“What are you doing here? This isn’t real?”
“I’m all too real, Mr. Peterson,” replied Sy, and then he reached down, pulled Jeffrey up by his shirt collar and threw him across the room. Jeffrey’s body flew in the air like a bird, but he landed on the dinner table a few feet from the fireplace with a painful thud. He moaned in pain as Sy ran to him and stabbed him in both legs with an army knife – a bayonet without the rifle - just as a loud roar of lightning struck the night air.
Jeffrey screamed out in pain in unison with the lightning strike, and tried to grab hold of his legs, but Sy grabbed his arms quickly and spread them above his head, wrapping a rope around them and then tying the rope to the legs of the table, spread eagle. Jeffrey’s legs flailed like a slithering snake as he continued to moan and scream in pain. Sy then grabbed Jeffrey’s legs and tied the legs to the table as well, stretching them as far as they would go and ignoring the screams of pain from Jeffrey. Sy took out a knife from behind his back and stabbed Jeffrey in the stomach as he lay stretched out on the table, narrowly missing any important arteries just as thunder and lightning charged across the sky again.
Tears ran down Jeffrey’s face as he writhed in pain, begging and screaming for help. This couldn’t be happening, his mind screamed. But the pain was too real, and the blood. Jeffrey looked down and saw his blood flowing on the table like a waterfall. He laid his head back on the table and blinked. “No! No! It’s not real,” he shouted.
Sy laughed a deep guttural laugh. Jeffrey looked up in fear and amazement. Sy had disappeared into the dark. Jeffrey blinked rapidly to clear his eyes and focused them on where he thought the laugh had come from. His chest heaved rapidly as he tried to catch his breath. He looked down and the knife in his stomach moved up and down with his breathing.
Then suddenly, Sy’s face appeared directly above Peterson. Dead green eyes stared at him. He was seeing the devil and he shuddered violently.
“I’m going to kill you nice and slow, Mr. Peterson … like you did those women. I’m gonna gut you like a pig just as you die ‘cause that’s what you are – a cowardly pig!”
Jeffrey was pleading for his life by now. “Please don’t kill me! Please! I don’t want to die. I’ll … I’ll give you whatever you want,” he screamed as his body writhed in pain; his clothes were soaked in blood and snot and tears mingled together with the blood from his nose to create a mural of various shades of colors of sorts.
“You’ll give me what I want?” Sy asked softly as he stared intently at Jeffrey’s bloodied face into his pleading, scared eyes.
Jeffrey felt he had made some headway here and tried to play it up … anything to save himself. He forgot that he was tied up and tried to move sending ripples of pain up his legs and through his stomach. He screamed. Sy watched as Jeffrey suffered.
Jeffrey caught his breath. “Yes … yes! I … I have money. My father died and left me a lot of money.”
“Your father,” Sy snickered. “You killed him too. And for what? His money!”
“What? No … no! He died in the hospital. He … he had stomach cancer,” Jeffrey cried out.
“You lie!” shouted Sy and he stabbed Jeffrey in the left hip in tune with the lightning and thunder that struck in unison. Jeffrey screamed and would have screamed more if Sy had not put a towel inside of his mouth.
“No more talkin’ for you, Jeffrey. You can’t give me what I want. What I want you killed already.” Then he disappeared from Jeffrey’s view, but he could still hear him in the room pacing the floor angrily.
“Why her?” he screamed into the dark. “What did she do to you? What did any of them ever do to you?” Sy paced the floor in a rage, breathing rapidly and hard.
Jeffrey tried to speak, but the towel blocked his tongue. His eyes started to roll back into his head and he was getting cold. But before he passed out, Sy pushed a pen into his shaking hands. “Sign this, you bastard,” and he helped Jeffrey to sign it by moving his hand for him.
Then he took the towel out of Jeffrey’s mouth. “What … what did I sign?”
“Your confession … to the murders of six … six women and … your father,” Sy stuttered, the only thing that betrayed his emotions. He folded the paper and put it in his coat pocket.
Jeffrey turned red and tried to get up from the table. He was screaming and cussing at Sy. “No! No I didn’t! I’ll kill you, you bastard. Let me go!” he demanded. The sudden movements caused his body to convulse.
Sy had had enough. He stood over Jeffrey Peterson, whose eyes bulged out of his head like fireworks, watching as another knife came plunging down into his heart. Jeffrey felt a brief moment of pain, and then it subsided making him think that he had survived. A sardonic smiled played across his bloody lips; their intent was to laugh at Sy, but then suddenly, it was dark.
Sy exhaled deeply, his shoulders falling in rhythm with the exhalation. He stared at the pearl-handle knife in Jeffrey’s chest. He had bought it from a merchant in France in 1916, and kept it in a safe in his office thinking it would be of value someday. He didn’t want it anymore. He left the knife in Jeffrey’s heart as he went in search of a bathroom. He found one on the second floor near the top of the stairs. He washed and scrubbed his hands of Jeffrey’s blood and sweat with the bar of soap in the soap dish on the counter. It smelled of lavender.
How ironic, he thought as he looked up to see himself staring at himself in the mirror. He quickly looked away and left the bathroom not even bothering to pick up or hide the bloody towels he had left behind. He went back downstairs and searched an office. He found what he had been looking for after a few minutes of searching: an envelope. Sy sat down at the writing desk in the parlor and took out Jeffrey’s signed confession; drops of blood dotted the paper. Smiling weakly, he put the confession letter into the envelope and proceeded to address it to Raymond Turner of the Richmond Planet: Fourth Street and Marshall. A clock from somewhere in the room struck midnight just as Sy shut the back door behind him.
Richmonders and the rest of America awoke Tuesday morning, October 29, 1929, to the news that the stock market had crashed. America was officially in deep financial trouble as banks were closing and any money people had in them was now gone. In New York, people flooded the banks in an attempt to get their money, but it was useless. Police arrested thousands of people as they tried to charge the banks. But it was all gone.
Back in Richmond, people in the Ward who had their money at Maggie L. Walker’s St. Luke Penny Savings Bank formed a small crowd in front of the bank. The manager was trying to calm the people down, but they simply waved the newspapers in front of the manager and demanded their money. But unlike the people in New York, they soon learned that their money was safe. Mrs. Maggie Walker had been paying close attention to the stock news printed in the Richmond Planet and from her connections in New York. She had begun the process of merging St. Luke’s with two other banks in Richmond, which saved it from being seriously impacted by stock losses because they had been able to pool their assets. But other banks in Richmond – Negro and white – had not been so lucky.
All over the country, people wondered what was going to become of them … except the poor, that is. They had already been catching hell, so today was just another day. But many of the wealthy who had all of their life’s savings in those banks that crashed found themselves hanging from the end of a rope by their own hand. The thought of being in the soup kitchen line or standing in the lines for relief was too much to bear for many of them. So, they ended their selfish lives, leaving their families to suffer and struggle on their own.
Raymond Turner sat in his office staring at the blood-stained letter an errand boy had just dropped off to him. It was Jeffrey Peterson’s confession, and Turner was deciding whether or not he should run it in the paper. He also had to decide if he’d run the story of the death of Jeffrey Peterson whose body had been found by the police in the early morning of Tuesday, October 29, 1929. Someone had made an anonymous call to the
sheriff’s office telling them about Mr. Jeffrey Peterson.
Turner rubbed his head in anguish as he reread the letter for what seemed like the hundredth time. Peterson had confessed to killing six women and his father, Elijah Peterson. “How could someone be so evil?” he asked to the spirits in the room. But none of them answered him, thankfully.
His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on his office door. “Come in,” he called as he hid the letter under a pile of papers.
Preston Miller stood reluctantly in the doorway. “So you were right about the market, I see.”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“We’re ruined, you know? All those years of hard work, gone now,” he lamented as he stood in the doorway.
“We’ll recover, Miller, especially the Ward. We’re a strong people who’ve seen and been through much. We’re down now, but we ain’t out. I refuse to accept that,” he stated emphatically.
Miller came further into the room and sat in a chair in front of Turner’s desk. He let out a deep sigh as his shoulders fell like bricks. “You heard anything from Sanford?”
Now it was Turner’s turn to sigh. He pulled the letter out from under the pile and passed it to Miller who read it cautiously and then ferociously. “My God, he did it! He was right under our noses. Poor Elijah. But … is this blood?”
“The police found Jeffrey’s body at his home. He had been stabbed many times.”
“Where’s Sanford?”
“I don’t know. I ain’t seen him since yesterday when we were all at his place. You think he did this?”
“I’d bet my life on it,” said Miller darkly. The two men sat quietly for a moment. “Well, are you gonna print this?”
“I ain’t sure yet. I think the Ward’s got more pressing issues to deal with right now, don’t you think?”
“I thought you said we’d be okay. Now you sound like you done changed your mind,” said Miller who was now agitated and weary.
“I ain’t changed my mind, but I ain’t no fool. The whole country’s in trouble, not just the Ward. Y’all have a lot of work to do … and so do I. Now, if you’ll excuse me,” and he pointed Miller to the door.
“I’m gonna look for Sanford,” said Miller as he handed Turner back the bloody letter. It sent a chill down his spine.
Turner smirked and laughed softly. “Something tells me you ain’t never gonna find him … if he don’t want to be found.”
Sy Sanford had long left Richmond. After killing Peterson, he went back to his room and packed his things. He was just about to walk out the door when Deputy Brody came in. The two men stared at one another.
“You leavin’ town?” Brody asked eyeing the bag in Sy’s hand.
Sy didn’t speak. He simply nodded his head and then put on his fedora.
Brody straightened up his shoulders and cleared his throat. “After you left the café, I watched you and Peterson. I kind of figured then that he was your killer. When the sheriff came to your place, I was outside watching. I couldn’t let him get in the way.”
“So it was you who told Miller and Turner where to find me?”
This time Brody didn’t speak; he just nodded his head. After a few seconds, he said softly. “I’m sorry about Lena.”
Sy tensed up and transferred his bag to his other hand. “Me, too,” and with nothing more to say, he tipped his hat and walked past Deputy Brody out of his room. He had nothing left in Richmond – no family, no business, but more importantly, no Lena. His life was not what he had wanted. He thought that saving Lena would give him a second chance to get it right, but her death just proved that he was better off by himself.
***
Sy hitched several rides along the highways and byways of America as he made his way West to California – Los Angeles, to be exact. Once he got there, he worked odd jobs here and there up and down the coast of California trying to forget Lena and the Ward, but he couldn’t escape them. He was haunted. He dreamt of them almost every night, her beautiful, big brown eyes and red lipstick.
One night while drinking in a dingy bar on the coast of Ventura, he got into a fight with a local. Sy had him beat but, as he turned to walk away, the man jumped up and stabbed Sy in the back with a pocketknife. Sy would have died right there on the puke stained floor of the bar if it weren’t for the quick actions of the dark haired woman with the light green eyes who had been watching Sy since he’d arrived in town two days ago. She just so happened to have been at the post office intending to mail a letter when she saw a man in a fedora hat walk by. She knew him instantly.
“I don’t know why you wanna die, but it ain’t gonna be today,” her cool minty voice whispered into his ear as the ambulance roared down the windy road towards the local hospital.
No one in the Ward knew what happened to Sy for several years. It was if he had disappeared into thin air – like he had never existed at all. His office was boarded up a few weeks later and his apartment rented out to someone else. That happened often to Negro men in the South: disappeared. Besides, after a year, the harshness of the Great Depression occupied everyone’s mind as the people of Jackson Ward found themselves and their community wallowing in decay and poverty. The once illustrious homes and productive businesses of the Ward were gone. The stars had long stopped coming to the Hippodrome and the Sessions Hotel to entertain or be entertained. Their doors were closed permanently by 1939. Life in the Ward was now a day-to-day crisis.
Even the memory of the weeks the Ward was held captive by the murders of six women - four weeks before the crash of the stock market - faded as people struggled to find food to eat and work to survive. Neighborhoods like Jackson Ward that were once all Negro and the pride of the community fast became integrated with immigrants and other whites from different parts of Richmond who moved there because economic necessity overshadowed racial pride. It was cheaper.
Jackson Ward – “The Black Wall Street of America,” the “Harlem of the South” – was now just another neighborhood in an American city in the South. It was nothing special. But for a while, the world watched as this little black neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia, was the Mecca to the pilgrims who would travel there.
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Rebekah L. Pierce Bio
Rebekah L. Pierce is an avid playwright and author with her works focusing on contemporary women and their search for purpose and identity. She received her MA in English with a concentration in Literature from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2002. In 2006, Mrs. Pierce placed as an alternate in the Virginia Commission of the Arts Playwriting Fellowship for her works Perfect and The Myth. Her work has appeared in the following Off-Broadway festivals: the Midtown International Theatre Festival, The Network One Act Festival, Strawberry One Act Festival, the DC Black Theatre Festival and the Fresh Fruit Festival.
Her most recent non-fiction publication is the self-awareness resource book, Kryptonite Killed Superwoman: Trading in the Cape for an Authentic, Purpose-Driven Life. It features a collection of inspirational blogs and journaling activities designed to empower and encourage women to live and work in their purpose.
Murder on Second Street: The Jackson Ward Murders (Sy Sanford Series Book 1) Page 22