Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  MacRae smiled with his mouth closed. “This is the future down here. Nobody realizes it, but I know it. Land, that’s where the money’s going to be. Cotton’s already on the way out. Same with turpentine.”

  The waiter delivered iced tea, and MacRae ordered lunch for them both in clipped tones. “Had two banks fail down here in two years—foolish investments,” he said. “Too liberal with bad debts. I brought in New York money, fixed all that. Issued bonds guaranteed by the city. Guaranteed. Stability, that’s what money likes. Order.”

  MacRae lectured on about politics, the stock market, the war in Cuba. “That spig army was no match for white men—you saw that for yourself.”

  Sam recalled the chaos of Las Guasimas. The Spanish regulars—the soldiers called them spigs—had shot from the tree line using smokeless powder. It was like fighting ghosts. The Americans were cut down in their ranks. “They got in their licks.”

  As the waiter delivered their appetizer of fruit compote, MacRae said, “Down here, the only fly in the ointment is the coloreds. Our city has become their mecca. In Raleigh, we believe it’s deliberate.”

  “A plot?”

  MacRae devoured his compote. “You’re the reporter, you figure it out. Look at the census—three times as many coloreds as there were ten years ago.”

  “But that doesn’t mean—”

  “Doesn’t mean what? It’s getting to be a liability, if you know what I mean. Economically speaking. You should hear them in New York. At the Chevy Chase Club in Washington. Holding back development, they say. Who’s going to put their money in a town run by coloreds? Which bank? Who’s going to build a factory here? Who is going to patronize a beach resort surrounded by colored slums? Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against the colored man—in his proper place.”

  “I don’t see the harm—”

  “The harm is the filth, Sam. The filth. It is in our interest for them to be clean and decent. Our food is cooked by colored hands. Our children rest in the arms of colored nurses. Colored housekeepers make our beds and wash our underclothes. But when you get too many of them in one place, the result is squalor and crime.”

  “Well, poverty can—”

  “They lack the instinct for civilization. Do you know that some white people are scared to emigrate to the South for fear of cannibalism? Cannibalism!”

  “You don’t believe that—”

  “The signs are plain. Things don’t change soon, we’re in for another depression.”

  Sam was nonplussed. “Are you saying we shouldn’t have come?”

  MacRae smiled and said softly, “What I’m saying is—if you’ll listen—what I’m saying is, we can’t count on outsiders to bail us out again. We must take matters into our own hands.” He squeezed the stem of his wineglass, and Sam waited for it to snap, but it didn’t. “Seize control of our destiny.”

  Sam hadn’t touched his compote. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning there are eight thousand Christian whites in this town. Well, my God, you got seventeen thousand coloreds over there across the track. Just waiting to rise up on their hind legs, just biding their time. You got white Republicans putting ideas in their heads. Now, they want to vote.”

  “They’re allowed to vote, the law says so.” Sam was confused: he thought that business about voting had been settled years ago, during Reconstruction.

  MacRae smiled but stopped eating, and Sam could tell he was annoyed. “Cousin, the law is not something written down in some book. The law is the way people live. How they do things. How they carry on their business and their families.” The waiter leaned over the table to take their plates. “Hell, you can’t have every ignorant cotton-field nigger voting for a two-dollar bribe. Where would this country be?”

  Sam had no answer. He fidgeted in his chair, trying to concentrate on the opulent surroundings.

  “Negro overpopulation, that’s the virus killing this town, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. And more coming in all the time. They’ve put the word out, see. Come to Wilmington, come to Darktown. Bring your mammy, bring your cousin. Bring your rifle.”

  Their entrées arrived. The steaming platter of braised pork loin hardly touched the tablecloth before MacRae attacked it with knife and fork. The waiter yanked his hand out of the way of the blade.

  “I don’t really believe—”

  “You’ll see a lot of things down here you’ll find hard to believe.” Sam ate a few bites. The pork was succulent, tasting of light vinegar and parsley. “What did you mean, take matters into your own hands?”

  MacRae sat back in his chair. “Just between you and me and the chandelier,” he said confidentially, as the waiter poured their coffee, “the fuse has already been lit on this firecracker.” He slurped his coffee. “Man, I love coffee on a hot day. Makes a man sweat out his poisons.”

  I take pleasure in writing to you to let you know that you are the sorriest scoundrel in North Carolina. The article that you had in your paper was a shame to the Old North State….

  And if I lived in Wilmington I would give you 24 hours to leave or I would blow your brains out.

  From an anonymous letter to Alex Manly, signed only “A. Man.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Saturday, August 20

  IN THE RIVER MIST OF 3 A.M., the high side rails of Smith’s Creek Bridge loomed gray and ghostly. The road was deserted—just as well. Instinctively, Frank Manly stopped the open carriage at the foot of the bridge, listening for riders. The only sound was the splash of fast, shallow water on rocks, rushing toward the Cape Fear. The lone jet mare stood riveted in place, head up, sniffing the damp air of the bottom.

  Around them was thick swamp, impassable even in daylight. Some night-hunting animal shrieked, and Frank shivered in the heat. He didn’t believe in spirits, but this was different. This was live things that could hurt you, chew you right up. Fangs, claws, stingers, and poison. Quicksand and gator wallows. Wouldn’t be caught dead out there, he thought.

  On the seat next to him sat his younger brother, thirty-two-year old Alexander Lightfoot Manly, deep in thought. He’d been up for thirty hours, traveling. After the telegram, he’d taken the train south, getting off at Castle Hayne, twenty miles out. No use risking a lynch party at the Atlantic Coast Line Station. But in the diffuse moonlight, he looked none the worse for all his hard travel. As usual, he wore a gray tailored suit and a high celluloid collar and cravat, along with a brushed gray derby over his wavy black hair. Though it was hot and muggy even at this hour, he wore kid gloves—a habit he’d picked up from his friend Dr. Wright, the mayor, who never appeared in public without white gloves. A black Prince Albert lay carefully folded behind the seat.

  Satisfied there were no riders waiting on the road ahead, Frank urged the mare forward. She stepped delicately across the uneven planking of the bridge, the boards creaking quietly under the wheels.

  “You stirred them up this time, brother, sure enough.” Frank was the general manager of the paper. He had nothing to do with the editorial side, and had been in Greenville the day the editorial was published.

  For a long moment, Alex Manly didn’t reply. He was still brooding. It didn’t make sense. He’d only been gone a few days, leaving young Jeffries, the new assistant editor, in charge. Jeffries was just an eager kid and not much of a writer. His prose tended toward dime-novel clichés and high-blown non sequiturs. Manly had hired him as a favor—an apprentice who would work for practically nothing. Surely, Jeffries hadn’t written the editorial.

  “Who was it, Frank?”

  “Damned if I know. All I know is, I come back from Greenville and the office is closed, two Red Shirts standing guard with a bottle of save-the-baby. I kept right on going.”

  “As of now, Jeffries is fired.”

  “That boy’s long gone. Norfolk, his girlie said.”

  Alex thought of his own fiancée, Carrie. Thank the Lord she was in London right now, singing on the stage, and not in the middle of this mess. Only
last month, she’d been setting type for him. Now, the aristocrats of Europe were gathered at her feet.

  “Is everyone safe? Mom and Pop?”

  “For now,” Frank said. He kept his eyes on the dark road. Alex was always the reckless one and Frank the tough, steady one. Like their other brothers, Henry and Lewin, they were descended from Charles Manly, an antebellum white governor of North Carolina who had freed all of his offspring by slave girls. Frank knew he himself could never pass for white in daylight—his skin was too dark, his hair too kinky, his nose too broad, and his lips too full. He preferred it that way—he suffered no ambivalence. He never went to sleep wondering who he was or where he belonged.

  But Alex had always joked about “passing”—fooling the white man. He had a perfect ear—he could mimic an Irish teamster or a German baker. Frank never saw the humor, only endless confusion, an agony of choice. A man should not have to choose his race. “How much black blood does it take to make a man black?” they used to argue. One grandparent made you a quadroon, one great-grandparent an octoroon. Named like exotic cigar wrappers, from light to dark.

  Even if you had seven white great-grandparents out of eight, even if your skin was fairer than a swarthy Irishman’s, you were not white. You were a mulatto, a high yellow, a colored, a darky, a black, a Negro.

  Alex’s fiancée, Carrie, was part Tuscarora Indian. Her people were trying to block their marriage—to them, Alex looked too white.

  Among their own race, both brothers knew from long experience, shades of skin color seemed to matter almost more than to whites—light-skinned Negroes seemed to get hired faster by Negro bosses. They were trusted more quickly. Deferred to. Every preacher Frank had ever met was more white than black—like his own family, the progeny of white masters and black slaves.

  But Frank Manly was not a man to stir things up. His main duty in life seemed to be to protect Alex from himself, and he was good at it. Strong and muscular, he had good physical instincts and an eye for trouble. He wondered why Alex had come back at all. What had ever possessed him to buy that damned printing press?

  “Where is the press?” Alex asked quietly. Lights were coming into view up ahead—the houses of early-rising mill hands.

  That goddamn printing press, Frank thought. Like it was some icon, the symbol of a divine mission. It was just a hunk of iron and a damned lot of trouble. They still owed Tom Clawson money on it. Well, at least Alex had asked about the people first. “They moved it, Lewin and the others. You missed all the hard work, brother.”

  “Someplace safe, I hope.”

  “Shoot. Ain’t no place safe. But we fixed it up with St. Luke’s to rent us Free Love Hall. Two stories, good ventilation, more space than we had before.”

  Alex listened: the businessman talking. Practical, sensible. Next door to a colored church, not a bad location, he thought. Might keep off some of the rougher elements—bocras didn’t like to mess with a church, superstitious that way. “So the ministers are with us.”

  “Wouldn’t exactly say that,” Frank said. The ministerial union had denounced the editorial as inflammatory but made a plea to support the Record. They’d printed subscription handbills and passed them out all over Brooklyn: Pay up at once, if you please, so that we can combat the evil influences at work against our race. It was the reminder Alex himself had written and run every day at the bottom of page one.

  “Oh, well. They have to be cautious.”

  Frank continued, “Anyhow, the office is all set up. We’re back in business.”

  Alex stiffened. “You haven’t put out a new edition?”

  “No, brother—waiting on you.”

  “Good. That’s good.” They didn’t need another inflammatory editorial. “Brother Norwood must be tickled,” Alex said.

  Frank hooted. “Been kissing so much white ass, he’s getting calluses on his lips.”

  They rode on, enjoying the breeze of movement.

  “Alex?” He said it softly, so Alex knew it must be important.

  “I’m listening.”

  “It’s bad. You don’t know how bad it is.” After the eviction, Frank had been so worried that he tried to buy a pistol, but nobody was selling guns to blacks. A new unwritten ordinance. It was always the unwritten laws that got you.

  Alex waited for more, but Frank said nothing. “You’re suggesting we cease publication for a while.”

  “Only for a little while. Tempers are hot. Some mighty rough characters drifting into town. On the scout for that handsome face of yours.”

  “Something’s in the wind, I know. I could smell it, too—all the way up in Asbury Park.” It surely had a stink.

  “Let it cool awhile, Alex. Hear what I’m saying? Give the man time to forget about us and get distracted by something else.”

  Alex thought, we are the only Negro daily newspaper in the country, but he’s right. He wished Frank were wrong. It could’ve been worse—should’ve been worse. Next time, it would be. It stung his pride. It felt all wrong, against fairness, against everything he stood for as a journalist and reformer, but he said, “All right, Frank. We won’t go to press for a while longer. But let’s keep the staff together.” Sometimes, you just had to hold onto your anger, let it burn in your belly. Sometimes, you said the most by saying nothing.

  Frank relaxed. It was all right now, Alex was home. Everything was going to work out fine.

  The buggy was among the outlying houses now, scattered kerosene lanterns flaring yellow lights across the dirt road. The electric lines didn’t come out this far. Off to the left, in the darkness, lay Oakdale Cemetery, where the dead of seven generations of the best white families in the county rested in peace: Rose Greenhow, the Confederate spy who, weighted down by gold, drowned while swimming ashore from a foundering side-wheeler; Captain John Maffitt, the blockade runner; George Davis, attorney general of the Confederacy; generals, tycoons, planters, and their women. Alex had made a pilgrimage out there one rainy Monday just to read all the names.

  Out of sight across the river, they could hear the rumble of a night freight laboring along the Seaboard Air Line.

  They passed through Brooklyn. There were no gas street lamps in this part of town. Through the thin clapboard walls, they could hear the clatter of pans and spoons, the husky murmur of sleepy voices. The sun wouldn’t be up for another two hours. The dirt track under the buggy wheels turned to sand. The mare was tiring with the effort of pulling. She leaned forward and cut the sand with her hoofs, digging for traction. The tires made a soft whoosh.

  Frank was dozing at the reins. No trouble would come to them here, among their own people. In a way, it was lucky they’d been chased away from downtown. Free Love Hall was across Market Street, half a dozen blocks up from the river, in a mixed working-class neighborhood. A Negro newspaper out there would be ignored. It was only six blocks, but in the right direction. “Frank,” Alex said. “One thing I don’t understand.”

  Frank stirred and cleared his throat. “Only one thing? You a lucky man.”

  Alex drew a folded newspaper out of his inside coat pocket, and Frank realized he’d had it all along. It was still too dark to read the print, but they both knew what it said. “This Mrs. Felton, from Georgia. The congressman’s wife.”

  Here we go, Frank thought. He can’t leave it lie. Got to worry it till he lands us in more trouble. “What about her?”

  “This whole editorial is on account of her speech, right?”

  “That’s the short of it. She’s some dumb bocra, saying nasty things about the colored man. Just like all the rest of them crackers. Should have let it go by.”

  “Frank, there’s just one problem.”

  Of course there is, Frank thought: with Alex, there was always one more problem.

  Alex said, “That speech is a year old. Why all the fuss now?”

  Frank didn’t say anything. A cold wind blew into his belly. He thought, somebody’s messing with us. Somebody is surely messing with us.

&nbs
p; Alex said, “Take me to the office. I want to see it.”

  “Now? I’ve been up half the night.”

  “Now’s as good a time as any.”

  Frank sighed. “Whatever you say, brother. You’re the man.”

  So instead of stopping at the neat yellow frame house at 514 McRae Street, where their parents and brothers were still asleep, Frank reluctantly clucked the horse on by. The windows were still dark. Alex didn’t even look.

  They rode down Red Cross for a block and a half to take advantage of the new paving, turned onto Seventh at Dr. Kirk’s Central Baptist Church, and crossed Market after four blocks. The streetcars weren’t running at that hour, but Frank, ever cautious, reined the mare to listen for the big eight-mule-team mill freighters that came barreling downhill to the wharf without lanterns.

  In the glow of the gas street lamps, the street was empty. Up Market on the left, in one of the big houses that kept servants, electric lights were burning behind window shades in the downstairs parlor. Alex wondered who was entertaining at that hour.

  Frank clucked the mare across Market. On the oyster shells, she moved at an easy pace. The brothers didn’t talk. The only sounds were the chick-chicking of the mare’s hoofs and the dull crunching of the wheels. Half a block past Williston School, they came to it—a white wood-frame building tucked between a private home and St. Luke’s.

  “You hung the sign?” Alex asked. His soft voice carried in the quiet.

  Frank pointed. “Can’t see it, but she’s up there.”

  Alex nodded, approving. It was good to have a brother you could count on. “I’ll stay here from now on. Sleep on the cot—you brought the cot?”

  Frank nodded. Then he said, “What you going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “You could always retract it.”

  Alex smiled in the dark. “Can’t retract it—how would it look? Anyhow, they’re going to do what they’re going to do, regardless of what I print or don’t print.”

  “You underestimate—”