Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  Angry murmuring, whispers.

  “Four hundred and twenty times in the course of ninety days, criminals have destroyed the most basic right under the law—the right of an individual to be secure in his dwelling.

  “And where are the miscreants, the vile perpetrators of such a crime spree?” He turned up his palms and continued speaking in a mild tone, as if he were baffled. “Are they in the county jail?” He looked around, as if waiting for an answer from the crowd.

  “I have not heard of any arrests. Indeed,” he said, his inflection now carrying a slight edge of anger, “I am in court five days in every week, and I don’t recall that the courthouse has been choked with thieves. In fact, not one of those perpetrators has been arrested!”

  Here we go, Sam thought—he’s starting to get wound up.

  But his voice backed down a notch. “The reason for this,” he said, head down, staring up at the balcony as a preacher stares toward heaven with a bowed head. “The reason for this civic outrage is clear. As clear as black and white. What color are the magistrates? What color are far too many of our policemen? What color are these predators who plunder the common weal?

  “They are,” he said, as if controlling his rage with great difficulty, “the dregs of that other race. The Negro race. That gentle, childlike people dangerously mutating before our very eyes. And what, pray, is the cause of this mutation?”

  Again he paused, and Sam expected another quiet answer. The crowd leaned forward in their seats.

  “Power!” he shouted. “The corruption of power! The shameless manipulation of a whole race by greedy Republican scoundrels!”

  He was warming up now.

  He went on with the litany of abuses, now familiar through repetition in the pages of Clawson’s newspaper: white women jostled off the sidewalks by Negro laborers, white professional men backsassed by janitors, white children bullied by roving gangs of vicious Negro boys.

  “They tell me the editor Manly is still in town. Still heaping abuse upon our womenfolk and our honor. Still printing slanderous lies upon the white race. Still daring us to do something about it!”

  Sam scribbled impressions in his notebook: the arc of light along the proscenium; the pulsing nimbus outlining Waddell’s hands, arms, and head; the malevolent undercurrent of outrage in the crowd. Sizzling, that was the character of the speech. The air was heating up.

  He’s got that light in his eye, Sam thought. That look of killing rapture. Then he gets that note in his voice, carries it along on a rising swell of pure words—not tumbling them out willy-nilly but firing them like rifle shots. Timing, Sam thought—that’s his secret. He does it all with the pause. He does it all with the spaces between the words.

  Waddell spoke for another forty-five minutes. He had them by their heartstrings, then he grabbed them by their throats. He had them soaring along on a wave of remembered glory, then answering his litanies in angry unison. He lifted them out of their seats and held them there—suspended in mid-sentence—with his voice.

  “If there should be a race conflict here—God forbid!—the first men who should be held to strict accountability are their white leaders!”

  “Hear, hear!”

  “Damn Yankee Republicans!”

  “And the work should begin at the top of the list!” Waddell said.

  “Damn right, Colonel!”

  “Send them to hell!”

  “I mean the governor of this state—the engineer of all the deviltry.”

  He paused again. Here it comes, Sam thought, the final windup. His heart was pounding. He loosened his tie. He could feel the swell of human energy filling the room. Gray Ellen watched, as she had all evening, with rigid indifference.

  The Colonel spoke deliberately, summoning all the drama of a prosecutor demanding a capital verdict. “Will we of the Anglo-Saxon race stand for this any longer?”

  “No!”

  “A thousand times no! Let them understand that we will not live under these intolerable conditions. No society can stand it! We are resolved to change them, if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses!”

  The house erupted. The crowd was on their feet, clapping wildly, screaming, shouting, singing old battle songs. Men pounded the seat backs, stamped their boots in unison. The balcony swayed. The whole building shook. Gray Ellen sat, unmoving, tears streaming down her face.

  Sam timed the outburst—seven minutes. Waddell stood like the Confederate cemetery guard once more, drinking in the crowd’s love. At that moment, standing between a thousand clamoring citizens and sixty of the most influential men in the city, he became the civic soul incarnate.

  In the circle behind the podium, Hugh MacRae’s face filled with blood. He hadn’t counted on the old warhorse taking such complete control. Kenan looked to the exits, fearing a riot, wondering how they would get the women out before they were trampled. Rountree cursed himself out loud, though in the din no one could hear him. He should never have let this happen. They were going to tear down the hall and then march on Brooklyn, murdering and burning. Their careful plans had just been pulverized by an old-time barnburner. Walker Taylor was so stunned by the clamor he could not think straight. He wrung his big hands and hoped to God that Dowling and his men were not still lingering outside to lead the riot.

  At length, Colonel Waddell held up his hand for silence, and got it.

  “The time for smooth words has gone by. The extremest limit of forbearance has been reached. Negro domination,” he said with a last, breathless pause, “shall henceforth be only a shameful memory!”

  All at once, in the new clamor of applause and shouting, Sam realized that Gray Ellen was gone. He sprang up in time to see her disappearing into the crowd at the exit. He shouldered his way through the press of people and kept her in sight all the way down the stairs.

  On the street, the cool air slapped him out of his daze. Gray Ellen had stopped under a street lamp at the foot of the steps.

  “Gray!” he called, but his voice was lost in the noise of the crowd. He shoved his way toward her. She climbed the pediment of the street lamp and swung around it, holding on with one hand. She cupped the other hand in front of her mouth and began to shout. At first, Sam couldn’t hear what she was shouting. Then, as he got closer, her words floated across the heads of the people beginning to mob the sidewalk.

  She swung and shouted, tears streaming down her dirty face. “You lost the War!” she shouted, swinging around the pole.

  People looked up. “She’s drunk,” somebody said.

  “Can’t you get it through your heads? You lost the goddamn War!” Her black hair was coming undone, falling around her face.

  “Look at that black hair!” a man shouted. “You got painted with the tarbrush, did you, honey? Nigger in the family woodpile?” His companions laughed. Sam knocked the man down, and he disappeared under the tangle of feet.

  She kept swinging and crying and shouting, “Don’t you get it? You lost the War!”

  Mike Dowling rode by, wheeled his horse in a tight circle, and shouted into her face, “Maybe we did, sweetheart—but we’ll sure win this election!”

  He galloped away. Sam snagged Gray Ellen around the waist and wrestled her, sobbing, to the street, where they rolled over and over on the oyster-shell paving until their clothes were coated white with lime dust.

   PART III

  THE BALLOT

  There need be no surprise if a large number of colored voters are killed in North Carolina to-day or to-morrow. The preliminaries have all been arranged by the Democrats. The last thing to be done generally in the way of preparation for such an event is to send over the country a report of the riotous condition of the negroes and the fear of the whites, who expect an “outbreak” at any moment. That report was sent out by the Associated Press yesterday.

  Philadelphia Press, November 8, 1898

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Thursday, November 3

  “BLESS ME FATHER, for I have
sinned,” Sam Jenks whispered into the confessional screen. The confessional box smelled of lacquer and mildew. “It has been many months since my last confession, and these are my sins.” He’d been meaning to do this since Chicago. He told about his old drinking habits, his neglect of his wife. The awful fight they’d had after Thalian Hall.

  Tomorrow was First Friday mass. He would start clean. The church always took you back. Always gave you a second chance.

  He told about Saffron, keeping his voice low, embarrassed and ashamed at the sound of the words coming out of his mouth: “I tried to seduce a woman not my wife.”

  He waited for Father Cripps’s bland, cheerful voice offering to absolve him. He was the priest scheduled to hear confessions. Instead, he heard a clear, fierce tenor, a voice not bothering to whisper, and full of righteous anger: “Black or white?”

  “Father Dennen?” Christ, why couldn’t that damned priest keep to his schedule? Sam wanted to bolt from the confessional box. But he was trapped—Father Dennen had surely recognized his voice already.

  “Father Cripps is ill—never mind. Black or white?”

  “Father?”

  “The woman!”

  “Black.”

  “Have you been back to her?”

  Sam tried to swallow, but his throat suddenly felt constricted, dry. He could not clear it to speak.

  “Have you been back to her?” Father Dennen repeated.

  “Of course not. I didn’t mean to go the first time.”

  “Of course not.”

  That was all he needed—irony from a priest. In the past months, his life had advanced beyond what any absolution could fix. Life was complicated, full of traps. A man trying hard to do the right thing would suddenly find himself doing exactly the wrong thing. “I always find myself exactly where I don’t want to be,” he explained weakly. Not just frequenting the saloons in Chicago or fleeing the battle in Cuba he’d been paid to witness, but seeing the mob at the Record office, witnessing the Gatling gun demonstration on the river, working at a newspaper office stacked with carbines, rolling around in the street with his hysterical wife.

  “What?”

  “I haven’t got anything against … They’re just trying to get along, I’m just trying … But on the river, and then my wife was angry, and there she was crossing the street under the lamp—it wasn’t my idea to go looking for him anyway.”

  “Please, please,” Father Dennen said, his voice less sure.

  “I’m trying, Father. But I don’t understand.”

  Father Dennen sighed. “At least you’re honest.” He sighed again, and Sam heard his callused hand rasping against the stubble of his chin. “But for the love of God, son—take charge of your life.”

  Sam said nothing. He waited for the lecture, the penance. But instead of assigning a penance, the priest said, “Why is your wife so angry at you? What have you done?”

  It took him nearly half an hour to explain. “I left her alone when she needed me,” he began. “Then I was a coward.” He had never told the truth about Cuba to anybody but his wife. Now, he told Father Dennen.

  When he had finished, he waited again for a penance. All he heard on the other side of the screen was the measured breathing of the priest. Now he knows everything, Sam thought. Now he can destroy me. Never again would he be able to face this man over a dinner table. He finally said tentatively, “A penance, Father?”

  “If only the good Lord had supplied me a whipping post.”

  Sam was afraid of his anger. “I am trying to be a good man.”

  “No doubt. So are we all. It’s hard to be a good man in these times. But that’s no excuse. Marriage is a sacred institution. You are debasing it.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “You want penance? Three things!” snapped the priest, the old ferocity back in his voice. Sam waited while Father Dennen milked the drama. “You will touch no strange woman.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “You will do no harm to any man, black or white. Especially black.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Father Dennen paused, breathing quick and shallow, like a prizefighter. “You will love your wife.”

  Sam barely whispered it: “Yes, Father.”

  “I know, I know—it’s too hard,” the priest said impatiently. “Do it anyway.” And slammed shut the panel before Sam could even answer. Behind the lacquered wood, Sam could hear him murmuring in fast Latin. It must be the absolution and blessing, but the wood was too thick and he could not hear.

  When he rose, his knees were stiff from kneeling so long. He cracked open the door. The church was empty—everybody had gone to watch the parade, he supposed. The priest had made him late. He hurried out the back way, furtive as a thief.

  Gray Ellen spent the morning at the kitchen table poring over her students’ copybooks. Some of her initial enthusiasm had begun to fade, and she was already looking forward to Christmas vacation. There were too many distractions for these children. Some of them were hopeless at spelling—there were so many letters they didn’t pronounce, and they couldn’t be persuaded to write down what they didn’t say out loud. They looked on it as a kind of craziness. White teacher craziness.

  Today had been proclaimed a holiday. She knew the reason, and it disgusted her, but she was grateful for a day to herself.

  She sipped hot tea and watched out the open window as she worked. The breeze was riffling the boughs of the locust tree in the yard. The weather felt almost real today—brisk and refreshing.

  When you’re raised in a place, she reflected, the landscape enters your body. The silvery look of a rolling Pennsylvania meadow in the morning, the feel of a stormy breeze on your bare cheek, how a warm day smells sweet or musky. The colors of housetops darkened by hovering banks of clouds. No matter where you lived your life, what lovely, exotic lands you visited, your body craved the landscape of your youth. Your eyes and ears measured everything else against it.

  This morning, the clear opal sky cast the world in a clean, mellow light, deepening the colors of things, limning their edges precisely. It was a light she could feel on her skin, full of hope and anticipation. The light made her feel at home—almost.

  Calliope Register materialized at the back screen door. “Hey, Gray,” she said, working hard to sound cheerful.

  Gray Ellen sighed and closed the copybook. “Come on in. Have some tea?”

  Callie came into the kitchen, so swollen with child she could hardly maneuver between the stove and the table. Her left eye was blackened, and proud flesh was rising on her cheek. Her right hand was wrapped in a dirty bandage.

  “Let’s go onto the porch, where we can be comfortable,” Gray Ellen said.

  She carried a tea tray onto the front porch, and Callie backed into the chair next to hers. “Thank you, dear. I swear to God, this baby is swishing back and forth inside me like a tub of laundry.”

  Babies again. “Is it all right? Did anything—?”

  “Farley came back last night. Maybe you heard him.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I did.” It had been hard to ignore the crashing and banging, the shouted curses and the bawling of the twins. She hadn’t heard Calliope make a sound. That meant she’d had practice.

  “Oh, ain’t nothing special with him,” she said quickly. “That’s how men are, I guess.”

  “Not all men,” Gray Ellen said. “There’s no excuse.”

  Callie looked embarrassed. She was having trouble getting her breath, talking in quick little spasms. “I ain’t complaining. Far’s a good man, mostly.”

  “Did he hurt you?”

  She touched her eye and smiled faintly. “He done worse before.”

  Gray Ellen touched her arm. She couldn’t help it. Part of her was outraged, but part of her understood perfectly. When you had so little, you couldn’t afford to give up anything without something certain and better to take its place.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Callie nodded but didn’t look at her. “
Has he calmed down?”

  Callie laughed. Gray Ellen caught the bitter note. “He’s gone, honey. First light. Off to a wreck in Goldsboro.”

  “At least he’s working.”

  “I ain’t talking no train, honey. He got laid off.”

  “Oh, I didn’t realize.”

  “He comes in drunk. Boys are playing with their new jackknives, opening and closing the blades. He like to pitch a fit. ‘What you throwing my hard-earned money away on toys for, woman?’ he says to me. I say, ‘Boy got to have a jackknife. How else he gonna play mumblety-peg with the other boys?’ I bought them knives out of my laundry money. Then he whupped me. Whupped the boys. Start busting up the room.”

  “You don’t have to stand for that. No woman—”

  Callie’s mouth went crooked as she talked. “Been slipping around. Whenever he goes slipping around, he’s got to make like it’s my fault.” She shrugged. “Same with any man, I guess.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “You better believe it, sweetie. You get off your high horse and look around. They get the itch, men do. Why, your own Sam—”

  “What about Sam?”

  Callie clasped her hands, looking straight ahead and rocking, though it was not a rocking chair. “Nothing,” she said softly, pasting a white hand over her split lip. “Me and my big mouth.”

  Gray Ellen’s cheeks stung. “Maybe you’d better go,” she said, trying to control her voice.

  “Maybe I’d better,” Calliope said, laboring to heave herself out of the chair. “I wish I was pretty, but I’m not. I’m just a fat woman with a big mouth and too many babies.” She was sobbing, making no attempt to wipe her eyes. The tears streamed down her face, leaving dirty tracks.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake—sit down and finish your tea.” It had been a clean, fine morning. Now, it was ruined. The beautiful light was wasted. She passed Callie a handkerchief. “Here, now, wipe your face.”