Transgressions, Volume 4

by Ed McBain

  The war came to Augusta on stretchers and in the form of food shortages and lack of mercantile goods—but never on horseback with flags flying and the sound of bugles. Augusta thought it would, of course. When Sherman marched to the sea by way of Savannah, troops crowded into the city to defend it, and the city fathers piled up bales of cotton, ready to torch them and the rest of the town with it to keep the powder works and the arsenal out of Union hands, but Sherman ignored them and pushed on north into South Carolina.

  Three months later the war ended, and federal troops did come to occupy the city.

  “I am a throne, Grandison!” Tommy Wilson announced one May morning. “And Madison here, he’s only a dominion.”

  “That’s fine,” he said without a glance at the two boys. He was cleaning out the little work room at the college on Telfair Street. It had been his headquarters and his storage room for thirteen years now, but the war was over and he was free. It was time to be his own master now somewhere else. He thought he might cross the river to Hamburg. Folks said that the Yankees over there were putting freedmen into jobs to replace the white men. He would have to see.

  Tommy Wilson’s words suddenly took shape in his mind. “A throne?” he said. “I thought a throne was a king’s chair.”

  “Well, a throne can be that,” said Tommy, with the air of one who is determined to be scrupulously fair. “But it’s also a rank of angels. We’re playing angels, me and Madison. We’re going to go out and convert the heathens.”

  “Well, that’s a fine thing, boys. You go and—what heathens?”

  “The soldiers,” said Madison.

  Tommy nodded. “They misbehave something awful, you know. They drink and fight and take the Lord’s name in vain.”

  “And by God we’re gonna fix ’em,” said Madison.

  “Does your father know where you are?”

  Tommy nodded. “He said I could play outside.”

  Madison Newton shrugged. “Mr. Hope don’t care where I go. He’s living up at my house now, but he’s not my daddy. He says he’s gonna take Momma and their new babies up north with him, but me and Cissie can’t go.”

  Grandison nodded. Fanny Newton was now called Fanny Hope, and she had two more babies with magnolia skin and light eyes. He wondered what would become of Dr. George’s two children.

  “Don’t you go bothering the soldiers now,” he told the boys. “They might shoot the both of you.”

  Tommy Wilson grinned happily. “Then we shall be angels for real.”

  “Do we call you judge now, Mr. Harris?” Either the war or the worry of family had turned Miss Alethea into an old woman. Her hair was nearly white now, and she peered up at him now through the thick lenses of rimless spectacles.

  He had taken his family to live across the river in South Carolina, but he still came back to Augusta on the occasional errand. That morning he had met Miss Alethea as she hobbled along Broad Street, shopping basket on her arm, bound for the market. He smiled and gave her a courtly bow. “Why, you may call me judge if it pleases you, ma’am,” he said. “But I don’t expect I’ll be seeing you in court, Miss Alethea. I’ll be happy to carry your shopping basket in exchange for news of your fine family. How have you been?”

  “Oh, tolerable,” she said with a sigh. “My eyes aren’t what they used to be—fine sewing in a bad light, you know. The boys are doing all right these days, grown and gone you know. But I do have young Madison and Cissie staying with me now. Mr. James Hope has taken their mother off to New York with him. Their little girls, too. You know they named the youngest after me? Little Alethea.” She sighed. “I do miss them. But tell me about you, Mr. Harris. A judge now, under the new Reconstruction government! What’s that like?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t do big law. Just little matters. Fighting drunks. Disturbing the peace. Stealing trifling things—chickens, not horses.” They both smiled. “But when I come into the court, they all have to stand up and show me respect. I do like that. I expect Fanny—er, Mrs. Hope—knows what I mean, being up there in New York and all.”

  The old woman sighed. “She hates it up there—would you credit it? Poor James Hope is beside himself with worry. Thought he was handing her heaven on a plate, I reckon. Come north where there’s been no slaves for fifty years, and maybe where nobody knows that Fanny is a woman of color anyhow. Be really free.” She shook her head. “Don’t you suppose he expected her to thank God for her deliverance and never want to come back.”

  “I did suppose it,” he said.

  “So did the Hopes. But she’s homesick and will not be swayed. Why, what do you suppose Mr. James Hope did? He took Fanny to meet with Frederick Douglass. The great man himself! As if Mr. Douglass didn’t have better things to do than to try to talk sense into a little Georgia girl. He did his best, though, to convince her to stay. She’ll have none of it.”

  “Do you hear from her, Miz Alethea?”

  She nodded. “Regular as clockwork. In every letter she sounds heartbroken. She misses me and her brothers and sisters. Misses Madison and Cissie something fierce. She says she hates northern food. Hates the cold weather and that ugly city full of more poor folks and wickedness than there is in all of Georgia. Fanny has her heart set on coming home.”

  “But if she stays up there, she could live white, and her children could be white folks.”

  Alethea Taylor stared. “Why would she want to do that, Mr. Harris?”

  She already knew the answer to that, of course, but stating the truth out loud would only incur her wrath, so he held his peace, and wished them all well.

  A year later, James and Fanny Hope did return to take up residence in Augusta, and perhaps it was best that they had, for Miz Alethea died before another year was out. At least she got to be reunited with her family again, and he was glad of that.

  He did not go to the burying. They laid her to rest in Cedar Grove, and he forced himself to go for the sake of their long acquaintance. At least she would rest in peace. He alone was sure of that.

  He wished that she had lived to see her new grandson, who was born exactly a year after his parents returned from the North. The Hopes named the boy John, and he was as blond and blue-eyed as any little Scotsman.

  Privately Grandison had thought Fanny had been crazy to come back south when she could have passed in New York and dissolved her children’s heritage in the tide of immigrants. But before the end of the decade, he knew he had come round to her way of thinking, for he quit his post of judge in South Carolina, and went back over the river to work at the medical school. Perhaps there were people talking behind his back then, calling him a graven fool, as he had once thought Fanny Hope, but now he had learned the hard way. For all the promises of the Reconstruction men, he got no respect as a judge. The job was a sham whose purpose was not to honor him or his people, but to shame the defeated Rebels. He grew tired of being stared at by strangers whose hatred burned through their feigned respect, and as the days went by, he found himself remembering the medical school with fondness.

  He had been good at his job, and the doctors had respected his skills. Sometimes he even thought they forgot about his color. Dr. George had said something once about the difference being a thin layer of skin, and then underneath it was all the same. Many of the faculty had left during the war, but one by one they were coming back now to take up their old jobs at the medical college, and he knew that he was wishing he could join them as well.

  He was wearing his white linen suit, a string tie, and his good black shoes. He stood in front of the desk of Dr. Louis Dugas, hat in hand, waiting for an answer.

  Dugas, a sleek, clean-shaven man who looked every inch a French aristocrat, had taken over as dean of the college during the war years. In his youth he had studied in Paris, as Dr. George had, and it was Dugas who had traveled to Europe to purchase books for Augusta’s medical library. It was said that he had dined with Lafayette himself. Now he looked puzzled. Fixing his glittering black eyes on Harris’s face i
n a long-nosed stare, he said, “Just let me see if I understand you, my good man. You wish to leave a judiciary position across the river and come back here to work as a porter.”

  Grandison inclined his head. “I do, sir.”

  “Well, I don’t wish to disparage the virtues of manual labor, as I am sure that the occupation of porter is an honorable and certainly a necessary one, but could you just tell me why it is that you wish to abandon your exalted legal position for such a job?”

  He had been ready for this logical question, and he knew better than to tell the whole truth. The law had taught him that, at least. Best not to speak of the growing anger of defeated white men suddenly demoted to second-class citizens by contemptuous strangers. He’d heard tales of a secret society that was planning to fight back at the conquerors and whoever was allied with them. But as much as the rage of the locals made him uneasy, the patronizing scorn of his federal overseers kindled his own anger. They treated him like a simpleton, and he came to realize that he was merely a pawn in a game between the white men, valued by neither side. It would be one thing to have received a university education and then to have won the job because one was qualified to do it. Surely they could have found such a qualified man of color in the North, and if not, why not? But to be handed the job only as a calculated insult to others—that made a mockery of his intelligence and skills. At least the doctors had respected him for his work and valued what he did. Fifteen years he’d spent with them.

  Best not to speak of personal advantage—of the times in the past when he had prevailed upon one or another of the doctors to treat some ailing neighbor or an injured child who might otherwise have died. The community needed a conduit to the people in power—he could do more good there than sentencing his folks to chain gangs across the river.

  Best not to say that he had come to understand the practice of medicine and that, even as he approached his fiftieth year, he wanted to know more.

  At last he said simply, “I reckon I miss y’all, Dr. Dugas.”

  Louis Dugas gave him a cold smile that said that he himself would never put sentiment before other considerations, but loyalty to oneself is a hard fault to criticize in a supplicant. “Even with the procuring of the bodies for the dissection table? You are willing to perform that task again as before?”

  We must mutilate the dead so that we do not mutilate the living. He must believe that above all.

  He nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Very well then. Of course we must pay you now. The rate is eight dollars per month, I believe. Give your notice to the South Carolina court and you may resume your post here.”

  And it was done. What he had entered into by compulsion as a slave so many years before, he now came to of his own volition as a free man. He would return to the cart and the lantern and the shovel and begin again.

  Well, all that was a long time ago. It is a new century now, and much has changed, not all of it for the better.

  He steps out into the night air. The queasy medical student has tottered away to his rooms, and now the building can be locked again for the night. He still has his key, and he will do it himself, although his son George is the official porter now at the medical college—not as good as he himself once was, but what of that? Wasn’t the faculty now packed with pale shadows—the nephews and grandsons of the original doctors? A new century, not a patch on the old one for all its motorcars and newfangled gadgets.

  He will walk home down Ellis Street, past the house where James and Fanny Hope had raised their brood of youngsters. One of the Hope daughters lived there now, but that was a rarity these days. There was a colored quarter in Augusta now, not like the old days when people lived all mixed together and had thought nothing about it.

  James and Fanny Hope had enjoyed eight years in that house on Ellis Street, before a stroke carried him off in 1876. They had let his white kinfolk take him back to New York for burying. Better to have him far away, Fanny Hope had said, than separated from us by a cemetery wall here in Augusta.

  Fanny raised her brood of eight alone, and they did her credit. She had lived three years into the twentieth century, long enough to see her offspring graduate from colleges and go on to fine careers. Little blue-eyed John Hope was the best of them, folks said. He had attended Brown University up north, and now he was president of a college in Atlanta. So was little Tommy Wilson, the white preacher’s son, who now went by his middle name of Woodrow, and was a “throne” at Princeton College up north. You never could tell about a child, how it would turn out.

  Though he never told anyone, Grandison had hoped that Dr. George’s son Madison might be the outstanding one of Fanny’s children, but he had been content to work at low wage jobs in Augusta and to care for his aging mother. He and Dr. George had that in common—neither of the sons had surpassed them.

  Funny to think that he had outlived the beautiful Fanny Hope. In his mind she is still a poised and gentle young girl, and sometimes he regrets that he did not go to her burying in Cedar Grove. The dead rested in peace there now, for the state had legalized the procuring of cadavers by the medical schools some twenty years back, but around that time, rumors had surfaced in the community about grave robbing. Where had the doctors got the bodies all those years for their dissecting classes? Cedar Grove, of course. There was talk of a riot. Augusta had an undertaker now for people of color. The elegant Mr. Dent, with his fancy black oak hearse with the glass panels, and the plumed horses to draw it along in style. Had John or Julia Dent started those rumors to persuade people to be embalmed so the doctors wouldn’t get you? There had been sharp looks and angry mutterings at the time, for everyone knew who had been porter at the medical college for all these years, but he was an old man by then, a wiry pillar of dignity in his white suit, and so they let him alone, but he did not go to buryings anymore.

  The night air is cool, and he takes a deep breath, savoring the smell of flowers borne on the wind. He hears no voices in the wind, and dreams no dreams of dead folks reproaching him for what he has done. In a little while, a few months or years at most, for he is nearly ninety, he too will be laid to rest in Cedar Grove among the empty grave sites, secret monuments to his work. He is done with this world, with its new machines and the new gulf between the races. Sometimes he wonders if there are two heavens, so that Fanny Hope will be forever separated from her husbands by some celestial fence, but he rather hopes that there is no hereafter at all. It would be simpler so. And in all his dissecting he has never found a soul.

  He smiles on the dark street, remembering a young minister who had once tried to persuade him to attend a funeral. “Come now, Mr. Harris,” the earnest preacher had said. “There is nothing to fear in a cemetery. Surely those bodies are simply the discarded husks of our departed spirits. Surely the dead are no longer there.”

  New York Times bestselling author and MWA Grandmaster Ed McBain has gathered ten masters of modern fiction and had them each write a novella for this one-of-a-kind series. Look for more Transgressions featuring new tales from these bestselling authors:

  Lawrence Block

  Jeffery Deaver

  John Farris

  Stephen King

  Ed McBain

  Sharyn McCrumb

  Walter Mosley

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Anne Perry

  Donald E. Westlake

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Allen, Lane. “Grandison Harris, Sr.: Slave, Resurrectionist and Judge.” Athens, GA: Bulletin of the Georgia Academy of Science, 34:192—199.

  Ball, James M. The Body Snatchers. New York: Dorset Press, 1989.

  Blakely, Robert L, and Judith M. Harrington. Bones in the Basement: Post Mortem Racism in Nineteenth Century Medical Training. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1997.

  Burr, Virginia Ingraham, ed. The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1848-1889. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

  Cashin, Edward J. Old Springfield: Race
and Religion in Augusta, Georgia. Augusta, GA: The Springfield Village Park Assoc. 1995.

  Corley, Florence Fleming. Confederate City: Augusta, Georgia 1860-1865. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press; Rpt. Spartanburg, SC: The Reprint Company, 1995.

  Davis, Robert S. Georgia Black Book: Morbid Macabre and Disgusting Records of Genealogical Value. Greenville, SC: Southern Historical Press, 1982.

  Fido, Martin. Body Snatchers: A History of the Resurrectionists. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988.

  Fisher, John Michael. Fisher & Watkins Funeral Home, Danville, VA. Personal Interview, March 2003.

  Kirby, Bill. The Place We Call Home: A Collection of Articles About Local History from the Augusta Chronicle. Augusta, GA: The Augusta Chronicle, 1995.

  Lee, Joseph M. III. Images of America: Augusta and Summerville. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2000.

  Spalding, Phinizy. The History of the Medical College of Georgia. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997.

  Torrence, Ridgely. The Story of John Hope. New York: Macmillan, 1948.

  United States Census Records: Richmond County, GA: 1850; 1860; 1870; 1880; 1990.

  Notes

  1 Note: The Sacrifice of the Corn Maiden is a composite drawn from traditional sacrificial rituals of the Iroquois, Pawnee, and Blackfoot Indian tribes.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright Acknowledgments