Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  Be as honest as you can, Sam’s first editor had always advocated: lying gets too complicated too fast, use it only as a last resort. “I happened to see you at the courthouse. I realized I had not yet paid my respects.”

  Waddell nodded in approval: here was a young man who appreciated the forms. “Must have been quite an adventure out on the river.”

  “Oh, not really. Kid stuff, for an old soldier like you.”

  Waddell stood and paced the small office. “I do wish I could have been there. It must have been very theatrical, yes?”

  Waddell spoke with a soft, mellifluous voice, like some of the professors Sam had admired at the University of Pennsylvania—those who always spoke partly to hear the sound of their own voices. That was all right, Sam decided: if I had a voice like that, I’d listen to it all day long.

  “Oh, it was that,” he said.

  “We live in interesting times. Especially for an observer of the human scene, such as yourself. We have just won a glorious foreign war, a new century is about to dawn, the world is being redefined before our very eyes.” His voice resonated in his nasal cavities so that it carried without sounding loud. Sam figured it must have to do with the bones of the skull.

  “Sure looks that way,” he said. Sam noticed for the first time the lined papers spread across Waddell’s desk, each page filled with flowing cursive. A fountain pen lay uncapped. “Legal brief?” Sam indicated the papers.

  Waddell beamed. “A speech. You haven’t heard me speak, have you? Of course not. Last week it was Kinston, week before that Goldsboro. Can’t get out of bed in the morning without consulting the train schedule—reminds me of the days when I was canvassing for Congress.”

  “You running for office now?”

  Waddell squinted one eye at Sam, as if he were not sure how to take that. “The Cause,” he said quietly.

  Sam looked blankly at Waddell, who picked up his pen, carefully capped it, and clipped it inside his shirt between the third and fourth buttons. His index finger and thumb were stained with black ink.

  “White supremacy,” Waddell explained, so matter-of-factly Sam wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “Putting the affairs of the Old North State back into the hands of the race God intended to rule her, the Anglo Saxons.”

  What was he supposed to say to that?

  Waddell smiled and touched his arm ingratiatingly. “Take yourself, for instance. Sturdy, blond, clear-eyed, intelligent. Nordic through and through. Born to take charge of things, not to go placidly along.”

  “You give me too much credit.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me, we all know colored men who have risen in the world.”

  “Frederick Douglass, for instance?”

  Waddell said, “Douglass once spoke at our own Thalian Hall—in the lecture room, of course, not the main stage.”

  “Of course.”

  “Powerful speaker.” He sipped water and smiled, as if he’d just remembered something. “I used to play comic roles on that stage—can you feature that?”

  Sam nodded. Thalian Hall and city hall were two parts of the same building. He could easily imagine Waddell gliding back and forth between politics and theater.

  “Anyhow, it’s a simple matter of King Numbers.”

  “Afraid I don’t know that expression.”

  “Simple enough: education. Whites go to school—most of them do, at any rate. Got some poor-bockers living back in the hills have never seen a primer. A few watermen up the coast. But the nigrah, he tends to be led around by the nose. Has no experience in self-government. White man tells him how to vote, maybe pays him a dollar, maybe not, and suddenly democracy don’t mean much. King Numbers, that’s all it means. Who controls the nigrah vote. It’s a confounded racket.”

  “So the answer is to keep them from voting at all?”

  “Until such time as the nigrah can make an intelligent choice, yes. Get rid of the bosses, the coercion, the corruption. Stop taking advantage of a gentle, timid people.”

  “I see.”

  “Democracy is a complicated business. You can’t learn it overnight. Takes generations of practice.”

  Sam said, “So someday, when we live in a better world …”

  Waddell could have been his favorite uncle, if he had any uncles.

  “I notice the nigrahs aren’t running Chicago.”

  Coming out of this man’s mouth, it all sounded halfway reasonable. Maybe he had a point. Sam felt tricked, but he did not know exactly why.

  The door opened and Gabrielle deRosset Waddell appeared, her face flushed from the heat and the walk. Across the room, Sam could feel her heat. “Mr. Jenks,” she said, curtsying slightly. “What a pleasant surprise.” She was clearly annoyed at finding Sam here. She held a receipt in her hand.

  “Mrs. Waddell.”

  Colonel Waddell stepped toward his wife. “Miz Gabby,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek. She flinched only slightly, but Sam noticed.

  “I had some business at Rivenbark’s. We can talk about it later.” She tucked the receipt in her sleeve.

  As she moved closer, Sam was overpowered by her scent—gardenias and rose water mingled with perspiration. And her heat—some women gave off heat, you could feel the air wavering with it. He’d known only a few like that before. She had to know the effect she was having on him. Women like her always knew.

  Her brown eyes locked on his—he could not read her at all.

  Gabrielle forced a smile.

  The Colonel said, “Why don’t we all retire from this sweltering office and refresh ourselves?”

  Gabrielle took his arm, and Sam followed them out. Waddell didn’t bother to lock the door.

  They sat on cafe chairs at Johnson’s Ice Cream Parlor and sipped iced soda water flavored with lemon.

  “Apparently, you found Mr. Manly,” Gabrielle said coolly.

  “I’m afraid I did. But what happened later, well, it was frightening.” Sam shook his head, eyes downcast. It had really shaken him up, and he wanted her to understand that. If she understood nothing else about him, he wanted her to know that. He was trying to do right. She watched him without giving anything away.

  Colonel Waddell said, “A mob is never the answer to anything. Real solutions require planning.”

  “Let’s not get into this,” Gabrielle said.

  “Of course,” said the Colonel magnanimously. “I was forgetting the company.”

  “I didn’t mean any harm, ma’am,” Sam said.

  “No, of course not. No one ever does.” She said it flatly, tiredly. Not an accusation but an observation, of a thing that couldn’t be helped.

  Sam watched her across the table. She had a distant look in her eyes. She was somewhere else. He sensed that, if he reached out and touched her hand, he would feel nothing but the cold outline of a ghost.

  “How is Bessie’s boy David faring?” he said.

  Gabrielle patted her loose chignon and said, “His arm has mended—I don’t know about his spirit.”

  “Bessie’s been with you a long time?”

  “Is that the habit of all newspapermen?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Can you only make conversation by asking questions? It’s quite rude, you know.”

  Sam felt put in his place. He felt that way a lot lately.

  “Miz Gabby,” the Colonel said. “Fifteen years, Mr. Jenks, more or less.”

  “She was with the Colonel while he was still married to Miss Ellen,” Gabrielle explained in a voice that made Sam wonder if she was looking forward to her widowhood. “Did you know Bessie was born into slavery?” She fiddled with her straw. He watched her white fingers play with it.

  “She looks like a woman who’s worked hard all her life.”

  “You can’t begin to know, Mr. Jenks.” Gabrielle cocked her head, parted her lips, but didn’t speak further. Instead, she sucked on the paper straw, and he could see the lemon soda rising toward her mouth. She kept her eyes on him.

  Sa
m tugged out his watch and glanced at it. He needed to get out of here, away from this woman, home to his own. “Time to go back,” he said.

  On the way out, they stopped at the counter to pay. Colonel Wad dell said, “Blast it! Must have left my money in my other jacket. I fear I’m getting senile.”

  “Never mind,” Sam said, handing a quarter to the girl behind the counter. “No change required.” At five cents a soda, the tip was extravagant. He wanted Gabrielle to notice.

  She put a hand on his sleeve. “You must join us for supper one evening soon.”

  “Thank you—of course.”

  “Bring your wife. Her name is—?”

  “Gray Ellen.”

  She bit her lower lip. A curl of dark hair came loose from her chignon. “A lovely name,” she said, “lovely.”

  Sam arrived home at six o’clock to an empty house. He’d stopped along the way to pick blue chrysanthemums from out front of St. Thomas’s—a minor revenge on Father Dennen—but now had no wife to receive his bouquet.

  He flung his wrinkled jacket on a chair and heard the revolver thunk against the wood. He’d have to remember to put it away later. Gray Ellen didn’t even know he had it. He put the mums in a pitcher of water and left them on the kitchen counter, loosened his cravat, and settled into an Adirondack chair on the porch to wait.

  Across town, in Brooklyn, Gray Ellen walked arm in arm with Ivanhoe Grant down Bladen Street. He’d practically kidnapped her from her classroom, and they’d ridden the streetcar into the heart of the Negro neighborhood. She was still wondering what she was doing here.

  She had just been finishing up a spelling lesson, the last lesson of the day. The children were spelling in unison, “D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T, Democrat,” and “R-E-P-U-B-L-I-C-A-N, Republican.” She wanted them to be able to read the handbills come Election Day. She believed good spellers made better citizens.

  The children giggled and vied with one another to see who could spell the loudest—they’d heard these words before. The little girls in the front row, sisters with tightly braided hair, recited in a single voice like a steam kettle. In the back, a huge, muscular boy recited in a clear tenor, almost a song. Somewhere in the middle, a skinny boy in filthy overalls croaked in a bullfrog bass, thumping out each letter. Gray Ellen loved the noise. It meant things were happening inside their heads. They were on their way to becoming people who could think for themselves.

  This, she thought, her ears filled with children’s voices, is where I live. More than ever, she longed for a child of her own. She could take her to the beach, raise her on the soothing rush of the surf. Teach her, love her, continue herself into another age.

  When she dismissed the class, she realized he had been watching from the open doorway.

  He stood in the hallway in his creased gray suit, Ivanhoe Grant, grinning his sweet grin, and she stood inside the sun-washed classroom, the children filing out rambunctiously between them, their little shoes clunking and scuffing across the scrubbed wooden floor.

  Then the children were gone, and the classroom was empty. For her, there was always a sadness about an empty classroom at the end of the school day. The ghosts of voices lingered in the air, dusty with chalk. The desks sat in neat, useless rows.

  Next month, next year, a dozen years into adulthood, maybe, some of them—one of them?—would remember her voice, the lesson it had carried that day, the pulse of her imagination and reason. If she were lucky, it would make a difference. Probably, she would never know. Every small lesson was an act of faith.

  Into the quiet classroom strode Ivanhoe Grant. “Suffer the little children,” he said, and smiled. His eyes were warm and glowing. She wondered how he could make them go warm and cold like that.

  “Reverend Grant. Shouldn’t you be out saving souls instead of haunting the schoolhouse?”

  He stood right up close to her and laid his fine hands on her shoulders. She shuddered, feeling his electricity, but she could not pull out from under his hands. He stood so tall that she was looking straight into his black silk tie. He smelled musky and clean at the same time. She had never been touched like this by a Negro man before. Why didn’t she balk?

  “Salvation does not come to committees,” he said. “Every man must go to the mountain alone.”

  “And every woman?”

  “Especially every woman. Here beginneth the lesson.” He let his hands fall from her shoulders but grabbed her elbow in a firm, gentle grip, coaxing her toward the door.

  “Where are we going?”

  “This lesson will cost you a nickel—have you got a nickel?”

  She kept a purse in the bottom of the large cloth bag she carried her schoolbooks in. She broke away from him and went to the bottom drawer of her desk to get it. He waited. She was outside herself, looking in, marveling that she was about to go off with this man, this black stranger, without a word of warning, explanation, or persuasion. He hadn’t even asked her permission to take her—where? She could—she should—say no. But something had gotten into her, a combination of the unseasonable heat, his audacity and sweet voice, her own stubbornness. She followed him out, and they boarded the crosstown streetcar at the corner of Seventh. He didn’t touch her again until they stepped off the streetcar in Brooklyn.

  “Where are we?”

  “In another country,” he said. “The Dark Continent. Bones in the noses and plates in the lips.” He was making fun of her.

  She looked down the row of unpainted shotgun shacks, the idle men loitering, smoking, pitching pennies. Negro men. On the sagging porches, black women rocked infants. Skinny dogs roamed in packs, chased by motley bands of Negro children.

  “Time you saw where your children go when they go home.”

  “I’ve been in Negro neighborhoods before.” She thought, we saw this from the window of the train, but it looks worse up close. She felt, irrationally, that her dark hair and brown skin weren’t dark enough.

  “You’ve been in places where the people go to work every day. For most of these men, work is seasonal. Seventy-five, maybe a hundred dollars a year.”

  “A year? How do they live?”

  “You tell me.”

  “But so many of the women work—in private homes, taking in laundry, fancy sewing.”

  “The best ones can charge three dollars a week,” he said. “Now that the Irish are trying to push them out, wages have dipped some.”

  The Irish? Sam had told her about Mike Dowling and his Red Shirts—was all that fuss about menial jobs? “Supply and demand,” she said. “When the labor pool gets smaller, they’ll have to pay more again.”

  “Half the men in this city are out of work right now—white and black. They’re not interested in Adam Smith.”

  “Just how is it you know so much about it? You got here the same time I did.”

  “For me, it was a homecoming, teacher. The Lord brought me back.”

  Whenever anybody started talking about doing the will of God, she shuddered: somebody was going to suffer, soon.

  She walked on, looking straight ahead. Heads turned as she approached, voices murmured as she passed. It was foolish to be here, a white woman walking with a black man she hardly knew. But then she scolded herself: why shouldn’t she walk with a colored man? Why shouldn’t she visit any part she pleased of the city where she lived? If she was really going to start a family in this place, she could not do it in fear.

  “Poverty is awful,” she said after a few steps. “What do you expect me to do about it?”

  He bowed his legs, as if he were about to draw a sword. He whipped his right hand up suddenly and nearly jabbed her in the eye with his finger. He whispered, “It’s not the poverty of their bodies that enrages me, teacher, but the poverty of their spirits.”

  “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” She slapped down his finger. Ivanhoe Grant smiled, and she suddenly felt mean.

  In a melodic tone, he said, “Teacher, there are more prosperous colored families in this city than you w
ould ever believe. I’m talking about lawyers and moneylenders and businessmen. Oriental carpets and a grand piano in the parlor. Men and women who have been to school, some of them to college. Who hire out their laundry and eat fresh meat in the middle of the week, who read books and ponder the sacred. But they’re poor, teacher—poor as the dumbest plantation nigger. And do you know why? Because they don’t aspire. Aspire, teacher. Like in breath. Like in spirit. They live on the surface. They believe that what they have is enough.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “What they have is everything there is, teacher,” he said. He was right up in her face now. “Everything except freedom.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  He drew back and made himself bigger. “I am a preacher of the Lord. My life must be large enough to encompass all the lives of my people.”

  “Just who are your people? Where is your church?”

  “Look around you. This is my church.” He stamped his foot in the sandy street. “Here is my pulpit.”

  Any minute now, Gray Ellen expected him to grab a passerby and start casting out devils. She wanted to get out of here, go home. Sam would be there by now. She should never have come out here with this wild man in a gray suit that never wrinkled.

  “They cling to the surface,” Grant said. He scuffed his shoe across the sand, raking out a large comma. “But the surface can be wiped away, just like that.”

  She waited for more, but apparently the sermon was finished. “As I said, what do you expect of me? I’m just a schoolteacher.”

  “I expect you to stop, look, and listen,” he said. “Or the Glory Train gonna run you over. I expect you to open your eyes and ears and heart. I expect you to remember what you see here when your Mr. Jenks writes his little tales of Negro domination.”

  So that was it. A Chicago alderman had once tried to intimidate her to stop Sam from writing the truth. “Sam doesn’t write that trash.”

  “You don’t sound too sure, teacher. You do your homework?”

  “My husband is a man of principles.”

  “They’re all men of principles, teacher—that’s what makes them dangerous.” He had her walking again. The street was so deep in sand that she had trouble stepping.