Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  He banged out the front door and walked to the corner of Red Cross and Nutt streets—across from the offices of Sprunts’ Champion Compress—with the gun on his shoulder, feeling like a damned fool. He loitered on the corner, watching in every direction for some sign of a mob, a riot. Nothing. He fished out his watch and checked it: ten o’clock exactly.

  What was going on? Where was everybody? He thought he heard the report of a rifle, but it might have been a hammer. Down Nutt Street, the yard of the compress seemed quiet enough. Empty freight wagons were parked in a neat row, tailgates to the iron fence, tongues raised like a line of stubby, raked masts. The machinery in the long shed clattered and droned—business as usual. At the end of Red Cross, on the river, steam tugs charged back and forth, hauling fat barges up and down the river.

  He listened. He squinted in every direction as far as he could see. He looked at his watch six times in ten minutes. He rubbed his moustache. He calmed down. He smoothed a hand over his bald head. He drew out a handkerchief and scrubbed a finger smudge off the oiled black receiver. He wondered how many shots he had—eight? No, seven: he had not replaced the jammed bullet. It was in his coat pocket.

  He wondered if he could shoot a man. Would it be easier to shoot a Negro than a white? The whole idea made his stomach go queer. He thought it would be damned hard to shoot anybody. This was his home. Whatever violence happened here, he’d have to live with it.

  He was a man of the law. He sighed and swore again softly, then carried the gun home and put it back in the closet. He would have unloaded it, but he didn’t want to fool with that damned pocketknife again. Instead, he rummaged in a kitchen drawer until he found a key that had never been used. With it, he locked the closet. He put the key in the top drawer of the desk in his study, then he locked that and slipped the desk key into his watch pocket.

  When he turned to go back out, Meta was watching him. Her arms were crossed in a hug, as if she were cold, though the house was quite warm from the coal grates. Her eyes were full of fear, and the fear was in her soft voice. “What’s happening, George?”

  “Don’t fret,” he said gently. “I put up the gun. Don’t know why I ever bought the thing.”

  She touched his arm. “Are we safe here?”

  “For right now. Just keep the doors bolted. I need to find somebody who can tell me what’s going on.”

  “Why can’t you just leave it be?”

  “Because I live here, Mrs. Rountree,” he said quietly. “I have a responsibility for what happens.”

  She nodded and lowered her head, not watching him as he went out again.

  Rountree went back to the same corner, intending to inquire at the Sprunt offices. Even as he walked, he realized he wasn’t thinking clearly. He should have just gotten on the telephone and tried to reach MacRae or Walker Taylor. He would use the telephone at Sprunts’. Or perhaps somebody there had already received word. He must collect himself and keep a clear head. He must not let this thing get away from him.

  Almost as soon as he reached the corner, he heard the crowd of Negroes advancing up Nutt Street through the gates of the Champion Compress—a hundred or more. Workers, unarmed but noisy. Rountree stopped walking. Seeing him, the crowd stopped, too. Out of the Sprunt offices spilled a collection of clerks and purchasing agents. Two pointed rifles. One of them, a young, slender man wearing shirtsleeves and a tie, took a step forward. “Where you think you’re going?” he called out.

  Several Negroes spoke at once. “Going home.”

  “They’re burning us down.”

  “Got to see our families.”

  The slender man said, “Get back to work.”

  Resolutely, the Negroes marched forward.

  “Just hold it right there,” the slender man said, backing up a step and glancing nervously at Rountree.

  Rountree said, “Go get your boss.” Here it is, he thought—this town’s going to go off like a Fourth of July rocket.

  The man disappeared into the office to use the telephone. By and by, as the men lingered, staring across the narrow street at the other race, the slender man returned from the office, and James Sprunt came limping up from the compress yard right through the ranks of the Negroes. “What goes on here?” he asked in a level voice. He was a tall, graying man with a handsome face, a mild manner, and a head for figures. He’d done his best to stay out of politics: he had work to do, a business to run.

  “We just want to go see about our families, Mr. Sprunt,” one of the Negroes said.

  “What about this?” he asked the clerk in the shirtsleeves.

  The clerk shifted his rifle from hand to hand. “I told these niggers to go back to work,” he said.

  Sprunt glared at him. “Don’t ever use that word again on my time.”

  The clerk ducked his head.

  Other white men materialized from nowhere and lined up behind the clerk and Rountree. Most of them carried Winchesters. Some wore red shirts. Rountree felt the atmosphere heating up like water in a kettle. Any minute now, it would cross a critical threshold and burst into steam. He ducked into the Sprunt offices and rang up the armory. He spoke to Captain James. “We’ve got a riot brewing,” he said. “Get that machine gun down here right now.” By the time he hung up the earpiece, he regretted making the call. He decided he had better stop making things worse.

  Outside, Grand Marshal Roger Moore had arrived with a squad of vigilantes. Moore had a compact, military bearing. Stuck in his belt was a double-action army Colt. From a crimson sash across his gray shirt hung an artillery officer’s short sword, blunt and sturdy. He deployed his men in a single line across Nutt Street and ordered them not to fire. The Negroes were getting restless and angry.

  Moore said, “What’s the situation, George?”

  “We’ve got to break this up,” Rountree said.

  Moore rocked on his heels, arms crossed, and nodded. “Let me read them the riot act. Then we’ll clear the street.”

  Sprunt joined them. “They’re just scared,” he observed. “Lots of bad rumors flying around. Let’s see if we can’t reassure them.”

  Moore touched the butt of his pistol. “We can reassure them, all right.”

  Rountree said, “Mr. Sprunt’s right, Roger. They’re not going anywhere, long as your men hold their position.”

  “I got damned few men.”

  At that moment, in a clatter of hoofs and shouted orders, Kenan’s Gatling gun detail reined up their wagon behind the vigilantes. Only minutes behind them, a company of Wilmington Light Infantry jogged up double-time and deployed in skirmish formation. The vigilantes moved out of the way as Kenan’s hostlers backed their wagon into position, tailgate to the crowd, so they would not be shooting over the horses.

  Kenan stood behind the gun, sighting in on the crowd of Negroes. As an officer, he ought to delegate the actual firing to an enlisted man, but he was the only one with real experience on the gun. Besides, it was too much responsibility for a younger man. His crew hunkered beside him over a case of magazines, ready to reload on cue. The hostlers stood by the team, hands on the bridles, bowing the horses’ heads so they would not plunge and bolt when the firing commenced. The last two men in the detail stood on either side of the wagon, guarding its flanks against snipers. They were well-drilled, deploying expertly in less than a minute.

  The Negroes fell back a couple of steps, pointing at the gun, the ones in front glancing back nervously over their shoulders, where their escape was blocked by the press of their companions.

  For a second, Rountree could not get his breath. Then he drew himself up and strolled as casually as he could toward the Negroes. Sprunt walked alongside. Moore held back, glancing at the gun, the vigilantes, the crowd, Rountree. Finally, he, too, moved toward the Negroes.

  “What have we done to you?” a Negro in front asked. He was looking right at Rountree and pointing over Rountree’s shoulder at the Gatling gun, Kenan’s infantrymen, the vigilantes and their Winchesters. “Tell me, wha
t have we done?”

  “Nothing,” Rountree said, trying to control his voice. He was angry at everybody, including himself, and more afraid than he’d ever been in his life. “You haven’t done anything. Let’s keep it that way.”

  “We want to go home, that’s all.”

  “Why don’t you just go back to work?” Rountree said. “Wouldn’t that be the best thing?”

  Another of the Negroes said, “They’re burning us down. I got to see about my family.”

  Sprunt turned to Rountree. “What does he mean, George?”

  “There’s been talk that Brooklyn’s burning. Probably nothing to it.”

  “Something to it, all right,” said the Negro. He was a tall, skinny fellow in denim overalls. Against the powder blue of his clothes, his face was dark as coffee. “Burned down Manly at the Record, that’s what we heard.”

  Sprunt muttered, “MacRae.”

  Grand Marshal Moore drew out a sheet of paper bearing small type. “I don’t care what’s happening in Brooklyn. These men are inciting to riot.”

  “I know the law,” Rountree said. Did this little colonel want a massacre?

  “Then read it to these rioters,” Moore said.

  “There’s no riot,” Sprunt said. “Let’s work this thing out.”

  Behind the gun, Kenan watched the delegation of white men dickering with the crowd of Negroes. As long as they stand in the way, he reflected, I can’t shoot. Let them keep standing there. There was not a single gun among the Negroes. He had no idea whether he would be capable of shooting them down. Let it be clear-cut, he prayed. Make them act decisively one way or the other. If the Negroes attacked Rountree and the others, he could shoot. It would not do to shoot over their heads, since the downhill trajectory would cause his fire to rake the Sprunt compress, probably killing innocent workers—white and black.

  He would have to shoot into their mass. They were all pressed together. At this close range, he could not miss.

  In the chilly November breeze off the river, Kenan sweated through his uniform. His fist closed on the crank. The gun swiveled noiselessly under his touch. The horses were standing still. His men were behaving like soldiers, not talking or moving.

  James Sprunt was fast losing his temper—and he almost never lost his temper. He took pride in being a fair man. If his workers were shot down at the gates of his compress, the act would show up as a debit on every balance sheet for the next twenty years.

  A man’s life was a balancing act. Every small action contributed to the balance, or else tipped the scales out of level. The balance was always between personal ambition and obligation to your community, the place where you lived. The place and the people were the same thing.

  He peered into the crowd of black faces, looking for one who would trust him. “Mr. Telfair,” he called to a man in the thick of the crowd. Jim Telfair was one of his top managers. They’d always gotten along well.

  The man shoved his way forward and faced Sprunt.

  “Why don’t you pick a friend and go up to Brooklyn to see what’s what?” Sprunt said. “Don’t take too long—nobody’s going anywhere till you get back.” He scribbled his signature on an envelope. “In case there’s any trouble,” he explained.

  Telfair grabbed a man out of the front row, and the two strode quickly toward Kenan’s infantrymen. “It’s all right,” Rountree called out. “Let them through.”

  For half an hour, both sides relaxed and tensed, relaxed and tensed. Kenan took his hand off the crank and sat on the sideboard of the wagon, feeling chilly now. Rountree and Sprunt continued to palaver with the Negroes.

  Telfair and his companion returned with a third man, the Reverend J. T. Lee of St. Stephen’s A.M.E. Church. Lee had been the lone minister at the meeting where the white ultimatum was given. Telfair introduced him, then reported, “They burned the Record, all right.”

  “You sure?” Rountree demanded.

  “Seen it with my own eyes.”

  Sprunt said, “If he says it’s so, it’s so.”

  “But that’s all,” Telfair continued. “Nobody’s burning our houses. Nobody’s shooting anybody—not that we saw.”

  The Negroes talked among themselves. The Reverend Lee moved among them, urging restraint and calm.

  A rider galloped up Red Cross and handed a note to Grand Marshal Moore. Moore came over to Sprunt and Rountree. “Tell them we’ll give them all safe conduct passes home,” he said. “Let them leave by twos and threes.”

  So by twos and threes, the Negroes hurried toward their homes. While Sprunt was signing passes, Rountree conferred with Moore and Captain Kenan, who had lit a cigar. Kenan’s heart was singing at the way this thing had turned out so far, but the day wasn’t over yet.

  “What’s the story?” Kenan asked Moore.

  “Some Negroes killed in Brooklyn,” Moore said. “Looks like the shooting has started. Got to move these men out before they get the news. Disperse them.”

  “Right,” Kenan said.

  A male secretary leaned out the doorway of Sprunts’ offices. “A call for you, Captain Kenan.”

  Kenan bit down on his cigar and clomped up two board steps into the hot office. On the telephone was Colonel Walker Taylor.

  “The State Guard is taking charge of all military units in the city,” Taylor told him. “You’re under my command now. We need you at Fourth and Bladen on the double. It’s starting.”

  Kenan walked slowly back to the wagon—there were still a few dozen Negroes hanging around, and there was no sense in stirring them up again. He issued quiet commands, limbered the gun, and started his company back up Red Cross. An image crossed his mind for an instant: Lincoln on the parapet of Fort Stevens, that ridiculous stovepipe hat sticking up like a clay target at the county fair. He reflected that his boy was deep in the heart of Mexico, and he thought that was a good thing. He wasn’t sure he wanted him to see what his father was about to do. He shrugged off dreams and memories, flung away his cigar, and focused on the lurching wagon, the heavy gun, the job at hand.

  They were three blocks from Bladen Street now, moving fast.

  Waddell’s mob moved in several directions at once. Dowling led his lieutenants off to find a drink at Jurgen Haar’s Saloon down on Front. Most of the businessmen walked downtown to their offices, some with assignments—men to call, meetings to set up, information to be passed along. A skeleton guard was posted at First Baptist, with a courier dispatched to Grand Marshal Moore to tell him to stand down, for the moment. They had no idea he was already at Sprunts’ Champion Compress talking down a riot. The streets around the armory were clear of Negroes. It was as if they had been erased from the city.

  A gang of white laborers headed north up Fourth Street toward their homes. The men were elated and full of brag. At last, action. At last, a white man could walk the streets of his own town swinging a rifle and saying what he damn pleased. Following the streetcar tracks, they straggled across the railroad culvert on a narrow bridge between Campbell and Hanover streets, straight into the heart of black Wilmington.

  Their own homes were mostly beyond this neighborhood, at the far end of Brooklyn. They hated living there.

  The men were tired—they’d been up all night, then had marched on the Record this morning. Now, they trudged along the sandy street with their heads down, double-barreled shotguns broken for safety and cocked over the crooks of their arms.

  “Darktown,” Bert Chadwick remarked conversationally, waggling his sixteen-shot Remington rifle toward the row of shotgun shacks on his right, which looked deserted but which they all knew were full of scared Negroes. “Pretty soon, we’ll clear out this breeding nest.”

  “They get back in those filthy shacks and hump like rabbits,” Teddy Curtis said. “No notion of right or wrong, no work ethic, no love of family.”

  Chadwick said, “They got animal sacrifice in their churches, the African Zionist ones. Take a poor child’s lost cat, carve it up for their heathen gods. Make a dec
ent Christian man ashamed.”

  Hill Terry said, “You work them niggers hard from sunup to sundown, let ’em sing awhile after supper, keep the women separate from the men, and they live and die happy.”

  “That’s the God’s honest truth,” Chadwick agreed. “And we sure as hell don’t need any Republican carpetbaggers coming down here from Yankeeland to stir ’em up.”

  Up ahead, on the near side of the intersection with Harnett Street, a small crowd of Negro men was assembling. When the first of the white men saw the Negroes on the corner, the whole band halted in the middle of the street.

  “Here they come,” Tom Miller said, watching the whites advance up Fourth. He had a fine, new Colt .44 pistol, taken in pawn months ago and stowed away in a cupboard until he might need it. Today, he planned to need it.

  Most of the men with him were unarmed. A few of them had old rabbit .22s or shotguns they had not fired in years. They had started as a dozen or so men drinking coffee and wondering out loud what was happening downtown, where there seemed to be some kind of demonstration. They’d heard the sporadic crack of rifles and the long-distance murmur of the crowd of white men.

  Then David King had showed up gory as a butchered shoat, blood splashed across his Sears-Roebuck mail-order shirt. He wore a hole in his neck you could stick your finger into.

  “They burned it down!” he blurted out, spraying his listeners with spittle and blood. He fainted into their arms.

  It was a few minutes before the sense of it dawned on them: the Record had been burned to the ground.

  “They gonna murderize Mr. Manly!” David King shouted again as soon as he came to.

  “Somebody shot this boy,” an authoritative voice said. Heads turned toward its source: Ivanhoe Grant, splendid in his tailored dove-gray suit.