The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  November 1910

  Asbury Park, New Jersey

  The Asbury Park Police Department had its headquarters in a two-story building, topped by a striking bell tower, on Mattison Avenue, just east of the railroad depot, and it shared space with the Independence Hook and Ladder Company. There were jail cells on the second floor, and another lockup in the basement.

  Detective Hankinson brought Tom Williams in on the night of Sunday, November 13, and turned him over to William Smith, the chief of police. Smith took Williams to the second floor and put him in a cell isolated from the others. There Williams was informally arraigned and ordered held without bail. Smith asked him to give up his suspenders, and Williams balked. He promised he wouldn’t use them to hang himself in the cell. Smith took them anyway, and left Williams with a small coil of rope to wrap around his waist to keep his pants up.

  There were stains on the suspenders, too; they would have to be tested for blood.

  By then Chief Smith had been running law enforcement in Asbury Park for several years, and he was controversial. He cut a modest figure, with clipped eyebrows dwarfed by a deep mustache, and big ears that made him seem boyish. He often wore a Gendarmerie-style, box-topped police hat and a silver-finished, solid copper police badge with an eagle sentry on it. Smith took pride in the low number of arrests made by his department, which he took as a sign that his enhanced police tactics were working. In 1903, there were a record-low ninety-nine arrests in Asbury Park, and the next year, only 102—including nineteen for drunkenness, seven for grand larceny, two for fast driving, and two for “peeping.” One year, Smith boasted of not having had to arrest a single burglar or pickpocket.

  In fact, many wondered if Smith had grown too close to the criminal element. In 1905, he was accused of running protection for bookmakers and partaking in gambling himself. He was known to play poker in the back of Doc McBride’s drugstore, and a slip with his name on it proved he’d laid bets with a bookie named George Vunck. The six-member City Council convened a vote and debated for hours, into the night, before deadlocking on Smith’s fate. It wasn’t the majority acquittal he was hoping for, but at least it meant he got to keep his job.

  Now, Police Chief Smith would be the first law officer to formally interrogate Tom Williams. He began by creating a timeline.

  “On Wednesday morning, what time did you get up?” Smith asked.

  “About six-thirty o’clock,” Williams said.

  “After you got up, what did you do?”

  “I went out to Bill Brower’s place.”

  “And after that?” Smith asked.

  “I went to Bill Griffin’s about seven-thirty o’clock.”

  “Who did you see at Griffin’s?”

  “Well, I saw the bartender, who they call John the Cripple.”

  “How many drinks did you have?”

  “Well, I don’t just remember how many I had.”

  Smith kept pushing, and Williams admitted to having four or five shots of whiskey and gin.

  “How long did you stay at Griffin’s?”

  “I stayed there until about eight-thirty o’clock.”

  Williams offered this further account of his morning—at 9:00 a.m. he left Griffin’s barroom and went downtown to buy a newspaper at the railroad depot. He got back to Griffin’s about 9:30 a.m. He said he stayed at Griffin’s until roughly 11:45 a.m., when he left and walked over the bridge near Griffin’s to Brickyard Road, in search of an old jug he had seen in the woods on an earlier scavenge. He wanted the jug to fill up with oil for his house-painting job in Oakhurst. He took the jug to Mollie Williams’s home, next door to Delia Jackson.

  “I was there from about twelve o’clock to nearly sundown and I didn’t leave the place during that time,” he told Smith. “When I left, it was getting dark.”

  After that, Williams said, he stopped by Stolze’s butcher shop and bought hamburger steak and hog liver, and then to a grocery for a loaf of bread. He went to the house of 19½ Atkins Avenue and sent William Wynn to buy them six bottles of beer. And that, he swore, was his day.

  Smith asked Williams if he had seen anyone on his walk from Griffin’s to Mollie Williams’s house.

  “Yes, I saw two men setting on the south side of the bridge,” he said. “I spoke to one of them and I said, ‘Well, are you taking a sun bath?’ And they said yes, and we sort of laughed, and I went on.”

  These were the two men, Conover and Taylor, who told police they remembered seeing Williams leave the barroom at 10:30 a.m. and not around noon, as Williams claimed.

  That was crucial. Marie Smith was last seen at 10:30 a.m., and police believed she was taken sometime between then and 12:30 p.m. If Conover and Taylor were to be believed, Williams was lying about when he left Griffin’s—which meant there was a ninety-minute gap in his timeline. A gap corresponding to the time of Marie’s disappearance.

  Smith pushed Williams on one other point. On November 8, 1910, the day before Marie disappeared, there was an election for governor of New Jersey. The Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, defeated Republican Vivian Lewis by roughly 50,000 votes out of more than 433,000 votes cast. Williams admitted to Chief Smith that he spent much of the following day discussing the election with patrons at Griffin’s and with Mollie Williams. Smith asked Williams if he himself had voted.

  “No, I didn’t,” Williams said.

  “Are you a registered voter?”

  “No, sir.”

  By then, Chief Smith knew that Williams had boasted to Mollie Williams of voting in the election. As a felon, Williams was flatly prohibited from voting. Here was a discrepancy, perhaps a lie, and possibly a criminal offense. Smith concluded his interview without once bringing up the murder of Marie Smith. He knew there would be many further interrogations, and plenty of time to grill Williams about it.

  * * *

  Chief Smith sent an officer to Delia Jackson’s home to find the ax Tom Williams used to chop up her tree for kindling. The coroners said an ax might have been used to kill Marie Smith, and if Williams was guilty, the ax could be the murder weapon. Police found it on the ground outside Delia’s home, but she insisted she had used it twice the Wednesday morning in question, first to cut wood chips for a fire, then to split a board. Williams didn’t arrive at her home until after noon that day. The ax couldn’t be the murder weapon.

  Still, there were problems with Williams’s statement. Police tracked down John F. Carlton—John the Cripple, the bartender who had seen Williams at Griffin’s Wednesday morning. Carlton confirmed that Williams was there early, and left to buy newspapers. But, Carlton said, “Williams returned with two papers shortly after 10:00 a.m. and immediately left, going out the back door.” That bolstered the testimony of Conover and Taylor, who saw Williams leave Griffin’s sometime between 10:00 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. that morning. Williams’s assertion that he was at Griffin’s until 11:45 a.m. was, police believed, simply false.

  Early on Monday, November 14, 1910, the morning after Williams’s arrest, Alvin Cliver—who had good sources in the police department—forcefully stated the case against Williams in his article in the Asbury Park Press, starting with the large-type headline.

  NEGRO IS PLACED AT SCENE AT THE TIME OF BRUTAL MURDER

  “Strong evidence is hourly being produced to show that Williams is the man who committed the crime, one of the most brutal and dastardly ever committed in the state,” Cliver wrote. He referenced Williams’s interview with Chief Smith and concluded, “the Police and a press reporter have found it to be radically incorrect in many instances.” He stressed that Williams knew Marie, and she knew him: “Naturally, if the negro had beckoned to her she would have gone to him. Possibly she would have followed him into the woods without suspecting anything wrong.”

  Now the people of Asbury Park, riled by the crime and demanding information, had themselves a suspect, and a good one. It was there in black and white in the Press. What’s more, they knew where they could find him. He was among them. He was rig
ht there in the jail.

  That night it began to rain, a cold rain, and soon it turned into sleet and snow. Word of Williams’s arrest spread all through Asbury Park, and through surrounding towns—Long Branch, Ocean Grove, Eatontown.

  From these places came the men.

  Many were fathers who brought along their eldest sons. Some were grandfathers, too old for this sort of business but not about to miss it.

  Some of the men took their longest ropes and fixed them in coils around their belts.

  Another group gathered in Whitesville, the area just west of Asbury Park where Marie Smith had lived. Around 9:00 p.m., they marched in the direction of the ocean. On the way, they passed the store of R. E. K. Rothfritz, a stonemason who dealt coal, wood, lime, and cement. One of the marchers, William Davison, broke open the front door and led the others inside. They came out with an arsenal—a twenty-pound sledgehammer, a long pinch bar, a steel crowbar, an ax, an iron roller.

  The men took their tools and merged with the other marchers on Mattison Avenue, beneath the bell tower. There were hundreds of them now, packing into the narrow street, drenched by the rain and sleet. They made no secret of their purpose.

  “Diamond will never leave this town alive!” yelled one.

  “Lynch him!”

  “Mingo Jack! Mingo Jack!”

  This was a reference to the 1886 lynching of the black stable hand accused of attacking a white woman in Eatontown, seven miles north—still the only lynching in the state at that time. Some of the men on Mattison Avenue bragged of having been there, in Eatontown, among the hangmen, more than a quarter century earlier.

  Now, here they were again.

  A few of the men dragged logs and fence posts across the roads leading out of Asbury Park, then waited in the woods with rifles, in case police tried to spirit Tom Williams away. Outside the police station, the mob grew and stirred and tightened. Chants echoed—“Shoot him, lynch him, let us at him,” loud enough for the prisoner to hear.

  Iron bars, hatchets, files, guns, waving in the night.

  Now a surge, and the latticed wood door leading to the police station tearing away.

  Now a push, and the men flooding into the jail, bound by determination to reach Tom Williams’s cell.

  CHAPTER 9 The Cry of Humanity

  September 1883

  Memphis, Tennessee

  A thousand miles southwest of Asbury Park—and long before Tom Williams ever lived there—a child was born a slave, and born in war.

  The infant was given the sweet-sounding name Ida Bell Wells, and through history’s long unfolding she would one day play a role in the case of Tom Williams—as well as in the shaping of her country and its ideals. In the words of preeminent Wells scholar and biographer Paula J. Giddings, Ida Wells would become “the reformer whose… progressive ideas became the foundation of the modern civil rights and women’s rights movements.”

  Her life was a life of conflict. She was born in the northern Mississippi city of Holly Springs, on July 16, 1862, eighteen months after the start of the Civil War. Just five months later, Major General Ulysses S. Grant stationed thousands of Union troops in Wells’s hometown, and filled a large depot there with more than a million dollars’ worth of medical equipment, clothing, ordnance, and other crucial supplies. In the middle of the night on December 19, 1862, one of Grant’s colonels, Robert C. Murphy, largely ignored a report from a black citizen of Holly Springs who swore he spotted Rebel forces in the area. Instead of rising to battle, the Union troops slept.

  The next day, in a surprise attack, Confederate major general Earl Van Dorn and his troops stormed Holly Springs. They captured fifteen hundred unprepared Union soldiers, destroyed the supply depot, and laid waste to the town. Train tracks were uprooted, stores looted and razed. A new two-thousand-bed hospital and several other buildings were torched and burned to the ground. Holly Springs was left largely in ruins.

  Two weeks later, on New Year’s Day, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln put into effect an executive order—Proclamation 95—decreeing that some three and a half million African American slaves in the United States “shall be then, thenceforward and forever free.”

  One of the emancipated was the infant Ida Wells, who, technically, had been born enslaved. Her father, Jim, was a slave, and the son of a slave named Peggy. Jim’s father was Morgan Wells, the white plantation owner in Tippah County, Mississippi, who owned his mother, Peggy.

  Ida Wells’s mother, Lizzie, was the teenaged slave of Spires Boling, a white home builder in Holly Springs. Lizzie prepared meals for Boling and became, in Ida’s words, “a famous cook.” Jim and Lizzie met when Jim—who’d been taught carpentry, and would become a master mason—was sent by his owner to Holly Springs to help build a new house there. They married first in bondage, and, after Lincoln’s proclamation, married again, in 1869, as free persons.

  Ida Wells was the first of their eight children (one of her brothers, Eddie, died not long after birth). A child of the deepest South, Wells grew up in a state, Mississippi, that lagged behind only South Carolina in seceding from the Union. A state that proclaimed, in its Declaration of Secession, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.”

  The concept of black people as property was so integral to the cotton-rich economy of Mississippi that its population included more black people than white people, making it one of only two states in the Union with a majority made up of the enslaved.

  Yet Wells was also born in a time of new hope for black people in the South. The end of the Civil War created new paths to education, land ownership, and voting rights for them; indeed, Ida’s father, Jim, bought his own plot of land for $130 in 1870, and built a three-room frame house on it for his growing family. The Freedmen’s Aid Society, founded by a collection of churches in the North, helped build dozens of new schools in the South, including one in Holly Springs, on the very land where General Grant’s men had camped a few years earlier. Ida Wells was schooled there, and her job as a youngster, she and her siblings were told, “was to learn all we could.”

  To be sure, some of the classes Ida and the forty other girls in her school were forced to take dealt with cooking, cleaning, and laundering. But Ida focused more on reading, and consumed books at a pace that impressed the adults around her. In the evenings she would read the newspapers aloud to her father and “an admiring group of his friends,” she later wrote. She read them articles about the nascent Ku Klux Klan, not understanding who they were, only that there was “something fearful” about them.

  In this way the Wells family struggled, grew, survived, and thrived in the new landscape of the South. Ida’s mother, who had been severely whipped and beaten by her owners, was now learning to read alongside her children at school. Ida’s father became a leader in the community, advocating for political awareness among his fellow blacks. The family worshipped at the new Asbury Baptist Church in Holly Springs, and listened to sermons on the spiritual value of piety and mercy.

  This was all before the arrival of the terrible scourge.

  * * *

  In 1878, a steamboat deckhand, William Warren, arrived in Memphis from New Orleans on the steamer Golden Crown. Warren was sick but did not know it. As was custom, the steamer was temporarily quarantined to ensure no one on board was carrying a tropical disease that might have come up the Mississippi River from some southern port. But Warren broke the rules, snuck off the boat, and went into town.

  In Memphis, at 212 Front Street, Kate Bionda and her husband owned a snack house where they cleaned and cooked fish and meats and served them to patrons in a back room. The eatery was popular among rivermen, and William Warren chose to go there. Not long after his visit, Warren began showing signs of a serious ailment—coughing, sweating, high fever, jaundiced skin. He was sent to a quarantine facility on President’s Island, twelve miles away.

  Within thirty hours, Warren was dead.

  On the
mainland, Kate Bionda fell ill, too. Her symptoms were similar to Warren’s. Dr. E. Miles Willet examined her, and gave his grim diagnosis—Bionda had yellow fever, the dreaded, mosquito-borne virus that originated in West Africa and made its way to America aboard slave ships. Yellow fever was highly contagious, and often fatal. The Memphis health officer, Dr. John Erskine, ordered the closing of Bionda’s restaurant and sealed off the area around it with fencing and rails. Men in face masks fumigated the building with carbonic acid and hydrated ferrous sulfate. They did the same to every neighboring building on Front Street. Police officers manned stations along the block to keep people away.

  It was all too late.

  Two days after Warren’s visit, Kate Bionda, mother of two young children, died at 11:00 a.m. She was hastily buried at 4:00 p.m. the same day. She was the first known victim of yellow fever—or “Yellow Jack,” as it was called—in Memphis that year. She would not be the last. The virus quickly spread through the city. Newspapers called it the Saffron Scourge.

  Memphis had suffered earlier epidemics, and its residents knew the hell that was coming. If they could afford to flee, they did, hundreds a day, by wagon, carriage, cart, and trains “packed to suffocation,” according to one account. Out of the city’s 47,000 residents, more than 25,000 left in a frenzied exodus. Most of those who remained fell ill—17,000 out of 19,000.

  Around them, their city ceased to function. Everywhere, the disease—retching, convulsions, delirium. Black vomit, so named because of digested blood. Faces warily searching faces for traces of imminent death. Schools and courthouses, suddenly infirmaries. Priests and nuns dying while tending to the sick; policemen collapsing on their posts. Fathers, mothers, friends, one by one, swallowed into comas.

  As it happened, Ida Wells was not in Holly Springs that summer. Her parents had sent her for a long visit to the home of her grandmother Peggy in Tippah County, forty miles away. Wells was sixteen and stayed with Peggy on her farm, most likely helping with chores, for most of the run of the epidemic. Through word of mouth, she heard about the outbreak in her hometown, and she assumed her family had also left Holly Springs to stay with an aunt in the country, out of harm’s way.