Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  “Just who the hell are you?” the squad leader asked.

  Fighting down panic, Sam said, “She’s on an errand for my cousin, Hugh MacRae.”

  “Mr. MacRae? Well, that’s different. Boys, let her pass.”

  Saffron shrugged them off and stalked away without looking back. The fire bells were still ringing, joined now by church bells. The squad of infantry began to move on.

  At last, Sam made it home. He climbed onto his porch and doubled over, his hands on his knees, to keep from being sick.

  At Front and Princess streets, David King was stopped by a vigilante patrol—Dowling and a band of Red Shirts. They had been refreshing themselves at Jurgen Haar’s and were now headed back to Brooklyn. David was all mixed up. When the shooting had started at Walker’s Grocery, he had lit out. He had to get to his mother, who was at Colonel Waddell’s house. He would be safe there—she had told him so. But he had come too far.

  “Hold up there, boy,” Dowling said, shoving the muzzle of a Winchester in his face.

  “Got to get to my mam,” he said.

  “And where would she be?”

  “Don’t know, perzactly. Fifth Street, at the big house.”

  “You’re off your road, boy,” Dowling said. “What’s that thing on your neck?”

  David King rubbed his bloody bandage.

  One of the Red Shirts said, “Ain’t you the boy was at Manly’s place?”

  “Not me, cap’n,” he said, backing away.

  “Sure, it’s the same boy,” another said. “I seen him there. Rabbited out the back.”

  “You going to rabbit on us, boy?” Dowling asked.

  David King was befuddled. What did these men want from him? All day long, he had run from one bad place to another. It was time to run again.

  He pumped his legs and got three steps before they shot him down.

  “Come on, boys,” Dowling said. “Open season on blackbirds. I know where there’s a whole flock.”

  Before the day was out, Dowling would boast that he had bagged thirty.

  Look around—do you see any monuments to Alex Manly? Is there a Carter Peamon Library on your pretty campus?

  Saffron King James, 1964

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Thursday, November 10

  THE KILLING WENT ON all afternoon.

  The State Guard under Walker Taylor established a semblance of military order, methodically marching through Brooklyn, closing shops, ordering people off the streets. Before them scattered hundreds of Negroes—men, women, and children—fleeing the city. They took only what they could carry. They didn’t look back. With bundles of bedding on their heads or stuffed into cloth satchels, they headed for Oakdale Cemetery, for the swamps along Smith’s Creek, for anyplace they could lie low and wait for the mayhem to pass.

  Meanwhile, the eighty men of the Light Infantry—now under command of Captain James—and the sixty Naval Reserves under Lieutenant George Morton raided Negro churches, where guns were rumored to be stockpiled. Where Manly was rumored to be hiding. Where armed squads of black assassins were rumored to be holed up. Where black secret fraternities were rumored to be torturing white prisoners.

  Kenan’s crew hauled the Gatling gun to the door of each church and trained it there. Then flying squads rushed the building. They overturned benches, desecrated holy places, outraged ministers, terrified custodians—but they found nothing except one stockpile of campaign leaflets.

  On Fifth Street a block from Colonel Waddell’s home, a Negro mailman was attacked by a crowd of white hooligans. They beat him unconscious and dumped out his leather mailbag in the street. The breeze scattered letters under the wheels of passing traffic. Gabrielle deRosset Waddell heard the commotion and rushed out to investigate. Discovering the mailman lying face down, she swabbed his bloody face with her handkerchief. Then she arranged a carriage to take him home.

  All up and down her street, black servants were hiding out with their white employers.

  Three blocks east of Colonel Waddell’s home, two members of the Wilmington Light Infantry, on detached patrol, cornered another Negro mailman. They held the muzzles of their Krag-Jorgensen rifles to his head and ordered him to kneel on the oyster shells. “Beg for your life,” they commanded. He did. They didn’t shoot him.

  First Baptist Church, half a block south of the Waddell home, was receiving white women and children from all over the city. A cordon of fifty armed men surrounded the building. Food, water, and blankets were stockpiled inside. A doctor, a nurse, and a pharmacist stood by. In the basement, a squad of vigilantes guarded the entrance to the tunnel that gave safe access to the Light Infantry Armory, a block away. Couriers came and went through the tunnel.

  At St. Thomas’s on Dock Street, three and a half blocks away, Negro parishioners were accumulating in the pews, waiting for Father Dennen. They knelt and prayed quietly, row upon row.

  In Brooklyn, Negro families were furtively retrieving the bodies of loved ones and burying them in cellars, woodsheds, and stables, so the surviving family members wouldn’t be implicated and hunted down by vigilantes. Some, according to custom, buried their dead with heads pointed east, toward Africa. The Negro mortuary on North Second was stacked with bodies.

  It was difficult to keep track of how many were killed, who they were, who precisely was responsible. Nobody was trying very hard.

  The only sure thing was that all the dead were black.

  George Rountree took the streetcar up to Brooklyn to see for himself. He’d heard reports of six Negroes shot down at the Cape Fear Lumber Company, their bodies buried in a shallow ditch. Somebody else told him that, for sassing a white man, a Negro stevedore had been knocked into the river and drowned within sight of the Market Street ferry landing.

  On Fourth Street, a boy no older than thirteen was bragging to all who would listen that he had ambushed a black man from behind a board fence. “Nailed that nigger rabble-rouser right between the eyes,” he claimed.

  One of Dowling’s boys was boasting that he’d picked off nine blackbirds, one by one, as they fled from a shanty by the railroad.

  When Rountree arrived at the Hilton Bridge on Fourth, several bodies lay sprawled against the iron railings. Barbaric, he thought—why wasn’t somebody removing these dead out of common decency? He would speak to MacRae. Soldiers were in position here. Rumor had it that a Negro mob was heading into the city from Rocky Point. This seemed unlikely to Rountree, but if it kept the soldiers out of mischief, so be it. Somehow, he had to slow this thing down.

  He was hoping the worst was over. He’d had word from Chadbourn that the aldermen were meeting right now to talk about resigning. In a little while, he’d go back downtown and hurry the process along. Bring some sanity back to this thing.

  On the far side of the bridge, he caught up with MacRae, who was arguing with Walker Taylor about where to deploy the Gatling gun. A courier brought word of a mob of five hundred Negroes massing at Ninth and Nixon streets, preparing to march on the downtown area.

  Rountree was skeptical. All day long, every report had been muddied by exaggeration. Discount all the numbers by half, he thought, and you might get a true picture.

  “If there’s really five hundred of them, or even two hundred, they won’t scare so easy,” Rountree said, recalling the mob of workers at Sprunts’ Champion Compress, who, even unarmed, had not backed down from a Gatling gun.

  “We’d better get somebody over there, stall for time,” MacRae said.

  “You’re not going?”

  “You handle it, George. We’ll back you up.”

  “Hugh, this really isn’t my—”

  “Get Carter Peamon. They’ll listen to one of their own people.”

  MacRae ordered Kenan to haul the gun to Ninth and Nixon.

  Meanwhile, he rounded up a contingent of infantry and Naval Reserves and double-timed them over to Nixon Street to put them between the black mob and downtown. Rountree located Carter Peamon, a ward boss, and fetch
ed him over to the trouble spot.

  Kenan unlimbered the gun and stood, once more, facing a mob. His dream washed over him in vivid color—the crowding faces, the reaching hands, the astonished eyes of old comrades—and his stomach went queer. He was sure that this time he would have to fire. The day was going on too long. Everybody was pressing too hard. Too much damage had already been done. Men were dying, and others were resigned to dying. He wished somebody would quiet those damned bells.

  He forced himself to take deep breaths. The air was full of sun, and the brass receiver was warm under his hand. His men were more nervous this time. Up the street, shotguns and rifles poked out of the mob. The Negroes had positioned riflemen in the second-floor windows of the corner houses to make a crossfire. He elevated the gun—he would rake the windows first.

  Kenan watched the delegation of three whites and Carter Peamon approach the mob, trying to make peace.

  “Mr. Peamon,” Ivanhoe Grant said. He slipped out of the crowd, his dove-gray suit still creased and immaculate despite all he’d been through today.

  “Reverend? This your party?”

  “It’s no party, brother. This is the future.”

  Men behind him muttered approval. A few of them raised their fists. In some of the fists were rifles.

  One of the whites, a business associate of MacRae’s named Heiskel Gouvenier, said, “Gentlemen, don’t you think there’s been enough trouble for one day?”

  “Trouble? Trouble hasn’t even started yet,” Grant said innocently.

  “I don’t believe I know you,” Gouvenier said, squinting at him. He’d been told to look out for a light-skinned preacher, thought to be Manly in disguise.

  Ivanhoe Grant mugged like a minstrel. “Don’t you recognize me, white man? Don’t you know me at all?”

  “I said I don’t. Now, look—”

  “I’m the fly in the ointment, white man. The bogeyman in your fairy tale.”

  “You tell him, preacher!”

  Grant put his face up close to Gouvenier’s. “I am the spy in the land of Pharaoh.”

  “Now, there’s no reason to start—”

  Grant stuck a finger in his face. “We’re not starting anything. We aim to finish a few things, though.” With that, Grant waved his arm, and several young men behind him grabbed the white men roughly and pinned their arms behind their backs. Tom Miller bound their hands with baling twine.

  “What do we do with him?” Miller asked. They had Peamon by the elbows, but nobody dared tie him.

  Grant looked Peamon in the eye. “You with us?”

  Peamon glared back, straightened up, shrugged off the men who were holding his elbows. He brushed off his sleeves with his hand. The gesture was so dignified that they let him alone. “So you’re going to give them a reason?” Peamon said.

  Tom Miller said, “It’s time to decide, Carter. Declare yourself.”

  “They’ll burn you down,” Peamon said softly. “They’ll burn you all down. Brooklyn will be a smoking hole in the ground. Don’t you see it? Look yonder at that machine gun.”

  Miller and the others took a long look. A few of them had seen the gun in action on the river.

  “They’re shooting our people down in the street,” Grant said in his sermonizing voice. “How long, O Lord?”

  “Our people? Since when did you belong to us?”

  “‘And lo the prophet came into their midst, and they knew him not.’”

  To Miller and the others, Peamon said, “This man is putting you in danger.” He pointed toward the Gatling gun. “He’s putting your families in harm’s way. For the love of God, get gone from here! Go to your homes! Stay with your families. If you provoke these people—”

  “Why not fight back?” someone said. “We can’t make it any worse.”

  Peamon swore. “It can always get worse.”

  A man behind Grant agreed: “Machine gun sure make it worse.”

  Ivanhoe Grant turned to the crowd of men and boys, now numbering in the hundreds. “‘Who will rise up for me against the evildoers? Who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity?’”

  Peamon answered him from the psalm: “‘He shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own wickedness.’” He paused for effect, raised a hand, pointed directly at Grant. “‘Yea, the Lord our God shall cut them off.’ Not you, Reverend—the Lord our God!”

  The crowd of blacks began arguing among themselves. Down the street, they could see the infantry moving into position, flanking the Gatling gun. They knew what was bound to come next.

  Tom Miller said, “If we let them go, maybe they’ll fire on us anyway.”

  Grant widened his eyes triumphantly. “Are you willing to trust that they will not?”

  Carter Peamon said, “I give you my word. Break this up, and I’ll keep them off you. They don’t want a war.”

  “Funny time to decide that,” Grant said.

  “More killing is not the answer.”

  Grant persisted. “I’m telling you, brothers—the white hostages protect us. They won’t fire on their own.”

  “Just what do you plan to do with these men?” Peamon said. “Have you thought of that?”

  Grant just smiled, then put a fist on his neck and crooked his head, as if he’d been hoisted up in a noose. Some of the men laughed nervously.

  “That’s brilliant! You lynch a white man, they will clear out this county of colored folk. We’ll give up everything we’ve gained since the War.”

  “Damned little enough,” Tom Miller said, resignation in his voice. It was becoming clear that they had not thought this thing through. They had a leader, but they didn’t have a plan. Grant’s only plan was mayhem.

  “Let them go,” Peamon insisted. “Untie their hands. Now. Do it.”

  Before Grant could reassert himself, Miller and the young men cut the twine with jackknives, and the white men stood there rubbing their wrists. One of them had pissed himself, and he stood with his hands clasped over his wet crotch.

  Gouvenier said, “Well?”

  Tom Miller turned him around bodily and pushed him away. “Go on, get out of here. All of you.”

  Peamon hesitated.

  “You, too, Mr. Peamon—you’ve shown us your colors.”

  Head down, Peamon walked with Gouvenier and the other whites to the Light Infantry skirmish line, where Hugh MacRae waited. MacRae clapped Gouvenier on the back. Immediately, infantrymen seized Carter Peamon and bound his hands with ropes. J. Allan Taylor supervised.

  “Now, wait a minute, John,” Gouvenier said. “This boy got us out of there.”

  Taylor said, “He stood by while they trussed you up like hogs.” He tapped his field glasses.

  “What are you going to do?” Peamon asked. He couldn’t believe what was happening. He hoped to God they weren’t going to turn the Gatling gun on his people. Get away, he thought—get far away and don’t look back. “You can’t just—”

  “As we’re under martial law,” J. Allan Taylor said, “this colored boy will face a firing squad.”

  “What for?” Peamon was incredulous. He lived by the law—due process, presumption of innocence, a jury of peers. These were the forces of law.

  “Inciting insurrection.”

  “Now, hold on,” MacRae said. This was getting way out of hand. The boy had just done them a big favor. They had what they wanted—no sense pushing their luck. It was one thing to fire on a mob of laborers, another to lynch a prominent citizen—even a Negro. And a politician at that. There would be questions, interference from federal judges, grand juries. Besides, the boy had always cooperated. You wanted to give some incentive. “Nobody’s declared martial law, John, not yet. You can’t just shoot the boy.”

  “What, then?”

  MacRae had a plan, a list, for later. He and J. Allan Taylor had worked it out weeks ago. Might as well start now. “Put him on a train,” MacRae reminded him. “Banish him.”

  Peamon started
to protest.

  MacRae clapped him on the back. “Don’t thank me, boy—you did us a good turn. Least I can do is see you safely out of here.”

  A detail of four infantrymen with fixed bayonets escorted Carter Peamon to the Atlantic Coast Line depot on Red Cross Street. It was a rough escort—twice when Peamon tried to convince the men to reconsider, they clubbed him with rifle butts. When they arrived, his right eye was swollen shut, and he had lost a tooth.

  The depot, like all the freight and passenger depots in the area, was patrolled by vigilantes. They had orders to let any Negro leave who could afford the fare, but they were also on the lookout for Alex Manly. There was no regular passenger train scheduled within the hour, so they flagged a Columbia & Augusta switcher engine that was heading across the river to Lake Waccamaw to pick up a string of boxcars. One of the soldiers cut Peamon’s bindings with a bayonet, and he climbed up beside the engineer and fireman.

  At Eagle Island, just across the river, the engine was shunted to a siding to let a freight pass. Peamon saw his chance. He was a man of property, with a family and interests, and he didn’t intend to be hustled out of town like a bad character. He would not forfeit all he had worked for. He hopped down out of the cab onto the gravel roadbed and straightened his coat. He brushed his sleeves and hitched his trousers.

  While Peamon was adjusting his tie, a vigilante down the track raised a deer rifle and shot him square between the shoulder blades. Then he ducked inside the crew shack and rang up Roger Moore’s post. He shouted into the mouthpiece, “Tell the Colonel I just shot Alex Manly!”

  The Board of Aldermen assembled at the home of building contractor Charles D. Morrill, who was ill with pneumonia and could not make the short trip to city hall. They sat around the dining room table, hands clasped on the white linen tablecloth. It had the flavor of a religious service. Whenever they heard hoofbeats on the street outside, or the sound of men’s voices, they glanced nervously over their shoulders at the unguarded windows.

  Mayor Silas Wright, as usual wearing white gloves, called the meeting to order in a quiet voice. “You—all are aware of what is happening in our city,” Wright began, speaking slowly and precisely, as if delivering an unpleasant diagnosis. As he spoke, his hands fluttered gracefully. It was impossible not to watch his hands. “We must take steps to restore order.”