Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  If things went wrong, Sam knew, they had a lot to lose. They had families, a community, a way of life. They cherished those things. Why wouldn’t they fight to keep them?

  But the nagging question kept coming back: who exactly was trying to take them away?

  Sam pushed away his coffee cup and asked the colored bartender for an iced drink. “Didn’t expect it to be so quiet today,” he observed, sipping root beer.

  Harry slugged down a shot of whiskey, then sipped another over ice. “It’s early yet. Stick around.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “You might could be going someplace, you ride the right coat-tails.”

  Sam ignored the remark. What did Harry know about Colonel Waddell or his plans? Why shouldn’t a man take advantage of the luckiest break he’d had in years? He hadn’t been asked to compromise anything yet.

  “So,” Harry said, staring at the bright rows of bottles behind the bar, “you’re cutting me out.”

  “What?”

  “Whatever deal you’ve got working, you’re going to keep it to yourself. Figure you can’t trust old Harry anymore. Old Harry’s unreliable.”

  “You’re way out of line, Harry.”

  “I suppose I was a fool to expect you to be different.”

  “Look, Harry—”

  “I never held back with you, Sam. I gave it to you straight. I’m the memory of this town, the only honest one it has. And you got the benefit.”

  “Don’t go too far, Harry. I’ve been hauling your carcass home too many nights. Don’t tell me what I owe you.”

  Harry smiled. “You’re right, of course. Make whatever deal you can. Somebody ought to come out of this with something worthwhile.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Whatever you say. Bartender?”

  So now even Harry thought he was up to no good, Sam thought. First the Negroes, then Gray Ellen, now his only friend. Well, he might as well be up to no good—he was already paying the price. They sat together, brooding separately.

  “Look at them,” Sam said after a while, meaning the other reporters, from papers in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington. “They’re going to file their eyewitness accounts from the bar.”

  Harry coughed into his handkerchief. Sam saw the smear of bloody phlegm before he refolded it. “Why the hell not?” Harry said. “They’re getting the same story we got, with a lot less wear and tear.”

  Colored waiters moved among the reporters delivering drinks, smiling, carrying messages between tables. Men in dark suits passed out cigars and shook hands, working the room.

  Sam sipped his awful root beer. The heavy sweetness made his teeth ache. “Still, doesn’t seem very professional.”

  Harry ordered another drink. “That’s what happens when you take the suspense out of politics. Makes it like watching a horse race you know is fixed.”

  Just then, a military courier—Sam couldn’t keep the uniforms straight, but he wore plenty of buttons and epaulets and a big horse pistol in a buttoned holster—rushed into the room and made for the back. He rushed out just as suddenly, a dozen men in suits trailing behind him.

  “What’s happening?” Sam asked one of the men as he rushed by.

  “Trouble up in Brooklyn. Nothing to be alarmed about. Stay put and enjoy your drink.”

  Sam grabbed Harry’s arm. “Like hell.”

  They rode a streetcar packed with the vigilantes Sam had seen coming and going from the Messenger for weeks. When they arrived at the polling place in Brooklyn a quarter of an hour later, they scarcely recognized it. That morning when they had visited, it had been quiet as a church hall, guarded by a handful of rifletoting white “specials” from one or another vigilance group. Now, it was under siege by a crowd of Negroes.

  At the edge of the mob, they met a woman reporter from New York wearing a crimson Eaton jacket. She scribbled furious notes in the most illegible scrawl Sam had ever seen. “What do you know?” he asked, dispensing with formal introductions.

  “Quite a row brewing,” she said happily, still scribbling. The streetcar vigilantes had meanwhile shouldered their way through the mob to join their comrades inside the polling place, where some two dozen white men were handling the vote of a largely Negro precinct. “They’ve been turning away Negroes who want to vote. They say they’re not eligible. Some kind of special registration.”

  Harry said, “Never heard of such a thing.”

  Sam said, “So they went home and got their pals.”

  “It’s all sort of spontaneous,” she said. “Nobody seems to be in charge. Of the Negroes, I mean.”

  Sam said, “Seen any preachers?”

  She nodded. “Just one. Handsome devil. He was around when it all got started, then he vanished. Guess he got scared off.”

  “Right,” Sam said. “That must be it.”

  She said, “They’re not even armed.”

  “I see a few ax handles,” Harry commented.

  “But all the guns are on the other side,” she said. “And more coming all the time. Do you think they’ll open fire?”

  By now, scores of white men were facing off more than a hundred Negroes. The standoff had an inertia to it—it wasn’t going anywhere without a good, strong push. Sam could feel everybody’s reluctance to push. It was in the air. He could see it on the faces of the Negroes, the uncertainty in their eyes.

  Captain James arrived with a handful of men. Sam admired the fact that he hadn’t trotted out his whole force. All those pretty uniforms on this side of the tracks would surely have provoked a riot, and a riot would quickly have turned into slaughter.

  “Aren’t you frightened?” Sam asked the woman reporter.

  “Frightened?”

  “Gadding about in that pretty jacket, asking questions, in the middle of all this?”

  She smiled a yearbook smile. “I’m just a woman. Everybody tells me everything.”

  Sam mounted a wagon bed to see over the crowd.

  “What’s happening?” Harry asked.

  On the front porch of the hall, a familiar group was speaking to the crowd—John Norwood, Carter Peamon, Armond Scott, and Father Dennen. Sam couldn’t hear everything they said, but it was clear they were exhorting the Negroes to disperse. “Leadership,” he told Harry. “That’s what’s happening.”

  Again, just as at the jailhouse last night, the crowd evaporated. Miraculous, Sam mused—the right man says the right words, and real things happen in the world. Or don’t happen.

  And all this today was about words—speeches and pamphlets, handbills and editorials. Little black marks on paper inserted into the slot of a locked wooden box. The marks became numbers, the numbers were placed beside names, and the names determined the law. Then real people had to live under the law. It held them from the moment they left for work in the morning until the last lamp in the house was extinguished at bedtime. It held them even while they slept.

  In fifteen minutes, the confrontation was over and the boredom was back. Sam climbed down from the wagon. The woman in the crimson jacket was still scribbling. He watched her fingers, thin and sharp as pencils. Her green eyes were focused on the notebook. Her face was lean, her little nose pointy as a beak. Tough girl, he thought. The kind that loves to watch. He hoped she was paying close attention. She wouldn’t blink. She would write the exact truth.

  Sam said, “Something’s holding everybody back.”

  “I told you,” Harry said. “It won’t happen today.”

  The woman reporter asked, “What are you talking about?”

  Harry said, “Let’s get back to the club. I want to go over my notes.”

  “I’m coming, too,” she said, grabbing Sam’s arm.

  He broke away. “Sorry,” he said. “Club rules. Gentlemen only.”

  They hitched a ride on one of the streetcars that were making regular circuits of the city carrying crews of white vigilantes. The woman reporter followed, but they left her at the door of
the Cape Fear Club, where she snagged Colonel Waddell on his way out. He happily consented to an interview.

  To nobody’s surprise, the Democrats swept the election. In the Fifth Precinct of First Ward, whose rolls registered 324 black and 31 white voters, nearly 500 votes were tallied for the Democratic slate.

  In Fourth Ward, with 546 registered voters, Democrat John D. Bellamy won nearly twice that number of votes for a seat in the United States House of Representatives, easily beating Oliver Dockery.

  Furnifold Simmons, the state Democratic chairman, won a United States Senate seat from incumbent Republican Marion L. Butler.

  All across the ticket, the few Republicans who ran were routed. They lost the courts, the county commission, and representation in the United States Congress. The state legislature was now packed with an overwhelming majority of white supremacist Democrats, who held it in their power to change the charter of Wilmington—and would certainly do so. The days of the Fusionist city government were numbered.

  Half the dead in Oakdale Cemetery voted the Democratic ticket. The other half didn’t vote.

  By eleven that night, the city was quiet. The reporters had filed their stories. The election officers had gone home. Brooklyn was deserted. Only a few saloons downtown remained open for business—illegally. No policemen appeared to cite them. Sergeant Alton Lockamy passed Polson’s on his way home and stopped in for a quick beer himself. He couldn’t quite believe Election Day had come and gone without a single attack. The worst was over.

  At the Wilmington Light Infantry Armory, the soldiers had long since stacked their weapons upstairs and retired to their homes. They were still on alert, but that was only a precaution. The Gatling gun was safely stored behind locked doors, neatly covered and under constant guard, its ammunition secured in the marble bunker under the front steps. The club rooms were dark.

  Colonel Walker Taylor was finishing off a brandy nightcap before going up to bed.

  Captain William Rand Kenan lay awake next to his wife, listening to her soft breathing with a quiet joy. He had done nothing to be ashamed of. There had been no bloodshed. The real power of any weapon—even a Gatling gun—was the choice of whether to use it. In a sense, as soon as you fired your weapon, it had failed to do what it was designed for: it had failed to change the enemy’s behavior to your advantage.

  Today, he reflected, had been a perfect example of that. They had deployed their weapon, and its very presence, the threat of use, had caused seventy-five horsemen to dismount and then disband peacefully. There had been no wounded horses to shoot, no bodies to carry from the field, no prayers to say for the dying. It had been the most efficient kind of military exercise.

  There had been no chaos of battle to disrupt the orderly plans for taking back the city. The right men would go to the state capitol and to Washington and start the process.

  The old house on Nun Street creaked familiarly in the late breeze. He’d left the window open—he would sleep well tonight. He touched his wife, gently, so as not to wake her. He loved her warmth. Next to her, he was protected from the force of his dreams. She turned on her side, and he tucked his body against hers, feeling their two heartbeats together. Somewhere out in the world, his son was making him proud.

  In a meeting parlor of the Cape Fear Club, George Rountree sat tabulating results from all over the state as they came in on the wire. Messenger boys jogged back and forth from the Western Union office at the train depot. A colored boy brought him fresh black coffee in a bone china cup. Rountree lit another cigar. He was still wearing his jacket and vest. His tie was still knotted perfectly at his throat.

  Rountree was going to the statehouse, he knew that. A warm satisfaction settled in his chest. The whole deal had worked out with such little friction and such precise timing that he was still slightly amazed.

  But that was the least of it. He and his fellow Democrats had been delivered a ringing mandate to take charge of the Old North State, to put the Negro in his place and send the carpetbaggers packing. When the magnitude of the Democratic victory became apparent, he relaxed a bit, loosened his tie, took a long draw on his cigar. It wasn’t over yet. He would stay until he had all the numbers, all the names. Tomorrow, he could sleep in. Nothing was happening tomorrow. They’d been ready to put down an uprising today, but the only mob that had almost gotten out of hand was Dowling and his damned rednecks.

  The section captains had kept the Businessmen’s Committee informed of events all over the city. The telephones had worked fine. There had been few surprises.

  Still, it never hurt to be prepared. Preparation was the key to everything. The first principle of the lawyer was to know in advance the answers to the hard questions.

  Hugh MacRae stuck his head in the door. He’d been in another parlor conferring with some businessmen, probably that so-called secret group of his. “You’re going to do great things for us in Raleigh, George—congratulations.”

  Rountree shook MacRae’s hand without standing up. “You expecting any trouble tomorrow?”

  MacRae winked. “Not a bit. It’s all over.”

  “Looks like all our precautions were for nothing.” After Rountree had shared the Pinkertons’ report, even MacRae had agreed force would no longer be necessary.

  “Never hurts to have your structure in place,” MacRae said. “Let them try and take the city from us now.”

  “Right. By spring, we can have the charter amended and a special election for a mayor and board.”

  “Don’t worry about all that now. You’ve got time. We’re organized, that’s the main thing.”

  MacRae went out. Rountree had never entirely trusted MacRae, and he didn’t trust him now. He’d always had the impression that the secret groups—MacRae’s and Walker Taylor’s both—intended much more immediate action. But maybe that wasn’t necessary now. All the cloak-and-dagger stuff made fine melodrama, but he and other level-headed men like him would do the real work for the Cause in the light of day, by law. The Republicans or Fusionists or whatever they called themselves were finished in this county.

  King Numbers was dead. Rountree already had notes for a draft of a bill to limit the franchise to voters who had the education to use it wisely.

  No more illiterate hordes of Negroes voting according to the orders of a white party boss. Rountree believed deeply in democracy—the democracy of educated, competent men of free will. With a little more work, it would come to pass here.

  In a few hours, he would go home to sleep the sleep of the just. For now, he sat awhile longer, waiting for one more wire, enjoying the finest cigar he had smoked in years.

  Solomon Fishblate hurried up Fifth Street. He had never liked the chill. He found Waddell’s house without trouble and rapped lightly at the front door. He expected the servant to open it, but instead the Colonel himself appeared. Of course, it was late—the servant must have already gone home.

  “Come in, Your Honor,” Waddell said, deliberately addressing Fishblate as if he were still mayor.

  Fishblate entered and took off his hat and coat. He smiled. It felt good to be treated with some respect for a change. A short time ago, he had been a man to be reckoned with in this city. But this new crowd had left him out of everything. How had it all changed so suddenly?

  “Come into the study,” Waddell said. “The maid has gone home, of course, but Miz Gabby is asleep upstairs, so we must talk gently.” Bessie King and her daughter Saffron were, in fact, asleep in his own back room, but he had no idea.

  Waddell settled into a leather chair, and Fishblate sat down in its mate, waiting for Colonel Waddell to explain why he had summoned him.

  Waddell waited a suspenseful interval, then said, “Solly—may I call you Solly, sir?” Fishblate nodded, hat in his hands. “Solly, you and I have been relegated to the margins of things. Left out in the cold, so to speak.”

  “Yes, we have.”

  “They—I mean the men who are running this particular show—call on us when they need
us, then conveniently shunt us aside. Am I right?”

  “Indeed you are, Colonel.”

  “There prevails a certain, shall we say, ingratitude?”

  Fishblate nodded vigorously. “They forget the sacrifices certain parties have made in their interest.”

  “Exactly.” Waddell clapped his hands together lightly. “And I’m forgetting my manners—may I offer you some refreshment? Wine or brandy?”

  “Brandy, if you please.”

  The Colonel poured him a full snifter. Now, this was more like it—being waited on by the blue bloods. Here was a man who appreciated his standing in the world.

  They settled back with their brandies. “You are aware of the meeting tomorrow,” Waddell said.

  “Of course. Would I forget a meeting at which I am to preside?” They had asked him to preside as a sop, he knew. As he understood it, the meeting would be largely ceremonial. They got the meat, he got the scraps.

  Waddell chuckled. “I mean no disrespect. It was only a way of broaching the subject. They’ve asked you to chair the meeting because you enjoy, shall we say, a certain influence over the Red Shirts.”

  “Lot of those Micks, they come from my district. MacRae figures I can keep them in line.”

  “Can you?”

  “Of course not. Mike Dowling, that hothead. Brains of a turnip. Nobody can keep that crowd in line. Any day now, boom. They’re going to blow off.”

  “But MacRae’s people don’t know that.”

  Fishblate shrugged. “Why tell a person what he doesn’t want to hear?”

  Waddell rose and paced the room with difficulty—his legs were stiffening up something fierce in this chill. “No doubt they also want to show that they have the backing of the former administration.”

  “No doubt.”

  “Then, sir, I have a proposition.”

  “I’m listening.” Here it comes, Fishblate thought—he was about to be invited inside again. Good. The outside was no place to be, not after today.

  “Tomorrow, invite me up to the platform. First thing.”