And everywhere he went he appeared as the Lord’s man against drink. His enemies knew he was a zealot who would accept no less than total prohibition. They burned his barn and horses twice and warned him if he didn’t let up they’d come after his wife and children with the torch.
Stuart rode the rails and ignored the threats.
He came into a North Carolina that had beaten prohibition three to one twenty years before. And he came into the town of Elizabeth City, with its thirteen saloons and plenty of working men starving for whiskey at the end of the day.
He joked and called himself one of the ugliest men in America. He made Elizabeth City laugh, and he drew increasing numbers to his evening sessions at the First Baptist Church. Stuart broke their hearts, telling how his father had been ruined by the Civil War and driven to drink, till he himself was converted at a Quaker camp meeting and begged his dissipated father to do the same. Then Stuart locked his own father inside a granary to pray and kept guard outside so his old man couldn’t slip out to meet the Devil and a jug of forty-rod.
Stuart held a special session at the Academy of Music on Sunday, October 6th. He came loaded for bear and gave them both barrels in the theater built where Sam Williams used to run his saloon.
Stuart pointed to a boy in the first row.
—Come here, boy, up to the platform. And when the boy was on stage with Stuart and in full view of all, Stuart shouted,
—What is the raw material for the gin mill? Our American boys!
He put his arm around the boy’s shoulder.
—And this great drunkard factory is ever crying, Bring on more boys!
An Irishwoman stood and cried, The saloons have got my boy, the saloons have got my darling boy!
He paused and asked, Please give me something to represent the saloon. Somebody brought Stuart the smoke-blackened chimney from an oil lamp.
—What shall I do with it? he asked Elizabeth City, shouting.
—Smash it! came the answer.
Stuart threw down the globe and trampled the glass till it was broken to shards, while the crowd stomped and cheered.
—Brother! he cried.
—Sister! he cried.
—My life work is to push the bottle from every drunkard’s hand. Everyone in this great audience, men and women, who will join the fight to vote for closing the saloons, stand on your feet!
The crowd was up almost at once, and a voice from the stage said, Thank God and Stuart, everyone is up.
When the soulwinner wrapped up his ten-day session in October 1901, the town was in a white heat.
JIM WILCOX
Nell joined the Methodist church a few days after that preacher Stuart left. She wanted me to join, too. Wanted me not to drink anything anymore, and we argued bad. I weren’t a drunkard, not then anyway. I didn’t get to drinking till after I come back from the prison farm. Then I had me a little grocery out on Ehringhaus Street. Nobody, no trade come except just a few old boys, friends of mine. People were whispering behind my back everywhere I went. It was pretty damn bad the way this town felt to me then. People said that’s Jim Wilcox’s store—he carried off Nell Cropsey and come out of prison mean.
Just those old boys come by and we just sat around that store of mine and waited for trade, but we could of waited for the stars to drop. Most days one of them’d bring a bottle and we’d pass it around till it was done. Then somebody’d go fetch another one. It was prohibition in the twenties but whiskey was easy to get in Elizabeth City. They made it down in the swamps, down at a still at East Lake so big they worked it in shifts and the boys went to work by a whistle. No tax man was ever gon take on them white liquor boys down in their own swamp.
Whiskey come into town by boat. Cars’d run it on up to Norfolk where the real traffic was, sailors and merchantmen. Here in town a fellow over by Tiber Creek kept liquor around. If you wanted some he’d reach down onto the creekwharf pilings at a certain spot and run his hand down in the water. He’d feel around for a nail underwater and then pull up a line that was tied to the nail. The whiskey bottles were tied onto the line every foot or so. He’d sell you a bottle and drop the line with the rest on it back into the creek. More come in regular so he never ran out, and nobody stole from him cause he carried a gun.
After the store went bust, George Madrin and I worked building cabinets and coffins and doing some upholstery in the shop back of Ziegler’s Funeral Home on South Road Street. George and I were a right good team. We had a house together then, a shanty behind the city market, and we used to sit out on stumps in the yard and tell stories to boys that’d come by.
I got to where I never wanted to be out on the street anymore, so I made a path I could follow off the street, from my sister’s to Johnny Tuttle’s garage, through the arch at Ziegler’s where the hearses go, then on to my shop out back and over to Zip Bailey’s gas station. This path of mine ran the same direction as Church Street, but it was a cut-through so I didn’t have to see nobody but who I wanted to.
We’d hang around and talk at Zip’s. Next to his place was the Duke Inn where men’d bring their girlfriends and sometimes forget to pull down the shades. We’d sit there watching at Zip Bailey’s and have us a real show. I guess I scared some of the boys from Zip’s one night. I was riding in somebody’s car and there was a pistol in the glove box that I pulled out. We saw some of the fellows walking west on Church Street. Pull over slow, I said to whoever was driving. The boys on the street could see I was twirling that gun and I asked em real slow and cool, How you boys doing tonight? They ran off double quick, never said a word. People were scared of me generally.
No, I never did give much thought to joining the Methodist church. I tried going once when I come back from prison and people wouldn’t even sit in the same pew with me. If that’s Christianity I didn’t want none of it.
I wonder what Nell would of said about that.
THE CIRCUS
The canvas train had come into town before dawn, October 22d, 1901. The boss hostler got the tents over to the fairgrounds, half a mile behind Seven Pines, away from the river. They put the kingpole of the three-peak tent up by hand, and it was a pure-t sonofabitch to do it using only a double block and fall. After that, the other two peak poles could go up by horse power, for there was no shortage of three-quarter-ton Percherons that stood sixteen hands high on heavy caulked shoes.
The boss hostler cried out in the dawn:
—Haul and hurry—find that damned stake and chain wagon—kick the plankers—fit the bleachers together or there’s no show today.
Matériel poured onto the lot—hay, straw, oats, bran, bales of shavings, cords of wood to keep a head of steam up on the calliope.
Later that morning, the second train came packing in, one thousand men, women, and animals on double-length railroad cars, and out came the marching advertisement, the free street parade.
Plumed horses, all color and light, drew the ornate gold-and-red lead wagon, and the windjammer band played a wild, disparate repertoire punched by a pair of great cymbals and a big bass drum. Circus wagons went past with a hollow truckling sound, and clowns ran all about tossing hard candy as freely as the old-time Uncle Sam clown, Dan Rice, had tossed money from a hat before the War.
Hundreds and hundreds flooded into Elizabeth City from the countryside to laugh and point and drink and fight, but above all to see the fine horseflesh and woman-flesh that was all sparkles and molded silk from where they sat in the bleachers. To see the boat racing and to bet the ponies, the runners and the fast trotters Little Jack, Yazoo, Dr. SK. To gaze upon the wonders of the world: the Garsenneti acrobat family from South America, the Martells with their fancy trick bicycles, Madam Marantette and her jumping horses, the female Zouave corps in a bewildering military drill, and the Bloody Sixth Rough Riders just in from their victories in the Philippines.
That year a restless, tethered horse kicked a twelve-year-old boy named Morris Bright in the head and killed him. The circus workers dra
nk and fought over each other’s husbands and wives and occasionally went after each other with tent stakes and knives.
It was the Walter L. Main Grandest and Best Show on Earth from Trumbull, Ohio.
JIM WILCOX
I went into Hathaway’s on the second circus day and ordered some tickets.
—What’s it cost?
—Fifty cents, children a quarter.
—How much does it get you?
—All the way through the menagerie, the hippodrome, the three-ring circus, and the Rough Rider exhibition.
I ordered two and asked for em to be sent around to the Cropseys, one for Carrie, one for Nell.
OLLIE CROPSEY
I know one of the reasons they argued was all the prohibition talk after Reverend Stuart left Elizabeth City. After all, the Wilcoxes were Republicans and Republicans had fought prohibition for years. But Papa said with the grandfather clause the Negroes couldn’t vote and they always voted Republican, so finally the Democrats could get prohibition through. We Cropseys were good Democrats, so it was no wonder Nell and Jim fought.
Nellie was tired of him, too. She wasn’t nearly as impressed with him as she’d been when we moved down and she was getting all the attentions of the sheriff’s son. Now she was short with him and that was unlike her.
But when the circus came she got a little friendlier with him again. Jim met us at Seven Pines after he got off work at the shipyards, and the four of us—Jim, Nell, Carrie, and I—strolled over to the fairgrounds after the first-day crowds had gone home.
We walked along the midway where there were painted backdrops of darky minstrels and exotic animals and women barely dressed, and we stopped at a set of scales where the man would guess your weight.
Nell weighed a hundred and ten—Hunnert’n’ten, the man said.
The next morning a boy brought an envelope to the house with circus tickets for Nell and Carrie from Jim. He didn’t send me any and I can’t recall if he knew Papa had already given me one or not. Jim couldn’t go because of his work, so we three girls went.
We saw an automobile operated.
And the equestriennes who posed and pirouetted and leapt and somersaulted—they were beautiful! For a moment I thought we were home and had gone to Madison Square Garden. Carrie said all the riding horses were white or dappled so the powdered resin wouldn’t show. The horses had to have resin on their backs or else the riders would slip from their perspiration.
Papa told us all the talk he heard around town was saloons or no saloons. That, and so many were mad about the new president who invited Booker T. Washington, a Negro, to eat with him at the White House. That was Roosevelt, who was a Republican.
One evening in early November, Jim was taking his hat to go home and Nell said Pull to him real sharply. Pull was what you told your horse to hurry him up. She went to the door with him but didn’t stay even a minute. After that she never saw him to the door and never went out with him except with Carrie along, too. Carrie walked between them and I noticed that now Nell and Jim never spoke.
Saturday, a week before she was going to leave, Jim asked Nellie and me to go sailing with him but we said no. Instead he took Carrie and Let, one of my older sisters. He got them lunch at a restaurant and then kept them out in the boat till late—not late like he had with Nell those times, but late into the dusk, near six. We were all uneasy, and when they did get back, Let said that Jim had wanted to wrap her in a blanket and bring her into the house as if she were dead, just to frighten Mama.
It’s no wonder we’ve never believed Jim Wilcox.
He made a date to take Carrie out to Munden’s Roller Skating Rink down on Water Street. I suppose he meant to spite Nell. When he came for Carrie, it was Tuesday evening. Nell would only be with us one more day. We were in the living room dancing to Uncle Hen’s mouth-harp music. We knew it was Jim’s ring. We had one of those twistbells that was built into the door, and Jim always rang the same way.
Nell asked me to let him in, but I wouldn’t.
—Girls, Carrie said, I’m tired of rude manners.
She answered the door and found Jim nervous and awkward. He told Carrie to get her hat and they’d go. While Carrie went for her things, he tried to talk with Nell by asking her how the corn on her foot was, saying he supposed it was getting better.
Nell wouldn’t look at him, but she turned my way and smiled a bit at me and said, A little.
After they left she told me I ought to go and see what they did, so I asked Uncle Hen to take me to the rink. We arrived as Jim and Carrie were just putting on their skates. It was very loud in there, that big empty room echoing the sound of the skate wheels hitting the wood floor and the ballbearing sound of the spinning wheels when someone fell.
One of Jim’s sisters skated by, and he remarked very sarcastically, They call that my sister. I haven’t spoken to her for two years. And I told him he ought to be ashamed.
Uncle Hen and I got home first because Jim and Carrie went off down Poindexter looking for some fruit. Nell was writing a letter at the dining room table, and when Jim came in the house he tapped me on the shoulder and motioned at Nell without saying anything as if he wanted to know whom she was so busy writing.
—I certainly would enjoy a good apple, Nell looked up and said.
Carrie passed the fruit around. Jim and I both took some, but Nellie, when she realized that Jim had bought it, refused. Soon after that, Carrie walked him to the door and when she returned, Nell was busily eating one of the apples.
—Nell, I nearly laughed when you refused the apple that cool way—I knew you really wanted one.
—It was a good joke on Jim, Nell said.
—I told him what you said about him this afternoon, about having no more use for him, Carrie said.
—How’d he take it?
—Never said a word to me till we got near the house. Then he started in, but I reminded him how he’d been acting. You should have seen us going to the rink. I felt like an elephant with that little thing—I’m so much taller than he is.
—Why don’t you call him Squatty? Nell said, and we all had a laugh on that. After we’d gotten the cups and saucers and dishes out and set the table for breakfast, we went on up to bed.
That was the night before Nell disappeared.
LEN OWENS
—Damn it, we’re late, the Captain said.
The smack Ray pulled out of Shallowbag Bay, Manteo, sometime between nine and ten Wednesday morning, November 20th, 1901, bound for Elizabeth City. The crew was Captain Bailey and Len Owens the engineer and Sherman Tillet the black mate. That was all.
They didn’t clear the Nags Head soundside landing till around noon, and by then the wind was kicking up so they used their sails rather than the engine. They made three trips a week back and forth, and there was one more stop, Powell’s Point at the mouth of the North River. Then they took the Ray on into Elizabeth City.
—We’ll be lucky to make town by midnight, Captain Bailey said.
But they did, and by doing so Len Owens became a crucial witness, witness to a mystery, before that night was out.
JIM WILCOX
There’s more pretty girls than one, the song says.
Least Carrie was nice and civil to me and I didn’t mind at all thinking I might make Nell jealous taking Carrie out. When we walked back from the rink that night she told me Nell pretty much couldn’t stand me anymore.
—Why is it Nell dislikes you so, Jim? she asked me.
I told her Nell didn’t even care enough for me to see me to the door and I’d decided to drop her.
—You mean she’ll drop you, Carrie said.
That was about the size of it. That business about the apple burned me up. Then on my way out I stopped to light a cigaret between the front door and the vestibule door and I heard em laughing at me. I could hear em through the broken pane.
Next day I walked over to Mister Fearing’s stable after I finished up work and met Carrie and Let there. I to
ld Carrie that listeners never heard any good of themselves and she apologized.
—Why didn’t you come unharness the horse for us?
Let laughed at me. Well, boy, I been lackey long enough and I told her so. I was going to have a word with Nell Cropsey before she left if it killed me. Three-and-a-half years I spent on her or wasted on her one. I’m going to tell her good-bye for good before she goes to New York, I thought. We went over to the Cropsey house and stood around the kitchen talking a bit. Nellie was sitting in front of a looking glass and ignoring me as usual. I slapped Ollie on the back and let her know what a nice girl I thought she was for joking about me like she had the night before. Then Nell hopped up, acting cute, talking about what fun she and Carrie’d have on the steamer that coming Saturday, Nell playing harmonica and Carrie on mandolin and them passing the hat for coins.
I didn’t pay any attention to her. I was going to say my good-byes later on.
There’s more pretty girls than one.
CALE PARKER
It was sunset time that night. The thin iceclouds were high in the sky, and the long sunrays stretched over the flatlands and wide waters, the lightlines longer and thinner till at last the long lines softened, lost their tension, and disintegrated, and dusk fell on the Pasquotank. The moon was already rising in the cold November sky, enough to light the pineywoods and the county roads cut through them.
About that time, a little man named Cale Parker fed and hitched his horse, making ready to leave his Frog Island farm in south Pasquotank and get on back to Elizabeth City, eleven miles to the north.
Cale Parker drove along at a jog, maybe five or six miles an hour, he reckoned. Won’t no hurry. He made the Sawyer-Meads store five miles from his farm between seven and eight, and he stopped to rest the horse but mostly to jaw.
The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey Page 8