“We’re in every newspaper from New York to San Francisco! Collier’s wants me to write them a memoir.”
Gabrielle mechanically opened another letter. “‘Astronomers, open your telescopes!’”
“Frank Wagnells has wired me for a photograph to accompany an article in the Literary Digest.”
“‘—Tell me what bright star I see rising which not only shines on but warms the sons of North Carolina!’” This time, Sam heard the merest hint of irony in her voice. Still, her eyes were hard and steady.
She picked out another letter. “‘As you know,’” Gabrielle read, “‘I have always admired you, and now I am almost a hero worshipper—’”
Waddell smiled, stood from the desk, and turned to the window. Sam watched his narrow back, the crisp yellow-white shirt creased by his sharp little shoulder blades.
The Colonel said, “Thing is, I have some hard news for you, Samuel.”
“‘For your deliverance of your good people, you will be loved by them all their lives—’”
“Bad news?” Sam said. “What do you mean?” He sat forward in his chair. Had Clawson called about the story already?
“‘—and a remote posterity will call you blessed.’” Tears were forming in her eyes.
Waddell spun around abruptly. “Read the one from Congressman Thompson.”
Gabrielle did not react immediately. She stood stiffly at attention, aware that Sam was watching her. He wanted to speak to her—clearly, something awful had happened in this house—but he had no idea what question to ask. She made no attempt to wipe the tears from her cheeks. Sam’s attention was riveted on her face, which seemed hotly alive, yet rigid.
She read, “‘While I am an uncompromising Republican, I—like you—would stand up for and defend the honor and good name of the white women of North Carolina, the South, the North, of America—’”
“That’s the nub of it, Samuel.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Women. Honor. Discretion. A sense of propriety and, well, manners. Knowing one’s place.”
“‘—Americans should be proud of their mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives.’”
“Yes, wives, Sam. Your wife.”
“What about her?” His face flushed. He glanced at Gabrielle, but she gave nothing away. Gabrielle stood just inside the door holding the packet of letters, saying nothing, staring at the floor.
“A man must be able to control his woman, Sam. A woman depends on her man to set limits.” He was still not facing Sam. He stood, hands clasped behind his back, staring out the window, a thin spiral of smoke rising from his cigar. “I have certain reports,” Waddell stated calmly. “We understand she has been, well, sympathetic to the Negro cause.”
“She makes up her own mind, if that’s what you mean.” Sam had a vivid image of Gray Ellen swinging around the lamppost after Waddell’s speech, screaming, “You lost the War!” then tumbling under him in the lime dust.
Waddell shook his head like a patient schoolmaster. He still wouldn’t face Sam. “Your mistake, then. It’s one thing to hold a few sentimental opinions.”
Gabrielle opened her mouth and then closed it on the back of her hand.
“It’s quite another to interfere with the business of men—public men.”
Sam stood up. “Why don’t you just come out and say what’s on your mind?”
Behind Gabrielle, a man entered brusquely: Hugh MacRae.
Waddell at last turned. “You want to tell him, Hugh?” He opened a drawer and fished something out.
MacRae said, “It cost me something to bring you down here.”
“I paid my way,” Sam said.
“I’m not talking about money. Money’s easy. Reputation, that’s what I’m talking about. Foreign correspondent. War hero.”
“I never claimed—”
“You didn’t have to.”
So somebody had wired Chicago—he’d almost managed to forget Cuba. He felt his cheeks go hot.
MacRae said, “You came here on the strength of my name. My poor relation from up north. You asked for a job, and I obliged you.”
“And I’m grateful.”
“Don’t be,” Waddell said mildly. “You don’t have it anymore.” He held a rag in his hand.
MacRae said, “I didn’t expect much. Didn’t ask for anything but a little gratitude. Is that so much to ask? Instead, look how you repay me.”
Sam started for the door. “I don’t have to stand here and take this.”
MacRae blocked his way. “Yes, cousin—I’m afraid you do.”
Gabrielle moved off to the side. He thought he heard her say, “I’m sorry,” but it might have been only a sharp intake of breath.
“Look, it must be some kind of mistake.” Sam’s insides were churning. Everything was going wrong again. He had been so close.
“Mrs. Waddell, please leave us,” MacRae said. She didn’t move. “Very well, then. I don’t mean to be indelicate. But since Cousin Sam here has no ear for subtlety, let me ask him straight out.” He stood on the balls of his feet, fists at his side. “Sam, did you know your wife was sleeping with a nigger?”
Sam swung his fist at MacRae’s face, but MacRae adroitly dodged it, then boxed Sam neatly on the ear. Sam dropped to the floor and banged his head. Gabrielle looked away. Bessie King, hearing the ruckus, stuck her head in the door to see what was wrong and just as quickly ducked out again.
Sam sat up. MacRae drew an envelope from his coat and flicked it into Sam’s lap—tickets. “The Yankee Clipper leaves at quarter past seven.”
Shakily, Sam got to his feet, but MacRae was already gone. He had trouble with his equilibrium and grabbed a chair for balance. He couldn’t believe it—he was being run out of town. What was their word? Banished. A word right out of the Bible.
Waddell said in a kindly voice, “I had such great hopes for you, Samuel. You had such a promising future.” Now, he’d have to write his own story—you just couldn’t count on a man anymore, not like in the old days.
Sam rubbed his ear and tried to focus his eyes on Gabrielle. It mattered a great deal to him at that moment what she thought of him. Why wouldn’t she speak?
“The worst thing, of course,” Waddell went on, as if he were reporting a postmortem, “is the Manly business.”
“What Manly business?”
Waddell smiled. “You’re out, Samuel. No need to dissemble. We know perfectly well that your wife”—he said it like it was a dirty word—“helped Alex Manly to escape.”
The absurd logic was coming clear to Sam: Ivanhoe Grant naked to the waist in his kitchen. The buggy Cousin Hugh had loaned them.
Waddell held up the rag—Ivanhoe Grant’s bloody shirt. “The buggy was recovered at Castle Hayne, near the depot,” Waddell said. “There was an eyewitness, a neighbor.”
Sam cocked his head. “Man or woman?”
“Neither—a little boy. Two little boys, in fact.”
Sam nodded. The two little gangsters next door. It was almost funny. He waited a moment until he got his equilibrium back, then slowly walked to the door. As he opened it, he turned and said, “I wrote it all down, you know. The whole story. Gave it to Tom Clawson.”
Waddell chuckled. “You don’t actually think he’ll print it?”
“Then I’ll write it again, someplace else. I will.”
“You do that. You scribble away to your heart’s content. I can’t use that kind of scribbler.”
“My God,” Sam said. “To think I admired you.”
“Of course, you did, Samuel.” Waddell smiled, stepped closer, and patted him on the shoulder. “You still do.”
Sam staggered into the foyer, still dizzy from MacRae’s blow. Gabrielle appeared at his elbow. “So you’re going along with all this?” he said.
She looked him right in the eye. “A woman doesn’t have as many lucky choices as a man.”
Sam nodded. He almost understood. “Did he hurt you?”
She shook
her head. “He’s my husband.”
“That’s it?”
“I have to live here.”
Sam turned and reached for the doorknob. “Gray will miss you.”
“Please tell her goodbye for me.”
“Tell her yourself.”
“No. She’ll understand.”
Of course she would. Sam nodded and left.
From the window of the train, Sam and Gray Ellen watched the flickering lights of the city reel by. They sat side by side, not talking. Gray Ellen was nearer the window.
Crowded around them in the dimly lighted car were other silent passengers, all white—the Negro coaches were up ahead, just behind the engine, where the noise and soot were worst. Every seat was filled. People crouched in the aisle. The passengers rocked gently with the motion of the train, heads bobbing. Many of them had their eyes closed, though Sam was sure they were not sleeping.
Shame, he thought—that’s what they were all feeling. Humiliation. Anger. Disbelief. He was feeling it acutely. Next to him, Gray Ellen had her eyes glued to the passing lights, but he had no idea what she was feeling.
They were headed back to Philadelphia, but what they would do there, whether they would even remain there, was an open question.
Sam hadn’t told Harry Calabash that he was leaving, but somehow Harry had known. He’d been waiting back at the house when Sam returned home from Waddell’s. He shook Sam’s hand solemnly. “Good luck in Yankeeland,” he said.
“How can you stay?” Sam asked.
Harry looked old and used up. He was sober now, but Sam knew he’d be deep in the whiskey by train time. Harry shrugged, as if the answer were too obvious to bother saying out loud. “This is where I live.”
“After everything that’s happened?”
“You’ve got to forgive a city, same as a person.”
Sam thought, how can you forgive anybody who won’t admit they’ve done wrong?
“It’s as simple as that?” he said.
“I didn’t say it was simple. It’s just the way it is.”
They were losing the city now. The lights were going out behind them. There were no stars to light the overcast sky. Somewhere off to the left, Sam knew, lay the river—brown, swollen with the rains, clogged with anchored ships waiting to be unloaded.
Beyond the city, he knew, lay beautiful, unspoiled country. Lowland forests full of deer and stubble fields thick with Canada geese, clear creeks swimming with trout and tidal basins brimming with oysters and clams. Wide-open beaches he had walked with Gray Ellen, dunes where plovers and giant turtles nested. But tonight, the country was invisible under the black sky. He might never see it again. Already, he missed it.
The train rattled over the trestle at Smith’s Creek and through the swamps—were the people still out there, huddling in the cold rain? Then they were moving away from the river for good.
Harry Calabash had told him rumors of bodies—wagonloads of Negro bodies—being dumped into the river in the dead of Thursday night. Sam had no idea if it were true. He knew for sure that dozens of Negroes had been killed. He had carefully tallied all the reports and corrected for redundancy, rumor, and exaggeration. He guessed that 120 to 150 Negroes had been massacred. That was the only accurate word—massacred. They never had a chance.
He had no idea if any of those had been dumped into the river. But he imagined them now, bloated and stiff—a fleet of faceless, nameless black corpses drifting out on the tide, floating down the Cape Fear to the sea.
EPILOGUE
New Year’s Eve 1899
GRAY ELLEN STARES out the window of her bedroom while Sam fusses with the bottle of champagne. Two stories below, Chestnut Street is thronged with holiday revelers heading to Independence Mall to cheer in the new year, as church bells toll all over the city. Snow has been falling for hours, drifting soft against doorways and curbs.
He twists off the wire and turns the bottle while holding the cork till it pops out softly. He can smell the sweet bouquet. Gray Ellen looks radiant tonight in a midnight-blue satin evening gown—a gift from Gabrielle deRosset Waddell. It arrived last week without a note. Perhaps Gabrielle had waited a suitable period, as if in mourning. Still, a whole year. Sam could not fathom why she sent it, why she even bothered to finish making it. Yet Gray Ellen was not surprised, acted almost as if she expected it.
Its arrival unsettled Sam, but now, fitted onto Gray Ellen’s slim figure, it gives him a kind of hope. Her black hair shines.
Gray Ellen is newly pregnant. She will not show for weeks. It is the best secret they have ever shared.
Sam pours the champagne into two crystal flutes, wedding presents, and watches the bubbles. He has not had a drink since his last whiskey with Harry Calabash. Tonight, they are allowing themselves one bottle of French vintage, a gift from her family, to celebrate.
This time, it has been easier for Sam to stop drinking. What he needed all along was not the drink but the foggy sense of well-being that came with the drink. The escape from himself. But he doesn’t feel the urgent desire to escape from himself anymore. He isn’t a hero, just a newspaperman who is sometimes ambitious, often afraid, full of venial sins, and dodging mortal ones. Be better than what goes on around you. He promised her.
Sometimes at night, though, he dreams of escaping. He is underwater, his feet planted to his boot tops in thick river mud, holding his breath. The current is tugging him downriver, toward the ocean.
In the murky water, large, lumpish objects drift by. Some of them have faces—eyes wide open in astonishment, mouths agape. Their fingers are splayed, reaching, trying to grab the brown water and hold on. Trying to grab hold of Sam.
Always, he pushes them away, his lungs burning from lack of breath. Far overhead, something moves on the surface, casting its fat shadow all the way down to the bottom of the river. What is casting the shadow? It is never clear. Something big, looming out of the dark future. He cannot hold his breath any longer. His feet are stuck, as in cement. One of the floating corpses latches onto him. He gulps cold water that tastes of tea. He tries to cry out, but his voice is lost in water.
The black corpse has him and won’t let go. He feels his feet lifting free of the mud, his body caught in the current, flying to the sea.
Then he wakes to Gray Ellen, peacefully asleep beside him.
“Look at the lights,” Sam says now, stepping beside her and offering her a flute of champagne. Through the mist of blowing snow, the lights of the city glimmer yellow and blue and orange against the drifts in the street.
“Every light in the world is on tonight,” she says. She is not happy, but she is content. She feels safe, here on home ground. Sam covers the city desk for the Bulletin. She teaches at Friends School. There are no mobs in the street, except for the revelers.
“It will be a good year for us,” Sam says. “I can feel it.”
“You say that every year.”
He always expects too much, and then the disappointment overwhelms him. Better to expect nothing, to be grateful for small blessings. But she doesn’t really believe that—who can live without hopes? It is only the future, bright as a field of new snow, that makes it possible to survive the present.
Still, she doesn’t want to know what the new year will hold. She will trust herself to bear it.
Outside, the world seems frozen. It is two minutes till midnight.
She watches the hands on the clock across the street, and they don’t move. It’s as if time is going to grind to a halt at midnight and then, with a great gnashing of celestial gears, begin to move backward.
“Did I tell you that I ran into Alex Manly on the street this morning?”
She has heard he moved to Philadelphia. So have many other Wilmington Negroes—they’ve formed a club they call the Sons of Liberty.
“Got a job as a painter—passing himself off as Irish.”
She doesn’t answer. She never wants to talk about that time again. She wants it to remain a hole in their
life. To talk about it is to bring it all back, and all the bad luck with it. The dress is lovely. The woman who made it is a lovely memory. If Gray Ellen’s life goes as she hopes it will, she will never see her again.
Sam realizes he shouldn’t have said anything. She is at peace now—leave her be. He had a letter from Harry last week that he hasn’t told her about, the first letter since they left. Mike Dowling is now a captain in the fire department. George Rountree is an important man in the legislature. Hugh MacRae keeps getting richer. Wilmington is a one-party town.
According to Harry, by the time it was all over, a thousand Negroes fled the county, most of them skilled workers and professionals. A thousand people, Sam reflects—one for every armed man who helped take the city. Where were the other seven thousand whites? Couldn’t they stand up to the minority with guns?
In the year since the uprising, Wilmington has been struck by a blizzard and two hurricanes. Business is stagnant—nobody is investing. The bottom has dropped out of cotton. Wooden ships are rotting at their moorings, waiting for cargo.
But Sam can’t help feeling it is not over. Harry said it—you have to forgive a city, if it is your city. Sam longs to go back there. He didn’t realize until he left, but somehow it is his city now. Part of him remains there. It will always be there, urging him to do better, to live up to a wife who believes in grace.
He misses the racket of the wharf, the opal sky, even the oystershell dust. Someday, he must go back. It will be different. A year from now, ten years, twenty. He will return and claim it.
Meanwhile, you’ve got to be where you live.
John Norwood went back, Harry wrote. Sam wishes he knew Norwood better. It’s always the quiet ones who make the lasting difference. You can charge around, make speeches, shoot guns, but in the end, it’s the quiet ones.
Gray Ellen sips her champagne. The bubbles tickle her nose. The revelers have passed. She cannot see them beyond the roofs of the houses, but they cast their dancing lights into the snowy sky, a modest aurora borealis. She sets her glass on the window sill.
There descends a great silence, like the silence of held breath. She trembles, feels her spine tingle. She imagines him out there in the silence, and his image sticks in her eye like a ghost: Ivanhoe Grant. She hears his strident voice, thinned by distance. He is a kind of devil made by men. A thing created out of suffering. There will be no easy rest for anybody while he is loose on the land. She does not approve of him, but she believes in him.
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