by John Sayles
“That would be fine with me,” says Mr. Sprunt. “They won’t get any work done till this is settled, one way or the other.”
Mr. Rountree turns. “How bout that, Roger? Two or three can’t do us much mischief.”
“I’ll let these two go,” he says, pointing to Dorsey and Reverend Telfair. “And then I want the rest of them inside.” He flips the Riot Act paper over, holds it out.
“Write your names here, if you can write.”
Dorsey writes, and thinks how this is the second time in two days the white people got his name on a paper.
“You hurry your asses back here,” says the man behind the Gatling gun as they pass. “This deal won’t hold water long.”
Men and boys are posing for photos when Jubal leaves the fire. It’s only just smoldering now and he’s got Dan tied across the Creek on Fourth with a wagon full of coal left to deliver. He tries to stay on the far side of the street from the white men who are drifting back toward Brooklyn in small groups, rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders, talking excitedly. The ones that got jobs must be taking the day off, as they are none of them in any hurry. When he crosses Chestnut he sees Toomer hurrying up in his uniform.
The police gives him a look. “Where you been, get all sooty like that?”
“With the Phoenix boys at the Love and Charity fire. Where were you, man?”
“Bad business popping up all over town. Somebody got a plan,” says Toomer, “but they aint let me in on it.”
Jubal nudges Toomer’s stick as they walk. “You gone ’rest somebody?”
“Not if I can help it. I be happy I get out of this day alive.”
There are a couple dozen black men outside when they get to Fourth and Bladen, glaring diagonal across the trolley track at as many whites carrying rifles who have bunched up between Brunjes’ store and the St. Matthew’s church. Dan is tied up by the white men.
“Help me with this,” says Toomer, heading for the black men.
“I aint no police.”
“Yeah, but you was over at the Love and Charity. You can put them straight.”
The one they call Little Bit who you don’t want to mess with at craps is out front of the men with his chest puffed out.
“Look who comin,” he says. “Pet nigger in a blue suit.”
Toomer steps very close to Little Bit. Jubal doesn’t understand stepping that close to a man known to favor a knife. “What you think you gonna settle out here?” says Toomer. “All this shit blow over fast if you let it.”
“They lynched a man.”
Toomer turns to Jubal.
“You see anybody swinging?”
Jubal shakes his head. “Burned down Manly’s paper but he wasn’t there. Not that I seen anyway.”
“Then what they all doin over here now?”
“Most of em lives here,” says Toomer. “Now why don’t alla you just—”
Little Bit pushes Toomer back a little and there is a pop and then another and a couple of the men around him have pistols out and there is a volley from the rifles across the street and a half dozen men fall. Jubal squats down as more shots are fired and glass shatters and one white man is down in the dirt with Dan rearing and bucking to tear himself loose while other white men take cover behind the wagon, shooting, shooting at him, and then Dan is down and screaming, kicking and writhing and Toomer stands tall and disgusted in the middle yelling “Damn you! Damn the bunch of you!” and then more white men with rifles arrive and Jubal is running, running with the rest, first down Fourth and then right up Harnett but there are men in houses shooting at them there and they retreat, a few men turning to fire back at the houses and then toward the river but more shooting now, whites chasing and black men coming out of their houses shooting and on Third another man goes down, Sam Gregory, he thinks, but Jubal just jumps over the body as it sprawls and keeps running, cutting back with three other men toward the railroad tracks and maybe a bridge to hide under, the fire bells ringing again all over town and marching up from Nutt Street to their right comes what looks like the Wilmington Light Infantry and a hundred of the Vigilance Committee with a rapid-fire gun mounted on a wagon.
“In volley, front line,” calls a white man on a horse, “fire!”
The front line fires and two of the runners fall, the other two just sprinting on through and they continue to march, the Light Infantry in the van, not a one out of step as Milsap follows the loose squadron of irregulars behind them.
“On your left,” calls Captain Kenan as they take fire from another house on Brunswick, “top-floor window. Fire!” Another volley and the front of the unpainted house is blistered with rounds. A pair of the infantrymen stop when they reach one of the men who was just mowed down. The top of his head is gone, and there are brains spread in the sand.
“Nigger got himself a haircut,” says one Red Shirt to the other.
Milsap feels dizzy, and then sees Mr. Clawson up by the wagon that carries the Gatling. He has heard there was a demonstration, a display for the colored that he was not invited to, and he would love to see the mechanism in action but not today. The detachment moves over to Bladen Street where the original trouble was reported and continues to move west, firing at whatever moves unless it is white and sensible enough to throw its arms up and declare loyalty.
“Keep your eyes open, Drew,” Mr. Clawson tells him cheerily, dropping back a few yards as they head for Manhattan Park. “Won’t see many a day like this one.”
Milsap nods, but when the editor strides away he lingers and then crosses to sit on the porch. There is gunfire from every direction now, screams and cursing, black powder smoke hanging in the air. A straggling Red Shirt with a shotgun steps over to him.
“Can’t stay here without us, buddy,” the man says. “They see a white man on his lonesome, they kill him for sure.”
This is probably true and his hands are shaking but he feels more weary than scared. “I live here,” says Milsap, nodding at the little shotgun shack behind him. “This is my home.”
Dorsey had this nightmare just last night. Trying to find his way back to Jessie but every path blocked, knowing she’s in the house and something might be wrong. Reverend Telfair went back to the cotton press hours ago, left before the worst of the shooting began to tell them it was not so bad. But now the alarm bells strike a constant warning, a clamor of metal in the air on every side, and all of Brooklyn is a running gun battle. Whatever street Dorsey turns down there are men who want to shoot him and what began as a search for a safe passage home has become nothing but flight, turning to walk, not run, away from the spots where they are killing.
If you run you’re just a target.
Without Jessie it would be easy, just get down to the river and make his way to the Orton. The whole colored staff will be there, safe, behind their wall of quality white folks. But without Jessie nothing matters and the least thing a man can do and hold his head up in the world is to protect his woman from harm.
“That’s him!” he hears, and his heart falls.
There are too many of them, and too many with rifles to run. They back Dorsey up against a building, dozens of them, wild-eyed and cursing, so close he can smell whiskey, and he thinks he sees Mr. Turpin at the back looking on. He holds his palms up in front of himself.
“I’m just trying to get home, people,” he says. “I don’t want no trouble.”
“That’s the one!” A different voice this time. “That’s the one shot Bill Mayo!”
“I don’t know any Mr. Mayo,” Dorsey says, trying not to sound as scared as he is. If you’re too bold or too scared they lose control—
“I saw him up on a roof ! Shot right down at Bill!”
“I aint been on any roof,” Dorsey says, feeling the bricks hard at his back. He wants to put his hands down over his privates where one of the men keeps poking him with the barrel of his rifle but you have to keep them up where they can see. “I don’t own any gun.”
“Crafty nig
ger, huh? Think we believe that?”
“I’m Dorsey Love,” he says. “I own property. Mr. Turpin, he can tell you—”
But Mr. Turpin, if he had been there, has disappeared. A man grabs Dorsey by the collar and yanks him stumbling out into the middle of the street with the others jeering and the rifle barrel poking him hard, again and again, in the ribs now and then a hard blue shock of light and he is down with his face in the sand and he smells blood and it is his own making mud next to his cheek and they kick him, kick him over onto his back and there is a big one with a chunk of lead pipe in his hand peering down.
“Did you kill him? Is he dead?”
“I hit him in the head,” says the big one. “You know they got skulls like cast iron.” And there is laughing and hands pulling him up till his jaw is grabbed and forced open and someone, he can’t see who with the blood stinging his eyes, jams a pistol into his mouth cracking his teeth and he can taste blood now, his own, and you can’t talk peace with a gun in your mouth.
“We gonna give you a chance to do what niggers do best,” says the man pushing the pistol into him. “Either you run or you stay here and eat this.”
He always knew it couldn’t last, that they’d find out sooner or later and put a stop to it. Raggedy-ass little orphan boy, what he do to deserve all he got, own himself a business, got the most beautiful young wife. Dorsey blinks till his eyes clear. He can see the way to Jessie. The man pulls the pistol out and gives him a shove, the others screaming for it now, veins standing out in their necks, spit flying. He runs to her.
Jessie listens to the gunshots and wishes he was here. She knows he will be trying to get to her, that’s Dorsey, sweet and courtly, though he should just stay in his shop and let it blow over. She will be fine, she knows, if you don’t step outside it’s only noise, the havoc of the alarm bells and the angry popping of guns. There’s nothing you want to see happening out on those streets.
Jessie sits at the table watching the door and misses the trees. At home—at her parents’ house—there are trees lining all the streets, white ash and chestnuts and live oaks and a kind of shade and shadow they make that smoothes the sharp edge off life. Over here north of the Creek the trees have mostly been cut down and the few left are twisted and scraggly. Sand blows into the house from the street and though there’s colored and white living side by side the feeling is different than where she grew up—harsh words and meanness all the time. She wishes he was home. If he gets here she will hold him and be glad and he’ll know it, he’ll feel it even if she can’t find the words for how good he’s been to her and what he’s done for her and what she thinks of him as a man. She’s been holding herself inside and that isn’t fair to him and she feels him out there, worrying, that’s Dorsey, a worrying man, and her heart lifts at the first hollow footfall on the wood of the front step.
The door is kicked in so hard it smashes against the wall behind it and sends a hung picture crashing to the floor. There are six of them, two in the red shirts, and one has a list he reads from.
“Dorsey Love,” he says.
“He isn’t home.” Jessie stands, thinking strangely of her mother all of a sudden, the lady of the house. What she would do.
“He’s on the list.”
“You may not come in here,” she hears herself tell them. This is Dorsey’s home. He works so hard to keep it—
“Look under everthing,” says the man with the list. “He’s probly crawled under somewhere.”
The men spread out, kicking and throwing and tearing and smashing, not looking at all, and Jessie can only stand where she is and hope they won’t turn on her and that Dorsey won’t arrive till they are long gone. One of the men stands scowling at the piano, as if its presence is a grave insult.
“Look at this,” he says. “Can you believe this?”
When the inside of the house is in ruins they come back to the man with the list.
“He shows his face,” the man says to Jessie, “tell him he got to report to City Hall, give himself up.”
“But he hasn’t done anything.”
“He got his name on this list,” says the man. “That’s enough.”
As they leave the man who is angry at the piano gets two others to help him. She has barely touched it. The keys give up a moan as the men bang through the doorway.
“That’s mine,” she says and feels the first tears rolling down her face. “He gave it to me.”
Harry has somehow located the only cabman left working on the streets of Wilmington, a poor little hare-lip negro with a spotted dobbin who has seen better days.
“Oh my Lor’,” says the cabbie as they are blocked and redirected and once even chased by the marauding white men, jerking his reins this way and that till they are thoroughly lost. Harry was at the wheel shop when the shooting began, cataloguing the inventory, and was struck with the sudden knowledge that it was his duty to join his father at home. He has seen the Judge’s signature on some sort of proclamation this morning, pasted crookedly on the display window of his shop, and it has troubled him deeply.
“A sense of impending shame,” Niles used to say, but always with his mischievous grin, his touch of irony. There were names far more prominent than their father’s on the ridiculous document, but he had an impulse to mount one of his speedier models and pedal to the old man’s side. As if he could.
A cripple running a bicycle shop, he thinks. An apt metaphor for the situation in this city. This city, he promises himself, that I am leaving.
“Oh my Lor’,” says the cabbie beside him, pulling up on the reins.
Men are butchering a piano in the middle of the street. Polished wood cracks sharply under the backside of an ax head, pieces of the beautiful machine yanked free and hurled about. The men, white men, look up from their furious work but say nothing, make no threatening move.
“Don’t worry,” says Harry to the rigid cabman. “You’re with me.”
He has his cane in hand, but is not suggesting he will use it in defense. It is their contract, the one race serving the other, that protects them, that has even elicited a smile or two from the rampant Caucasians they have encountered. The man in the red shirt, the one with the ax, is smiling at them now.
“You can pass by here, Mister,” he says to Harry, then winks. “I see you got yourself a tame one.”
Harry elbows the poor hare-lip, who chucks his ancient nag forward. It is a tense, jittery passage, the cab wheels bumping over the scattered ivory keys, black and white.
It is one thing to bear witness as the disgraced ones sign themselves out, but another to compromise his office by swearing this new crowd in.
“You haven’t been elected,” says the Judge. “Not a one of you.”
Mayor Silas and the white aldermen and Melton the police chief have just been sent off with their tails between their legs, having signed the paper and said the words to relinquish their positions, and here is Waddell shoving this new slate under his nose for confirmation.
“But you agree, Judge,” says Hugh MacRae, who is listed as one of the new aldermen, “that we need somebody in charge to deal with this riot we got outside.”
“It appears to be running pretty much how you planned it,” says the Judge. They can jockey for position all they want, but nobody is going to ride on his back.
“We need this board in place,” says Waddell, who has windbagged himself into the mayor’s spot on the list. “We need our new chief of police to get active weeding the troublemakers out of town and we need at least a couple hundred special constables sworn in to restore the peace.”
“Now that you’ve burned down everything you wanted.”
The old man stiffens. “Mob violence is the most terrible occurrence. I dispersed those men myself, with words of conciliation.”
“I can hear them out there spreading fellowship.” The alarm bells have been ringing since before noon, the gunfire constant and not so far to the north of City Hall.
Allen Tay
lor is pacing behind him. “You going to do this for us or not?”
There was no subterfuge in the Secession. He remembers the euphoria of those first days, how free they all felt, free of compromise and secret agendas, their defiance proud and open. But this, despite the legal filigree and the old Colonel’s stirring peroration about saving the city from an African uprising, is nothing but clubhouse politics under the cover of wholesale slaughter.
“No, I will not,” he says.
“Dammit.” Taylor looks to the other men, the self-declared saviors of Wilmington, already occupying the old board’s seats. “Somebody go dig up a Justice of the Peace,” he snaps, “that got more sense than scruples.”
The men seem almost awed, standing on the carpet in the Doctor’s house. Alma shows them in and then Mrs. Lunceford comes down to tell them no, he is not home, and yes, if they must they may search the house. Alma wants to take a fire poker to the one that sits in the Doctor’s favorite chair without being invited and sticks his dirty boots up on the hassock, but Mrs. L is as gracious as if they were guests.
“My husband is a physician,” she says, using the fancy word. “I suggest you go look for him where the victims of this outrage,” and here she drills the one sprawled in the Doctor’s chair with a look that would melt lard at forty paces, “are being treated.”
Mrs. L doesn’t blink as they get up and shuffle out, a few grumbling, the others looking like boys just been whipped by the deacon. She turns to Alma.
“Would you’d help me pack a few things?” she says. “I suppose we need to be prepared for the worst.”
It feels like the alarm bells are in his head. They should shut them down—everybody knows to watch out by now and it’s only adding to the panic. Jubal ducks behind a light pole as a riderless, crazy-spotted Appaloosa comes barreling down the street, big eye swimming around in terror, lathered beyond what is healthy. Horse like that will run till those bells stop or it falls down dead.