by John Sayles
Moody changes tone.
“I was called once to the bedside of a dying man, a man who had tried to follow the word of God but let the opinion of his worldly acquaintances obstruct his progress, a man who had turned away from the Light to bask in the false warmth of his comrades’ admiration. ‘You need not pray for me,’ he said, ‘for my damnation is sealed.’
“Nevertheless I fell upon my knees and tried to speak with the Almighty, hoping in His charity He might comfort a sinner come to the final day—but my prayers did not go higher than my head, as if Heaven above me was like brass. ‘The harvest is gone,’ said the poor unfortunate from his bed, ‘the summer is ended, and I am not saved.’ ”
Moody turns his lion-like head slowly, seeming to look deeply into the soul of every person in the tent, black and white. He speaks softly, sadly, yet such is the silence in the tent that even Little Earl, crammed in the rear of the colored wedge, can hear his every word. “He lived a Christless life, he died a Christless death, we wrapped him in a Christless shroud and bore him away to a Christless grave.”
The Golden Orator of Chicago slams his hand down on the top of the podium. “Fly to the arms of Jesus this hour! There is yet time! You can be saved if you will!”
And then the choir, bursting into song with Sankey’s beautiful voice rising above the others, the man nearly blind now but God-possessed, calling them, calling them forward to Glory—
What means this eager, anxious throng
Which moves with busy haste along,
These wondrous gath’rings day by day,
What means this strange commotion, pray?
In accents hushed the throng reply,
“Jesus of Nazereth passeth by!”
Tampa is a fever dream.
Tampa is a fever dream lying by the fetid Gulf, writhing hot with fear and desire. Camp followers have swarmed the miasmic city to feed upon the soldiers and each night, drawn to light and noise, those soldiers dare each other to be the drunkest, the loudest, the lowest. The pianos are all warped out of tune, the liquor smells of kerosene and the Army is a guest who has stayed overlong. Tampa wishes he would leave but can’t help selling one more cocoanut, one more drink. And there are guns everywhere, guns are the point of it, guns and flags and men marching or staggering in groups and the hard slap of a black man in uniform a reminder that there is a price for this boon, this bonanza of war, an insult that must be swallowed to keep the riches flowing. Tampa is a cackling reverie, flushing hot in fevered temples, teetering on a point of chance—
Finally, Coop is the shooter. It’s the first time he’s held the dice all night and up to now he’s just nibbled around the edges of the table, for it is a table and not a poncho behind a tent or chalk marks on a floor, throwing the nickel minimum in on hopping bets with long odds and the house has taken his nickels. The house used to be a butcher shop from the hooks on the ceiling and the smell of it, with a half-dozen games working and Army-issue tin cups, a boxcar-load of them seems to have been stolen and spread around Tampa, that you rap on the pine three times when it’s time for a refill. Coop puts his half-full cup down to press the dice between his palms.
“These bones been waitin for a man knows how to treat em,” he says, closing his eyes and rubbing the cubes. “They feelin awful cold.”
“What you play?” The boxman is a Chink in a vest and bowler hat. A light brown boy with a harelip is ragging a tinny little piano at the rear where the heavy breakdown used to happen, blood stains mottling the wall beside him.
“No pass, what you think? Lay a dollar down, Willie.” Willie always handles his money when he is rolling. Making change interrupts the flow.
“Train leaving the station,” says Coop, rattling the dice next to his ear now. “You boys better jump on board.”
Some of the boys he knows and some he doesn’t get on it while he heats them up and then Too Tall shouts “Come out, brother!” and he whips them down on the felt. It really is felt, too, recently razored off a billiards table from the marks on it, and an easy eight bounces off the rail.
“No pass,” says the Chink with the bowler hat. “Point is eight.”
Coop will play whatever is running but he likes craps the best. Straight poker is slow, feels like you’re slaving at the mercy of all that royalty on the cards, and roulette you can’t ever hold nothing in your hand, but craps is ever-shifting, like trying to catch fish in a river while bouncing through its rapids. And he’s always been good with numbers.
“What you paying for hard-ways?” he asks as he scoops the dice up.
“Nine to one.” Jerome, who is black as a wood stove and twice as wide, is dealing and wielding a bamboo cane for a stick at the same time. “But for a sportin man like yourself we make it ten.”
Coop smiles. “Put me down five, Willie.” Cheers and whistles from the boys. “Gone roll me a hard eight.”
The floor man is a tough-looking cracker who sits on a high stool with a shotgun across his knees. Coop has never seen a white man shoot craps, one of the things he likes about it, but has no doubt that’s who owns the bank here. Willie puts the cash on the layout.
Coop rolls a five, and then a ten. Fagen, a big old local boy from the Scrub who soldiers with the 24th, leads a few men over from the other games. Coop feels their heat around him, feels snug and happy in the smoke and noise and music, gulps whiskey and bangs for more. He knows the secret and they don’t. He rolls a four.
“The man is hot!” Willie calls out. “Keep back or you catch fire off him.”
Yes, there is luck, he knows, but it smiles on nobody. The rain is going to fall or not fall whether you put a crop under it or not, enough people scratch for gold someone is likely to find it, and you can be the slickest thief in the Carolinas but a day will come when you’re in the wrong place with the wrong mule.
“Show me a five, keep it alive,” he chants and snaps them down on the table and yes, it is a five but it could have been anything. He starts to laugh.
“He got the power,” calls out Rufus Briscoe from A Company, who is sweating the way he does when thoroughly drunk. “He got the touch.” And doubles his bet on the point.
Most of them are making deals with God, but Coop knows better. He knows the secret. “Oh Jesus, if You love me slip me a queen on the draw.” Jesus don’t play that game—Jesus is the house and the house always wins. The black come up five times in a row it’s just as likely to come up a sixth as to go back to red. Company of men go running at a lot of people shooting a lot of bullets and some number of them, good soldier or bad, is going to get killed. That’s the odds Jesus will give you. You have to forget about winning and just be happy to hold the dice for a while.
Coop hurls them down and the twin fours come up. There is a cheer and men slapping him on the back, half the room following his game now, and even fat Jerome pretends to smile.
“The Lady didn’t just smile at this boy,” says Fagen when the shouting settles down. “She done sat on his face.”
Coop nods and Willie pockets his winnings. He rolls an eagle to the Chink. There are shots then, just outside the door.
“Bout time the show got started,” says Coop before he rolls boxcars and craps out.
Tampa is a fever dream.
When they step out of the arcade there are men with guns and a woman screaming and a child held upside down. It is hard for Royal to focus at first, he’s been looking at the views in the little machine, a train coming straight at him but contained on the rectangle and if he looked away it wasn’t there. But this is all around him on the street and won’t go away, a black woman screaming and cursing as the white boys, Ohio Vols, laugh and hold her back and another down the street holds the child, who is screaming too but with an animal terror, swinging by his ankles gripped in another soldier’s hand, the man holding him out like a rabbit just killed, a shell on a leather thong dangling down from the boy’s neck, and then Junior grabbing Royal’s arm, Watch out he’s saying and then the shot, coming from behind him.
Yet another Vol, feet spread apart but body swaying with liquor, one eye closed as he aims his Colt at the swinging shell.
“You don’t hold that pickaninny still,” he calls, “Imonna plonk him for sure.”
The man fires again and then the street seems to brighten under the gas lamps, colors flaring as Royal steps toward the one with the Colt, Junior dragging on him and the woman screaming “God damn you! God damn you to hell!”
But before Royal can reach him the Vol with the Colt grunts and collapses on one knee, a dark stain blooming on the man’s light blue trousers just below the hip. He looks around, stupid with drink, sees Royal and raises his pistol but his balance is all gone and he pitches sideways to the street. More shooting then and there are others, Coop is one of them, running out from a raw-pine building across from the arcade, many of them firing and it’s then Royal realizes he left his pistol in camp. Junior said it would be best, but Junior is now shouting and waving to get off the street, dammit, and a blue shock cracking behind his ear and the pavement comes up fast to thump him hard. There are night-pass boots in his face, stomping, he can smell the wet polish, and then he’s rolled under falling bodies.
Junior pulls him up out of the writhing pile and he sees the weeping woman holding her child, the child still shrieking and the street filling up with white men.
“This is no good,” says Junior, seeming to have a clearer idea of what is happening. “We got to run!”
How do they know what it’s about so quickly? These white men, a few of them soldiers but mostly shopkeepers and corner sports and family men in white skimmers with their shotguns and pistols already, their bats and pool cues—how do they know the moment they step into the heat of the gas-lit street that it’s get the niggers and not some other disaster, some other entertainment, here on a block full of drunken men and a dozen clashing musics and gunfire commonplace since the encampment began? Some instant signal, some electric connection has hurled them out here and every white man is searching for a black one to shoot, to beat, but now suddenly there is a counterrush of black and blue out from Miss Sadie’s on the north end of the street, Miss Sadie’s Lovely Ladies where Little Earl has been spending his pay, a wave of black men wearing bits and pieces of their uniforms and several of them firing pistols and the ground is sparkling, sparkling with broken glass as Junior pulls him back into the arcade.
Royal is coming and going now, dizzy, hurting sharp behind his right eye and missing some pictures in between like the Mutoscope he was viewing before when you crank it too fast and each time he comes back the Orchestrion is still playing Goodbye, Nellie Gray, pumping the piano and drums and cymbal and tambourine but the shots outside not in time with it and then he’s gone for a moment, the pictures blurring together till they slow and he reels, caroming off the bagatelle table they were playing at then stopped hard at the hips and doubled over, vomiting on the surface of the beanbag toss, looking up woozily into the goggle eyes of the target, a monstrous laughing jigaboo head, its open mouth the hole you have to aim for.
“You get outd of heer!”
The proprietor, a big German with pop-eyes, comes at him from a tilted angle, raising an ax handle in his boiled-ham fists.
“I break you in the hedt!” he cries, voice surprisingly high. “You get oudt now!”
And where, in a penny arcade, did he find a brand-new ax handle?
“We’re just going,” calls Junior, ever the gentleman, as he lifts Royal by the shoulders and steers him away. “We don’t want any trouble.”
Royal sees they are the only customers left and the Orchestrion switches to Bill Bailey as he is hustled out the back entrance, stumbling over a drunken soldier sleeping curled on his side.
“I’ve been hit,” says Royal, the fact dawning on him with another wave of nausea. “Somebody hit my head and I’m sick.”
There is too much water in the air to breathe right and there is more shooting, shooting and shouted curses from the other side of the building. A small soldier hurries down the alley toward them, looking back over his shoulder and he is almost on them before they see it is Little Earl, his eyes shining with more excitement than fear.
“I been saved,” he says. “I’m prepared to meet my Maker.” And then, as if an afterthought, “Why everybody shooting?”
Tampa is a fever dream bubbling acid to the brain. Old hatreds are resolved in a flash, strangers try to murder one another, property is destroyed, storefronts violated.
A fire wagon races down the street, horses wide-eyed and prick-eared, thick-armed men ready to shoulder through doorways, but nothing is burning yet. Tampa is unhinged, thoughtless, thrashing in its own worst nightmare.
Coop has one round left in the chamber and they’re running. Not running away but running wild, running to spread it as fast and as far as possible, to do what is needed till it can’t be done anymore.
Too Tall trots with a sack of cans, beans and tomatoes and succotash they pulled from the grocery where the clerk spat at his shoes, and whenever one of the boys says There, they wouldn’t serve me there, they all reach in and grab a can and let fly at the glass. Coop wonders what the Army name for the formation they are running in is, a wide V with a few pedaling backward behind to cover the rear. Willie Mills has a new Winchester and a pocketful of shells he took from the hardware and hasn’t got to use yet. Now and again some white head will look out from a doorway or window, take one look and disappear before he can get a shot off.
“They sposed to pop up again,” Willie complains. “Give a man a chance.”
Coop is feeling good, feeling free and bold and keeping that one ace back in the chamber in case he needs it. The first one he knows he hit cause the man fell out, aimed at the balls and cut him under the hip, and two more must have hit somebody cause it was such a crowd of them coming all together he fired into. The Krag, what he would give to have the Krag in his hands right now and a belt packed with ammunition. Put these rednecks to school.
“It’s there on the left,” says Rufus Briscoe and they see the girls, most all of them white, looking down from the second-floor balcony. The V swings right and again Coop is sure the Army has a name for it, Too Tall shattering the door with the heel of his boot and the rest squeezing shoulder to shoulder to push it through.
A thick-necked black man sits on the parlor stairs, shotgun leveled and his face glistening with nervous sweat.
“You go upstairs,” he says, “they gone kill me for sho.”
“You put that shotgun up.” Too Tall spreads his arms out wide, drops the sack with the last few cans in it. Men still outside are shouting, wanting to know what the hold-up is.
“Don’t you make me do this.”
Coop drifts off to the side, toward the parlor. He has the pistol loose in his hand.
Too Tall takes a small step forward, arms still spread.
“We gonna get what we come for. These gals anything to you?”
“This my job.”
“It worth dyin for?”
“Ax you the same thing. White-woman pussy worth dying for?”
Too Tall laughs. “You all right. What’s your name?”
“Jawge.”
“There’s at least seven, eight of us here, Jawge. Aint no white man gonna blame you, overwhelm eight-to-one.”
Coop watches the man’s trigger finger. He’s seen a man taken apart by a shotgun this close once, in Raleigh. Saw backbone come out white behind and the man lifted clear off his feet.
“And this aint just no common layabouts, Jawge,” says Too Tall, easing his hands down. “You got professional soldiers here, out on a rampage. If you think your white man blame you for that, give us his name and we go get him.”
The man on the stairs ponders this for a moment, not happy, then looks over to Coop.
“Lay your shotgun back,” says Coop, smiling, “and step out the way.”
Coop eases back closer to Too Tall, not taking his eyes off the weapon. George stands, then swings the gun a
round and unloads both barrels into the parlor, shattering a mirror and blowing stuffing from a pink divan. Screams from upstairs.
“You done lost me this job,” he says accusingly. “But you tell them gals I peppered some hides down here, maybe Mist’ Carlyle won’t come after me.”
He steps aside and the men charge up the stairs, cheering.
“Aint a thing up there that’s worth it,” he says to Willie, left behind with his rifle to watch the street.
Coop is the first in the room. A blond woman with a face round as a pie plate, dressed in red silk, stands in front of the others with her hands on her hips.
“We don’t fuck no niggers here,” she announces.
“Aint nothing to it, darling,” says Coop. “And how things is, tonight you got no choice.”
The blond woman eyes the roll of money as he pulls it from his shirt pocket.
“You gone pay?”
“Yeah, darling, we gone pay,” says Coop, laying his winnings on the bureau and smiling. “One way or the other.”
Tampa is a fever dream, lingering through the night, a nightmare that won’t end.
“Who goes there?”
There are five of them, sharp-eyed boys from the 2nd Georgia. The boldest has the barrel of his rifle jammed against the center of Junior’s chest. There is enough light to see color now.
“What we got?” calls another as he steps around the side of a scrapwood shanty.
“Got a bunch of plantation monkeys all dressed up like sojers.” A scrawny dog is sniffing loudly at Royal’s leg and growling, its tail rigid. There is a distant popcorn-rattling of gunfire from back in Tampa City but here the black folks have barred their doors, or what they have that will pass for a door, praying the fight won’t blow their way.
“What you doing out here, Rastus?”
“Private Aaron Lunceford,” says Junior as calmly as he can. “25th Infantry, Company L.”
“Not what I asked you, is it?”
They cut through the Scrub hoping somebody might hide them till daybreak. Little Earl knows a house with two women who host card parties but nobody was in there and then they got turned around because the streets are just sand paths with no signs anywhere.