Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  “Do something. That’s all I ask—do something!”

  “Let me think, let me think.” But he could not think. He was a reporter—his job was to find the action and get to the bottom of it. But he couldn’t risk putting Gray Ellen in danger. He was torn. Part of him wanted to follow the crowd, but another part wanted to get as far away from the turmoil as this horse could take him.

  “I’m going to turn around—go down Eighth and go in the back way. Hang on.” The horse was easier to handle heading away from the clamor. He slowed for the corner and then clucked her along Eighth until they reached Nun Street. As they turned down Nun, they started seeing faces—Negro faces—staring up at them as they passed. A crowd of Negro men and boys surrounded Free Love Hall. One of them held their horse. “What y’all want to come down here for?”

  “I need to see Manly. Warn him. There’s a mob—”

  “Manly’s gone.”

  “Where? I need to—”

  “Someplace safe from the Red Shirts—you think I’m going to tell you? You best ride on out of here before things get hot.”

  Suddenly, the buggy seemed surrounded by hostile black faces. Some of their hands held tool handles and brickbats. A couple of old double-barreled shotguns poked up among the crowd.

  “You want me to tell him you were here?” It was a man dressed in a suit. A lawyer—Sam had seen him around town but didn’t know his name.

  Sam looked for Frank Manly but didn’t spot him. He was distracted. He needed to get Gray Ellen out of here. “What?”

  “Have you got a name? I’ll tell him you tried to do him a good turn.”

  “Yes, yes. Tell him Sam—” Gray Ellen grabbed his arm. “Never mind,” Sam said.

  He turned the buggy and eased the horse through the crowd. Behind them, they could hear shouting, the clopping of horse’s hoofs, the low, dangerous murmur of a mob of men getting set to do things that couldn’t be taken back.

  Gray Ellen craned her neck to watch as long as she could. Sam looked straight ahead. “Giddap!” he yelled at the horse, then whipped her across the rump.

  The commotion was happening five long blocks from Hugh MacRae’s mansion. As J. Allan Taylor and the Pinkertons they had hired apprised him of the situation, he paced the length of his library, furiously smoking a cigar. A lynching now would spoil everything. President McKinley would have federal troops here before morning.

  The only solution he could think of was to go himself and try to reason with that fool Dowling. The white trash were sometimes worse than the nigrahs—unpredictable, didn’t know their place.

  “Get my buggy,” he told his man. “Get it quick.” To the Negro Pinkerton men, he advised, “Disappear.” They went out through the smugglers’ tunnel.

  By the time he got to Free Love Hall, the situation was serious. After that foolish newspaper piece, word had gotten around that Mike Dowling was going to hang Manly from a street lamp. A hundred or so Negroes now surrounded the Record to prevent him. Some of them were armed. There were no women or children—it was a fighting mob.

  The Red Shirts were drunk and in disarray. Boys were mixed in with men. Some of the men had Winchesters, but plenty of them were just curious to see what was going to happen.

  He spied Sergeant Lockamy facing down the white crowd. “Are you just going to let this happen?” he said.

  “I’ve got six men. You tell me.”

  Walker Taylor rode up on a horse that looked too small to carry him. He had three men with him, also mounted. “Walk, can’t we get that Mick under control?” MacRae said.

  “Exactly,” Walker Taylor said, wheeling his horse dramatically, “what I propose to do.”

  The Negroes weren’t advancing. They remained in a defensive posture. Walker Taylor noted that and admired it. Inside Free Love Hall, three or four riflemen could shoot over the heads of their own people and decimate the white mob. Somebody was thinking. Because the white mob was disorganized, Walker Taylor knew that if he could turn the Red Shirts back, he could stop the whole thing. Mobs were stupid creatures. But after a certain stage, they could be dangerous. Some threshold would be crossed, and then nobody could claim control anymore—events would be propelled by sheer momentum. The thing would start to want to happen, and then it would. He had seen it happen in South Carolina once.

  Luckily, this mob was still brewing. He could sense its half-heartedness. These men were out for mischief, not murder. Some were just starting on a drunk, while others were just sobering up. Walker Taylor found Mike Dowling—disheveled, red shirt unbuttoned nearly to his waist—and two of his lieutenants on farm horses. They were passing a bottle.

  “You’re messing where you have no business, Mr. Dowling,” Walker Taylor said.

  “You country-club people really thrill me, and that’s the truth.” Dowling swigged on the bottle and then tossed it away, toward the Negro crowd.

  Walker Taylor watched it thump into the sand and hoped to God nobody would use it as an excuse to shoot in his direction—he was a pretty broad target.

  “These swamp niggers is keeping good men out of work, and you’re siding with them,” Dowling said. “Well, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

  “This isn’t the way,” Walker Taylor said quietly. “I’m telling you to call it off.”

  “You’re telling me!”

  Walker Taylor leaned as close as he could. “There’s riflemen on the second floor. You might as well paint a bull’s-eye on your fat Irish kitchen.”

  Dowling looked uncertainly at the second story. “I ain’t scared of no darky with a gun.”

  “There are five double-barreled shotguns in the front rank,” Walker Taylor said coolly, making an automatic military appraisal. “Twelve-gauge, I think. They will blow you out of the saddle and take the saddle, too.”

  “Mike,” one of the lieutenants said, “maybe this ain’t a good idea.”

  “You going to let that nigger Manly get away with this?”

  Walker Taylor said, “My Lord, you are thick! Manly’s not even here. Don’t you get any news at all in Dry Pond? Manly went back to New Jersey.”

  “Well, Jesus, Mike, that tears it.”

  “What do I have to do to persuade you?” Walker Taylor was running out of patience.

  Dowling cocked his head, as though a beam of light had just lit up the inside of his skull. “Oh, I get it! You’ve got your own blessed plans! And you don’t want us poor-bockers fucking it all up!” He grinned, showing broken front teeth.

  Walker Taylor said, “Ride away. Now.”

  Dowling smirked. Then he noticed that Walker Taylor had his hand wrapped around the grip of a .45-caliber Colt, hidden under the flap of his jacket. He heard a wet click as Taylor let the hammer down and shoved the revolver back into his waistband. “Just so you know,” Walker Taylor said, practically whispering. “There’s nothing we’re not prepared to do.”

  Dowling jerked upright in his saddle and whistled a clear, piercing note. “The nigger’s gone to New Jersey!” he shouted. “We told him we’d drive him out, and we did! Leave these darkies to their supper!”

  The mob began to bleed away by twos and threes. Dowling saluted Walker Taylor, still grinning, and then galloped up Seventh Street, scattering those on foot before him like barnyard chickens. He had some drinking to do. Things were turning out better than he could have hoped.

  From the second floor of Free Love Hall, Alex Manly peered out cautiously onto the dispersing mob. Beside him, back against the wall, hunkered his brother Frank, a Winchester rifle cradled across his knees. Saffron King James was fetching them glasses of lemonade. She moved toward them from the stairs across the room, crouching, quiet as a breeze, careful to keep her silhouette out of the window.

  “See what I mean about white reporters?” Frank said. “They out to nail your ass to the barn.” He was angry—nobody ever took him seriously until it was too late. Especially Alex. Frank had rallied the other men just in time, or they might all be swinging from lampposts.
“When things settle down, I be hunting a Sam Jenks for my trophy wall.”

  Saffron slid to the floor next to the men while they gulped lemonade. They’d been up here in the heat for two hours.

  “Now you’re talking Tom Miller’s trash,” Alex said. “We only need one like that.”

  “We best not be here next time they come.”

  “Next time?”

  “Bank on it, brother.”

  “Why do you think they stopped at the last minute like that?”

  Frank finished his drink and clunked the glass down on the floor next to his leg. “Didn’t like the odds, I guess. Who knows what’s on whitefolks’ minds? Maybe nothing. Maybe just a hum like a ’lectric turbine.”

  The white mob had all but disappeared, the stragglers hurrying not to be left behind. The Negro men around the building relaxed and joshed. Some drifted home.

  Alex Manly watched one figure emerge from the cover of a board fence and stand watching up Seventh Street after the retreating Red Shirts. He was a tall, lean man dressed in a gray suit. In the yellow lamplight, his face and hands fairly glowed. “Who is that fellow? Don’t believe I’ve ever seen him around here before.”

  Frank bestirred himself for a look out the window. He thought, there he is down on the street, acting like he owns the neighborhood. “That’s trouble,” Frank said. “That’s that goddamn preacher man, Ivanhoe Grant.”

  “Why trouble?”

  “Man preach, but he don’t preach in church. Skulk around behind the scenes, talking the talk, playing the tune.”

  Saffron said, “That’s right. Preacher come around here while you were up north. Full of words, talking the talk.”

  Frank said, “Preacher be a shadow man. Inside man.”

  As Alex watched, Grant turned their way and stood gazing up at the window, his face caught full in the lamplight. “Amazing,” Alex muttered, “truly remarkable.”

  “What?”

  “Man looks just like me.”

  In the morning, Sam found Clawson in his office early, pencil in hand, poring over copy of the previous night’s near-riot. He slashed away at sentences, cut whole paragraphs, inserted new details.

  “You took a hatchet to my story,” Sam said.

  Clawson didn’t look up. “All I did was punch it up. I’m an editor—haven’t you read the masthead?”

  “You have an obligation to the truth.”

  Clawson slapped the pencil onto his desk and stood up. “I have an obligation to sell newspapers.”

  “You’re a professional.”

  “You want truth? Go to church.” Clawson opened and slammed a file drawer, then hollered for a copyboy. “We all do things we don’t like. That’s how things get done.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ask your cousin. Meantime, write me a story I can use.”

   PART II

  THE CAMPAIGN

  It was determined that this city and county should be redeemed.

  George Rountree

  CHAPTER SIX

  Thursday, October 6

  FOR A WHOLE MONTH, an uneasy surface calm prevailed. Whites and blacks went about their business warily, avoiding open confrontation.

  It was as if the town had rushed headlong to the brink, stared into the chasm, and pulled back. Something irreparable had almost happened. Nobody had lynched a black man in Wilmington in fifteen years, yet now, on the verge of the twentieth century, it had almost come true. It scared them sober. For a short time, merchants were more civil, preachers less strident, agitators less agitated. At Walker Taylor’s urging, Mike Dowling left town to visit relatives across the river.

  For a while, Clawson backed off. He ran Sam’s copy with only light editing—just a touch here and there to remind him who was boss. Sam tried hard to tell the truth about things nobody could argue with. The city was quiet, orderly, boring.

  But then the incidents began. Small punctures in the social fabric, more and more frequent. Sam started to feel the seams of the town straining, pulling apart. He lay awake at night next to his unhappy wife and fancied he could hear the town stretched tight, tearing slowly, like sun-rotted tent poplin. It made him anxious. Would he be a reliable witness? Would he tell the story? Or would he run for cover, as he had in Cuba? He made up his mind to be braver.

  A white laborer assaulted a black stevedore with a baseball bat, and a black policeman refused to arrest the attacker. “I’m not allowed to arrest whitefolks,” he explained to the Messenger—a contention that Mayor Silas Wright hotly denied.

  After the heaviest rainstorm in September, a gang of Negroes pushed a white woman into a muddy ditch. When Sergeant Lockamy happened by, they claimed she had slipped and they were only trying to pull her out.

  Persons unknown desecrated the African Methodist Episcopal cemetery, smashing some tombstones with a sledgehammer and chalking obscenities on others. The caretaker spotted two Red Shirts fleeing into the woods.

  Somebody fired a single pistol shot through the window of a streetcar as it passed through Brooklyn. Luckily, though the car was crowded with white shopgirls, nobody was injured.

  A gang of white teenaged boys whipped a colored boy bloody with willow switches. They claimed he had stolen a wheel belonging to one of them. The colored boy said he didn’t even know how to ride a wheel, so why would he steal one?

  As Negro mill workers trooped through the streets to their jobs, bands of jobless white men loitering at tavern doors called, “Nigger!” and “Sambo!”

  Every night the jail filled and every morning it emptied, as magistrates dismissed each other’s cases. It wasn’t exactly legal, but nothing seemed to be exactly legal these days. Justice was erratic and political. It was a good time to be a petty criminal, whatever color you were.

  Fires broke out mysteriously in buildings all over town. It was rumored that the white firemen themselves were setting the fires to remind the Board of Aldermen just how vital they were. Like many other rumors, it didn’t make much sense—the burned buildings were owned by both Republicans and Democrats, whites and blacks. But the town was mostly wooden. Three times in the last century, it had been razed by fire. Even the rumor of arson panicked sensible citizens. Night watchmen jumped at every shadow. In one week alone, they shot five prowling alley cats.

  The weather remained hot and muggy, offering no relief for flaring tempers.

  In the midst of the heat wave, organizers from the state Democratic party showed up and started Government Unions—white supremacy clubs. Within a week, they issued a Right-to-Work Resolution: from now on, employers were warned, they were to hire whites only.

  Through September, the Daily Record published sporadically. It was no longer a true daily. The news featured church suppers, excursions by boat to Carolina Beach, recipes for summer squash, war news of black regiments fighting in the Philippines, inspirational poetry, pleas for moderation.

  “We are one city, and we have got to get along together,” read a typical piece. “The upcoming election makes for heated debates, but let us not forget the many advantages our white neighbors have shared with us.”

  Amazingly, most white merchants didn’t pull their advertising. Subscriptions were up, and, for the first time in its six years of operation, the paper was making a reliable profit. Once a week, Alex Manly slipped a five-dollar bill into an envelope and posted it to Tom Clawson at the Messenger—installments on the Jonah Hoe printing press.

  Manly, though, became a ghost. He visited his newspaper office at odd hours of the day and night so that no one could predict his movements. He stole through the back alleys of Brooklyn, convinced that if he were spotted in the open on the street, he would be shot down in cold blood. He believed that Pinkertons were following him. He no longer dared go downtown.

  His brother Frank urged him to pack up the newspaper and go north. “Time is running out,” Frank insisted, but, as usual, nobody listened.

  “We’ll wait it out,” Alex said. “This will pas
s.”

  “It’s the calm before the storm,” Frank said. “They’re getting ready.” He had heard the rhythm of the town quicken, like a machine ratcheted up a gear. The pitch of ordinary talk grew more shrill. Vibrations shuddered along the downtown streets. The foundation of things was shifting—he could practically feel it under his feet. In random conversations, dangerous resonances made the air sing with threat. Loaded words ricocheted over their heads.

  “When the election is over, we can get on with regular business,” Alex said.

  “That’s a long time away,” Frank said, tired of arguing. “Anything can happen.” The cool days of November seemed like a country he would never visit again. He couldn’t imagine the heat ever breaking.

  “But it won’t.”

  “Then why you skulking around like a fugitive from a chain gang?”

  Alex was embarrassed by his fear. But he was not a man for guns. He was a thinker, a planner—not a street fighter. “Because just when you don’t expect anything to happen, that’s when it happens.”

  On September 27, the Messenger broke a story handed to it by the state purchasing agent for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, which had taken an order from a cadre of local Negro businessmen for two hundred carbines. The Wilmington Negroes Are Trying To Buy Guns! announced the headline. Sam wrote the article. He had heard a persistent rumor that a Negro preacher was mixed up in the business, but he could never get a name or a confirmation, so he ran the names on the purchase order. The carbines were never delivered.

  The Messenger continued to run an abridged version of the infamous “Manly editorial,” and next to it each day was featured a new, lurid, sensationalized account of Negro rampage: Black Beasts Attempt to Outrage the Young Daughter of a Respectable Farmer! Often, the stories were wired out of Charlotte or Raleigh, and Sam began to suspect that the newswire was being used as a trick to make it impossible to verify such accounts. For all he knew, they were concocted in the back room of his own paper, then traded around the state with changing datelines.