Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  Maybe Silas Wright and James Sprunt. Kenan had spied the two of them rushing between trouble spots in the doctor’s black landau, imploring men on both sides to put up their guns and back off. He could still see Dr. Wright’s white-gloved hands fluttering as he talked, and James Sprunt nodding and gathering men around him with the sweep of his long arms. Both men had endangered their lives for the sake of peace.

  But after it got going good, they didn’t have a chance. Kenan had lost track of them in the mayhem.

  Jesus, he thought—volley-firing along Bladen Street. What in the hell were those boys thinking of? You could shoot a Krag through both walls of one of those flimsy shotgun shacks and kill a mule standing out back. The army had used the Krag in Cuba against dug-in professional troops and killed them through adobe walls.

  He could hear them singing now. He’d heard them off and on all night, as the breeze shifted. Hymns, mostly. From time to time, when he recognized the tune, he hummed along quietly. Sometimes, the rain drowned out the voices, but now it was letting up. The government weather office predicted tomorrow would be crisp and clear. They’d freeze out there. Why had they taken their children? Fear, he supposed. A powerful fear, to drive a man and his whole family into a cold swamp on a November night.

  He puffed on his cigar and thought fondly of his wife, Mary, asleep back at the house. Then he thought of his boy in Mexico, building a dam. Maybe he would take Mary down for a visit. But the boy might be gone before they could make it down there—he was always on the move, always building, soaring along as if he had a perfect map of the complicated future. Lord, how he missed that boy.

  Kenan studied the sky—still black. When the stars came out, he would pull the tarp off the gun and wipe it down good with an oily rag.

  There was still a good six hours till first light. If anything happened tonight, they would be ready. There was no need to inventory the ammunition—he’d worked hard all day to make sure they didn’t fire a single shot.

  When the high-hat preacher, with his spike-tailed coat and with gun on his shoulder, went out hunting blackbirds, it was not much of a surprise to see others not so prominent in church affairs acting as he did.

  Benjamin F. Keith, wholesale merchant

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Sunday, November 13

  BY FRIDAY MORNING, the killing was mostly done, and the banishments began. Squads operating under the orders of Hugh MacRae, J. Allan Taylor, and the others of the Secret Nine combed the city for the men on their list. Many of them, including all the Manlys, had already fled. Some, such as Silas Wright, they simply could not find.

  First, they emptied the jail. Former Police Chief Melton, United States Commissioner Robert Bunting, and Bunting’s mulatto wife, Nancy, were placed on the three-fifteen northbound Zephyr, along with four Negroes prominent in local politics: lawyer William Henderson, a police sergeant, Charles Gilbert, and merchants Isaac Loftin and Charles McAllister. McAllister was said to have sold guns to blacks.

  Another caravan from the jail included Tom Miller, Magistrate R. B. Pickens, the Reverend Isaac Bell, James Loughlin, who was clerk of the Front Street City Market, and ward boss A. I. Bryant. All of them were herded aboard the southbound Limited. Miller was especially bitter—he left behind dozens of rental properties, a pawnshop inventory worth fifty thousand dollars, and a fat portfolio of debts owed to him by white clients, none of which would ever be paid.

  His assets, like those of the Manlys and others, would enrich some of the leading white families in town. All the papers would be legal, notarized by the Democratic register of deeds.

  They caught Chief Deputy George Z. French sneaking out the back door of the Orton Hotel and hauled him in a wagon to the Atlantic Coast Line depot on Red Cross Street, escorted by a forest of Wilmington Light Infantry bayonets. Outside the depot, Red Shirts swarmed aboard the wagon and seized the reins. They stopped it under the twisted limbs of a grandfather live oak and tossed a rope over the stoutest one, then looped a noose around his neck. Before they could drive the wagon out from under him, he cried out in gibberish. His high voice carried the weird ring of incantation.

  Harry Calabash was watching. “I’ll be damned,” he said out loud to the woman reporter in the crimson jacket.

  “What? Has he lost his mind?”

  Calabash laughed sweetly. “It’s code—the secret Masonic cry for help. His brother Freemasons can’t refuse.”

  And even as he spoke, men in suits came streaming out of the crowd. Two of them held the horses while Heiskel Gouvenier and others climbed aboard and took the noose off French’s neck.

  “What’s so funny about that?”

  Calabash laughed again. Sam ought to be here to see this, he thought. “Fellow’s got the hangman’s noose around his neck, and he still believes his club won’t let him down.”

  Armond Scott, the young Negro lawyer who had failed to deliver the answer to Waddell’s ultimatum, was put on the seven o’clock northbound train that evening—the same train that carried Deputy French. But Scott was escorted to the Negro car.

  And so it went. The city was being systematically emptied of the opposition party—the party of carpetbaggers, Negroes, Populists, and Republicans. Order was being restored. The black middle class disappeared.

  No Negroes were allowed to come into the city limits without first being searched. Men and women alike were frisked, and some suspicious characters were required to strip. Parcels and bags were ransacked for weapons. Wagons were unloaded onto the street. The posses confiscated several billy clubs, a razor, a broken pistol, and three old case knives.

  But blacks were allowed to leave the city unmolested, and they fled in droves. The road over Smith’s Creek Bridge was clogged with pedestrians. The mill workers and domestic servants who chose to remain were escorted to their jobs by squads of mounted vigilantes. White boys were pressed into escort duty. Safe conduct passes were issued. White men were quickly hired to fill the places of black men dismissed from the police and fire departments. The bureaucracy of order was taking hold.

  By Saturday, it was becoming clear that the city could not function without Negro labor. Sprunts’ Champion Compress, largely because of James Sprunt’s reputation for fairness, had retained most of its men, but MacRae’s Wilmington Cotton Mills and other large concerns were nearly deserted. It was impossible to train ordinary laborers to be skilled machinists overnight. Construction sites were abandoned, waiting for brick masons, carpenters, and glaziers.

  Most of the forty-four restaurants in town had been owned and run by Negroes. Now, all but a handful were closed. On the waterfront, nothing was moving. Steamships and coastal packets lay idle at the wharf, accumulating wharfage fees, with no stevedores to unload their cargoes and no teamsters to haul them away if they did.

  Blacks were no longer allowed to leave the city but were directed back to their homes. They left anyway: in boxcars, on trails through the swamp, along unguarded lanes, in small boats across the Cape Fear River.

  Colonel Waddell sent delegation after delegation into the swamps to persuade the Negroes to come back into town and return to their jobs, but none met with much success. He even wrote an appeal for the Messenger, explaining away the violence as isolated, spontaneous acts: “Self-appointed vigilantes are responsible for much of this misery, because of the indiscriminate way they have gone about banishing objectionable persons; and, in some instances, unscrupulous whites have gratified their personal spite in dealing with the Negroes.”

  But nobody was reading the newspaper out in the swamps, along the lanes of Oakdale Cemetery, or under makeshift cover in the great railroad culvert that was the boundary between Brooklyn and white Wilmington.

  As a last resort, Waddell sent black search parties into the swamps—men borrowed from Sprunts’ Champion Compress. These brought back a few dozen workers, but not enough. Brooklyn was a ghost town.

  The city was still technically under martial law. At the suggestion of George Rountree, W
addell’s board took advantage of the situation and approved Rountree’s draft of two temporary ordinances designed to consolidate power and ease the labor shortage: first, any person arrested within the city limits could be tried only before the mayor, not a magistrate, since there were still a handful of Republican magistrates legally in office; second, any vagrant was ordered to find employment within twenty-four hours or leave the city. If he refused, he could be summarily sentenced to work without wages on city property for up to thirty days.

  Rountree planned to include these ordinances in the new city charter he would champion in Raleigh when he took his seat in the legislature in January.

  On Sunday, Sam and Gray Ellen Jenks walked to St. Thomas’s for the ten o’clock mass. But Father Dennen was not there. The place was empty. The Negro janitor watched them warily from the sacristy as they stood, bewildered, in the center aisle of the little frame church. When he was sure they meant him no harm, he emerged into the sanctuary. “Father’s gone north,” he said.

  “There’s no mass today?” Gray Ellen asked. This morning, it seemed very important to attend mass, to listen for reassurance in the old Latin prayers, to come away with at least a qualified blessing.

  “All the whitefolks over at First Presbyterian. All the ministers, too.”

  “How do you know?” Sam asked.

  The janitor shrugged. “Man keep his ear to the ground, hear all kind of news.”

  By the time they arrived at First Presbyterian Church, the meeting was already well underway. J. Allan Taylor was in the pulpit, addressing the crowd of ministers and white citizens. He was explaining the banishment policy. “And that,” he concluded, “is how we deal with agitators—now and in the future. Colored or white.”

  All at once, Sam realized that was what had happened to Father Dennen.

  “My God,” Gray Ellen said under her breath, “who do these people think they are?”

  A minister Sam did not recognize stood up in the front pew and protested. “That’s illegal! What about a man’s rights under law?”

  “Of course it’s not legal!” Taylor said. “Nothing is legal here just now. Where have you been? We’ve been fighting anarchy, and we’re trying to establish orderly government.” He went on to name all the leading citizens who had supported the actions to take back the government, beginning with Waddell, MacRae, and his brother Walker, all of whom were seated on choir chairs in the sanctuary. “Do you want to stand there and tell these men that they are not honorable men? Not the finest men in this city?”

  There was a burst of applause, and the minister sat down. Someone was missing, Sam realized: Captain Kenan.

  The white pastor of Brooklyn Baptist Church, now an alderman, stood up and said, “In the riot on Thursday, the Negro was the aggressor.”

  “Hear, hear!”

  Gray Ellen said loudly, “Riot? It was a massacre.”

  “I believe the whites were doing God’s service,” Taylor said. “Just consider all that has been done for the good of business, politics, and the church.”

  The Reverend Peyton Hoge, presiding in his own church, ascended the pulpit. “Let us pray and give thanks to God,” he said, raising his eyes to the ceiling, hands upturned as though he were expecting rain. “‘He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city.’” He lowered his eyes and swept a hand toward the men assembled behind him. “We have done both.”

  “Amen,” said the congregation.

  But Hoge wasn’t finished. He held up an index finger. “That is much. But it is more—because it is our own city we have taken.”

  Later that afternoon, Sam went by the Messenger office. Even on a Sunday, he knew he’d find Tom Clawson there. He would appeal to Clawson’s sense of fair play. Clawson had never wanted things to go this far—he’d warned Alex Manly.

  “Well, look who’s here,” Clawson said.

  “I’ve got a story,” Sam said. He’d been up all night writing it longhand. Gray Ellen had proofed it.

  “I’ll bet you have. Where the hell have you been for the past two days?”

  He was right, Sam knew. He hadn’t even bothered to check in during the worst of the violence. His thinking had been all cloudy. The whiskey hadn’t helped.

  “Out in the field,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s what Harry said. See anything?”

  “I saw plenty.”

  “Did you? Did you really?” Clawson’s voice had an edge to it. The tone was all wrong, as if there were something important and obvious that he wouldn’t say out loud but expected Sam to hear anyway.

  “Read all about it,” Sam said, holding up the handwritten sheets.

  “Never mind that. You’re wanted at the mayor’s house. They’ve been looking for you all day.”

  “They?”

  “Waddell and your cousin.”

  “Look,” Sam said, standing up. “I’m sorry I left you in the lurch. It was a mess out there. I got caught up in something. Lost my bearings, you know?” His eyes burned from lack of sleep. Again, he held out the pages of the true story of what he had witnessed.

  Clawson just stood there.

  Sam said, “Is there some kind of problem?”

  “I’m sorry as hell it worked out this way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Clawson rubbed his own tired eyes. “From the start, it was all wrong. You’ve got no business here. You haven’t got a clue.”

  Sam offered the pages a third time. “It’s all true. Fact after fact.”

  “You think the facts make it true?” Clawson snapped the pages out of his hand. “Get out of here. You’ve kept them waiting long enough.”

  Bessie King wordlessly ushered Sam into Waddell’s library, where the mayor sat smoking a cheroot and going through a sheaf of carbons. In his shirtsleeves and garters, he looked skinny and frail, a harmless old gentleman of letters. His shirt was yellow and shiny.

  “Samuel—glad you could make it. May I offer—?”

  “No, thanks. I was working. Tom Clawson sent me over. Things have quieted down a good deal.”

  Waddell smiled and winked. “It’s so peaceful right now, I could patrol this city with six nannies and a willow switch.” He rose from his desk and peeked out the door into the hallway. “Miz Gabby, dear—would you please bring in the mail?”

  “Mail on a Sunday?” Sam asked.

  Waddell smiled and ambled back to his desk. He sat on the edge of it puffing his cheroot. He looked well rested but pale. Framed by his silver hair and goatee, his face seemed positively translucent. Now comes the pitch, Sam thought. That must be why Clawson was so upset—Sam was about to be included in the inner circle. J. Allan Taylor was Clawson’s man, and now that the dust had settled, J. Allan Taylor wasn’t mayor of anything. It had been like watching a chaotic game of billiards, in which a dozen men were all shooting at once on the same table. All the vectors had converged, intersected, and deflected, and now it was clear which balls were in whose pockets.

  Whatever happened now, Sam had a clear conscience. He had for once, done the right thing. And still come out ahead. Waddell wasn’t perfect, but he had saved those men at the jail from lynching. Not like the soldiers running amok in Brooklyn. Sam could work for the man, honorably.

  “As you can see,” Waddell said to the windows, “events have borne out my predictions.”

  “They sure have.”

  “It’s all turned out better than I dared hope.”

  Sam thought briefly of Dan Wright peddling for his life in deep sand, the crack of the rifle shots. Then he put the image out of his mind. What was done was done—it couldn’t be fixed now. Best get on with the future.

  The library door clicked open and in glided Gabrielle deRosset Waddell, lovely in a gray woolen dress that looked almost military. From collar to waist, a line of red buttons ran between stripes of black velvet. Her dark hair floated in black combs, swept up from her neck and ears, which were rose-pale. She nodded a greeting and held out a ha
ndful of envelopes, all of which had already been knifed open.

  Waddell set his cheroot on the ashtray and clapped his hands like a happy child. “This place has turned into a branch office of Western Union and the United States Postal Service. Miz Gabby, read some of them.”

  Without enthusiasm, Gabrielle slipped a letter out of the envelope on top. “‘My dear Colonel—Just a few lines to congratulate you on your courage, and the people of Wilmington on their nerve.’”

  “When a public man acts,” Waddell said, rubbing his hands and then taking up his cheroot again, “other men take notice. Keep reading, Miz Gabby.”

  Gabrielle glanced at Sam and chose another letter. He suddenly understood that she had read all these letters out loud before, perhaps many times. “‘I beg to congratulate you on the struggle in dear old North Carolina—’”

  “You see, Sam,” Waddell said, as Gabrielle kept reading in a monotone, “we have made history here. We have seized the moment.”

  “‘… have dragged the dear old state out of the slough of black mud and degradation into which she was fast sinking.’”

  “The whole country is paying attention to what has happened down here.”

  “A revolution,” Sam said quietly.

  Gabrielle read, “‘Should you want any more help in redeeming this state from Negro rule and tyranny, there are many sons of North Carolina here in Georgia who will cheerfully go to your aid.’”

  Waddell nodded vigorously. “Revolution—good word for it. Washington and Jefferson would approve. The Anglo-Saxon tradition—when a government becomes intolerable, openly and manfully overthrow it.”

  Sam started to argue with him, but Gabrielle distracted him with her reading. “‘Brooklyn Wharf and Warehouse Company, New York: We congratulate you on the result, in whose solution your own courage, eloquence, and self-control in the moment of success have been such potent elements.’”