-plated shotguns in a glass case and cleaned them every Saturday.

  Kenan went back to his seat, leaving the aisle clear. Gray Ellen was relieved. She squeezed Sam’s arm—he had stood by her.

  Across the aisle, old Waddell smiled enigmatically, narrowing his gray eyes but never losing his smile. A couple of miles down the track, he observed, “That Captain Kenan, he has quite a reputation in these parts. He was the sharpshooting champion of the entire Confederate army.”

  “Looks like a steady man,” Sam said.

  “The Duplin Rifles advanced closer to Washington than any other company in the Forty-third, and him out front.” This was a story Waddell liked to tell, about a time of glory, of honor.

  “They could see the unfinished Capitol dome shining above the battlefield.” His eyes were dancing, and he used his hands in broad, fluttering gestures. “They could see workmen on the scaffolds.” Waddell wished he’d been there himself, shoulder to shoulder with Bill Kenan, watching the president’s black stovepipe hat sticking up above the parapet, shivering in a breeze of musket fire. “When the battle began, Lincoln was inspecting the troops at Fort Stevens. Captain Kenan—Lieutenant Kenan then—led the sharpshooters to within hollering distance of the fort. Took a shot at Abe Lincoln himself.”

  Gray Ellen said, “He missed, I take it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Waddell said, missing the joke. “Killed the boy next to the president—a head shot.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “Kenan was wounded at Charleston, but he stayed with the regiment till Appomattox. Wasn’t a single deserter in that outfit all during the War.” He said it as if he himself were personally responsible.

  The train rumbled over the trestle at Smith’s Creek. Sam said, “You were with the Forty-third?”

  “Do I look like a foot soldier?”

  No. He looked like a Collier’s ink sketch of an antebellum cavalier, an aristocrat—hawk nose, receding hair, silver goatee.

  “The Forty-first Regiment of the Third North Carolina—cavalry, sir.”

  Sam nodded. “Those fellows in the red shirts—that some kind of uniform?”

  Waddell smiled and fingered the brass head of his cane. “An Irish fraternal group, I gather. Poor-bockers. Men who can’t find work.”

  “Poor-bockers?”

  “Local slang.”

  “What do they call themselves?” Sam asked.

  “What else? The Red Shirts.” He smiled, as if amused by the obvious lack of imagination. “Those boys are from out of town—lots of strangers coming in these days.”

  Like us, Sam thought. “I’m a newspaperman,” he said. “A reporter.”

  “Bright young man might go far, he keeps his head.” There was a twinkle in Waddell’s eye. “Somebody who could tell the story of this place. Write it for the whole world.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  The train was out in the open now, running fast on good track. Across the river, another channel flowed
into the Cape Fear under a high spit of land.

  In the back of the carriage, the Red Shirts were stirring. They trundled up the aisle carrying cloth bags and string-tied bundles in brown paper. Two of them had Winchester rifles slung across their backs. They passed the preacher, but the last one stopped beside Gray Ellen. He leaned down and pointed across her body and out the window toward the river. “See that point of land yonder? They call that Nigger Head Point, sweetheart.” He grinned. “Care to know how it got that name?”

  “That’s enough,” Sam said. “Move along.”

  The Red Shirt joined his companions in the forward vestibule.

  Outside the window, the river vanished and houses appeared—shotgun shacks and clapboard two-stories, some of them clean and tidy, others run-down, their paint peeling, pigs rooting among trash in the yards. Men loitered in the dirt streets—black men in a knot outside a drugstore, white men smoking on the stoop of a tavern. Sam had seen the ragged unemployed in other cities.

  Waddell said, “Brooklyn. The darkies live here. And white laborers. Most of the Irish are in Dry Pond, over in that direction.” He pointed out his own window. “Don’t be alarmed—the train comes into the better part of town.”

  “Why do they call it Brooklyn?” Gray Ellen asked.

  Waddell smiled. “Who knows? They do have a Manhattan Club there—sort of a bal musette. They go there to dance and carouse. The darkies do love their music.”

  “I see.”

  The conductor walked through the car announcing, “Wilmington, change for the Seaboard Air Line, the Short Line, Charleston, and points west.”

  The train pulled under the long awnings of the Atlantic Coast Line platform, thronged with women in sun hats and men in seersucker suits meeting the arrival. Redcaps scurried about retrieving bags.

  “Come see me, hear?” Waddell said, handing Sam his card: A. M. Waddell, Lt. Col., C.S.A., Attorney-at-Law. “You lose it, I’m in the city directory,” he said. “Mrs. Jenks.” He bowed in the old, grand manner and left the train. On his seat, he left behind a copy of the latest Raleigh News & Observer, opened to an editorial cartoon of a giant black boot—labeled The Negro—crushing a tiny white man’s back. The caption read, A Serious Question—How Long Will This Last?

  The preacher quietly walked out the back of the car. Through the window, Gray Ellen watched him pause, hatless, on the platform, before he pushed through the crowd and past the swinging iron gate into the city.

  One of the editors and owners of a paper was an associated press reporter and he let loose all that a credulous people would believe. They had most of the innocent people, women and children, with the feminine men believing everything that was printed, as well as the news that was circulated and peddled on the streets.

  Benjamin F. Keith, wholesale merchant

  CHAPTER TWO

  Monday, August 15

  WHEN SAM ARRIVED at the newsroom of the Messenger on Monday morning, the place was in an uproar. Men were gathered in a knot around a wooden desk piled high with books, papers, and a typewriter—talking loudly, disagreeing. Inside a glassed cubicle, a short man in rolled shirtsleeves marched back and forth in front of two other men, gesticulating wildly. He grabbed a newspaper from his desk, stabbed it with his finger, then flung it aside. The paper fluttered to the floor like a falling dove. None of the men bothered to pick it up.

  Nobody noticed Sam standing in the doorway, sweating into his coat after climbing a flight of stairs. He moved across the room as if invisible, fingering his letter of introduction from Cousin Hugh, until he was close enough to hear the muffled voices behind the glass door, stenciled Thos. Clawson, Editor.

  “That black son of a bitch has gone and done it this time!” the short man ranted. Clawson, Sam figured.

  “Now, Tom, get hold of yourself.”

  “You get hold of yourself, Harry. I don’t want to get hold of myself.”

  “You’re the one sold him that Jonah Hoe printing press,” Harry said. He was tall and bent, with a shock of white hair and a florid face—an aristocrat gone to seed.

  “I want it back! I want him out of this town!”

  “Rumor has it Alex Manly already left town,” Harry said casually. “I hear he’s in New Jersey.” Sam had the distinct impression that Harry was enjoying all the hullabaloo. His bloodshot eyes were smiling.

  “Well, somebody wrote that trash!”

  “Mr. Clawson,” the third man said, “don’t you hear the clarion call?” He was a lean blade of a man in his mid-thirties. Sam sized him up: pale, a man who spent his days indoors, in offices, clubs, smoke-filled meeting rooms, hammering out the fine print of stock-for-cash deals, bond issues, third-party real-estate transfers.

  Clawson wheeled to face the third man. “What are you talking about?”

  “Reprint the damned thing.” He spoke softly, with authority.

  “Print the damned thing?” Clawson pounced on the discarded newspaper and waved it around, reading, “‘We suggest that the whites guard their women more closely’!”

  Harry said, “No need to sell papers that way, Tom. We can’t keep up with circulation now.”

  “In the meantime,” the third man said, “buy up all the spare copies you can get your hands on and pass them out free on every street corner in the city.”

  Harry studied his own copy of Alex Manly’s Daily Record. “A cut above his usual style, wouldn’t you say? Pithy, active verbs, right to the point. A bit bold for Manly.” Then he doubled over in a spasm of coughing. He fished out a soiled handkerchief from his immaculate white linen suit.

  Clawson ignored him and kept reading, still marching back and forth: “‘Our experience among the poor white women of the country teaches us that women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men, than are the white men with colored women’!”

  Harry recovered. “Nobody reads that nigrah paper.”

  The third man trimmed a lean cigar and fired it from a wooden match. “Exactly my point—put it in the Messenger. They’ll sure read it then.”

  Clawson wasn’t listening. “‘Every Negro lynched is called a big, burly, black brute, when in fact many of those who have thus been dealt with had white men for their fathers—’”

  “Such alliteration.” Harry wiped his mouth once more with the handkerchief and stuffed it back into his pocket. “No one will take it seriously.”

  “‘—and were not only not black and burly, but sufficiently attractive’—sufficiently attractive!—‘for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them’!”

  The third man puffed his cigar. “Print it,” he said again, putting a hand on Clawson’s shoulder. It sounded like an order. “Run your own editorial right beside it. Tomorrow. Next week. Every day until the election.”

  Clawson noticed Sam standing outside the glassed cubicle. He jerked open the door. “You lost?”

  Sam held out his letter of introduction. “I’m your new reporter.”

  “Like hell you are.” Clawson slammed the door, and Sam stood perplexed, aware that the other voices in the newsroom had suddenly stopped, replaced by muffled laughter. He felt his face go hot. His armpits were soaked. The letter wilted in his hand. He brushed back his blond hair with a moist palm.

  Before he could decide what to do next, the door swung open quietly and the white-haired gentleman called Harry held out his hand. “Harry Calabash,” he said. “Honored.”

  Sam shook Harry’s soft, damp hand.

  “You must be Jenks—our war correspondent?”

  Sam nodded. “Well, I was over there.”

  Calabash nodded slowly. “You arrive at an interesting juncture, Mr. Jenks. Come along.” His voice was soft, lilting, almost effeminate. He spoke in theatrically unhurried phrases. Sam had heard a Southern drawl before, but Calabash affected an accent he could hardly comprehend. Despite a slight limp, Calabash moved nimbly among the desks, dodging through the narrow aisles toward an
old hulk of a desk in the far alcove. He rummaged in the drawers. The clatter of typewriters filled the room now, writers at work. Copyboys dodged in and out. Sam kept his mouth shut.

  “I understand you had some trouble on the train.”

  “Word gets around.”

  “It’s a small town of a city, son. I’m an old reporter.”

  “There was an incident.”

  Without glancing up, Calabash said, “So I’m told.”

  “One of the soldiers settled it.”

  “Buck Kenan. Used to be collector of customs—best-paying job in the state, for the hours. Four thousand dollars per annum—that’s a cool thousand more than Governor Russell himself makes. They kicked him out for a nigrah, fellow named Dancy.”

  “Hard news for him.”

  “Shoot, he’d a whole lot rather play soldier with the boys at the armory than ride a desk. Likes to get his arms around this life. Buck Kenan would have been Teddy Roosevelt, if Teddy Roosevelt hadn’t already been invented.”

  “And Mr. Waddell?”

  “Colonel Waddell,” Calabash corrected. “He rode in with you, too? A local curiosity, like the statue in the square. Mostly harmless.” He rummaged some more. “Eureka!” He held up penciled carbons clipped together. “Let us depart this sweatshop for a more agreeable locale.”

  Sam held out his letter, now stained with his fingerprints. “But I should—”

  Calabash snapped the letter from his hand. “You should do what I tell you. I’ve been assigned to break you in. For heaven’s sake, take off that coat before you keel over.” Sam took off his coat, and Calabash slung it over the chair on top of his own. He took up a cane. From a peg above his desk, he grabbed a finger-creased Panama hat and set it lightly on his shaggy head. “And get you a hat.”

  They clattered down the wooden front stairs together and into the hazy heat of Market Street. “This humidity—makes a man fairly ooze,” Calabash said. At that moment, from a stairwell doorway across the street, a lean figure emerged wearing a smart gray suit. A sign on the second floor read, The Record Publishing Company.