A Moment in the Sun

by John Sayles

  “The mayor is useless,” he says. “Once the hope of Federal troops was gone he crawled under a rock to hide. Which means it’s up to us.”

  “They got the guns, they got the power.”

  “They’ve asked for a reply.” The Doctor seems almost calm. “We should give them one. We reject their declaration and all of its provisions. If they can achieve the same ends through legal means, let them try. There’s no reason we should take a part in our own disen—”

  “There’s a couple hundred reasons still wandering around town,” says David Jacobs. “They’re just aching for an excuse to let fly at us.”

  “I’m not talking about a physical confrontation. I believe it is important, for the record, to—”

  “Who’s gonna write that record?” Tom Miller holds the lease on Dorsey’s Dock Street shop, owns the pool room he used to hang in before he married Jessie. “Anything don’t look good for them they just change it.”

  “If there’s nothing to be gained by defiant language,” says Mr. Henderson, “I suggest we just distance ourselves from Alex Manly and appeal to the cooler heads among them. If those Red Shirts had their way—”

  “Those Red Shirts don’t do a damn thing the big folks don’t put em to.” Miller is by the door, angry, holding up a fist studded with rings. “And no matter what we say in any letter it’s already been decided whether they be let loose or not. But lemme tell you, they come huntin niggers where I’m at, they gonna find one who bites back.”

  Dorsey finds himself stepping up on one of the chairs by the back wall to be seen. “They think we got some say about how other colored folks act,” he says. “But the ones they worried about, all that wild Brooklyn crowd, them shack people live down south of town, they don’t go to no church service. And they sure as hell don’t care what we got to tell em—”

  “Just like how we had nothing to do with what Alex Manly wrote in his paper.”

  “That boy was here,” says Tom Miller, “I’d put my boot to his near-white behind.”

  “So what will our response be?” asks Dr. Lunceford.

  “You seen that gun they got,” says John Goines, who was Manly’s printer at the Record before it shut down. “Seen what it can do. You want to be responsible for that machine being turned loose on our people?”

  “The responsibility rests on the head of the man who pulls the trigger,” says the Doctor.

  “Yeah, and the man who gets caught in front of it,” adds David Jacobs, who is also the city coroner, “won’t have no head left.”

  Jubal spends the long night down with his animals. Old Dan is still poorly, shedding the worms, and Nubia is flighty from the white people all day. They’ve been quieter and more sober than for the marching, but so many of them about, crowded around the polling places, laughing and waggling their rifles and looking their looks at you. Jubal take her out for her little trot, Nubia a horse you can’t leave in a stable all day, no matter what, and she got a sense for it, contention in the air make her shy just like a shotgun blast, and now her skin is still quivering on her back in sudden ripples, her ears switching this way and that listening for it to start for real. Jubal listening just as hard.

  “Best thing for it,” he says softly as he moves around her stall, “is they drink some more and fall out from it, wake up happy they won this round. Things go back to normal.”

  Dan is farting as he dozes, not a mule to worry about people business. There is hauling to do tomorrow and Jubal wants people back in their homes and forgotten about the election. He uses his time now, too jangled up to fall asleep, to put the tiny stable in order, hanging tack and polishing leather, talking soft to his nervous riding horse.

  “Maybe this Sunday we head out to the beach,” he tells her. “Let you go on them mudflats. You like that, I know.”

  It is a quiet night, a long night, and dawn is peeking in through the cracks between the planks before Nubia’s head finally drops low and her ears relax. Jubal eases the bar up silently and steps out onto Love Alley.

  Across the way, sitting in the sand with his back against a slat-and-wire chicken coop, is old Caleb who used to drink with his father, who was a slave on the indigo plantations and then rolled turp barrels on the loading dock till the liquor made him useless, which he’s been as long as Jubal can remember, Caleb who never in his life give a damn about anything you couldn’t pour down your throat. There is no telling what shade the old man is under the crust on him, with yellow eyes and yellow nails thick as horse teeth on his toes.

  “They done stole it back,” he says, looking in Jubal’s direction, the way he does, but not really at him. “Everthing we won in the War, everthing we built up, they done took it back.” He shakes his head, lets his turtle eyelids drop shut, tears making channels in the grime on his cheeks. “Aint that some shit?”

  And then there are roosters crowing.

  POSSE COMITATUS

  When Milsap turns onto Market Street a thousand armed white men are marching toward him. At least a thousand—they fill the wide thoroughfare from side to side all the way from Sixth to the Armory two blocks down. The flood must have come like this through the streets of Johnstown, he thinks as he waits for it to sweep him along, no chanting or haranguing in the ranks, only an inexorable force of nature unleashed to run its course. He knows where they are headed.

  Colonel Waddell is in the van, the old gentleman riding ahead with a Winchester held up like a standard, grim as fate. Many of the town’s leading men hurry to keep beside him on foot, armed or not, determined to be noted by the swelling throng behind them. Mr. Clawson is up on the sidewalk staying parallel, with Walter Parsley and Hardy Fennell trailing after, Clawson scribbling in his notebook as he walks. Milsap falls into step—where else in the wide world should he be?—and feels the power of a thousand bodies with one deadly purpose in their consciousness as the mass surges hard right down Seventh Street, picking up speed, more men and boys pushing into the torrent from the side streets as they cross Dock and Orange and Ann and Nun, small brown faces goggle-eyed at the windows of the Williston School till they are pulled away by their teachers and then Waddell raises his rifle over his head and the righteous horde washes out around him facing a two-story clapboard house just south of the colored Methodist church, modest in façade and seemingly empty. The Love and Charity Hall.

  Milsap has only seen it once, when he was a boy in South Carolina. By the time he and his friends got there the beating and burning was well over and somebody had strung a cord through the calves like it was a slaughtered deer and three of the Knights were hoisting it by rope over the branch of a sycamore tree. The top part was more charred than the legs, but as it swung, poked by gleeful older boys with long sticks, it was evident that it had been a man. Mr. Hudson, the town’s only photographer, had been summoned to set up his apparatus and there was repeated posing with the trophy, Milsap and his friends sneaking in just before the cord was pulled to be included among the huntsmen. He had not, at that point in his life, seen himself in a photograph. He remembers them all being queasy with excitement, remembers the bitter smell and the strange rush of saliva in his mouth, this confluence of blood and gathered neighbors always in the past leading to fresh cracklins and pickled souse.

  “You know who it is?” Milsap asked one of the older boys wielding a stick and the boy laughed and poked the hanging carcass again to make it spin and said “Say hello to Albert Lee.”

  But Albert Lee was a man he knew, a man who sat on the dock at the feed store and had once given him a gator he had carved from a chunk of tupelo, and this thing with half a head left strung up by the sinews could not be him.

  One of the Red Shirts steps forward to pound on the door and there is shouting from the men who have flowed around and behind the structure and then Milsap is borne in a rush, feet barely touching the ground, in through the door just smashed open with axes and wrenched hard, fighting to keep from falling under the stampede of men squeezing into the downstairs hall,
chairs and benches hurled shattering before them, Milsap grabbing a belt and lifted at the head of the crush up the steep incline to the crowded press at the top of the stairs. It is all he can do to avoid being brained by wood or glass or metal as the furies attack Manly’s den and wreak upon his tools of outrage what they had hoped to inflict on his person.

  They have been, as Milsap often surmised, still setting by hand here at the Record, and he cannot help but make a hasty inventory as the smaller pieces of equipment whiz past his head to smash against the walls, as stacks of papers are flung about to carpet the floor and sloshed with kerosene from the lamps snatched up from below and a man next to Milsap is beating on a folding table with a compositor’s stick, smashing down again and again screaming “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” while four burly men struggle to tear the bulky rotary press from its moorings and, failing that, allow others to rush in and have at it with ax and sledgehammer. Then fire, the flames whooshing across the floor and the angry wave that has scoured this room becomes a desperate scramble of men fighting to escape, men leaping down the stairwell rolling over those still struggling upward to claim a shard of glory. Milsap is shoved and then rides another man’s back to the ground floor, someone stepping on his neck, then lifted and pulled to safety, hundreds of voices roaring in exaltation as white men pour out the bottom of the house and black smoke pours from the top.

  Milsap doesn’t remember having grabbed the chunk of metal till he feels it cutting into the palm of his tightened fist. It is a rectangle of brass with a raised shape on one face, only a shape to most but to Milsap unmistakably a capital N when reversed in a newspaper headline. He jams it in his pocket and hurries back from the sudden wave of heat roaring out from the building, flames licking out from the smashed front window above now, nearly stumbling over the guts of the defenestrated printing machine.

  They could have stripped the office of the equipment, he thinks, and given it to someone who would have used it responsibly. He learned his trade on an old four-cylinder press just like the one now busted at his feet, which Mr. Clawson himself had bought cheap then sold on credit to the Manly brothers. A pity to butcher the horses, he thinks, when the coachman is to blame.

  The heat has driven them all to the west side of Seventh and the fire bells are sounding their alarm when Davey finds him in the throng. Tiny points of orange are reflected in the printer’s devil’s eyes.

  “Manly wunt in there,” shouts the boy over the clanging of the bells and the cheers of their companions. “That bird done flew the coop.”

  Milsap nods. His neck hurts where it was tromped on. “Then we’ve all got something to thank him for,” he says.

  The alarm bells are clanging and then it’s their new hose wagon come rattling down Fourth behind those two big iron grays. Jubal ties Dan off to a light pole and runs alongside till Elijah Gause can pull him up to the siderail.

  “What we got?”

  “Seventh and Church,” shouts Elijah, pointing ahead to the left where the smoke is billowing up.

  It is a mixed neighborhood and it might be three other companies there first. Jubal used to drive for these boys, the Phoenix Hose, before they went on the city payroll at the beginning of the year. Back then it was every company for itself and a race to be first at the scene for a crack at the insurance money. Uncle Wick told him once how he and Mance Crofut killed a bear years ago, how it reared up big as a hillside and threw their dogs through the air and took a couple pounds of lead shot and a smack on the head with a railroad spike before the light finally went out in its eyes. There are no bears left around here, though, and maybe a fire is the biggest thing left worth fighting, where at the end you feel like you done something important and come out alive.

  They whip around the corner, wheels sliding in the dirt, and Jubal calls forward to Elijah. “You know what’s burning?”

  “Not yet,” Elijah shouts back. “But I got a feeling it’s more than a fire.” And then Johnson has to pull back the reins as they come into the white people.

  There is a shifting sea of them all around the fire at the Love and Charity Hall, men and boys, lots of them waving guns around. White men catch up the horses and surround the wagon, looking ugly, though Bud Savage is grinning as he struts up to hand them the word.

  “False alarm, boys,” he says. “Chief says we gone let this one go to the ground.”

  None of the other city companies have come. Heavy wood is shifting and cracking inside the building now, glowing embers floating down all around them, but not one of the Phoenix boys budges from the rig. Jubal can feel crackling heat from the blaze ahead and the acid glare of the white men closing in.

  “You mean to let this church burn too?” asks Johnson, nodding to the St. Luke’s Zion. “Cause that’s what’s gonna happen next.”

  An old gray-haired white man walks his horse over.

  “What’s the problem here?” he says.

  “Boy claims the church gonna burn,” says Bud.

  The old man looks at the church and then back at the Hall, frowning. “Our work here is done,” he says. “Let them through.”

  It takes a minute for the others to catch wind that they’ve been vouched for, every few yards another knot of white men throwing up their guns to challenge, but finally Elijah’s brother Frank jumps off and hooks them up to the hydrant as Jubal runs the hose out to within twenty yards of the fire with the other pipemen, his face feeling like it is blistering, and then Frank yanks the valve. The hose jolts stiff on his shoulder and then, despite themselves, the crowd of white men cheer as the first gout of water spurts skyward and smacks down on the St. Luke’s roof. Hot sweat boils off Jubal’s face, stinging his eyes as he wrestles the line with the others, water pressure pretty feeble here and thinking they could use one of the steam engines to pump while he hears the old white man’s voice, singing above the noise of the fire bells and the now roaring flames and suddenly the greater part of the white men start to move back north up Seventh, many of them ducking under the hose as they go. Something cracks under his feet and when he glances down he sees it’s a sign that’s been torn off the front of the house and hacked with axes, a sign you can still tell said THE RECORD PUBLISHING COMPANY.

  He helped carry the printing gear up into that house just a little while back and now it is burning away, and he has to wonder was anybody trapped inside or shot when they run out from it, such a low, spiteful thing to do when they already took their damn election, the faces on the couple hundred whites who stay to watch not twisted with meanness, but just looking happy and curious like it’s the 4th of July and next there’s going to be rockets. Johnson directs them to wet the outside of St. Luke’s and then do a quick knockdown of the fire on what’s left of the Love and Charity top floor.

  “What’s the use setting it on fire,” says a disappointed white boy, stepping up close with two of his friends, “if you gonna let em come and put it out?”

  Dorsey was born on the day of the Capitulation, when the rebels give up to the Union at Appomattox, and his mama says that’s why he’s bound to keep the peace. But nobody seems to be in the mood for that right now. There is a big crowd of them come out from the cotton press, maybe a hundred men, worried about their families or their homes or just so mad they want to fight back, all facing the double row of white men lined up across Nutt Street with rifles raised and ready to shoot, some with uniforms and some without, and a Gatling gun mounted on a wagon with a white man sweating at the trigger.

  Dorsey stands in the middle with Mr. Rountree and Mr. Sprunt and old James Telfair.

  “What we heard is they strung up Alex Manly and burned down the Love and Charity Hall and St. Luke’s Zion,” says James, who manages the floor for Mr. Sprunt and sometimes preaches at St. Stephen’s. “And now we hear they coming over to Brooklyn to shoot us up.”

  “No truth to that at all,” says Mr. Rountree, whose hair looks like he hasn’t put a comb to it this morning. “You got to get these people back insi
de.”

  “—that if any persons, to the number of ten or more, unlawfully, tumultuously and riotously assemble together to the disturbance of the public peace—” Mr. Roger Moore shouts out, reading from a paper and marching back and forth in front of the line of riflemen, “—and being openly required or commanded by invested authority to disperse themselves—”

  “Dammit, will you stop that?” snaps Mr. Sprunt.

  Mr. Roger Moore is in some kind of made-up uniform, wearing a sword. “We got to make this legal,” he explains.

  “There hasn’t been any disturbance here and there’s not going to be any,” says the press owner. Dorsey was cutting Mr. Sprunt in his shop in the Orton when a couple men run in and yelled “Your niggers are coming out!” and then run off again. He should have just stayed and let the white man deal with it, but they put his name on that Colored Committee, which maybe was an honor but felt more like a responsibility, and so here he is in the middle of it. He knows they at least won’t start shooting while the man who owns the cotton press and the Orton Hotel and a good deal of the rest of the city is right beside him, but the big mounted rapid-fire gun keeps swiveling to follow every time his nerves force him to move a little bit.

  “If there’s nothing to it about a mob coming,” says Dorsey quietly, trying to be still, “I don’t see why the men can’t go and see for themselves.”

  “The situation has got beyond that,” says Mr. Roger Moore. There are stripes and other shapes on the shoulder of his uniform but Dorsey doesn’t know what rank they add up to. “We can’t let a whole gang of these people out into the streets when they supposed to be working.”

  “It’s the rumors, suh,” says James Telfair, who belonged to the de Rosset family when he was a young man and knows how to talk to white folks. “Rumors beset a man’s mind. But if you let a few out, two or three at a time, they can go look and come back with the real story.”