“What I love is sewing. Making clothes, fancy stitching. I’ve made party dresses for all my friends.”
“This one?” Gray Ellen touched Gabrielle’s sleeve.
Gabrielle blushed. Even in the bad light, Gray Ellen could see she was embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to brag. But I feel like I know you.”
“It’s lovely,” Gray Ellen said. “I’ve admired it all evening.”
“It’s a bit too much, isn’t it? I should save it for a ball.”
“Have you been to any balls lately?”
“It’ll be two years in November,” she said, looking away.
They had made the circuit of the small, enclosed garden. The chill was settling on their shoulders, and their wraps were no longer enough for comfort. But neither wanted to go inside and join the men. The brisk air smelled clean. It carried the light scent of pine and wood smoke. Gray Ellen closed her eyes, tilted her head back, and breathed in the night.
“Your husband, he’s a very handsome man,” Gabrielle said. Gray Ellen opened her eyes. “He’s very much in love with you,” Gabrielle said.
“How can you tell?”
“At dinner, he wasn’t paying any attention to the Colonel. He was looking at you the whole time.”
“I thought he was looking at you,” Gray Ellen said, then suddenly realized how mean the remark sounded. Tonight, she seemed to be saying the first thing that came to her mind.
Gabrielle hugged her briefly. “You mustn’t think that,” she said. “I’m afraid, wearing this dress, I was deliberately flirting.” She laughed, but to Gray Ellen the laugh sounded forced and public. “I hardly ever get to flirt anymore. I enjoy distracting Father Dennen.”
After a moment, Gray Ellen said, “Do you think he heard?”
Gabrielle said, “Don’t be silly. Men never hear what we say.”
“I wouldn’t mind if he heard,” Gray Ellen said. “I wouldn’t mind if he paid that close attention.”
Gabrielle took her hand again. “Let me make you a dress. It will give you an excuse to come over.”
Gray Ellen nodded. Gabrielle led her toward the back door, then stopped her before going inside. Gray Ellen felt as if she were about to be kissed good night. Gabrielle took her other hand. “It can’t be easy, working with the coloreds,” she said.
“They’re just people—”
“No, that’s not what I meant.” She put a hand to her mouth. “I always say it wrong. I meant, people don’t understand. There’s a meanness. Have you felt it?”
Gray Ellen’s pulse was quickening. It felt lovely being with this woman. At last, someone who understood. “Yes, I’ve felt it. It’s in the air.”
“It didn’t used to be that way. There used to be a kindness. There’s so much money here now. It’s growing so fast. People are forgetting themselves.”
“Whatever it is, Sam’s in the middle of it.”
Gabrielle pulled her in gently and embraced her with surprising force. Gray Ellen was the taller, and their breasts nested together without the usual awkwardness of women embracing. Gabrielle kissed her on the neck, just under the ear, and Gray Ellen kissed her cheek.
Gabrielle let her go. “Promise me you’ll take care.”
“I promise,” Gray Ellen said.
They went inside, where the air was already stuffy from cigar smoke. Gabrielle took her into the sewing room, off the kitchen. With a yellow tape, she measured Gray Ellen’s waist, her neck, the length of her arm. Her touch was reassuring. They sat together in the window nook while Gabrielle passed bolts of fine cloth to her. Gray Ellen picked out a midnight-blue satin. The fabric was cool in her hands. Gabrielle draped it over the dressmaker’s form, and Gray Ellen watched her fingers tucking and pinning it into a beautiful shape.
Gray Ellen said, “The fabric is so expensive. Let me pay—”
“Never mind. I bought more than I needed last time.”
“But it’s such an extravagant gift.” Gray Ellen hated to take something for nothing.
“When you wear it, think of our friendship.”
In the library after dinner, Sam took one of the four cracked leather chairs and lit a cigar, along with the other men. Waddell offered him brandy from a crystal decanter, but he declined. The library was cluttered with souvenirs and knickknacks—framed citations, a stuffed owl, a tarnished cavalry saber hanging on the wall over Waddell’s head.
“A fine cigar,” Father Dennen said, a snifter of brandy in his hand.
“Dash of cognac in the humidifier,” the Colonel explained.
The room took on the heady aroma of cognac and Cuban tobacco. “A man of taste,” Sam said.
The Colonel laughed dryly. “God dwells in the details.”
Father Dennen said, “So does the devil.”
Colonel Waddell laughed and sat heavily in the chair behind his desk. Sam was fascinated by the eclectic library arrayed in leather bindings on floor-to-ceiling shelves—everything from Sophocles in Greek to Dante in Italian, with English classics and scientific books in between. And law books.
On Waddell’s desk was a sheaf of white sheets with carbons. The top sheet was covered with penciled handwriting. Waddell saw the men looking. “My speech for tomorrow night.”
“Do we get a preview?” Father Dennen asked, eyes alert.
“Afraid not, gentlemen.” Waddell twirled the points of his moustache. “Public speaking is a dramatic art. One must create a certain suspense.”
“I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” Father Dennen said.
“Honi soit qui mal y pense, Father.”
“This has all happened before,” the priest said. “Last time, they killed only six—how many this time?”
Sam was confused.
Waddell said, “He means the uprising of 1831. They caught six rabble-rousers in league with Nat Turner.”
“Wasn’t any uprising. It was six innocent Negroes.”
Sam said, “What happened?”
Father Dennen, looking at Waddell, said, “They cut their heads off and stuck them on poles. I’ve got parishioners who remember.”
Waddell stiffened. “They had raped and murdered. My father told me the story. A lesson was required.”
“The lesson is,” Father Dennen said, “if you don’t tell the story in its truth, you relive it over and over again. Can’t you see that?”
“I know that’s what you Catholics believe: your story, your mass, is a true story. But in my church, a story is just a story.”
Sam said, “Your speech—can you give us a hint?”
“Come to Thalian Hall tomorrow evening.”
“So Goldsboro wasn’t enough. You’re going to sing your bloody opera in your own hometown.” Father Dennen puffed and exhaled smoke in a quick burst.
The Colonel was cool. “We had eight thousand people at Goldsboro. We’ll have another thousand tomorrow night. They demand a hearing.”
Father Dennen squinted at him. “I don’t think you believe in this so-called Cause any more than I do.”
“Father, you underestimate me.”
“No, Colonel, that’s one thing I don’t do. Everyone else may underestimate you, but I know exactly what you’re capable of.” Father Dennen slugged down the rest of his brandy and set the glass on the desk rather hard. “If you’ll excuse me, I have parish duties.”
After the priest had gone, Colonel Waddell came around the desk. “A first-rate mind, but his sympathies are mistaken.”
“You mean the Negroes.”
“‘As a city upon a hill,’ that’s what we ought to be. A city with a grander vision, a place of enlightenment, a model for the Southern metropolis of the new century. Men should guide themselves by our light.”
Before the Colonel could get carried away, Sam said, “What do you want?”
“You, too? You think I’m in this for personal ambition?” He sounded so hurt, Sam felt embarrassed for asking. He was constantly surprised by Waddell’s eloquence, the utter sincerity of his to
ne. As always in his presence, Sam wanted more than anything for Waddell to take him into his confidence.
Colonel Waddell paced, limping jerkily, like a windup toy. “Do you know who discovered America?”
“Christopher Columbus, of course.”
Waddell stood admiring his shelves of books, his back to Sam. “Five hundred years before Columbus, Norsemen from Finland had already colonized Newfoundland. They called it Vinland.”
“I never realized.”
Waddell fingered the spine of a fat brown book. “Most people don’t. They accept whatever flimsy myth you put into their primer-book heads. But it’s all here, in Dr. Shallowate’s History of the Hibernian Navigations. The Nordic people came across the northern ocean in their celebrated longboats—langships.” He turned on Sam and fixed him with his gray eyes. “Your people.”
Sam was fascinated but also utterly confused—what had Viking raiders to do with Negro Republicans?
“They were a remarkable people, larger and stronger than any in southern Europe. Fearless and disciplined. Not like the swarthier races, who came later. And they brought no African slaves with them. Columbus started all that. The way he brought disease and ruin to the native peoples. The first thing he did was preside over the kidnapping and rape of a native woman. Later, he introduced the African slave to this hemisphere, on the sugar plantations. And the result has been misery on all sides, ever since.”
This was not quite the Age of Discovery as Sam had learned it in grammar school. He was surprised to hear Waddell taking the side of the natives.
“It is always a dreadful mistake to mix the races,” Colonel Waddell said quietly, sipping brandy. “The crew of the Nina carried syphilis home to Spain—the divine verdict on miscegenation! The Lord in his wisdom created the oceans to keep us apart.”
“But we’re not apart anymore,” Sam said. “You can’t change the past.”
Waddell narrowed his eyes and stepped close to Sam. When he spoke, Sam inhaled the fumes of brandy on his breath. “No, but you can change the future. You can take the future into your two hands.” He cupped his brandy snifter in both hands, like an offering. “You can make it whatever you want it to be.”
Sam smoked his cigar and flicked the ash. The cigar made him lightheaded.
“I know you’ve been thrust into the middle of something you don’t understand,” the Colonel said. “You want to do the right thing. I pegged you for a man of character the moment I first laid eyes on you.”
“What do you want from me?”
The Colonel gripped his arm, and Sam felt captured. “Help me. That’s all. Be one of us, not against us.”
“I’m not against you.” But he wasn’t sure. He wanted to remain passionately neutral.
Waddell stepped back and smiled, exhaling perfect wreaths of smoke. Sam had never been able to blow smoke rings. “You can do this thing, or you can do that thing, but you cannot do them both at once,” the Colonel said. He drew on his cigar, and the end glowed. “Dichotomy. Choice. A man is either with us, or he is against us. There is no middle ground.”
“I don’t know what you want me to do.” Sam felt an irrational desire to justify himself to this man, to please him. He sounded so reasonable.
Waddell’s voice took on an avuncular tone. “You have been doing it all along—writing the truth.”
Is that what I’ve been writing? Sam wondered.
“But now, I want something more. I want your loyalty. I want to know I can count on you.” He clapped a hand on Sam’s shoulder. Then, suddenly, he punched him lightly in the chest. “I want your heart.”
Sam didn’t speak. This was beyond politics now. It was a battle for souls. Maybe it had been that all along—the battle for the soul of this city. The particulars didn’t matter. Paving contracts, dockage rights, railroad bonds, sewer rights of way—these were just the word made flesh.
It came to him, sitting in a leather chair in the presence of a Confederate colonel, inhaling cognac and Cuban leaf: he was at last being invited inside the club.
“What are you going to do?”
“No one will get hurt, I give you my word.”
“Why do you need me?”
Waddell waved his cigar. “We don’t. It will all happen whether you are part of it or not.”
“What would I have to do?”
“Tell my story from the inside.”
So he wanted a biographer to make him famous. “Let me think about it.”
Waddell stubbed out his cigar. “Don’t think too long. Afterward, it will matter who was with us. Names will be remembered. Loyalties will be counted.”
Sam felt a chill. “I see.”
“An enterprising young man like yourself could go far. The opportunities in this city will be nearly boundless.”
Sam heard the back door open and close, heard the voices of the women.
Waddell gathered his speech in a neat sheaf and locked it in his top drawer. “I love the precision of rhetoric,” he said happily. “Parallel structure. Either, or. Every word accounted for.”
Mike Dowling was back in town.
In the wagon yard of Fire Station No. 2 at Sixth and Castle streets, barely three blocks from the Daily Record office, sixty Red Shirts and their horses milled about. On the stern advice of Colonel Walker Taylor, Dowling was sober. It was seven-thirty, and a chilly dusk was already settling in.
“Form on me,” he told his men. “Mount up.”
With uncharacteristic discipline, the riders swung into line, two abreast, Winchesters and shotguns tucked into saddlebags. The column moved at a walk down Castle Street, wheeled onto Front Street, and broke into an easy trot as it passed through the business district, straddling the streetcar tracks. Pedestrians, many going in the same direction, stopped and stared. A few cheered. A policeman waved. Nobody challenged Dowling’s little army. No Negroes dared these streets tonight.
Dowling kept his eyes straight ahead.
At Princess Street, the column turned right and cantered three blocks, then reined up at the front steps of Thalian Hall. There, Dowling’s men formed a gauntlet to the door. Among the first to pass between their ranks was Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, splendid in top hat and tails. “Cavalry,” he observed happily, doffing his hat. From his horse, Dowling nodded. Behind Waddell came George Rountree, J. Allan Taylor and Colonel Walker Taylor, Captain William Rand Kenan, and every member of the Secret Nine and Group Six except Hugh MacRae, who slipped in by a side door to avoid the crowd. MacRaes had built this playhouse, and he knew all the back stairs.
Kenan glanced nervously at the mounted men. “Don’t much like the look of that,” he said to Walker Taylor.
“Don’t fret, Buck. They’ll behave. I read Dowling the riot act.”
White men and women by the hundreds poured up the steps and packed the hall. Sam and Gray Ellen found seats in the front row of the mezzanine. She hadn’t wanted to come, but Sam had insisted. Now, she marveled at the lavish appointments: pillars twined with a relief of painted grapevines; crimson velvet seats; crimson carpet on the main floor; an elaborate proscenium flanked by pillars and elevated private boxes, lavishly ornamented in gold leaf and carved rubies. The high, curving walls were a deep forest green, a warm contrast to all the crimson and gold. Electric lamps were strung under the curving rails of the mezzanine and balcony and bathed the stage in crisscrossing pools.
She was impressed. This could be the Philadelphia Academy of Music or Symphony Hall in Boston. On the stage, beyond the gleaming brass rail of the empty orchestra pit, sixty leading citizens took their seats in three semicircular tiers behind the podium.
After preliminary remarks by the Democratic chairman, the Reverend Peyton Hoge of First Presbyterian Church stood up. “During the War of Secession, our mills turned out iron for Confederate cannon,” he announced before he’d even reached the podium. “Those cannon are long gone now, broken into scrap. But let us pray that the Confederate iron that went into their making—that deter
mination—is as strong as ever.”
The crowd applauded. A few whistled. Somebody behind Sam let loose a rebel yell.
“Among the finest citizens of this town are many who served the Cause.”
Cheering and applause.
“In Oakdale Cemetery, a stone soldier in full dress uniform stands at parade rest, guarding the bodies of our fallen. In the so-called National Cemetery, only a short walk from this opera house, lie the two thousand Yankees who found out what a mob of nigrahs and Republicans are shortly going to learn: we will not be pushed around!”
Pastor Hoge waited for the applause to trail off, the house to settle down.
“Tonight, it is my great privilege to present a man who fought with equal bravery on the field of honor and in the halls of Congress. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell!”
Waddell stood up slowly and remained standing at his chair as the applause and cheering went on. He smiled slightly, then walked casually toward the podium. The applause increased as Pastor Hoge—who, Sam thought, looked annoyed at Waddell for taking his time—shook his hand. Waddell braced his hands on the rails of the podium and swept the great hall with his eyes, nodding slightly toward the left balcony, the right balcony, the mezzanine. Then he clasped his hands behind him and stood rigid until the hall quieted. The silence was remarkable. Still, Waddell said nothing. He stood fixed in place, like the stone soldier at Oakdale. That was exactly the pose he struck—parade rest.
Sam was holding his breath, straining to hear. How many hundreds of others, he wondered, were doing the same?
“My fellow citizens,” Waddell said at last, pronouncing each syllable as if it pained him. His voice was low and conversational, but by some trick he made it carry to the back rows. He looked around, and for an instant Sam wondered if he had forgotten his speech—Waddell had no paper in his hand. He stood looking up at the vaulted ceiling, as if his words were printed there.
“Last month.” Again he waited, shook his head as if he himself could not quite believe what he was about to say. “Every month for the past three months, there have been in this city one hundred and forty burglaries. Person or persons unknown have violated the homes of law-abiding citizens and made off with their valuables an average of once every five hours.”
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