Somehow, knowing he is still out there—believing it—reassures her. “Can you hear it?” she says.
But Sam hears nothing beyond the silence.
“Listen,” she says. Ivanhoe Grant—he’s still out there somewhere, chasing away sin, gathering his anger, seething with the white man’s poison. He will call them back. He is a sinner, too wicked for this world, but he will call them all back. He will outlast them all.
She stares into the snowy night and wills his image into focus: a hobo jungle at the edge of a swamp. A black man in a pearl-gray suit headed south. In his hand, he carries a Bible he knows by heart. He walks alone beside the tracks, head up, back straight, a man burning at the core. Behind him, a train is approaching around a long curve, whistle moaning. He turns. In the beam of the locomotive, his skin is the color of wheat dust, and his eyes shine with ferocious anger.
Yet, in the thundering darkness, he smiles.
Sam says, “But I don’t hear—”
“Shh.” She takes his face firmly in her hands, touches his ears with her fingertips. “Shh,” she whispers again. “Don’t talk. Don’t answer. Don’t say anything. Listen—just listen.”
Any second now, the gong will strike the hour.
Gray Ellen stares across the street at the black hands of the clock, frozen against the luminescent, pearly face at one minute until midnight. One minute until the twentieth century.
Armond Scott, the young lawyer who failed to deliver the Committee of Colored Citizens’ reply to the white ultimatum, became a judge of the Twelfth Municipal Court in Washington, D.C. George Rountree and Walker Taylor engineered the appointment, leading to speculation that Scott had been bought off by the white supremacy movement.
Father Christopher Dennen returned to Wilmington to continue his work of social activism and build a new, bigger church—St. Mary’s.
Dr. Silas Wright, the mayor ousted by Waddell, showed uncharacteristic bravery in his futile effort to restore calm during the events of Thursday, November 10, 1898. He remained in the city until November 14, then fled. He was rumored to be in Knoxville, Tennessee, leading a quiet life as a general practitioner.
Hugh MacRae realized his lifelong dream of colonizing the Cape Fear region with “utopian” agrarian communities of Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Dutchmen, and Italians. In 1900, he became head of the Wilmington Gas Light Company, consolidating that utility with the Wrightsville Street Railway and Seacoast Railway.
He was largely responsible for developing Wrightsville Beach as a resort destination for tourists from all over the country. Because of his expertise with real estate and agriculture, he was considered for a position in the administration of Herbert Hoover.
Colonel Walker Taylor never achieved his ambition of becoming mayor of Wilmington, but he was appointed collector of customs by President Woodrow Wilson in 1913. He was lauded on several public occasions for his performance during the coup of 1898. His Boys Brigade was reorganized under the auspices of the Kiwanis in 1921 as the Brigade Boys Club and remains active today as a model for training young men to be good citizens.
Widely traveled, Taylor visited Rome in 1928. There, he was granted an interview with Mussolini, whom he characterized with admiration as a combination Caesar and Napoleon.
Sam Jenks worked for various Eastern newspapers and later for newsreel syndicates. Trying his hand again as a war correspondent, he accompanied Blackjack Pershing’s expedition into Mexico in vain pursuit of Pancho Villa. For his coverage of the repression of striking copper miners in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1917—during which he was run out of town in a boxcar and left to die in the New Mexico desert along with the strikers—he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for journalism. He never returned to Wilmington.
Gray Ellen Jenks taught reading and history at Friends School for thirty-one years. Her memoir, Through a Woman’s Eyes, won her international celebrity, including an invitation to the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. She corresponded with Eleanor Roosevelt and frequently lectured at universities and clubs.
Gray Ellen and Sam’s first daughter, Christine, became an aviator and for a time held the women’s solo speed record from San Francisco to New York. Two other daughters, Margaret and Kathleen, became champions of women’s rights.
Their only son, Harry, became an archaeologist and disappeared in the Yucatan in 1955.
George Rountree distinguished himself as a judge on the North Carolina Superior Court. As chairman of the Committee on Constitutional Amendments of the North Carolina General Assembly, he authored the so-called grandfather clause, requiring voters to qualify as literate and to pay a poll tax before voting. For generations, it effectively barred blacks from casting votes.
Elizabeth “Bessie” King never left Wilmington. She continued her employment as a domestic servant to various leading families until forced to retire because of arthritis in 1926 at the age of sixty-six. She finished her days in a private retirement home, where she lived for forty more years, supported by an anonymous benefactor.
Saffron King James went to Baltimore in 1902. There, she attended the Baltimore College of Nursing and Medical Arts. After stints in various hospitals, she returned to Wilmington’s James Walker Hospital in 1917 and was cited for her service during the influenza epidemic the following year. She outlived three husbands, the last a minister, and was struck and killed by an automobile in 1966 while going to the bedside of her dying mother.
John G. Norwood left Wilmington briefly during the coup but returned six months later. He continued to work behind the political scenes to improve the treatment of Afro-Americans.
Harry Calabash continued to reside in Wilmington. He was found dead of a heart attack on the night that the armistice was signed ending the Great War. On the floor next to his chair was an empty fifth of bourbon.
Captain William Rand Kenan, in the peak of health and vigor, died suddenly of unexplained causes in 1903 on the thirty-eighth anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell served three terms as mayor of Wilmington, becoming one of the city’s wealthiest and most distinguished citizens. He died in his bed at the age of seventy-six on St. Patrick’s Day 1911, after an eight-hour illness. His funeral at St. James Episcopal Church was attended by hundreds of mourners, including representatives of many of the best clubs in Wilmington. The Raleigh News & Observer eulogized him as a model for Southern manhood: “When Waddell died, the South lost one of the cleanest and purest types of the chivalrous gentleman.” He was interred at Oakdale Cemetery.
Gabrielle deRosset Waddell survived her husband by many years. She became conspicuous for her public and private philanthropy, and she traveled widely. She never remarried.
Ivanhoe Grant disappeared from history in 1898. But an elderly man rumored to be Grant appears in an Associated Press wire photo, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial behind the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” oratory. Grant would have been a hundred years old. The man in the photograph has never been positively identified.
Alex Manly returned to Wilmington only once, in 1925, with his wife, Carrie. He visited the courthouse, where he attempted to regain title to his properties confiscated in 1898. But there was no record that he had ever owned any real estate or other assets in New Hanover County.
In the aftermath of the coup, reporters from numerous papers in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia requested interviews, but he refused them all, claiming that he would someday write the definitive account of his experiences during the uprising. No such account was ever published.
AN AFTERWORD FROM THE AUTHOR
Cape Fear Rising at Twenty-Five
INSPIRATION AND PROCESS
When I moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1989, I was nonplussed by the absolute sense of segregation I encountered. I had come from the Chicago area, a teeming pool of ethnicities and races, and it seemed strange indeed to encounter only white faces at rest
aurants, concerts, grocery stores—even on the university campus. And every so often I would attend a concert or go into a store in which I was one of the only—perhaps the only—white person.
My lone African-American colleague mentioned that this condition had a history, which he referred to obliquely as “the riots.” He offered little more detail. I asked around and got a variety of equally vague answers: The “riots” referred to the mob of blacks who had ransacked downtown at the turn of the century and burned the courthouse. No, it was the time when the National Guard marched into the black community in the 1920s.
Well, the courthouse was brick and stone, and it had been standing a good long while. So I continued to dig—finding a few obscure self-published works by Alfred Moore Waddell, a short biography of William Rand Kenan written by his son, a novel by Charles Chestnutt called The Marrow of Tradition, and another by pseudonymous author Jack Thorne called Hanover, or the Persecution of the Lowly—these last two published near the turn of the twentieth century. I was astonished that no one had written a novel about the events in nearly a hundred years.
The story became like those old tunnels that run under Market Street and come up in some of the most prominent homes, churches, and other buildings, running underneath every act of contemporary civic life.
All accounts shared one point of convergence: at the center of events was a black newspaperman—a writer—named Alexander Manly. So it was more than a racial story—all too common in the South of that time and place—and became a story about the right to speak and write one’s convictions. And soon enough I learned that the heart of the thing was a failure of democracy—a corps of well-funded, determined men sought to overturn a legally elected government by force of arms.
I spent my second holiday break poring over the material and drafted a ten-page book proposal for exactly one publisher: John F. Blair, an independent publisher then located in Winston Salem, North Carolina. If I were to write about these horrific events, I wanted two things: a Southern publisher who could not be accused of being some kind of carpetbagger, and a publisher who would keep the book in print far beyond the usual six-to-eighteen months of most trade novels.
From the start, I conceived the story as a novel. At first, I was going to write it as a detective story: an outsider moves to town in the 1990s and discovers the story. But that felt too self-conscious. Then I thought to cast it as the trial of Alfred Moore Waddell, a courtroom drama in which all the facts and crimes would be adjudicated in open court. But I couldn’t make that structure work, for various reasons.
At last I hit upon the idea of creating a character who, in a sense, would be a kind of avatar for both me and the reader, a stranger coming to a new place as the events of that time are unfolding and finding himself in the morally complicated position of going along with the powerful men who can reward him after a professional lifetime of disappointment—or standing up to them at the cost of his livelihood and exile from the community.
My job—the job of the novelist of history—is to tell a compelling human story, born of true facts, that not only engages the reader emotionally but also sharpens or even awakens an interest in the history that underpins the story.
The novel takes place in Wilmington, North Carolina, from August to November 1898, climaxing with the white supremacist coup d’état that stole—at gunpoint—city government from a legally elected coalition of black and white Republicans and Populists at the cost of an uncounted number of dead and injured blacks and the exile of as many as a thousand people from their home place.
I wanted to create as accurate a story as possible from the public facts, many of which had been noted by the actors themselves for the record. Obviously, there were overlaps and contradictions, but by triangulating what one witness reported with the testimony of another, I was very confident before I wrote a single word of scene that I knew pretty precisely who had done what, where, when, and to whom. I spent an entire year researching, consulting every primary source I could locate in local archives and those farther afield at UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke, and many others: letters, memoirs, coroner’s reports, testimonials from victims, resolutions created by the white supremacists, speeches, maps, and photographs.
But my interest as a novelist lay in the why—the interior life of motive and principle that caused these men to act. This was the invisible part of the story—not the official reasons, but the private, perhaps contradictory imperatives of the heart, the engine of human character.
Who were these people? What did they have to gain? What in God’s name made them do the things they did? They were not evil villains—they were mostly family men, deacons in their churches, well-respected, beloved fathers and husbands.
So why were they roaming the streets, shooting down innocent people, subverting democracy?
It would be easier if they were villains, because then we could dismiss them. We’re not like that, we could say—as we say it of every real villain history offers us: Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden. But we can’t get off quite so easily.
Col. Alfred Moore Waddell, who led the uprising, was a brave officer, an eloquent and witty speaker, and a charmer of young women.
Judge George Rountree, who wrote the Grandfather Clause, part of a constitutional amendment that effectively disenfranchised blacks for generations to come, was a fair and honest man, even his enemies agreed. He later helped get an African-American man appointed to a judgeship in Washington.
William Rand Kenan, who had charge of the Gatling gun used to terrorize black inhabitants of the city, was known for his integrity, upright character, and physical bravery.
Col. Walker Taylor, who assumed military command of Wilmington once martial law was declared, is best known for his work with underprivileged kids in the Boys Brigade, the forerunner of the Brigade Boys and Girls Club.
These men were—are—uncomfortably like many of us. They had their good points—in fact, you could argue that for most of them, their actions in the uprising were way out of character—good or bad. Inexplicable.
In an extraordinary situation, some of them revealed their true characters, and some did things nobody—least of all they themselves—ever expected them to do.
During the violence, for example, Dr. Silas Wright, the ousted mayor, a man known for his inability to act decisively, behaved like a hero, riding to and fro at great personal risk to try and stop the shooting.
Rountree, a man of law and reason, found himself walking the streets with a Winchester in his hand—feeling, as he later reported in his own words, “like a damn fool.”
In some important way, the writer of public events becomes a surrogate conscience for the community. So, I needed to grapple with the moral problem they all faced, the moral problem that lies at the center of the story, the problem I laid squarely in the lap of my proxy viewpoint character, the newspaperman Sam Jenks: When everyone around you is doing wrong, at what point must you, the individual, take responsibility? At what point must you act to stop it?
And how can you act when those people all around you are the people you most respect, who most matter to you, with whom you will have to go on living for a lifetime in a small place?
And how can you then not act?
In a sense, my audience, the folks sitting on my shoulder as I wrote, were the ghosts of the seven thousand or so white people who did not take part in the violence but also did nothing to stop it. And their descendants—which is to say, most of us. We are not likely to be in the fray, but how we stand up for what we believe, how we then tell the story of it, matters.
My process was this: I constructed a timeline of the actual known events, along with where they occurred and who was involved. I researched and wrote pocket biographies of sixty-odd main players—real-life figures—and chose from among them the few who would carry the action, the prime movers.
I then created a viewpoint character—the fictional Sam Jenks—and his wife, Gray Ellen. I wanted an outsider who w
as fighting his own demons and so could not stand in easy judgment. Sam is a failed war correspondent, last seen missing the Rough Riders’ charge up San Juan Hill while sleeping off a drunk. His wife, Gray Ellen, is a schoolteacher—and in a sense, embodies his conscience. Between them, in that time and place, they could gain access to the councils of any group, white or black. They are what I call “line-crosser” characters. And to illuminate a story like this one, you need characters who can cross borders.
I added several secondary composite characters—a housekeeper and her son, who dies in place of an unidentified real black man who was actually shot down. And a firebrand black preacher, who represents the several anonymous preachers abroad in the city trying to stir the restless young men to claim their rights by law. These were the kinds of people not named in the accounts but who nevertheless were present, and I wanted them represented.
It’s always risky to try to inhabit characters of a different time, especially if they are also of a different race. But as Charles Johnson (Middle Passage) has argued so eloquently, the writer’s true aim is to achieve empathy—to imagine with as much authenticity as possible any character’s experience and to transmit that sense of understanding to a reader of any background. It’s a tall order, and no doubt leaves the writer open to criticism. But what’s the alternative—to write only about people exactly like ourselves at our precise moment in history? That would forbid the historical novel altogether—as well as any novel with a mix of characters. My aim was always to try my utmost to project the essential dignity of characters such as Alex Manly and Bessie King and Carter Peamon—and to present the complexity of characters like Buck Kenan and Alfred Moore Waddell.
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