“Wait a minute—how about the man stepping off the train?”
“He’s lived there all his life, only he doesn’t know it yet. In temperament. In books, maybe. Or the music he’s listened to, the paintings he’s seen. In dreams and desires. The women he’s loved.”
Sam waited for him to drink his whiskey, craving to join him.
“There is a landscape of the soul, Samuel. We walk around on this rocky planet, swatting skeeters and slipping in the mud. But we also walk around on the little postage stamp of ground inside our heads.” He tapped an index finger against his temple. “That’s our real compass. That’s the place we know every inch of by heart.”
“Too early in the day for speeches, Harry.”
Harry shook his head. “No, no. It’s late. Later than you know.”
“You’re drunk again.”
Harry smiled and raised his glass. “Samuel, you’ve got to find your place.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“That’s not what I mean. You have to make this place your own. Or you have to go. There’s no third choice.”
“Harry, if I knew how to do that …”
“Where were you brought up?”
“Philadelphia.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything.”
“A gritty little tenement on the Schuylkill River. My father was a riveter, fell off a scaffold and broke his back. He hung on for a couple of years. I sold newspapers on the corner, that’s how I got started. Then a printer took me on as his apprentice. From there to the compositing room of a newspaper. Quit before I went deaf.”
“So you’ve worked your way up.”
“You could say that. I was a scholarship boy at Penn—only lasted two years. Otherwise, I pay as I go.”
“And you couldn’t wait to leave your life behind.”
“Right. And sometimes it couldn’t wait to leave me behind.”
Harry sipped his drink and nodded. “But don’t you ever miss it? Don’t you ever want to go back where you come from?”
Sam thought about that. He tried to recall a single image from childhood, a single smell or taste. The touch of his mother’s hand at bedtime, tucking the covers around his shoulders while he pretended to be asleep. But he didn’t really remember that. He was cheating—making up a memory. She might have done exactly that, and the room might have been sweet with her rose water and the scent of baking rolls still in her apron and in her hair. Her voice might have been soft and husky, her lips dry and cool as they brushed across his cheek.
But really, he couldn’t remember. The room was just a room. His mother, dead now for years, was just a pretty, shy face in a frame, too young ever to have been the dour woman he knew. Philadelphia was a name on the map, an indistinct geometry of dark, square buildings against a gray sky. The details were blurred. The drinking must have wiped it all out, he figured. He had never understood, before today, the extent of what he had lost. He had drunk to forget—that old joke.
“No,” Sam said. “I’m here now. I don’t ever want to go back.”
“Are you, Sam?” Harry asked sadly. “Are you really here with us now?”
In Peru or Nicaragua or Paris we should call this revolution. It is no less revolution in North Carolina.
The New York Independent, quoted in the Philadelphia Press
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Wednesday, November 9
JOHN G. NORWOOD went to his office at Williston School early and worked all day behind closed doors. His regular work routine had been interrupted enough already by this white supremacy nonsense. The politics were settled for now. They’d lost ground, but they could make it up next time. This election was an aberration. History favored the Republicans.
At three o’clock, he stood in the corridor to watch the children burst out of their classrooms. He was feeling low today, weary of talk and politics and weighty matters, and seeing the children lifted his spirits. Their squealing banter delighted him, made him feel younger, free of all the responsibilities he had taken on. Over the heads of passing children, he could see Gray Ellen Jenks standing beyond her desk, watching out the window.
Against all odds, Mrs. Jenks had proven herself a fine teacher. She clearly had the gift. Partly, the gift was just plain, old-fashioned love. Partly, it was a questioning intelligence. Real teachers had a kind of longing, a searching excitement of soul. They wanted to find out things. They didn’t settle for the old, easy answers. They lived in their minds more than in the world. Real teachers were often disappointed in life.
They had to guard against this disappointment or give in to a deep sadness about the nature of the world. The difficulty of learning anything. The impossibility of knowing anything for sure. That was the risk, and it got them all sooner or later. The thing was to carry on as long as possible, and to seek strength from the Lord.
When you don’t know for sure, you have to go on what you believe.
Or was he only idealizing? So what if he idealized the calling?—it was the key to the future of his race. He knew this as surely as he knew Christ had died on the cross. Ignorance was the enemy. White supremacy was just ignorance made flesh.
In a few years, or a few decades, there would be another kind of white man in the South—a white man as color-blind as Mrs. Jenks. They might still be named MacRae and Taylor and Rountree and even Dowling, but they would have moved beyond the old antagonism. They would understand that The Negro was as mythical as The White Man. There were as many kinds of Negroes as there were Negro people. Color was the least useful way to categorize anybody.
The evil genius of the white supremacy campaign was that it had managed to erase all other distinctions among men. It had created the Black Monolith. Only fear of difference mattered. Like any irrational proposition, it was impervious to logical argument.
The irony was clear as water to Norwood: the Negro community’s greatest liability was that it did not act as a unified community. It was a fractured, fragmented coalition of bickering interests. Like any other community, really—but as far as the MacRae crowd was concerned, it was a single-minded threat stamped only by its color.
The children were all gone now. Mrs. Jenks came toward the door of her classroom. She looked wan and dispirited—he wondered how her own people treated her. He should have paid more attention, but there were so many good people to look out for. Her arms were heavily laden with books and themes. “Mr. Norwood—I didn’t realize you were in today.”
“Oh? I’m always in at this time of day.”
She felt uncomfortable to be caught in the middle of this business again. Bad enough that Sam was in it up to his neck. “I just meant, with all that’s going on downtown—”
“What’s going on downtown?” Suddenly, his pulse quickened.
“Look, I steer clear of politics.”
“It’s a man’s business. But tell me, please.”
“Another meeting,” she said. “One of those white supremacy carnivals.”
“Not much we can do about that. Anyhow, the election’s over.”
She pursed her lips, wondering how much of what Sam had told her was supposed to be confidential. It couldn’t possibly matter now. She wasn’t obliged to keep his secrets. “They’re presenting some list of demands or something.”
“Who’s presenting?”
“The usual crowd, I guess.” Sam hadn’t been specific.
“To whom?”
Maybe they’d deliberately left him out. “To your people.”
My people, he thought. Your people. How easily we use those terms. “Oh? And when is all this supposed to happen?”
She shrugged, shifting the weight of the books in her arms. “The meeting was this morning. I don’t know about the rest.”
He stood in front of her unintentionally blocking her exit, nodding dumbly. How could he have been so naive? He should get to a telephone and call—whom? Maybe he ought to just get downtown as fast as possible and start asking questions. But what m
ight he be walking into? He’d seen how that Colonel could get them worked up. No need to be the first black face they saw after a session like that.
Bare feet slapped on the pinewood floor at the end of the corridor. David King ran toward them with his crippled gait. “Mr. Norwood! Mr. Norwood! You got to come quick!”
“Calm down, boy. What is it?”
“There’s been an old tomatum.”
“Ultimatum?”
“That’s right, that’s right.” His arms were windmilling, and he couldn’t keep his head still. “They meeting at Jacobs’ Barbershop right now. Mr. Jacobs say to fetch you.”
David Jacobs was also the county coroner. “Thank you, David. Run along and get a drink of water.”
When Norwood turned back toward Mrs. Jenks, she said, “Isn’t it ever going to end? What else can they possibly want from you people?”
“Hush,” he said, patting her arm. “You go on home.”
When Norwood joined the thirty-two men who had been rounded up for the meeting with Waddell, others who had not been at that meeting were also present. He immediately spotted Ivanhoe Grant. Jacobs’ Barbershop was on Dock Street, a stone’s throw from the river. It had three barber chairs in a long, narrow space heated by potbelly stoves at either end and lit with electricity. Jacobs was a prominent man, and his clients were all white. Both side walls were hung with mirrors, creating the illusion of a larger space. If a man stared into the mirror, he could see himself multiplied to infinity.
Seated in the middle barber chair, lawyer Henderson was presiding, or trying to, amid the clamor of argument and denunciation. Jacobs sat to his left and Carter Peamon to his right.
“What’s going on?” Norwood asked Armond Scott.
Scott passed him a two-page typewritten carbon with a list of signatures appended. “Read this,” he said.
Tom Miller, the pawnbroker and real-estate man, said, “I warned you! I told you they wouldn’t be satisfied with no damned election.”
“Gentlemen,” Henderson said. “Let’s not bicker among ourselves.”
“Where’s Manly?” Norwood demanded.
Armond Scott snorted. “Long gone. Him and his brother both.”
“About time.”
Tom Miller had the floor. “You want to make peace, that’s your business. But not me. I’m nobody’s boy.”
“Nobody said you were, Tom.”
“I still say we stand up and fight! Get our guns and give the sons of bitches what for!”
Some of the men cheered and hooted.
“We’ve got them outnumbered three to one! Three black guns against every white gun.”
“Just where you planning to get guns, Tom?” Norwood spoke in a loud voice full of a confidence he was not feeling. Things were unraveling fast.
“Out of our closets, our attics.”
“They got all the guns, Tom. You know that.” For months now, it had been impossible for a black man anywhere in the county—anywhere in the state—to buy a gun. They’d scraped up only a handful, enough to show off at Free Love Hall that first time. “You want to turn this city into a shooting gallery? That what you want?” Norwood turned on the crowd now, grabbing men by the lapels, asking them personally.
“Time we did something,” one man said.
“Time the black man stood up for himself ’round here.”
“Time we shoot up this town.”
Norwood cursed. He was not a man to curse—he knew it would get their attention. “Shoot up this town?” He walked among the crowd and it parted to let him pass nearly the length of the shop. “Shoot up this town? Just what part of this town you figure on shooting up? Market Street? You think they’re going to let a bunch of marauding niggers shoot up Market Street? All those fine homes?”
“We’ve got to do something, John,” Carter Peamon said.
Norwood paid no attention to him. “Let me tell you this, and get it right: if the shooting starts, the shooting gallery is going to be Brooklyn. And guess who gets to be the clay ducks?”
Men murmured sullenly. He was right, and they knew it. The Wilmington Light Infantry and Naval Reserves had been parading all over the place lately, showing off their fine rifles. And some of the men in the room had watched the Gatling gun firsthand, out on the river.
Lawyer Henderson didn’t say anything. Jacobs spun his chair slowly back and forth, shaking his head. Peamon stared into the mirror.
Ivanhoe Grant said from somewhere, sweet and low, “If you ain’t the sorriest bunch of plantation niggers I ever saw.”
Norwood said, “That’s not fair, Reverend. It’s all right for you to raise hell, but we have to live here after you’re long gone. We’ve got families, property. We’re on for the long haul.”
“Everybody got to live somewhere.” Grant emerged from the back, shaking his head, smiling big. He paused to light a cigar and smoke it awhile, waiting for them to want to hear what he had to say.
Henderson said, “I don’t recall inviting you in here anyway.”
“The Lord invited me,” Grant said quietly. “The Lord invites me anywhere the black man won’t say boo to the white man.”
“Man has a point,” Tom Miller said. He, too, lit a cigar, as if to show that he wouldn’t take any guff from anybody, white or black. The atmosphere quickly became smoky and close. Somebody accidentally kicked over a brass spittoon, and it clanged under the men’s feet till somebody else righted it.
The men were all talking at once. Grant stood nonchalantly smoking. After a while, he started laughing—soft at first, then so loud that, gradually, the other talk quieted. Once again, all eyes were turned on him.
Norwood, annoyed, said, “Just what is it that amuses you so, Reverend?”
“You are one precious gaggle of niggers,” Grant said, hardly able to speak through his laughter. “Man might mistake you for the United States Congress.”
“This is an important matter,” Norwood insisted. “We’re the duly appointed Committee of Colored Citizens.”
“You’re a bunch of scared niggers in a barbershop.”
Everybody objected at once. Grant stood casually puffing on his corona, oblivious. Armond Scott, a young lawyer, stared at him, captured by his clear blue eyes and the sureness of his manner.
Sitting above the pandemonium of angry voices, Henderson raised his arms for order. When that didn’t work, he took off his shoe and banged it on the arm of the barber chair. “Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen,” he kept repeating uselessly.
“Go ahead—shout me down!” Ivanhoe Grant said suddenly, with such force that the room quieted. Henderson put his shoe back on. Aware that some of the younger men, including Scott, were listening hard, Grant said more softly, “Do whatever you think is right. In the end, it won’t matter. It will happen.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.” He snapped his fingers crisply. “Don’t any of you get it?” He held up his cigar. “You’re not in charge of this. Never were. They’re going to do what they’ve been planning to do all along.”
Norwood smiled and seized upon Grant’s own logic. “So if it doesn’t matter what we do, why not be reasonable? Why not take the moral high ground?”
“Call it that, if you want,” Grant said. “I call it giving in.” He sidled over and stood nose to nose with Norwood. “What I’m telling you is, your only chance is to stand up to them.”
“Why? What kind of chance is that?”
Grant shook his head, as if incredulous that any grown man could be so thick. “Because,” he said with forced patience, “that’s the one thing they won’t expect.”
The meeting lasted another hour and a half. Norwood and Henderson prevailed, as Grant knew they would. He had made his speech for today. He knew why they wouldn’t take the risk. But they were taking the same risk anyway, without any pride. For the last half of the meeting, he looked on with detachment. What will be, will be, he thought. You can’t stop it.
“So we’re agree
d,” Henderson said at last. The men murmured assent without enthusiasm. “Mr. Jacobs, if you please,” he said, trying to invest the proceedings with a formality appropriate to the gravity of the moment.
Jacobs, who as coroner was accustomed to filling out meticulous death certificates in a fine cursive hand, acted as secretary. He read the final draft of their reply: “‘We the colored citizens to whom was referred the matter of expulsion from this community of the persons and press of Alex Manly, beg most respectfully—’”
“Beg,” Tom Miller said, and spat on the floor. “Beg.”
“‘—to say that we are in no wise responsible for, nor in any way endorse, the obnoxious article that called forth your activities.’”
“That’s right,” Carter Peamon said. “We’re not taking the blame, so we’re not really giving in. All this fuss about a man that’s already gone.”
Tom Miller said, “We’re giving in. At least admit it.”
Jacobs continued, “‘Neither are we authorized to act for him in this matter, but, in the interest of peace, we will most willingly use our influence to have your wishes carried out. Very respectfully,’ etcetera.”
“Fine,” Henderson said. “That ought to smooth their feathers.” He handed Jacobs an envelope, and Jacobs addressed it to the Honorable Alfred M. Waddell, 16 North Fifth Street, City. At Norwood’s insistence, he added, “Please deliver at House.”
He sealed the envelope and handed it back to Henderson, who held it up like a prize. “Now, who’s going to deliver it?”
“Give it to me,” Tom Miller said. “I’ll deliver it on the end of a brick!”
Some of the men laughed.
Norwood said, “I suggest a delegation of three—Jacobs, Henderson, and myself. Let them see we have a united leadership.”
Carter Peamon, who had been a precinct boss and had held various minor county posts, said, “That’s exactly the wrong thing to do. We don’t want to go making this thing out to be too important.”
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