Proper ladies don’t involve themselves in such matters; but I was overwhelmed by her outraged dignity and sorrow, and blurted out, “Ida, I saw that mob assemble. Mr. Peterson and Mr. Carmack were both there, masked like the others.”
As soon as I’d said it, I wanted to call back the words. Wouldn’t you? It was dangerous to know such things, more dangerous still to speak of them. But Ida did not seem shocked. “Yes, a friend said he thought he’d seen them. It’s not surprising. Carmack writes hateful editorials. But they won’t admit to being there, and they won’t identify any of their friends in the newspapers and certainly not in the courts. There will be no justice for Tommie.”
In my head Aunt Mollie was in full bray, pointing out that I must avoid the anger of armed, masked gentlemen, and that I’d best get me some money quick and light out for St. Louis, and other sensible businesslike things. But Ida’s words batter’d me like roaring cannon-shot. I took a deep breath. “Suppose someone white testified against them?”
Ida looked at me with pity. “If you have any foolish notions about testifying, forget them. You’re white, yes, that’s a great advantage. But you’re a woman, and an outsider, and an actress. They will make your reputation the jest and byword of the street.”
She was right, of course. This was not the first time I had faced the dreadful prejudices against those in my profession. I could not help Ida’s cause in the courtroom.
I tried again. “Perhaps I could speak to a judge privately, and he could call for official inquiries.”
“My dear Bridget, the criminal court judge too was a member of that mob.”
“Oh.”
“There will be no justice in this case.”
I could almost hear Aunt Mollie breathing a sigh of relief as I realized the hopelessness of the situation. I turned sadly back to cleaning my gown and asked, “Ida, can you safely publish this story in your newspaper?”
“Safely? No. But publish it I will,” she said firmly. “So much education is needed! Even I believed the lie that lynching occurs because of unreasoning outrage at the violation of an innocent woman. There is much work to do among both races to dispel that lie. But white people don’t read my newspaper. I can tell my people the truth, and I will. But Bridget, how can I tell yours?”
That was a difficult problem indeed. Even I, kindhearted as I was, had done my best to avoid noticing these horrors. I said slowly, “Well, they have revealed their weakness with this lynching. As you say, what they fear is not damage to white womanhood, after all. It is not even being shot, for when a man of their own race shoots at them, they allow fair trials to take place. No, what they fear is colored success. Tommie’s grocery won your race’s patronage, and they killed him. That means they fear the loss of your business.”
“So we are not powerless after all. We must use our power. But how?” Ida began to pace up and down the porch, ignoring the flapping garments on the line. “Ah, Oklahoma is opening up. Tommie said, turn our faces to the west. I’ll urge my people to move west!” Ida paused in the light from the kitchen window, her small immaculately dressed person erect, her luminous eyes flashing. “There is only one thing left that we can do; save our money and leave behind a cruel town which will neither protect us nor give us a fair and legal trial, but instead murders us in cold blood!”
I applauded. “Ida, that will work! Money always works!”
“I only wish I could make them see the immorality of their actions.”
“I fear they are not yet rich enough to be moral.”
“Was your brother rich?”
“Well, no, but he was hired by the Northern army.”
“The money’s northern, even now,” Ida pointed out. “Our streetcar line is owned by northern capitalists, although it’s run by southern lynchers. Suppose we stop riding the streetcar? We walked before it was built, we can walk again!”
“Good! Withholding patronage from the streetcar may catch the attention of northerners too. And here’s another idea!” I exclaimed. “Ida, go on stage! Tell your story, just as you’ve told it to me. Other white people will be as moved as I if they hear you tell of these outrages. But don’t go west. Go north, and speak to the moneyed classes. Southerners look up to those with money!”
“I don’t know,” Ida said dubiously. “My acquaintance Mr. Fortune is the editor of a New York newspaper, and he tells me that it’s difficult to get white people to read it there too. It’s like a great stone wall without a door.”
“Then talk to those who are richer and more powerful than New Yorkers! Tell your story to the English, Ida!”
“The English?”
“They are rich and powerful and highly moral. Well, most of them,” I amended, thinking of my friend Lillie Langtry, but deciding not to mention her, as Ida was so proper that she might be offended. “And furthermore, the English have nothing to lose if your race gets justice in faraway America, so they can afford to be moral. And their opinion carries great weight among influential people in this country.”
“But would they listen to a person of my race? To someone who was born a slave? To an American?”
I looked at her short, trimly attired person, her blazing eyes, her face, so vivid in its darkness, and smiled. “The English will find your story mesmerizing, Ida, because you’ll tell it in the ringing accents of their own beloved Mrs. Fanny Kemble.”
“So learning the rich folks’ language can be a weapon too!” Ida bounced to the edge of the porch and raised both hands to the starry sky. “Do you hear, Tommie?” she cried. “We shall have justice yet!”
Well, I reckoned justice would take a while, but there was no need to say that to Ida Wells, who understood the world at least as well as I. She hurried off to write an editorial urging her people to move away from Memphis if they could, and to save their money and avoid the streetcar.
I hurried off, too, to pawn one of my genuine theatrical emerald necklaces before the pawnshops closed, and to purchase a ticket to St. Louis from the reprehensible Chesapeake and Ohio. Then I donned my blond wig and my striped dress trimmed with white guipure lace, screwed my courage to the sticking place, and made my way to Front Street.
I know, I know, it wasn’t proper to return to such low haunts, and it was mighty risky besides, and in the usual run of things I never would have done it. But somehow Ida’s words kept ringing in my head and nudging me on.
In the tavern, several of the gentlemen kindly offered their companionship, but I declined firmly and ordered a catfish dinner, which the innkeeper agreed to bring if I first paid for my interrupted dinner of Tuesday night. Presently, who should appear but my acquaintance of the waxed blond mustache.
“Why, Mr. Peterson!” I exclaimed with a shocked flutter of my eyelashes. “What am I to think of you?”
“My dear Miss Mooney! I beg your forgiveness!” He adjusted his gunbelt and dropped to one knee with an extravagant flourish of his hat. A couple of men in the room snickered, but lordie, his blue eyes and golden hair were handsome!
I gave him my prettiest pout. “Sir, it was not gentlemanly to leave a lady for so long.”
“You are right, and you have my most fervent apologies. My business took considerably longer than I had anticipated, and I was desolate to think that you awaited me still. It was a matter of honor and of justice.”
“It is true, sir, that the moment I first saw you, I took you for a gentleman of honor and justice.”
“True, journalists too serve society. When the law is sure to fail, journalists too fight for justice!”
Hang it, how could a lady resist such a touching apology and such a kindly regard for justice? “‘We will solicit heaven and move the gods / To send down justice for to wreak our wrongs!’” I quoted, and smiled at him. “And when the law is sure to fail, heaven sends down journalists! Please, sir, sit down.”
He called for a whiskey and took the other chair at my table with a hopeful glint in his blue eyes. “Thank you, my dear Miss Mooney, for your u
nderstanding. It is delightful to meet again.”
“It is a pleasure to renew my acquaintance with a man of intellect, who helps society by publishing the truth.”
He beamed. Handsome blond gentlemen have little difficulty believing that they also possess intellect. “It is true,” he said. “Mr. Carmack and I are devoted to the betterment of society.” The golden fleur-de-lis on his watch fob winked at me as he added gallantly, “I must say, the company of a lovely blond lady who knows Shakespeare is pure delight!”
“My dear Mr. Peterson,” I said, leaning near so that he could appreciate my Parisian perfume, “I would be very pleased to discuss justice and journalism at greater length, but I find it very close in here, and fear that I may faint. Do you suppose we could take the air for a few moments?”
“An enchanting idea! But it is rather cool, and there is mist on the river,” he warned.
“So much the better!” I exclaimed, most sincerely. “Nothing could be more helpful for light-headedness. Let us take a stroll along the riverside.”
With a triumphant wink at his fellows, Mr. Peterson downed the rest of his whiskey, peeled a bill from his roll for the innkeeper, and offered me his arm. We made a lovely pair, yes indeed, such a blond and handsome couple! Smiling into each other’s eyes, we passed through the tavern door into the night.
Mr. Peterson’s friends never saw him again.
The next morning, a redhead once more, I redeemed my emerald necklace from the pawnshop, then collected my baggage and bid farewell to Ida. “Bend every effort to addressing the public,” I urged her. “Your splendid voice moves people to action.”
“It is not my voice, it is the justice of my cause,” she said earnestly.’ “And you too will tell the truth to those you meet?”
“I will do what I can,” I said, and handed her a blue-black pistol. “I hope you never have to use it, Ida. But even the most proper of ladies must occasionally defend herself.”
Her expressive eyes glowed with pleasure upon receiving the gun she was forbidden to purchase. “Thank you, Bridget! I too pray that I never have occasion to use it, but I promise you, if I must die by violence, I will take my persecutors with me!”
I know, I know, I shouldn’t have given it to her, but she might well need courage, and I only had room in my pocket for one Colt. Besides, I had the feeling that Tommie Moss would be pleased to see one of the guns that killed him in the hands of his crusading friend.
And crusade she did. Within a few weeks, at Ida’s urging in the Free Press, hundreds of colored people disposed of their property and left town, leaving Memphis businessmen reeling. Six weeks after the lynching, the superintendent of the streetcar company came to the Free Press offices and begged Ida to use her influence to get the colored people to ride the streetcars again, because the company’s losses were enormous. She naturally refused. In late May, when she was out of town, Mr. Carmack took exception to her editorial that revealed the truth about false accusations like that of my friend Phoebe, and he incited a mob to destroy the office of the Free Press.
That didn’t stop Ida Wells. She began writing for Mr. Fortune in New York and telling her story to women’s clubs and church groups. Through them she met the famed English Quaker Mrs. Impey, editor of Anti-Caste. At Mrs. Im-pey’s invitation, Ida was soon in England and Scotland rousing the churches and newspapers there to protest lynching. They raised such a clamor that this nation could no longer ignore the problem. Chastised by the valor of Ida’s tongue, Americans of both races formed antilynching societies all over the United States. There were setbacks in Congress due to southern filibusters, but more and more prominent whites publicly opposed lynching, and slowly, mob rule receded.
Justice, I fear, will be slower to arrive.
Or perhaps it arrives in scraps and fragments. Mr. Carmack, who moved to Nashville, was eventually gunned down in the streets there—but that’s another story.
As for my admirer with the blond waxed mustache, surely he could have no complaints, for he himself believed that sometimes the law is sure to fail, and for the betterment of society, other means of justice must be found. Who could argue with such estimable sentiments? His corpse washed up near Natchez a couple of weeks after I left. The verdict at the inquest was that he had died at the hands of parties unknown by the jury.
NANCY PICKARD, creator of the popular Jenny Cain mysteries, is the proud owner of possibly the most eclectic collection of honors in the field of mystery fiction. A former president of Sisters in Crime, she has won Agatha, Anthony, American Mystery, and Ma-cavity awards for her novels and short fiction. She has been nominated for the Edgar award twice and even has a Shamus award from the Private Eye Writers of America. That particular tale, “Dust Devil,” was the first and only private eye story Nancy ever wrote—until now.
A Rock and a Hard Place
Nancy Pickard
I’m not a hard woman; I’m only a private investigator. You see me, you think I’m an athlete, a tough girl, even at my age, which is fifty-one. You hear my voice, my language sometimes, you think, she’s a rough one. But I’m college educated, with two degrees, one of them in English lit, believe it or not. Besides, lifting weights never built up muscles between a person’s ears, if you see what I mean. I work out on computers more than I do at the gym, that’s the nature of this job.
It’s fairly respectable, my profession.
I’m fairly respectable, is what I’m saying, even if I do carry weapons and use them, even if I did serve in Vietnam for six months that are supposed to be top secret, even now, and even if I have witnessed sordid scenes and participated in violent acts. I still maintain I am basically a respectable and mostly law-abiding person, or I was, until recently. Now, I don’t know what I am. Except that one thing I am for sure is dying. Yeah, right, aren’t we all? No, I mean, specifically me, specifically now, from breast cancer. My doctors claim they excised it with one of those “partials,” but I don’t believe them. I hear it growing, infinitesimal and stealthy, escaping their means of detection, but not mine. The saving grace is: I’m good at guns. Things get bad, too painful, I always have my stockpile of large and little friends, the ones with the long noses and the short ones, the loud voices and the soft. Dying definitely does not scare me; I would not move one foot off the sidewalk to get out of its way.
Are we clear on all this, so far?
I was already all of those things I have just described—except the part about not knowing any longer what I am—at the moment when Grace Kairn (not her real name) applied her knuckles to a tentative knock on my office door. I looked up from my Macintosh Quadra, where I was trying to hack my way into a database I wasn’t supposed to be able to get into, and saw her: late thirties, really short blond hair, Audrey Hepburn bones, one of those women who makes a woman like me feel big and bulky and clumsy, like we’re ail muscle and cuss words and she’s all lace and fragrance.
“Hello?” she said, from my doorway. “Angela Fopeano?”
Immediately, I was awkward, not at my best, barking back at her like I was an MP and she was a private caught off base.
“Yeah!” I said.
Yeah As if my mother hadn’t raised me to say “yes,” or to be polite, to be a nice girl. Yeah. Duh. I’m Angie.
“Who are you?” I asked her, point-blank, like that.
God, sometimes I make myself cringe.
“I’m Grace Kairn, may I talk to you, do you have time?”
No appointment. I hate that. Who do people think they are, expecting me to drop everything for them? I always do, though, because one of my failings is curiosity. God knows, I would hesitate to call it intellectual. Still, I want to know, even when I’m pissed at people—who they are, what they want. People in general were starting to bore me, though, with their repetitive stories about infidelity and fraud and deception and greed. Big deal. Did they think that made them different? It was all starting to feel banal and sordid. My own clients were beginning to bore me. Bad sign for a work
ing gal. What did I think I was going to do if I didn’t solve crimes? Crimes, hah. Misdemeanors of the ego, was more like it, that was what I investigated. Who was sleeping with whom. Who cooked the books. Who stole the paper clips. Who the hell cared. Not me anymore.
Man, I sound angry, don’t I? Even I can hear it.
At least this woman asked if I had the time.
I waved her into a chair, and she looked across my desk at me with the gentlest smile I ever saw in anybody’s blue eyes. In a humble kind of way, definitely not boasting, she said, “What I have to say is … maybe … unusual.”
“Uh huh.”
Yeah right, I thought, tell me a new one, or better yet give me a cure for cancer.
“I want to hire you,” she said, concisely, gently, “to prevent three murders.”
“You have my attention,” I said, wryly. “I’m taping this.”
“All right.” Her voice was a sweet, melodic breeze across my desk, and I couldn’t imagine she could have anything so very “unusual” to tell me. In fact, her first words were ordinary, to my jaded ears. “Five years ago, before Christmas of that year, I was held up at gunpoint in a parking lot of the Oberlin South Mall.”
She was surprisingly direct, for someone so soft.
I sat back and listened.
“It was one man, with a gun, and he pushed me into the car and made me drive him out of town to a riverbank. And he raped me and shot me and left me there, thinking I was dead.”
Jesus, I thought, and was surprised to feel tears in my eyes.
I cleared my throat. “I guess you weren’t dead.”
“No.” She smiled, a wonderful, calming, gentle expression of serenity that I instantly coveted. “I was dead.”
“Okay.”
“To be specific, I was still alive when he left me, but I was bleeding to death and I was in shock and I was starting to be hypothermic, it was winter, after all, and I was lying in the snow.”
Women on the Case Page 4