by Ann Towell
Then, starting at the top of my head and running down my back, my blood went from hot to ice cold. That was the moment in my life when I knew real terror. The first stook had been torched.
CHAPTER
22
The blaze stood out against the night sky. Men jumped around like black, dancing puppets. My feet were stuck in the muddy ground. I pretended it was the miry clay that held me fast, but it was my weak heart – my lack of courage. When they lit the second stook I pulled one foot out of the squelchy mud. Then the other foot came out, and I ran, screaming toward Moses’s home.
I pushed my way between two men with torches. Their faces were made scarier by the torchlight. They looked like monsters, not men at all. John Longville was at the front throwing oil at the first shanty. When he touched his torch to the oil, the small house went up in flames. People ran out screaming. Some men had sticks in their hands and began chasing the black families, beating them over their heads, shoulders, and arms. I saw a woman stumble beneath a blow. Then a man came back to help her up. They both ran for the woods, holding hands.
I turned away, only to see a man, I’m sure it was McQuarrie, on top of a shanty, pouring kerosene on it. He jumped off and then threw his torch to the roof. It ignited in a huge flash and more people ran out of their home.
The mob hadn’t reached the Croucher place yet. At least Beulah, Ogden, and Mrs. Croucher were safe. I prayed that Moses and his pa were not in their house. I was still headed in that direction, but Longville was there ahead of me. He had lit the corner of the house after pouring kerosene on it. The Crouchers escaped, but I saw Mr. Croucher confront Longville. Moses kept running, but Max caught up and began hitting him.
Mr. Croucher wrestled with Longville until others came to help. They beat on Mr. Croucher with their sticks too, but somehow he managed to get away and ran into the woods. I was heading for Moses to help him when Mr. Croucher came back out of the bush to rescue his son. He picked Moses’s limp body up off the ground and cradled his son in his arms. I called out to them, and for an instant, Mr. Croucher’s eyes met mine. The look on his face was one I will remember for the rest of my life. It had fear and desperation and disappointment and confusion – and hate – all mixed in together. His lips formed a single, soundless word: Titus. I didn’t know if Moses was dead or alive, but I did know his daddy wondered what I was doing there. Surely he couldn’t think I was part of all this.
Longville saw me standing there in a daze. He raised his cudgel above his head and walked steadily toward me. I didn’t need any more warning. I turned and ran, not bothering to look back until I was halfway home.
My chest hurt from the smoke and all the running. I just had to stop. I was crying and shaking so hard I could hardly find my way. Everything was a living nightmare through the shattered lens of my glasses.
“Lost your way Titus?” A familiar voice behind me made me jump.
Tom Abrams was there, holding a pad and paper.
“What are you doing here, Tom?” There was reproach in my voice.
“The question is, what are you doing here, Titus. Your uncle sent me to find you when he realized you weren’t home in your bed.”
“Am I in big trouble?” I asked.
“I figure so.”
He put his pad and paper in his coat pocket and took my arm. I let him lead me home.
Uncle Amos was in the kitchen holding chipped ice to his head.
I wanted to ask where Lemuel was, but the words wouldn’t come. All I could do was cry and shake. Tom asked though, and Uncle Amos told us that Lemuel was helping the constable to arrest the hooligans.
What good will that do? I thought. The damage is already done.
I couldn’t stop shaking, so Mercy fetched a blanket, put me on a chair, and wrapped me tight. She put some water from the kettle in a basin so I could warm my feet. I winced at the heat, but it felt good. Still, I couldn’t answer when Mrs. Ryan asked where I’d been.
“Tom, what happened to him?” she demanded.
“Ah, Mrs. Ryan, it’s a long story.”
“Is it to do with the fire south of here?” she asked.
“She could see the light from the parlor window,” Uncle Amos told Tom. “Is it what I think it is?”
My uncle was as pale as the bandage someone had wrapped around his head. Tom sat down next to him and they talked about what had happened. Tom jotted down notes for the article he intended to write for his paper. Uncle Amos was more than ready to talk, though he had to stop now and then to rest. Tom asked me questions too, but I could only shake and cry like some helpless baby.
Tom left soon after.
“Come here lad,” my uncle said, patting the chair next to him. He put his arm around me and pressed tight as if to will the shakes out of me.
Mrs. Ryan watched the two of us and said, “There are two men in need of tending I see.” She took off my glasses and shook her head over them.
“We’ll get these fixed as soon as possible, won’t we Amos.” she said.
I don’t remember much after that because I must have dozed off. Mrs. Ryan woke me to help me up to bed. She tried to unbutton my shirt, but I pushed her hands away. She sighed, almost said something, changed her mind, and left the room. The wail of a baby drifted up the stairs. All at once I remembered Moses and Mr. Croucher were hiding in the woods.
“Mrs. Ryan?” I called out. “Isabelle!”
She rushed back. “What is it, Titus? Are you all right?”
“The Crouchers. They’re in the woods. Their house was burnt.” My voice shook. “Can you send Lemuel to find them? Moses and his pa are going to be cold, so cold.”
“You get to bed right away, and I’ll see what I can do to find them.”
I felt a burden lift off of me. Mrs. Ryan left only to return with a warmed brick, wrapped in a towel, to put at my feet. That seemed to help a little. She sat down on the bed, “I’ll go out to find Lemuel right away and Constable Puddicombe. Don’t you worry. We’ll find them.”
I was still trembling like a leaf in the wind on a fall day. She watched me struggle for a while then pushed my hair back on my forehead. Her palm was warm, and for that second the shaking stopped. When she removed her hand, it began again.
“Oh, Titus,” she whispered. There were tears in her eyes, and she leaned over to kiss my cheek. “Sleep well, child, and call for me if you need anything.”
I nodded to let her know I understood. Then, she blew the candle out. No flames to frighten me.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
Those were the last words I spoke for a very long time.
CHAPTER
23
Whenever I closed my eyes that night, everything came back to me. If I lay with my eyes open, I was fine. I listened to the cry of the baby downstairs, that stopped and started over and over again. I heard the groans of the others, sick in our hospital. I don’t know if I slept at all. All I remember is lying awake, afraid to close my eyes. But some time around dawn I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew, Lem was standing next to my bed and sunlight was coming through the windows. He looked tired and angry. I pulled the blankets up to my chin, thinking maybe he was mad at me.
“It’s time to get up,” he said and threw some clean clothes at me. I pulled the covers over my head. “Didn’t you hear me? I said get up.”
Lem told me I should stop acting like a baby, and there was work to be done. What kind of work, I wasn’t sure but I was sure that Uncle Amos and Lem had something planned.
I pulled my pants on over my long underwear. It was another cold morning. I noticed how quiet it was. Baby Ogden wasn’t crying anymore. I wondered if he had survived through the night.
Lem’s heavy footsteps followed me down the stairs. I stopped at the parlor-turned-hospital door. Mrs. Croucher sat, in the room, with the baby in her arms. He was very still. She looked up at me and smiled. I went closer and reached out my finger to touch Ogden’s cheek. It was warm and soft. I br
eathed a sigh of relief.
In the kitchen Mercy and Mrs. Ryan were bustling around heating water, making porridge, and putting bread into the oven. They must have been up all night looking after the sorry Sullivan lot and their patients.
“Are you feeling better, Titus?” Mrs. Ryan wiped her hands on the apron and felt my forehead. I nodded. “Come. Sit down and have some breakfast.” She scooped the porridge into a bowl and set it in front of me.
“You’re awful quiet this morning,” Mrs. Ryan said, as she prepared a tray for Mrs. Croucher. Beulah had come into the kitchen and was eating across from me. I passed her the maple sugar and shrugged my shoulders at Mrs. Ryan.
“Cat got your tongue?” Mercy asked me as she wrung out her cloth. “You are never at a loss for words.”
She turned her back and wiped the sink down. She then began on the sideboard. I tried once more to say something and then gave up. I threw my spoon down into the bowl of porridge, splattering the top of the table. Beulah looked up, alarmed.
Mercy turned around and yelled at me. “Watch what you’re doing. There’s enough to clean up as it is.”
I ran up to my room with her words following me and slammed the door behind me. I flopped down on the bed and cried some more. The shakes started coming back, so I crawled under the blankets and tried to warm up.
Mrs. Ryan entered the room soon after. “What’s wrong with you, Titus? All the slamming and noise is scaring the baby.”
I heard Ogden’s thin wail and wanted to say I was sorry, but I only turned my head and looked out the window at the dreary first day of spring.
“I’m off to school then,” she said as she pulled my quilt up to my chin. “Mercy will need you to run to the apothecary and pick this up.” Mrs. Ryan handed me a list Uncle Amos had written on a small scrap of paper.
The last thing I wanted to do was leave the house. I was scared John or Max would get me and hurt me too. I started to shake even more, but I held out my hand for the paper. I didn’t want to admit to her that I was afraid. She gave me the paper with a puzzled look on her face. She shook her head, turned around, and left the room. I followed her after a few seconds.
At the store groups of men were talking about the events of the night before. I tried not to listen but couldn’t help it.
“I say we shouldn’t have done it,” one man said.
“They deserved what they got, trying to take an honest man’s work from him,” another said.
“They’re honest men too, Bob.”
“I never trusted the likes of them. Why would they work for less money unless they were dishonest?”
“That is the most ill-founded bit of logic I’ve ever heard. They were probably forced to work for less.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute. They was trying to work us out of a day’s wage.”
On and on it went as I stood close by. So many thoughts swirled in my head and none of them were good just yet. Mostly I was just afraid. This town that I had called home was not my town anymore. I no longer wanted to belong to it. If Aunt Sadie had come that day to tell me I was going to London with her, I would have gone gladly.
“Well they got their comeuppance and I won’t shed a tear,” the loudmouth said. “I was glad to be a part of it, clearing our town of riffraff and good riddance to ’em.” He patted his belly and smiled.
I hadn’t seen him till now, but Mr. Wakefield stepped out from behind the men, winked at me, and said, “There’s a young man present and I think you should mind your manners – set an example of honesty and good will. We wouldn’t want him turning into the likes of you.”
“Who the heck are you to tell me how to behave in my own town? Seems to me we might chase your kind out of here too!”
“I would like to see you try.” James Wakefield’s voice was quiet but there was steel in it. He took a step toward the man.
“I got no bone to pick with you, brother,” the man said.
He put his hands up in the air as if to keep Mr. Wakefield away from him. His voice was a little shaky. He then turned around and walked rapidly away from us.
“See that you keep it that way,” Wakefield said to the man’s retreating back.
He tipped his hat to me. I watched him with my mouth open; I was that surprised. He waited for me to say something, but all I could do was shake my head.
CHAPTER
24
Most of them said it was just white men protecting white women. But Mercy and I knew different because we knew John, and we knew the Crouchers and their neighbors. We would have sided with them any day against John Longville when it came to integrity.
Mercy spent the day complaining about her aunt and what had happened that night. I couldn’t complain along with her, only nod my head.
“I don’t know why anybody’d believe that old cow. I’m sure she stumbled into the road herself. Everyone knows how much she drinks.”
But it really didn’t matter much if that was the truth or not. What mattered was how people had reacted to it. Uncle Amos says most people want to believe things that confirm their own prejudices. They’d rather hang on to their narrow beliefs than accept something new.
“Change is painful, son,” he told me, “especially if the change comes by having to face your own faults.”
But I was thinking powerful thoughts. Let’s say Mrs. Mabee was pushed off of the sidewalk by a black man. It still wouldn’t seem right that all the colored people should suffer. And I reckon, don’t you, that burning someone’s home is more powerful wrong than pushing someone in the mud.
See, when I was pushed down last year at school, I didn’t go burning down no one’s home. I don’t figure I would have got away with it. No sir! The punishment would have been something fierce – maybe even jail.
I could almost hear Aunt Sadie calling to me real clear. “Two wrongs don’t make a right, no matter how you look at it.”
Maybe Aunt Sadie wasn’t such a bad sort after all. She was like medicine: miserable as all heck when you’re swallowing the stuff, but good for you in the long run. She also was easier on the mind when she wasn’t able to stick her nose in all my business.
I sat listening to Mercy while she mixed some of the medicine powder I’d brought home into the boiling water. I wanted to tell her my thoughts, but it would have been awful slow to write them all down on paper just then. Besides, she was too busy to pay me any mind.
I didn’t dare sit with Mrs. Croucher in the hospital room. I didn’t know if she was aware of all the goings on yet, and I was afraid she’d be able to read something in my face about it if I sat with her long enough. I took the paper that the powder had been wrapped in and wrote these words on it.
The men at the store want to chase every last Negro out of town. What if they find out Mrs. Croucher is here?
Mercy glanced over at me while she stirred, then came up behind my chair and rested her hands on my shoulders while she slowly read the note.
I wrote another question at the bottom of the paper. Does Mrs. Croucher know what happened last night?
“I don’t rightly know what all happened myself. Can you tell me, Titus?”
I shook my head. A shiver ran through me and the shakes began again. Mercy didn’t seem to have the patience for that, and went back to her mixing.
I could feel a chilly draft on my feet. Someone had opened the door. It was Lemuel, back from looking for the constable. I wrote Mrs. Croucher should know what happened. We need to find her husband and Moses and get them all out of town.
Lemuel came into the kitchen and stood next to Mercy while they read my paper.
“I found the constable. He’s rounding up some help to arrest the men responsible for the riot.” Lem paused. “Titus is right. We have to find the Crouchers and get them all out of here safely.”
They’re hiding in the woods, I wrote.
“What’s wrong, Titus? You still not talking?”
I looked up to catch Mercy sending him an angry lo
ok. Lemuel was confused and a little irritated. I didn’t blame him because he had probably seen what happened last night too, and he could still speak.
I began to wonder where Uncle Amos was. I supposed he might be sleeping off his concussion upstairs. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Up to now, I hadn’t even thought of going into the woods to find Moses, but all of a sudden I had to know if he was alive or dead. I got my slate and wrote, I’m going to find Moses, and showed it to Lem.
Lem told me that I wasn’t to set foot outside the house and that Uncle Amos had found many Negroes in the woods and was setting broken arms and binding wounds. Lemuel grabbed food from the pantry and loaded it into a leather satchel while he spoke. He told Mercy he would be back around suppertime and with no explanation at all, he left. Mercy had it figured out. “He’s taking it to the people in the woods,” she told me.
I jumped up from the chair and ran after my big brother. He was in the barn saddling the horse. I yanked at his arm and tried to choke out my warning, but the words wouldn’t come.
“Slow down,” Lem said. He took me over by the window and gave me a nail that was lying on the sill. “Spell it out.”
Be careful. It took me a while to scrape this into the new wood, and those words can still be seen today.
“All right, Titus,” Lem said. “I’ll take Tom Abrams with me. We’ll make sure no one sees where we’re going.”
I was thankful that Tom was going with him and nodded my head over and over again.
“Don’t worry, Titus. I’ll be back, and then we’ll find a way to get Mrs. Croucher’s whole family together again.”
I was so thankful I hugged him and then hugged the horse’s neck too! I watched from the barn door as Lem headed toward Tom’s place. My teeth chattered as I headed back to the house.