“Don’t you know that girl Agnes?”
“I didn’t do nothing.”
“We’ll see.” “What if she recognizes you, boy? Then what?” “Something tells me she’s going to remember.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“You think she’ll know you? You think she’ll remember your face?”
He was guilty enough then for most people. But the cops took him over to the Loebeck house, not far from Gibson Road, up on Second Street, to ask Agnes if this was the one who did those things to her. She screamed when she saw him in her mother’s lamplit parlor, the one she said raped her, twisting his cloth cap in his hands. She collapsed to the sofa when she saw him. “Yes! That’s the man,” she shouted. Her sister repeated it. “He’s the one! That’s him!”
Milton Hoffman was there and he confirmed this was the man without a doubt.
One of the neighbors sent his boy over to Bancroft to tell the party the cops got the one who did it. They were told what Agnes said. She knew from his hat and clothes and shoes and from his face and his size. He said, “It wasn’t me that did it,” and she recognized his voice instantly. She remembered that voice telling her to shut up as he pulled her into the weeds. Agnes Loebeck rubbed her face as she said these things, her head aching, bound in a scarf. The little sister stayed close to keep a shawl over her shoulders.
They weren’t inside twenty minutes. The house was surrounded by the time they went to leave—10 p.m. on Friday night.
The mob party ran the eight blocks from Bancroft to Second Street and waited for the cops to bring out the one who did it. Karel was with them, one of the three hundred whose throats burned from running. They packed like grain around the house. They climbed trees and to roofs. That was when they saw him for the first time. They had a face, a name. Will Brown.
The mob, that first one, tried to lynch Will Brown right then, once the cops led him into the open. Some boys in the mob party snatched the keys from the police Model T and wouldn’t give them back. The phone lines were cut. There was a standoff on the porch. Three police and Will Brown; the three hundred of the party. The party wanted the one who did it. They shouted, “Lynch him!” Karel saw the police and Will Brown on the Loebeck porch. He got as close as he could to see Will Brown. The one black man in a field of white. His dark, spongy hair, his shirt torn from folks pulling. Warning shots were fired from both sides. Stones thrown. Nooses tossed over tree limbs. The party jabbed at Will Brown with long clubs. “Let us have him! A judge won’t punish him! We will!” Almost three hundred people were in that mob and they wanted Will Brown. Somebody tossed a lariat around his neck, a lucky shot, and started to tug away, nearly yanked Will Brown off the porch by his throat before a cop was able to slip the loop off. It went on like that for an hour before more police showed up, every reserve in the city. They got Will Brown out of there. They fought through the party and got him in the back of a commandeered truck and sped recklessly away to the county courthouse downtown. The mob party chased after the car and threw more stones, but the police got Will Brown away. Somehow they got him out of South Omaha and into a jail downtown.
Some in the mob party tore off after the police, but most of them stayed to tell tales about what just happened and what would. The little Loebeck sister peeked her face out the door and asked everyone to leave. Most didn’t. A mob party like this went on for a while. Most of them were blotto or near it. There were oaths to swear, promises to make about what they’d do later.
Karel found a spot in a tree and listened to what went on. A few ballplayers were loud about what had happened at the Interrace Game some months before and how things only got worse after that. “We should have made an example of that cheating Fowler when we had the chance.” A scuffle broke out between some ballplayers, ones who weren’t even on the field when Fowler pulled the razor. Karel had been on the field. These guys argued over how they should have got that Will Brown but they’d botched it. The attacks on the front porch weren’t organized, no wonder they didn’t work. But what to do about it? There was only one thing. The courthouse. They had to get him. They talked and scuffled. They cracked new bottles and drank more, so after a while they wanted to drink more than anything. Near the front porch, maybe down the block, men unzipping to piss on the ground.
Karel went back to the dorming house. He’d stopped drinking.
It was much the same in the streets along the way. The mob party out on a drunk, the speakeasies overflowing. Saloons weren’t too secret during the Ak-Sar-Ben anyway. Some who’d chased after the police filtered back to where they lived on the Southside. They’d been too slow to catch up before the one who did it was locked safe in a jail cell. That Will Brown had slipped away. But they’d get him.
Some word was going around how Milt Hoffman set it up to have a friend of his darken his skin with soot then rush them in the park and do those things to Agnes Loebeck—but why would that happen? Was Milt mad at his girl? Why would Milt do that?—and now the underlying interests were just playing this Will Brown for a patsy. Karel had heard enough about those men Jake had worked for that he knew Dennison wouldn’t be at all opposed to what was going on, since it made the new mayor look bad. Tom Dennison, Billy Nesselhous, they wouldn’t care if a lynch mob roamed. Even if a riot broke out it would suit them.
Not everyone agreed that Milt set it up to have his girl raped. Some thought Agnes was in on the sham too, that she’d been paid off to finger a black, or that she was a prostitute, and maybe she’d wanted those things to happen to her.
Karel heard these rumors. People debated in the street.
And Will Brown could have done it. There was always that possibility. Will Brown could have raped Agnes just like she said, just like Milt said. It was easiest to believe this. Who wanted to accuse a girl of lying about a thing like that? And who was saying those things about Milt anyway? Who’d believe a guy set it up to have his girl raped?
Will Brown did it. That’s what most believed, what Karel thought he believed. That’s what made sense.
At the dorming house there were organizers from the machine talking to boys. Just inside the door, by the manager’s office. Joe Meinhof was with them. Lining up the boys, handing out some coin. Half now, half later. Karel slipped upstairs before Joe saw him. He wasn’t looking for a job. Months and months had passed since Karel cared a bit about making money, not since Anna went away. What Karel cared about now was sleep. He’d been running around day and night and figured he’d do the same tomorrow. The mob party wasn’t going to give up that easily. They all said so. They’d do anything to get that Will Brown.
Everyone had a theory about who he was. No one knew for sure. He’s someone the boys wondered about a lot in the years after 1919, after what they did that September. Will Brown. What was he thinking when the cops handed him over? Could he hear what that mob promised to do to him?
Consider that Will Brown lived in Gibson. It wasn’t easy for a black man there. Not far from Rourke Park and right next to Riverview Park. He was forty years old. Pockmarked with a small mustache. He came from Cairo, Illinois. Some said Will Brown got a girl pregnant and a judge in Cairo was going to order them married. That was how he ended up in Omaha, running out on that girl. Men like him moved around so much it was hard to say what made them go from one place to the next. Most of them in Omaha worked in stockyards, a lot of them scabs who took the jobs of doughboys.
A black man was guaranteed nearly two dollars a day in the yards. With some money to spend, a place to live, life would have been good enough for Will Brown. But he was getting old that summer. He felt bad in his back, his legs and arms. His neck would have always been twisted. Some days it wasn’t all that bad if he didn’t get work, if he could rest on a park bench and look at a newspaper. Otherwise it meant staying home.
He and another black man lived under the same roof with a white woman that year. Their place on Cedar Street wouldn’t have been much, in some backwater ward bisected by freight line
s, a shack so close to the Missouri that Will Brown could sit on a tar paper roof with a bottle and watch the river swell in the late hours if he wanted to. He could have seen riverboats float downstream at night, electric lights shimmering on the water, heard cornet calls echoing off the cottonwoods on the Iowa side. There wasn’t much legitimate fun a black man could have down in South Omaha besides going to a lunchroom for beans and coffee. Sitting on a roof and listening to a jazz band play a riverboat was a jubilation most nights. If he felt sick and sore, it would be. People on those boats wore white suits and dresses and bathed in electric light. They drank illegal booze and danced to hot music. Everybody else had to sit down in the muck to listen. If they lived down in the muck they’d hear by and by, like Will Brown would have.
He was in his cell on the fifth floor all night Friday. He was there all day Saturday. Never once did he confess. Never once did he say anything but that he was innocent of raping that girl. He had to know it was over. He’d already had a noose around his neck. If you’d been accused of rape and had to rely on the police to protect you, then you’d know it was over. They had him rushing away in the back of a truck, people trying to get him, bottles breaking, the uproar at the courthouse. God in heaven. They claimed he didn’t say but six words the whole time all this happened. It wasn’t me that did it. They put him in front of that girl Agnes and that’s all he could say. He nearly got carried off by a lynch mob, had to be saved by the police. Will Brown would have known what kind of trouble he was in. He’d have known there wasn’t much he could do about it. Men in a fix like that almost never said something to defend themselves. They knew what was coming.
A few blocks away the Ak-Sar-Ben carnival carried on. The prisoners could hear a calliope from the midway, the dying murmurs of faraway laughter, from an open window at the end of their row. There were traveling shows in theaters, musical revues, strong men, and novelty acts. Folks ate candied apples and hot dogs. The parade and coronation ball were still to come. Not a single room was vacant downtown; there was record attendance all week. The arcade was bustling busy all night Friday and all night Saturday, tens of thousands of visitors downtown to see what kind of action they could find in the city.
Will Brown was in his cell Sunday morning. It was quiet. The carnival wouldn’t open until noon. City and county offices were closed. The only commotion inside the courthouse came when breakfast was carted around and the drunks from the night before were let out of the tanks.
No more than fifty people in the whole city would have known him the day before he was arrested. The day after, up in a county jail cell, Will Brown’s name was on the lips of everybody in Omaha after what that girl said he did to her.
A guard showed Will Brown first thing that morning, the three Saturday editions draped over an arm like shaving towels as he rapped the bars with his cudgel. “You read?” the guard asked. “I guess you recognize your own name at least.”
It would have been different for Will Brown to see his picture in a paper. He was known. What did he think about that? Maybe he convinced himself that someone good could save him. He knew whether he did what that girl said he did or not—him being one of the holy few who would ever know the truth—but he’d hoped to be saved even if he was guilty, even if he did do things to the girl. Seeing his name in the dailies, maybe he believed it for a while, that something could save him.
Jake and Evie stayed in Saturday. They didn’t know what to do. They read the papers. Jake wished he knew what Tom Dennison had going. Things had moved on without him while he lived in Lincoln those fourteen months. They would move on now despite his being back.
He went to the Eigler house on Sunday. There was lunch at noon. Hamburger steaks and beet salad. They sat on the front porch after and listened to the noise coming from the mills, the clanging bells of streetcars, the shearing of a hot wind kicking up dust. Maria and Jake and Theresa and Silke and Miihlstein—Karel hadn’t been seen for weeks. It was a thing they’d done a thousand times before, watching the day wind down, watching the families across the way on their porches watch back, seeing groups of friends walk Clandish in twos or threes, debating some point of gossip or philosophy that was important to them and perhaps no one else in the world. Jake never quite knew what folks said as they walked by, murmuring from crooked mouths, shoulders touching as they swayed. They’re going to get that boy.
It was hot and humid for the time of year. It would probably rain, the air was so thick, maybe overnight. The clouds were low and hazy. They blended together and formed continent-like masses, gray, amorphous, never-ending. Jake hoped it would rain. Just sitting on the porch made him sweat. He felt drops roll down his back and tried not to move at all. Silke and Theresa sat sunning on the porch steps. “I like your beard,” Theresa said. One of them had to say something. When he arrived, they’d all stared at Jake and his wiry red beard.
“Yeah?” He played along. “I like it too. It gives me an excuse to scratch.”
The girls beamed as he dug into his jaw with his fingernails, their faces pink and glazed in the sun, in their heavy dresses, the only kind they had. Sleeves rolled, skirts to the knee. The girls were content like this, as if on a beach in Atlantic City, modeling bathing suits in a Harold Lloyd picture. Theresa swept hair off her forehead and tilted her chin skyward. Silke leaned back on her hands to stick her chest out. Jake couldn’t help laughing, looking at them.
He asked Silke how many boys were chasing her. She shook her head and blushed, then cleaned the thick lenses of her glasses with the fabric of her dress to avoid looking at Jake. He blushed too, seeing how uncomfortable he made her.
“There’s boys who talk to her plenty.” Theresa ratted her out. “The boys who live down where they keep the streetcars at night. Italians, around there. Poppa wouldn’t like them. They’re sweaty and grow stupid mustaches.”
“They’re gross,” Silke claimed.
“Who’s gross? Those grimy boys who work in machine shops?” Jake had spent enough time in Little Sicily to know what Theresa meant. “They unbutton their shirts when they see you two coming, yeah?”
He saw it clearly. Both girls would have babies of their own before they knew what. It pleased him to think of something so usual.
Maria asked if Jake had been to see Evie yet. Evie had come to visit the Eigler house a few times since he left. Requested his forwarding address. Maria asked if Evie ever wrote. “No,” he said. “I never heard from her.”
Maria shrugged.
Jake didn’t say more about Evie. It was Sunday and she hadn’t asked him to stay. He’d only wanted to see her again—that was why he wrote that letter asking if she’d let him come by—and he saw her. Four days he stuck close by her side. They walked and ate. There was the carnival. Evie made him sleep on the couch at night—she’d reattached a door with a lock to the hinges of her bedroom—but that was fine. This was more than he hoped for. To be near her. To hear her voice. Of course he wanted to stay. Of course he wanted to share her bed, to have her in the bathtub at least one more time. But that didn’t matter. He’d return to Lincoln that afternoon. He could go even further, all the way to California, if he wanted. These old things he told himself. Promises still valid in their ephemeral way.
It was then he saw the boys march across Clandish. He noticed the mass of them first. Teenage boys in lines a dozen wide going up the street, across lawns and abandoned, rubble-strewn lots. They blocked a streetcar. A few police kept up at the flanks, lecturing the boys, it looked like, trying to get them to turn back. Milton Hoffman manned the point. Jake recognized Milt. The boys’ mob was only half a block down Clandish, Milt shuffling along with his bad leg as he shouted some slogan.
Jake crouched in the lawn to watch. The Miihlstein girls scrambled to the porch. They understood what was happening. They didn’t have to stumble to the walkway and squint down the avenue. The girls had experience. Jake remembered when he saw their cowering. They’d come from the Eastern Front during the war. Their glass
y eyes and pinched lips were what caused him to react. He told them to get inside.
“Make them stop.” Silke was on the top step, pleading with Jake. “Don’t you know those boys? Weren’t you the boss of them? Tell them to go away. We don’t want them here. We want them to leave us alone.”
“Don’t worry,” Jake said. “They’re not after you.”
“It’s Karel,” she sobbed. “Karel’s out there!”
He put them inside and had Maria clasp the locks. He heard them on the other side of the door before he followed the noise. “Is Jake going to find Karel? Is he going to make them stop?”
It was 2 p.m. when the boys got to the courthouse. They marched from Bancroft, fifty or sixty of them in the beginning, boys one and all. None were older than sixteen, except for Milt Hoffman. Some were as young as ten. They added more before they got downtown. Hundreds of boys. All feeling strong. Worthwhile and mean. Shouting school slogans and war songs they knew by heart. Karel sang along from the middle. It was boys who first battered the courthouse doors—on the north side—and demanded Will Brown be handed over.
“Give him to us!” they shouted. Some of the voices high-pitched, some cracking. “We’ll take care of him!”
The guards locked the doors. It was Sunday, the building was closed. “There’s a way these things are done,” a police detective told them. “You got to let the courts do their work.” He ordered the mob to disband. Boys laughed in his face.
A towhead named William Francis was one of the leaders. He wore the military uniform of his high school cadet squadron and riding breeches. William Francis was from Gibson—he stopped around the boys’ dormitory sometimes but never stayed—and was a good friend of Agnes, everyone knew. That gave him some authority in the matter. He was tall and slim. His hair was shaved up into a mess atop his head.
Kings of Broken Things Page 27