Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  Norman Lindsay, a foreman at Wilmington Cotton Mills, pulled a red neckerchief out of the back pocket of his overalls and wrapped it around David King’s neck to stanch the bleeding. “Boy’s only nicked,” he said. “Be hunky-dory in no time.”

  David King wandered away, searching for a quiet corner.

  Grant kept his hand in the pocket of his coat, fingers wrapped around a two-shot nickel Bulldog derringer. “Going to be hell to pay,” he said.

  Now, the white men moved closer, cautiously. Bert Chadwick took his Remington in both hands.

  “Get you boys on home now,” one of the Negroes said. “Don’t be making trouble out here.”

  The Negroes held their ground. More arrived, swelling their number, but most were unarmed. Several pried loose slats from a nearby fence and hefted them as clubs. All the whites were armed.

  Tom Miller shouted, “What you doing with those guns?”

  “Going hunting for blackbirds,” Chadwick answered.

  Some of the whites laughed nervously. They shuffled around, unsure what to do. Hill Terry and Teddy Curtis thumbed two shells apiece into the breeches of their shotguns and snapped them shut with a motion like breaking a chicken’s neck.

  “Round these parts,” Miller shouted back, “the blackbirds shoot back!”

  “Shut your mouth, boy!”

  “I’ll shut it when you carry those guns out of my homeplace!”

  “Goddamn you, boy, I’ll ram this Winchester up your—”

  Chadwick was drowned out by taunts. The whites answered with threats and obscenities. The whites advanced slowly, and the Negroes retreated across the intersection to the far corner, their backs to Walker’s Grocery. Old Mr. Walker, hair and beard gray as ash, rocked on a cane chair in the open doorway gnawing an unlit Missouri meerschaum, waiting to see what would happen.

  The taunting continued. More Negroes arrived. A streetcar barreled up Fourth Street and through the intersection without stopping, and the crowd dodged out of its way. Several armed white men swung off the moving car and hit the street running to get their balance. One of them was Sam Matthews, a teamster, who carried a .44 Colt navy rifle. Another was Sergeant Alton Lockamy.

  “Get off the street! Go home!” Matthews shouted, the big-game rifle cocked on his hip.

  “Never!” one of the Negroes said. “This is our homeplace! Get you bullies gone!”

  Lockamy, open hands raised in a gesture of conciliation, sidled over to the blacks. “Gentlemen, there’s no sense to borrow trouble.”

  “Tell that to them that burned out Manly!” Tom Miller said.

  “I know, I heard about that. But what’s done is done.”

  “You’re the police. I’m a citizen. Protect me from that mob, officer.” Some of the men behind Miller laughed nervously.

  “Listen to the sergeant,” Norman Lindsay said, growing agitated. “For heaven’s sake, listen!”

  Lockamy shrugged. “Boys, they’ll shoot me quick as you,” he said. “Use your nut. Get you on out of here.”

  “No,” Miller said. “They can’t be coming around here toting shotguns—”

  “Look, I’ll try to make them clear out of here.”

  Lockamy sighed and crossed the street to the white side, where he conferred with more stubborn men.

  Chadwick said, “About time a white man walks where he pleases in this town.” Matthews, Curtis, and Terry loudly agreed.

  Everybody was chawing tobacco, spitting nervously. Time was running out. Sergeant Lockamy knew he must find a telephone and get some help up here, fast. He went inside Brunjes Grocery & Saloon.

  On the other side of the street, Ivanhoe Grant said, “Now’s the chance we’ve been waiting for. This is the place, and now is the time.”

  Norman Lindsay, at the front of the black crowd, saw at once what was about to happen. He turned to his friends and neighbors. “In the name of God, go home.”

  “The Lord despises a coward!” Grant shouted, pointing his finger in accusation at Lindsay.

  “For the sake of your lives, your children, your families—”

  The crowd shouted Lindsay down. He was still imploring them to disperse, his back to the whites, when Grant slipped the Bulldog derringer out of his coat pocket, straight-armed it past Lindsay’s ear, and snapped off a wild shot in the direction of the whites.

  Their reaction was so immediate it might have been simultaneous. Chadwick’s Remington went off. A dozen Winchesters fired at once, as if in volley. Two shotguns thumped—Curtis and Terry. The shotguns thumped again. Pistols cracked. Sam Matthews’s big-game rifle boomed, the walnut stock punching him in the shoulder.

  Norman Lindsay felt a fist in his back and was dead before he hit the dirt. Beside him, a brick mason named John Townsend screamed, twisted, and fell dead. William Mouson, an unarmed clerk, crumpled without a sound, astonished, shot clean through his open mouth.

  Negro men fell wounded on either side of Tom Miller. He pumped six shots toward the whites and hit Bert Chadwick in the muscle of his left arm. Chadwick’s Remington jumped out of his hands, and he fell on top of it.

  A couple of men behind Miller got off shots, deafening him. He ducked into Walker’s Grocery to reload and sent Mr. Walker sprawling into a pyramid of canned peaches. The crowd of Negroes scattered, dropping fence slats, trying to outrun the bullets. The whites kept shooting. George Henry Davis, himself shot in the thigh, shepherded a wounded friend around the corner and into a house, where the friend bled to death in his arms. Some of the wounded lay in the street, afraid to get up. Miller fled out the back of the store into the alley.

  Ivanhoe Grant evaporated.

  A white dentist named George Piner took a slug in the left side. Bill Mayo, who had proudly signed the White Man’s Declaration of Independence, climbed onto his own porch on Fourth Street to be able to see above the crowd. From behind a board fence across Fourth Street came a single report. Mayo collapsed, shot through the chest.

  Lockamy now had his hands full. He tried to stop any further shooting, but bands of white men rushed after the retreating Negroes in all directions. Still, no police arrived to help him. He feared it was deliberate.

  A streetcar sparked to a wrenching stop. Father Dennen jumped off. A gang of white men lifted bloody Bill Mayo into the car, and Dennen was torn: should he stay here and try to do some good, or remain with a dying man who needed last rites?

  He stayed on the streetcar with Mayo. A safe distance from the shooting, he helped carry the wounded man into Bernice Moore’s drugstore. Dr. T. J. Schonwald happened to be there ordering medicine, and he tended Mayo while someone telephoned for an ambulance.

  “Get out of the way, if you please, Father,” Schonwald ordered curtly. “I’ll tell you when you can have his soul.”

  Caught once again in the duty of his office, Father Dennen rode in the ambulance with Mayo to City-County Hospital at Tenth and Red Cross. Mayo’s chest was a pulp of blood and bandages, and he was unconscious. In the ambulance, his ears rushing with the momentum of what was happening all around him, Dennen reached into the pocket of his cassock for a vial of holy ointment no larger than a fountain pen, dabbed his thumb, and murmured the Latin blessing of extreme unction.

  He might have saved himself the trouble: Bill Mayo lived.

  By the time Kenan’s Gatling gun detail arrived at Fourth and Bladen, the violence was well under way. Grand Marshal Roger Moore arrived on horseback with two dozen riders and a hundred others on foot scattered behind him. Colonel Walker Taylor, also on horseback, arrived alone. A few minutes later, Hugh MacRae and J. Allan Taylor showed up at the head of the Wilmington Light Infantry. Dowling and his Red Shirts were already on the scene.

  Rountree was still back at the compress conferring with James Sprunt.

  Waddell was at home.

  In the melee of competing commands and scattered firing, Walker Taylor found his brother. “Where’s Captain James?” he asked. “He’s supposed to be in command of the infantry.”<
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  J. Allan swore. “The son of a bitch refuses to come out of barracks. Hugh and I are in charge.”

  “You have no authority—this is a State Guard action now.”

  “We have all the authority we need. Just stay out of our way.”

  Kenan set up his gun in the intersection. The main activity seemed to be down Bladen Street, where the Negroes were regrouping in small bands. A rifle fired out of a window a block away and nicked the sideboard. Kenan steadied himself. Behind a nearby fence, he spied the heads of half a dozen black boys, curious about the excitement.

  J. Allan Taylor pointed his pistol toward the fence. “Knock down that damned fence, Bill. Give ’em a little pepper.”

  Kenan was dumbfounded. J. Allan Taylor had no military authority. Kenan didn’t move. His men waited for his orders. “There’s no threat,” he said.

  “Goddamnit, I’ll show you threat.”

  Taylor ordered the infantry to form a hollow square. The front ranks knelt, and the second ranks aimed over their heads—toward the fence on the left, the shacks on the right, and straight down the center of the street where the Negroes milled. He gave the orders. They cleared Bladen Street with volley fire. The sniping stopped.

  Shots tore through the thin front planking of homes and right out the back walls, shattering everything in between. Gun smoke warmed the air and clouded the vision. At the far end of the street, black men went down in surprise. Inside the houses, women screamed. The board fence splintered from the high-powered rounds. The boys behind the fence ducked, but one didn’t go down in time, and a Krag round tore his head off above the ears.

  Kenan watched. His men waited. He gave no order to fire. His mouth went dry. His whole body was clenched. He had not signed on for this. Who was in charge here? Where was Captain James, or Colonel Walker Taylor?

  The Light Infantry advanced up Bladen Street, bayonets fixed, firing as they went. When J. Allan Taylor spotted two Negro women attempting to remove the corpse of their brother, he ordered, “Make them leave the bodies in the street—as a lesson.” Soldiers hustled the women away at bayonet point.

  All along Bladen Street—on the stoop of Walker’s Grocery, in the streets and alleys of Brooklyn—lay the bodies of black men and boys, cooling in the sun, stiffening into unnatural shapes.

  Walker Taylor was busy rounding up his State Guard volunteers by telephone from Brunjes Grocery & Saloon. Within fifteen minutes, he assembled a sizable contingent. He stationed them on street corners with orders to detain and search all Negroes. He was nominally in command of the military district of Wilmington, but he couldn’t control Dowling’s Red Shirts or Roger Moore’s vigilantes, which answered to Hugh MacRae. And he couldn’t control the Naval Reserves or the Light Infantry, because his orders were being flouted by his own brother.

  It was a hell of a mess. He would have to rein it in, street corner by street corner. He would do what he could to keep order. Without order, there was just a mob of scared people—the most dangerous kind.

  Hugh MacRae was breathless with excitement, yet at the same time, he had never felt so cool-headed and alive. He stayed with J. Allan Taylor and the Light Infantry as they cleared the neighborhood. He fired and reloaded his own pistol so many times he lost count.

  Somewhere along the line of march, Sam Jenks caught up with his cousin. He kept himself in the middle of the square, scribbling notes as he walked. “Keep your head down,” MacRae said. “I don’t want to be explaining to your pretty wife.”

  “Can’t write it if I don’t see it.”

  “Then take a good look. This is what history looks like.”

  A vigilante joined them. “Word is, they know who shot Bill Mayo,” he said to J. Allan Taylor.

  “They got him?” Taylor said.

  “No, sir. But I know where the boy lives. Laborer, name of Dan Wright. Missing the thumb on his right hand.” He splayed his right hand and crooked the thumb to illustrate.

  MacRae said, “Take a flying squad over there. I’ll stay with the boys.”

  J. Allan Taylor took a sergeant and fifteen men to Wright’s home, two blocks over. Sam tagged along. Using rifle butts, they burst through the door and pointed their guns at Wright and his wife. Then they ransacked the house and found a Winchester .44 leaning in a bedroom corner. Taylor sniffed the muzzle—it had been fired recently. He worked the lever, and a spent shell ejected onto the pine floor. Taylor picked up the shell.

  “I shot into the air,” Wright explained. “Then I got scared.”

  “Didn’t even have sense enough to get rid of the casing,” Taylor said. “Bring him along, boys.”

  Taylor formed the men up in a gauntlet in the sandy street outside the house. Dan Wright stood uncertainly at the foot of his stoop, rubbing his maimed hand. His wife looked on from the stoop, weeping.

  Taylor said, “Run to daylight, boy.”

  Wright hesitated. “Cap’n?”

  “You heard me. We’re letting you get away.”

  The men cocked their rifles.

  “Have mercy, cap’n! I told you, I shot into the air.”

  Sam said, “You’re not actually going to—”

  “You’ll get the same mercy you showed Bill Mayo,” Taylor said. Wright stood fast. Taylor put his pistol to Wright’s forehead. “Or I can give you a third eye right now.”

  Wright squinted his eyes closed and held his breath.

  “Go on, run, boy. It’s the only chance you’ll get today.”

  Sam wanted to grab the black man and wrestle him to the ground, save him. He wanted to shout, protest, put a stop to what was about to happen. But he just stood there, mouth open.

  Dan Wright put his head down and ran hard, grunting, through the gauntlet. He passed one man, another, gray and red blurs out of the corner of his eye. He kept his head down. His feet sank into the deep sand. He struggled for footing, running in slow motion. He would make it, he had to. He could see daylight at the end of the street.

  And then a rifle butt punched him in the side, and he went down. His mouth tasted sand. A bullet shattered his knee. Another took part of his maimed hand clean off. He lay in the sand as nine more bullets kicked his body.

  Sam fell to his knees and threw up. The infantrymen stood around and watched, curious about what they had just done. One of them poked Wright with a rifle barrel, and he moved. He was still alive.

  After he collected his wits, Sam said, “You can’t just let him lie there! For Christ’s sake!”

  J. Allan Taylor said, “Boy, don’t crowd me.”

  They let Dan Wright lie in the street for half an hour. When it was clear he wasn’t going to die anytime soon, Taylor had him taken to City-County Hospital, so his men could get on with their business. In a ward three hundred feet away from where Bill Mayo lay wounded, Dan Wright lingered till sundown the next day. He never lost consciousness. He never admitted shooting anybody. He uttered no last words.

  When it became clearly a matter of keeping civil order, Captain Thomas James left barracks. He joined the main body of the Wilmington Light Infantry as they were preparing to advance on the Manhattan Dance Hall, a two-story frame building surrounded by a high wooden fence. A lone sniper was firing from a second floor window. James’s men took cover across the street in an alley.

  “Get some sappers out there and knock down that fence,” he commanded.

  Three men disappeared and came back fifteen minutes later with axes looted from a hardware store. While their comrades covered them with volley fire, they hunkered low to give a scarce target and dodged across the street. The sniper fired once over their heads, kicking up sand in the street. Then, as volleys raked the second story, he quit firing. Windows burst. Clapboards sprang loose.

  In half a minute, the sappers hacked down the rickety fence, and the infantry charged into the building. They arrested three unarmed men and caught a fourth, Josh Halsey, clambering over the back fence. They found a rifle upstairs.

  James said to the prisoner, �
��As you were caught fleeing the scene, I can only assume you are the culprit.” He ordered Halsey to stand against the back fence and formed his men into a firing squad.

  One of infantrymen, Bill Robbins, said, “This ain’t right.”

  The man beside him said, “You shoot him, Bill, or I’ll shoot you.”

  On James’s order, they fired. The high-powered rounds flung Halsey into the fence, and one of them tore the top of his head off. Robbins shut his eyes and fired into the fence.

  David Jacobs, the coroner, later reported that he removed a pint of bullets from Halsey’s body.

  Sam Jenks couldn’t believe the scene he had just witnessed outside Dan Wright’s house. Not even Cuba had been like that. He had seen it coming. He had done nothing to stop it. His ears rang from the incredible noise of the guns. He could hardly catch his breath.

  He could hear firing all over the city now. And another sound: the constant pealing of fire bells. The town was coming apart. He must find Gray Ellen and get her out of here. Was she at school? He couldn’t remember. He was lost in a strange neighborhood. All around him moved armed men.

  He would go to the house first. If she wasn’t there, he’d search for her. This was no town for a woman alone. Or a man. He broke off from the infantry and ran back the other way, passing vigilantes and Red Shirts and men wearing half a dozen different uniforms. Half of them seemed to be giving orders. The other half seemed to be running in all directions regardless of the orders.

  Still a dozen blocks from home, he encountered a squad of infantry detaining a young black woman—Saffron King James.

  “What’s that in your hand, missy?” one of them asked.

  She held up her rock of virtue in her fist and threatened him. “Strip off that dress and search this little gal,” the squad leader said.

  Two men grabbed her arms, and the leader began to unbutton her dress.

  Without thinking, Sam stepped into the middle of things. “Don’t touch her,” he said with authority. “She hasn’t done anything.”