Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  “Glory be to Jesus!”

  “Amen, say it again!”

  “Lord, Lord, Lord!”

  Norwood wheeled on him, gripped his wrists, and pushed him out of the way. Grant’s eyes flashed, but he did not resist. He had trained himself not to resist until it mattered. In the meantime, just absorb the violence. Let it pass through you. Let them waste their strength fighting what won’t fight back. In time, even Norwood would come around.

  “Now, listen to me,” Norwood said. “This has gone far enough. This here’s dangerous talk. A man could find himself strapped to the lynching tree for this kind of talk. Get ahold of yourselves.”

  Tom Miller, a real-estate investor and the most enterprising pawnbroker in town, said, “Maybe we’ve had ahold of ourselves too long, John. Maybe it’s time we got ahold of something else.” Miller made loans to lots of white clients, and lately, plenty of them were holding out on their payments, as if daring him to do something about it.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  Norwood persisted. “Look, we’ve made progress. We got Red Cross Street paved.”

  “Only ’cause it leads to the railroad station.”

  “We’ve got bicycle paths so our men can get to the mills without having to pay for a streetcar. We’ve got ten Negro policemen. We’ve got a closed sanitary sewer in Brooklyn now, instead of an open ditch. And the Negro ward down at City-County—”

  “Editor Manly got us those things,” Tom Miller said.

  “You think he did it alone? He has been the voice of a united front. The ministers, the lawyers, the businessmen, the workers. And he got them by leaning. A firm, steady push. But no threats, no violence.”

  “We need more than bicycle paths, John. And we need it now.”

  “There’s an election coming up.”

  “You think they’re going to let you niggers vote?” It was Grant, laughing openly at them now. His words came slow and clear. “My, my, how you do carry on!” He paced in front of them, back and forth, hands clasped behind his bent back, shaking his head as if he could not comprehend such foolishness. Then he wheeled on them. “They’re buying rifles and riot guns.”

  “We don’t know that,” Norwood snapped. He was getting tired of these histrionics. All Grant needed was a purple robe, maybe a choir swaying in rapture behind him. It was easy to get people riled up—they craved the drama. They’d wail and croon and clap their hands. With the right voice filling their ears with voodoo religion, they’d march straight into rifle barrels.

  What was hard was getting them to do the unglamorous thing. Lean, he thought. Steady pressure, day after day, year after year, generation after generation. Use your head. Make the laws. Win the ballot. Bring your people up one at a time, each one helping the next.

  “Open your eyes!” Grant hissed, balling his fists in front of his own eyes, then exploding them into star bursts of long fingers. “You stand here in your pretty white man’s suits and talk like the white man and wear your hair like the white man and pay the white man’s taxes. But roll up your sleeves. Look in a mirror. What color is the face under those white man’s whiskers?” Ivanhoe Grant’s face was running with sweat now, his beautifully combed hair glistening, his cheeks shining like yellow apples.

  The men were murmuring and nodding. Some of them rubbed their faces, their wrists. Even Norwood, caught by the voice, reflexively glanced at the light olive skin beneath his rolled-up white sleeves, then felt tricked.

  Norwood had lost control of the meeting, and he knew it. The whole point was to defuse the situation. Reassure these young hotheads so they wouldn’t do anything rash and ruin all that he and the rest had worked so hard for—John Dancy, Armond Scott, Carter Peamon, Constable John Taylor, and all the other prominent black men who had lifted their community up to share in the prosperity of the largest, wealthiest city in the state. Its political center. The place where real and lasting reforms were happening every day.

  They controlled the trades. The masons, the carpenters, the mechanics, the teamsters were all black men. They ran the waterfront—nothing moved into or out of the port without black men taking home honest wages. They had one all-Negro fire company—Phoenix Hose Reel Company No. 1, the best in the state. They had the trophy to prove it. They had lawyers at the bar and a black coroner. A Negro ran the customs house and another one ran the ferry. They had their own newspaper, their own schools run by their own principals.

  But they could lose it all in a heartbeat. All the Redeemers wanted was the excuse, and Norwood refused to give it to them. The Republican party, the party of Lincoln, was his religion. It would be, he believed, the salvation of his race.

  If any city in the South would lead the way to true equality for the Afro-American, Norwood believed, this one was it. He had the support of the Black Ministerial Union, the Society of Colored Ladies, the Negro Veterans Association, the Republican party, and—until today—Manly’s Daily Record. He wasn’t about to let a small band of hotheads set the clock back fifty years.

  “Now, listen to me, all of you.” Norwood spoke firmly. “They won’t dare move against us. They’ll fight us at the ballot box. Send Dockery to Congress. Return Marion Butler to the Senate. Lend your strength to Jeter Pritchard. Vote the Republican ticket—the black man’s ticket. This is America—we have the vote. Your fathers and grandfathers died to win that vote. Don’t waste it.” Now, Norwood was sweating. He hadn’t meant to give a speech—he was no good at speeches. What he had wanted was quiet talk in a private room among reasonable men. He hadn’t counted on Ivanhoe Grant. Lord, it was hot.

  Grant sat back on the desk, dabbing at his neck and cheeks with a squared white handkerchief, smiling at his own private joke. “And tell me this, Alderman Uncle Tom.” He said it so smoothly it hardly sounded like an insult. “What color are the men who are going to count those votes?”

  Norwood ignored him. “They won’t move against us,” he insisted evenly, for emphasis. “The fight is at the ballot box.”

  Pawnbroker Miller clenched his fists and held them up, then opened them into straining fingers, as Grant had done. “If they do move against us, I swear I will wash these hands in white men’s blood.”

  Before anybody could reply, the door was flung open and sixteen-year-old David King burst in, out of breath and sweating, as if he’d run a long way. Doubled over, hands on knees, panting, he managed to deliver his message: “He’s been evicted!”

  Norwood said, “Who, boy?”

  David straightened up, wiped the sweat out of his eyes, and massaged his left knee. He’d been born with a withered leg and was slow-witted. “Editor Manly! They throwed him out! Closed down the Record!”

  “Manly’s in New Jersey,” Tom Miller said, puzzled.

  “That damned editorial,” Norwood said. “We’ll just see about this.”

  Ivanhoe Grant sat on Norwood’s desk looking elegant and unsurprised. He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and stage-whispered, “The New Jerusalem.”

  Halfway back to the Orton Hotel, at the corner of Market and Fourth, Gray Ellen Jenks was nearly knocked down by a colored boy running fast, pumping his fists hard and not stopping for anybody. Immediately, she wondered if he were a thief fleeing a policeman, then scolded herself for jumping to such a conclusion. That was mostly what was wrong with the world, she had decided a long time ago—everybody jumped to conclusions.

  The boy ran gimpy, one leg cocked out straight. She watched him disappear up the street, a strange, scuttling figure.

  An electric streetcar passed her, and she almost hailed it, to get a break from the muggy heat. It stopped at the corner, and the motorman stepped down to help two young white ladies aboard. When the black woman in line behind them boarded, the motorman stood aside, offering her no assistance. Gray Ellen decided to keep walking.

  The lime dust from the oyster-shell paving parched her mouth and stung her eyes. Oyster-shell pavement—who’d ever heard of such a thing?
Half the storefronts in town were dusted with it, their paint corroded by the lime, and the public parks were full of hacking children. The whiteness was blinding.

  In the black neighborhood she had just come from, the streets were paved—those that were paved at all—with sawdust from the ice ships, spread to keep down the odor of fresh manure. But in neighborhoods like that, the manure didn’t lie in the streets long enough to stop steaming: people rushed out to collect it for their rose gardens, their vegetable plots.

  A sudden emptiness overcame her, a hollowness of the spirit: what was she doing here? All she wanted was a baby and a home, and a husband sober enough to give her both. And to work quietly at her profession. Was that so much for a woman to want?

  A Negro man and his wife passed her, arm in arm, nodding good day. A black man and a white man strode by her going the other way, too engrossed in their conversation to notice her.

  The sidewalks were jammed with well-dressed blacks—lawyers and commercial men. She’d never seen so many Negro professionals mingling with whites in Chicago or Philadelphia. No one here seemed to find it remarkable.

  A black policeman on the opposite corner smiled and nodded. She felt ogled, felt the burn of a blush—silly, but she couldn’t help it. She moved quickly up the street, not paying attention to where she was walking. Two white boys whipped past her chasing a colored boy. Black workmen and delivery boys crowded the alleys. She smelled the river, the fish market, the sharp odor of the guano factory. Two mule-drawn freight wagons rumbled by, the hostlers whistling at her. She turned to see if they were white or Negro, then realized, all at once, that for the first time in her life, she was seeing the world in black and white.

  She found herself back at Market Street. Up the block, across from the Messenger offices where Sam worked, there was a commotion in the street. She had no other pressing business, so she walked that way. A crowd of white men was gathered around the entrance to a saloon. Then she saw that the focus of attention wasn’t the saloon but the rooms above it. Two black men were leaning out of the open windows on the second story dismantling a large, artfully lettered sign: The Record Publishing Company.

  With a rope braced somewhere inside the building, they lowered the sign to street level, where other black men—not laborers, but men wearing clean shirts and snappy pinstriped vests, cravats undone—guided it into the bed of a two-mule dray.

  The dray was already lying flat on its springs under the weight of a massive object behind the teamsters’ seat—a shapeless hulk covered by an old green tarpaulin.

  The white men were waving their fists and yelling so many things at once that Gray Ellen couldn’t make out any of it. Some of them wore red shirts, like the rowdies on the train. A small knot of Negroes watched from the other corner.

  A man in wire-rimmed glasses and leather printer’s sleeves emerged from a stairwell door next to the saloon, and she realized what the tarpaulin must be hiding: a printing press.

  The jeers grew louder, and for an instant, Gray Ellen expected violence.

  But suddenly, a stocky, red-haired priest in a cassock and collar shoved himself between the crowd and the black man, and the Red Shirts at the front hesitated. The priest stood them off, crouching, fists balled.

  Gray Ellen had drifted into the fringes of the crowd now. “Excuse me,” she said to a pretty, petite woman. “What’s going on here?”

  “Don’t you know, dearie?” the woman said. “They’re clearing out that rat’s nest.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The nigger paper, honey—that Manly devil. Throwing him out on his ear. About time, too, after what he wrote.” The woman handed Gray Ellen a limp copy of the Record and snapped her index finger down on the editorial. “It’s a slander to Southern womanhood, is what it is.”

  A fat woman in a faded print dress laid a damp hand on Gray Ellen’s wrist. “Don’t listen to that mess, honey. There’s more to this than meets the eye.” The petite woman walked away in a huff.

  Gray Ellen cocked her head to listen amid the growing din of jeers and catcalls. “What do you mean?”

  “Ain’t from around here, are you? That nigrah paper wa’nt doing nobody no harm. Got carried away, is all.”

  “Who’s the fellow in the sleeves?”

  The fat woman squinted, then shook her head so her pink chins fluttered. “Can’t say—but it’s not Manly. Don’t see Manly anywheres. You’ll know Manly—pencil moustache, a real rooster. Smooth and cool—ice wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Could be his new assistant.”

  “Who’s the priest?” Gray Ellen had not yet visited her new church, St. Thomas’s. This priest looked more like a prizefighter than a man of the cloth.

  The fat woman chuckled in admiration. “That’s Father Dennen, works with the coloreds over to St. Thomas’s. A real hellion, that father.”

  “You’re Catholic?”

  The woman looked at her, horrified. “Honey, I’m a Christian woman, but I draw the line. I don’t go in for all that wine guzzling first thing on a Sunday morning.”

  “Well, it’s not exactly—”

  “Just you take a look at what that Manly wrote—that’s what’s causing all the fuss, honey. Poor man wa’nt thinking clear, that’s a fact.”

  Gray Ellen quickly read a few sentences of the editorial: “A Mrs. Felton from Georgia makes a speech before the Agricultural Society at Tybee, Ga., in which she advocates lynching as an extreme measure. This woman makes a strong plea for womanhood, and, if the alleged crimes of rape were half so frequent as is oftentimes reported, her plea would be worthy of consideration.”

  To Gray Ellen, the tone seemed reasonable. Maybe the controversial part came later. “Who is this Mrs. Felton?”

  “Congressman’s wife. Likes to sound off. It’s politics, is what it is,” the fat woman said. “MacRae and that crowd, they’re the ones behind it. Wouldn’t trust that man to give me change back for a dollar.”

  Lovely, Gray Ellen thought—twice in one day. Of all the people in this town to have for a sponsor. She’d never even met MacRae.

  The Record staff all climbed onto the dray, perching on the sideboards. Gray Ellen noticed a girl among them, with a lovely, clear face. She wore a high-collared cotton blouse with balloon sleeves, her long muslin skirt wrapped by a blue denim apron. And eyeglasses. The girl clambered nimbly over the high sideboards.

  At last, with a braying heave, the mules got the overburdened wagon moving, and it rumbled slowly through the heavy horse-drawn traffic up the long hill of Market Street, farther and farther from the river.

  Hugh MacRae steered Sam through the shadowy breezeway and toward the dining room. MacRae was a lean-faced man with a high forehead and penetrating eyes. They’d both been born during the last year of the Civil War, but Sam thought of Hugh as older, since his business affairs were so important. Sam had met him for the first and only time almost ten years earlier, in Philadelphia, where Hugh was trying to buy hotels. Hugh had started and managed half a dozen corporations, most of them concerned with land development. He wanted to fill in the swamps east of Wilmington and build houses, factories, whole colonies. He had a vision.

  “I believe in two things, Sam,” he said, after they exchanged preliminaries. “Family and land. A man has to take care of his own people. And his people belong to the land.”

  Hugh MacRae looked as if he’d just leaped down from a horse after a fast, hard ride. His receding hair was mussed, his cheeks had high color. He impressed Sam as an energetic man always on the move, restless and easily bored. He had all sorts of deals working, all sorts of plans. He was an M.I.T. graduate, a self-made tycoon, a real-estate speculator. He was director of the National Bank of Wilmington. He was owner and president of Wilmington Cotton Mills, the second-largest cotton compress in town, after Sprunts’ Champion Compress. He owned parcels of land all over the county and was busily buying up more.

  “The only real standard of wealth is land,” he explained. “They’re not making any more
land.” His pet project was to build immigrant communities on the outskirts of town—Italian, German, Hungarian, Dutch. Separate enclaves of working men and women. Utopian labor communities. “White immigration,” he said, “that will solve the race problem in the South once and for all.”

  Sam said, “I’m not sure I follow.” They stood at the entrance to the dining room. The white maitre d’ hurried over from another table and bowed.

  As they were led to their table, Hugh said, “A question of numbers. Right now, the numbers are way out of proportion. Part of it is our own fault—hell, we brought them here to work the rice plantations. But that’s not the whole story.”

  Colonel Waddell passed by on his way out. “Good to see you again, sir.” Sam held out his hand.

  “If you’ll excuse us,” MacRae said. “Busy afternoon ahead.”

  They settled at their table. As the Negro waiter poured ice water into crystal stem glasses, MacRae observed, “That old boy Waddell was really something once. Politician. Orator. By God, he could really get your blood up. Now, well, events have sort of passed him by.”

  Before Sam could say anything, MacRae said, “I was surprised to get your letter. But it gave me an opportunity. You’ll be an asset to this community.”

  Sam shrugged, but he was flattered. “I’m just a newspaperman.”

  “You didn’t hesitate to go off to the war, do your duty. We can always use that kind of gumption.”

  “It wasn’t so much.”

  “The proper way to measure a man is by his achievements. A man is what he does.”

  “I’m just a reporter. All I do is write the stories.”

  “You can tell our story to the world. You can look at us with a fresh eye, with a cosmopolitan perspective. What we’re doing here will seem all the more remarkable to a newcomer.”

  Sam nodded. Waddell had said the same thing. Well, being a booster never hurt. “People always crave a good story.”