The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  Matthews began the program with an introduction. Then a few short speeches and the reading of resolutions, followed by music and singing. Finally, Ida Wells took the stage. Matthews, Lyons, and several other prominent activists took their chairs behind her on the platform, and in front of her a crowd of several hundred sat and waited. Wells looked out over their faces, took a deep breath, and began to tell her story.

  And then, as she would recall, “a panic seized me.”

  * * *

  Wells was not yet a confident speaker. She’d stood before people and spoken before, first in school, then in recitals and plays. She was comfortable going door-to-door and giving short speeches to sell newspaper subscriptions. She’d even addressed respectable gatherings: in 1891, she talked about her life in front of the Afro-American League in Knoxville, Tennessee, and in September 1892 she gave a speech titled “The Afro-American in Literature” to a literary circle in the Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn. She also had the benefit of Maritcha Lyons’s public speaking lessons.

  Even so, Wells admitted, “When the committee told me I had to speak, I was frightened.” Her speech at Lyric Hall would be different from anything she’d ever done. It was expressly political, and it was at the request of—and in the presence of—her most prominent fellow activists.

  “This was the first time I had ever been called on to deliver an honest-to-goodness address,” Wells wrote—the first time she’d actually written down the words of a speech, rather than simply speaking from memory. Wells was being asked to transform herself yet again, from a journalist into a bona fide public speaker—someone who could not only command a crowd, but also stir it to action.

  Wells also understood that, as part of her speech, she would have to discuss the violent lynching of her Memphis friend Thomas Moss, a trauma that was only a few months old. She had no idea how talking about Moss would affect her. And, to her surprise, it overwhelmed her.

  Onstage at Lyric Hall, not too far into her speech, Wells lost her focus. While describing the events surrounding Moss’s murder, “my mind went back to the scenes of the struggle, to the thoughts of my friends who were scattered throughout the country,” Wells later wrote. She felt shaken by “a feeling of loneliness and homesickness for the days and the friends that were gone.” And then, she said, “I felt the tears coming.”

  Wells struggled to control her emotions, or at least prevent the prominent people behind her from seeing her cry. “I was afraid that I was going to make a scene and spoil all those dear good women had done for me,” she wrote. “I kept saying to myself that whatever happened I must not break down, and so I kept on reading.” But Wells could not stop her tears—and she realized she didn’t have the handkerchief she usually carried with her. She’d left it on a seat behind her.

  Wells did not stop speaking. Instead, she put her hand behind her back and signaled for help. Victoria Matthews came forward, and Wells asked for her handkerchief. Matthews got it and brought it up to her. “I wiped my nose and streaming face,” Wells wrote, “but I kept on reading the story which they had come to hear.”

  It was without doubt a powerful story. “On the morning of March 9, the bodies of three of our best young men were found in an old field, horribly shot to pieces,” Wells said in her clear, even voice, even as tears still ran down her face. The details of the killings, and the dispute that led to them, were dramatic enough, but Wells, who was friends with Moss’s widow and godmother to his daughter, also spoke of events and moments that could not be found in newspaper accounts. She spoke of the loss of the three young men—of her friends—in starkly human terms.

  “The baby daughter of Tom Moss,” Wells said, “too young to express how she missed her father, toddles to the wardrobe, seizes the legs of the trousers of his letter-carrier uniform, hugs and kisses them with evident delight, and stretches up her little hands to be taken up into the arms which will nevermore clasp his daughter’s form.

  “And his wife holds Thomas Moss Jr. in her arms, upon whose unconscious baby face the tears fall thick and fast when she is thinking of the sad fate of the father he will never see, and of the two helpless children who cling to her for support she cannot give.”

  Many people in Lyric Hall quietly wept. “Do you ask a remedy?” Wells said at the end of her speech. “A public sentiment strong against lawlessness must be aroused. Every individual can contribute to this awakening. When a sentiment against lynch law strong, deep and mighty as that roused against slavery prevails, I have no fear of the result.

  “The voice of the people,” Well concluded, “is the voice of God.”

  * * *

  When she was finished speaking, Wells felt mortified. “I had not been able to prevent such an exhibition of weakness,” she later wrote. In fact, her speech was a success. The crowd gave her a long, loud ovation, and afterward several people assured her that her emotions had only lent her words more drama and power. One preacher told Wells her speech “did more to convince cynical and selfish New York of the seriousness of the lynching situation than anything else could have done.” One newspaper account of the speech read “All eyes were turned on Ida B. Wells, for it was she herself a victim of the portrayed outrages, and she was moved to grief. Miss Wells was the star of the convention; though modest in appearance she shone with intellectual brilliancy.”

  Wells’s speech at Lyric Hall changed her life again. She gained an almost instant renown as a fiery activist and forceful public speaker, giving her the platform she needed to spread her antilynching message. The event raised four hundred dollars, which was handed to Wells, along with another one hundred dollars, to use toward publishing her New York Age editorial as a stand-alone pamphlet that could be more easily distributed around the country. Her new friends Maritcha Lyons and Victoria Matthews also presented Wells with a gold brooch in the shape of a pen. The brooch had the word mizphah etched on it.

  Mizphah is the Hebrew word for “lookout” or “watchtower.”

  It was a sort of benediction. The expanding circle of black New York–area activists had appointed Ida Wells their lookout, their eyes and ears—the tip of their spear in the fight for the rights of black citizens.

  Wells continued to inspire the movement through her writings and through many more powerful speeches—hundreds of them over the next several years. Some women’s clubs even chose to name themselves after Ida Wells. Her influence on the movement led directly to the formation of the National Association of Colored Women Club, which helped to clear a path for the eventual founding, in 1909, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—the NAACP.

  The next three years were a nonstop storm of action and advocacy for Ida Wells. With the money raised by her Lyric Hall speech, Wells and T. Thomas Fortune published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, a pamphlet that featured pages of lynching statistics and more of Wells’s powerful, graphic narrative about the true nature of mob violence.

  The pamphlet sold for fifteen cents, and found readers across the country. Wells followed it up in 1895 with another even bolder pamphlet, The Red Record, which ran to one hundred pages and delivered more vivid reporting about the rising tide of lynchings in the United States. The pamphlets were financially successful and earned Wells more fame as the leading female activist of her time. “The salvation of the colored people of the south,” read one editorial, “may yet come through a woman.” Wells was becoming, in the words of another columnist, “the most famous colored woman in the world.”

  * * *

  In 1894, more than one hundred people, a surprising number of them white, crowded into the main pews and balcony seats of the Bethel A.M.E. Church, an ornate, Gothic Revival building with towering arched windows overlooking Sullivan Street, in New York City’s Tenderloin district. They were there to hear Ida Wells speak.

  Her friend T. Thomas Fortune introduced her to the congregants, before Wells—wearing a plain black dress with her mizphah gold brooch, and a w
hite braided leghorn hat pinned with white ostrich feathers—strode forward and stood confidently before the gilded, wood-paneled altar and the church’s large silver crucifix. By then Wells had delivered more than one hundred public speeches on the subject of lynching, including several speeches in the United Kingdom, where she had been invited for a series of talks.

  “The colored people of this country should organize themselves from one end of the country to the other,” Wells told her listeners in the church, her plea for action now sharpened into a militaristic charge. “They should at least contribute the sinews of war with which to fight the battle. It is our duty to see that every story published from the South, in which a Negro is accused of some fiendish act and lynched for it, is run down by our own detectives. There are two sides to every lynching.”

  Every story. Every accused black man. Every last one. This was the task Wells set for herself, and for her race. They would all be detectives now, searching for truth and justice, no matter the cost or danger.

  “I am occasionally threatened to this day with death if I do not cease my work against lynching,” Wells told one reporter in 1895.

  “Does it scare you any?” the reporter asked.

  Wells closed her eyes, took a moment, and smiled.

  “I haven’t quit yet,” she said.

  CHAPTER 24 Two Coffins

  December 15, 1910

  Brooklyn, New York

  Ray Schindler was not pleased with the autopsy performed on Marie Smith. It was incomplete and inconclusive. After the disappointing coroner’s inquest, Schindler made an unusual and extraordinary request of the coroner, Robert Purdy, and Sheriff Hetrick. The men listened to his reasoning, and agreed to his plan.

  A few days later, midmorning on December 15, 1910, the Burns detective Charles A. Severance crossed over the Brooklyn Bridge and walked into an elegant five-story, white-marble building set inside the triangle formed by Flatbush Avenue, Willoughby Street, and Fleet Place. The building housed the offices of the Brooklyn Board of Health. Severance was there to get the signature of a local New York City undertaker, James McCanna, on a permit, to go along with permits already signed by Robert Purdy and Peter Smith.

  Once he had the third signature, the way would be clear for Ray Schindler to exhume the body of Marie Smith.

  Peter Smith, who was needed to identify his daughter’s remains, came along with Severance. Sheriff Hetrick and Randolph Miller, as well as a stenographer, Edward Handley, also traveled up from Asbury Park. The coroner of New York City, Otto H. Schultz, would perform the second autopsy, aided by a noted Manhattan surgeon, Walter H. Bishop. Raymond Schindler would join them later for the procedure.

  After McCanna arrived and signed the permit, Severance paid an eight-dollar permit fee and phoned a supervisor at the Holy Cross Cemetery in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. He was told the grave site would be ready for them by 2:00 p.m. All the talk of exhumation was too much for Peter Smith, who told Severance he felt sick. The detective took him to a nearby saloon for lunch and a hard drink. In the Catholic faith, it was no small thing to pull the dead up from the ground. Burials were meant to be acts of finality, allowing the deceased to rest in peace until their flesh was resurrected in the glory of a risen Jesus. To disinter a body was to interfere with one of the most essential principles of the faith. It should only be done for the most solemn of reasons.

  After their drinks, Smith and Severance made their way to Tilden Avenue and the arched stone entrance gates of the Holy Cross Cemetery, and through them several hundred yards to Marie’s plot in the St. Alban’s section of the site. Marie had been buried just outside the shadow of the Chapel of the Resurrection, beneath which, in catacombs, lay the diocese’s pioneer priests, and some of Brooklyn’s oldest Catholic families.

  By the time they got to Marie’s plot, the dirt had already been dug and heaped in a pile besides the grave. The coffin remained in the ground. Severance and Smith stood around the hole, along with Hetrick, Miller, Otto Schultz, and Walter Bishop. Six cemetery workers used ropes to raise up the outer burial vault—the rough box—and placed it in the grass. The box was marked with a metal plate identifying Fred E. Farry as the embalmer, and a pasted paper label from the manufacturer, Morris Manufacturing Company. Sheriff Hetrick turned to Marie’s father.

  “Mr. Smith, do you recognize this grave?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. It is the grave in which my child, Marie, is buried.”

  Hetrick pointed at the box.

  “Does that box contain the coffin in which your daughter Marie was buried?”

  “Yes, sir,” Smith answered.

  “Your daughter—Marie Smith?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hetrick waved at the workers, and they loaded the box into a wagon provided by the local undertaker, James McCanna. Peter Smith sat in front of the wagon and rode along the one mile to the office of P. McCanna & Sons, at 804 Flatbush Avenue. An autopsy room in the back quickly filled up: the surgeons Schultz and Bishop, Hetrick, Miller, Severance, and Charles Scholl, another Burns detective. The men crowded around the embalming table, on which workers had placed Marie’s coffin.

  Otto Schultz took control. The city coroner was small and serious, his owl-rimmed glasses only slightly softening a scowl. He spoke in a droning monotone, as if “he was weary of murders,” one reporter suggested. The town of Asbury Park would pay Schultz the considerable sum of seven hundred dollars for performing this second autopsy—by far the biggest expense yet incurred by Ray Schindler and his team.

  Schultz gave the instruction for the coffin to be opened. When the lid came up, Marie Smith was there, white and bruised in her funeral dress and shoes. Schultz turned to her father.

  “Look at the body,” Schultz told him. “Tell us who lies there if you can.”

  “That is my daughter, Marie,” Smith said.

  “Do you positively identify the body was that of your daughter Marie?”

  “Yes, sir, I am positive.”

  “Now,” Schultz said, “don’t you think you had better leave the room, Mr. Smith?”

  “No, sir. I want to stay.”

  Schultz would not have it. He knew what was to come.

  “But we think you had better leave the room,” he said.

  Smith lowered his head. Charles Severance led him out of the room, and to another saloon for another hard drink. Smith was badly shaken, and Severance let him talk about it. Smith explained that he had seen something when the workers raised up Marie’s box at the cemetery. There, at the very bottom of the hole, he had seen the second box.

  The box that held the coffin of his firstborn child, John, who died at eighteen months of age after swallowing horse liniment.

  Smith had his drink, and got ready as best he could for when his second child to die would be lowered into the earth once more.

  * * *

  In the airless, unsterilized embalming room, Otto Schultz pulled an apron over his suit clothes. Around him, the tools of autopsy—a broad-bladed postmortem knife; a seven-inch brain knife; long-bladed scissors for cutting through stomach, bowels, air passages, and heart cavities; rib shears, bone forceps, various scales and weights, needles, twine, sponges, sawdust, graduated vessels, and glass bottles.

  Once Peter Smith was out of the room, Schultz asked Randolph Miller to serve as a second witness and identify the body. Miller confirmed it was Marie. Schultz began by surveying the surface of the corpse for evidence not included in the first coroner’s report. Charles Scholl, standing next to him, did the same. “Nothing of a startling nature was revealed,” Scholl would write, “except that when the skull was laid bare there were two distinct fractures revealed.”

  The first autopsy had listed only one compound fracture at the back of the head, slightly above the neck.

  Schultz called out his findings for the stenographer.

  Fracture on the right side extends down to one-quarter inch from the base of the skull, just above pyramidal portion of right temp
oral bone. Fracture in left side extends down to the base of the skull at the junction of the outer wall with the floor of middle fossa.

  Scholl asked Schultz about the fractures. Could one of them have resulted from a fall into a pit? Schultz answered that yes, a fall into a pit with a concrete bottom, with the head striking something on its way down, could also cause such fractures. Scholl noted the length of one of the fractures—two inches. “It will be remembered that two inches in diameter is about the measurement of the iron pipe standing in the furnace pit at Kruschka’s greenhouse,” Scholl reported. The pipe had been mentioned in the first coroner’s report as a theoretical cause of the fracture. Now Schultz confirmed it was possible. Both fractures, he concluded, would have required a very severe blow.

  By then, Raymond Schindler had arrived at the undertaker’s office. The autopsy itself, he was told, had not revealed anything new or meaningful beyond the second fracture, which only confirmed the severity of the death blow. Further analysis of Marie’s organs might shed more light on what happened, but that would take some time. For Schindler, this was disappointing news. He had hoped to be able to settle on a murder weapon, at the least. All that had been accomplished, then, was a strengthening of Schindler’s leading theory—that Frank Heidemann had lured Marie into the greenhouse and killed her there.

  Otto Schultz ended the autopsy. Schindler joined up with Severance, who was back from the saloon with Peter Smith. Schindler stayed with Smith until they could be sure Marie’s body had been properly re-dressed and reburied. It was the last grim task of a grim day. That Smith had not been present to see what remained of his daughter after Schultz’s procedure was the only small mercy of the afternoon.

  And when Marie went back into the earth later that day, she, too, had played her final part in the case, and had given all she possibly could to help the men in their hunt for her killer.