Brann’s Revenge

by S. Smith

  A day or two later, Pal or as Jules called him, Sandy, ran up to greet me as I was opening the door to the toll booth. I let him in, fed him, and took him back to the Briscoe’s place. This happened day after day until it almost became part of my daily routine.

  One day, Jules said, “Red, instead of bringing Sandy back every day, why don’t you just keep him for a day or two? Then you can bring him back. That way we can share him.”

  I responded, “Jules, you are a good man. I might just take you up on that.”

  And so it went. Pal started spending more and more time at my place. Pal kept me company and Jules would come by and check on him. Jules and I became good friends. I helped him with his homework. Occasionally we’d go fishing right out my door. He had a love of music and of fishing that he got from his father. What a fisherman he was. He almost always out-fished me, but I didn’t mind. I knew the eating would be good afterwards as I often joined the Briscoes for dinner after a long day of fishing. And everywhere that I went, Pal followed. It was like having family and I enjoyed it.

  That Jules was one smart fellow. He was the smartest kid in his class, graduating at the very top. After he graduated from the academy he moved up to Dallas where he attended Bishop College, the closest Negro Baptist College to Waco. He’d come home, riding on the Interurban railway about every other weekend. Pal and I would always be there to greet him. His arrival always meant good conversation and a tasty meal from Mrs. Briscoe.

  He’d write me on occasion when he was up in Dallas. He asked how his dog Sandy was doing. I’d write him back and tease him by telling him that my dog Pal was doing fine and helping me catch a fine mess of fish.

  I was never so proud of Jules as the day he came home before graduation from Bishop and said he had been accepted at the Columbia School of Medicine in New York City. He was going to be a doctor, one of the very first colored folks to attend Columbia! I always knew that he would make something of himself. He was never one to wallow in self-pity when things didn’t go his way. He got out and did something about it and his acceptance at Columbia was proof that he was going places.

  By the time Jules graduated from Bishop, Pal was getting pretty feeble. He was about half blind. He couldn’t get around as much as he used to, which saddened me. I walked with Pal from the bridge to the train depot station on Jackson and South 8th Street to see Jules off to New York. By the time that we got there, Pal was panting and coughing. We had to stop several times along the way to let him rest. But when Jules reached down to pet him, you’d have thought that he was a young puppy again, with his tail wagging, up on his two hind legs, and dancing around like he was greeting his long-lost buddy. He was so exhausted afterward that I had to carry him back home, where he took a sip of water and then went to sleep on his pallet on the floor. I don’t know if Pal knew that Jules was going away for good or that it was just his time, but it always seemed peculiar to me that Pal never woke up after that. I was never so proud yet sad at the same time. I lost two pals that day, my dog and my friend.

  While in New York City, Jules changed his major from medicine to music. He graduated and became famous worldwide for his part in the Broadway show, “Showboat.” I always knew that no matter what he ended up doing, he would be the best at it. Once he became famous, he seemed to change. I’d write him, but I never heard anything in return from him. I suppose he was too busy with his fame to pay any mind to an ole geezer like me. I was still proud of him, yet sad that he didn’t respond. I’d always ask the Briscoes how he was doing and they’d catch me up on what was happening with my buddy, Jules.

  Shortly after Pal died, the Briscoes brought another dog over for me. They knew that I would miss Pal. But I didn’t take the new dog. Just like when Inez died, I never married and when Pal died, I never took another dog. Call it what you want, but I think it had to do with fear of loss. I’d lost everyone and everything that I had ever loved in life. The hurt was always so terribly painful, I just couldn’t stand the thought of it happening again. I’d rather be an island alone, in the midst of the vast empty ocean rather than be subject to the pain of loss again and again and again. I just couldn’t take it.

  Looking back, I think this was just plain foolishness. I was a fool not to let myself love again. I certainly had plenty of friends, but I always had my shield up and never let anyone come close to my heart. I suppose after Inez died, I didn’t believe anyone else could live up to her. Perhaps they wouldn’t have, but then again, I’ll never know as I never even tried.

  Jules was friends with the Davis kids while they were growing up. The Davis family lived on Dallas street, while the Briscoes lived close to Paul Quinn College. The kids used to pal around quite a bit and were always getting into what I liked to call “innocent mischief.” They never did anything malicious, just general cutting up and having some good fun. The younger Davis kids, although a couple of years older than Jules, took to him quite kindly. Even Mrs. Davis grew quite fond of Jules, as almost the entire town did. He was such a good kid, with such a gentle spirit.

  One day before Jules left for New York, he came over to see me. He had an envelope with him that had the letters “WCB” hand written on it. He said that Mrs. Davis had given it to him to give to me. I asked Jules what it meant, and he told me that Mr. Finnie William, who was Davis’ employer at the time of the shooting, had brought a box of items belonging to Mr. Davis over to Mrs. Davis after the shootout. In the box was this sealed envelope. She asked Mr. William where it came from and he promptly denied any knowledge of it. He had no idea where the envelope came from, who brought it over, or what was in it. He was just bringing over Davis’ work belongings. I asked Jules what was in it and he said that he asked Mrs. Davis and she just shook her head and looked down and didn’t say a word.

  I almost fainted when I heard Jule’s story and saw the envelope. I looked at Jules, to see if I could see any hint of a smile to denote that he was playing a gag on me. He assured me that he was being honest. He said that Mrs. Davis knew that he was leaving and wanted me to have the envelope before he left. I wondered why Mrs. David didn’t just give it to me directly, but then again, we were never really close friends, like she and Jules were.

  I immediately started running scenarios through my head about evidence and fingerprints. With Mr. Brann’s initials on the envelope, wasn’t this evidence of a payoff to Davis for trying to assassinate Mr. Brann? Might fingerprints be able to be lifted off of the envelope? Although by this time, it had been twenty years since the murder, I thought that perhaps there might be some evidence left. Perhaps some similarities in printing to some of the possible culprits might be able to be established. I had never directly asked Mrs. Davis about the shootings and never would since I didn’t want to bother her or even make any accusations about her husband, but this seemed like pretty hard evidence to me.

  I thanked Jules for bringing it to me. I quickly hid it in a cubbyhole inside the toll booth for safe keeping. I pondered quite some time on what I should do with it. Should I just throw it away or send it somewhere for a crime analysis? I had no idea where to send it or what to do with it, so there it sat for forty years.

  Chapter 16

  THE CURSE

  The years and the decades have gone by like the wind. While other cities in Texas have boomed, including Dallas, Ft. Worth, Houston, and San Antonio, this Baptist city of Texas declined. Waco was trying to do some good things. It built the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi, the ALICO building, which was the pride of the city. It built a beautiful courthouse blocks from the city square. But for some reason, the city didn’t see the growth its neighbors were seeing. Some speculated this was because of the dreadful reputation Brann brought upon the city. It was still considered Brannville. Waco had multiple railroads, the fertile Brazos River bottoms, and many of the same resources its neighbors had. Some called this stagnation the Curse of Brann.

  Most people forgot about the entire Brann-Davis affair. I didn’t. Many of the play
ers died from natural causes. After he founded the Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Waco, Big Brother Carroll moved the seminary and himself to Ft. Worth. He served as president and died in 1914. Doc Burleson died shortly after Mr. Brann. His demotion likely caused him to die with a broken heart. Judge Gerald’s ashes were spread out in the Gulf of Mexico, although he has a monument in Oakwood. The Davis kids all grew up to be good, bright kids.

  Meanwhile, although I did not have the festering emotional wound I once had, I never forgot what happened. I still wanted to try to get to the bottom of it.

  I stayed in the toll booth. As far as I was concerned, I was married to Inez, based on our Indian grass ring. I was widowed and could never love again. I didn’t want anything to change from my times with Inez. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much to say about the matter. Times did indeed change. I continued asking questions around town about Mr. Brann’s murder. I have to admit that there were long periods when I didn’t do much investigating, I figured there wasn’t much additional information out there. I spent a lot of time at the library doing research. Along the way, I made time to read all the classics multiple times. I crossed the River Styx plenty of times on my journeys through Dante’s Inferno, and rode Mark Twain’s riverboats and hot air balloons several times.

  I explored everything I could about the kids who kidnapped Mr. Brann. Interestingly most of them turned out to be great people. The Scarborough kid became a famous playwright. He wrote multiple silent screenplays in Hollywood. The Lovelace kid fought with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Then he became a prominent physician in Waco. The Hamilton kid served on the Texas Supreme court. He also ended up shooting his brand new son-in-law dead when the boy announced he had eloped with his daughter. He was acquitted. George McDaniel became the very famous pastor of First Baptist Church of Richmond, Virginia. And Charlie Carroll, the son of Big Brother Carroll, went on to become a pastor of several churches in Louisiana. So apparently, these young folks made some mistakes early in their lives but were not terribly scarred from it. I was happy to see their successes in life as I knew them to be but pawns in this entire mess.

  I enjoyed living and had many friends. Life was good to me and I was content. I never forgot Inez, and I never stopped loving her. Nor did I forget what she asked of me. But time is undeniably a healer, and it did heal me. At least once a week I would go out to 1st street cemetery and put a flower on my mother’s grave. Then I would go out to Oakwood and put a flower on Inez’s and her father’s grave. I always took a cloth and polished the tombstone. I kept wishing that Inez would emerge from the lamp as I rubbed it to have one last conversation with me, but it was not to be.

  This relatively peaceful era drastically changed as of May, 11, 1953. On this date, a huge tornado hit Waco and came very close to killing me. It struck the city around 4:40 in the afternoon. It started as a Texas size thunderstorm. Texas does experience thunderstorms that bring torrential rain and hail. Heat and moisture from the Gulf of Mexico generate big storms, particularly in the spring. When this happens, I smile and think, Judge Gerald is stirring things up again in the Gulf to agitate all the folks here in Waco. Everyone thought this was just another storm except for one thing. Instead of the sky being a dark blue or black like it typically was, it was an eerie green color. We’d seen green storms before and knew they were twister storms.

  According to a legend of the Hueco Indians, a twister could never directly hit Waco. The city sits too low in the valley of the Brazos River basin, so the tornadoes would just skip by. The past generations of Hueco tribes had seen twisters before but never one directly in their village. That was one of the reasons they settled here hundreds of years ago. When the white, colored, and Spanish folks moved in, the legend was still believed by the general population.

  If you’re from Texas, you are probably quite familiar with tornados and what to do if one comes close to you, or at least I hope you are. There are several different variants of tornados, from the small to the very large. They are all dangerous if you end up in their debris field. This is the area where they toss things about, which includes the funnel area. When people get hurt or killed in tornados, it’s usually from either debris hitting them at a high speed, or buildings collapsing on them. All tornados, including small ones, are dangerous. However, the small tornados have a relatively small debris field, which results in quite a narrow area of danger. Although there are many more small tornados than large ones, the larger ones are the deadly ones. A small one might rip some limbs off of a tree, but a large one can rip all of the houses out of an entire city block. There are been some large ones that have been over a mile wide on the ground.

  Since 70% of all tornados are small, they typically do only minor damage when they touch down. And since their debris field is quite small, the chance of one having a direct hit on one particular thing is quite small. On the other hand, most large tornados hit the prairies of Texas where their paths don’t encounter people or buildings, resulting in few deaths and little damage. It’s only when both of these things intersect, a mammoth tornado and a city, that disaster occurs. And that is exactly what happened to Waco on May 11, 1953 at 4:40 p.m.

  If a small tornado had hit downtown Waco, it would have caused some damage to the area. However, this was no small tornado. This was a huge F5 tornado that demolished almost everything in its path, except for certain areas. It was crazy that a building on one side of the street was destroyed while a building on the opposite side was untouched. The tornado first destroyed the Cotton Palace and the Baseball stadium. It hit the downtown area most severely. It destroyed the area that used to be the center of commerce, specifically along Franklin and Austin Avenues, and Fourth and Fifth Streets. It also hit the reservation area harshly. By this time most of the bawd houses were in bad shape, and the tornado seemed to finish them off, with the exception of Molly’s house and the loveseat tree.

  I was inside the toll booth at the time. I have never heard anything so terrifying in my life. I remember it like it was yesterday. It had been raining for hours. I was holed up in the toll booth with Madison Cooper’s epic novel about Waco that I had received from the library just the day before. I didn’t dare walk outside as the rain was coming down in sheets. It was lightning and thundering about every five to ten seconds. I remember since I was counting the time between the flashes of light and the associated rumbles of the thunder to try to determine how far off the lightning bolts had occurred. At some point, the flashes and the rumbles started coinciding with each other and I knew that things were about to get worse.

  Then I heard a small rumble in the distance that sounded like it was coming from the west. Initially I thought it was the Katy train running very early that day, at 4:30 p.m. Usually she didn’t come in until about 5 p.m., and I thought, so that can’t be her, especially in this heavy rain and not from the west. Something else is going on. The rumbling grew louder and louder. I looked out of the pane of the window and couldn’t see a thing since the rain was thick and the sky was dark. It sounded like a huge freight train coming right for me.

  By then the wind had started picking up and the rain became horizontal. The trees outside were going crazy, leaning over one way and then a few seconds later leaning over another way. At this point, I knew what it was, and I started shaking with fear. I took cover as best I could. I got under my cot, as if that could really protect me, and covered myself with blankets and waited for the storm to pass. I could hear the bridge span fluctuating chaotically from side to side like it was a child’s swing on a playground. I thought that the cables would surely break and the entire bridge, including me, would be swept into the river.

  Debris was hitting the bridge with the frequency of a heavy hail storm. The window panes busted out and rain and debris poured into the tollbooth like water from a fireman’s hose. The toll booths, I surmised, surely couldn’t take much more of this before they collapsed, and Mr. Mann’s bricks would come falling down on me. I held my breath, closed my eyes, an
d curled up into a ball under my cot while I awaited my imminent death. I had never heard anything so loud in my life as when the tornado passed literally only a few yards from me as it made its way from West Waco to East Waco between my bridge and the Steel bridge. I heard the roar lessen as it passed me. I breathed a sigh of relief. I couldn’t believe that I was still among the living.

  After it had passed, the rain still poured but the violent winds died down. I rose up off the floor, which was by then several inches deep in water. The door had been torn off the toll booth and all the windows panes were gone. It was cool, almost cold, and I shivered like a leaf from the cold and from utter fear. I was soaked to the skin but otherwise unharmed. I stepped halfway out the doorway and saw the ugliest and meanest monster of a twister cloud that I’d ever seen in my life. I knew at that moment that this storm was indeed a banshee of death, wailing about her doomed victims. I was relieved, but still surprised that I wasn’t counted as one of them.

  After my initial fright, I picked up my broken mirror off the floor and looked at myself. Through my fragmented image I could see that my hair was strangely askew as if Mr. Brann and Inez had both run their hands through it. I could also have sworn that after the tornado passed, I smelled a faint but distinct scent of Inez’ perfume. She always wore a unique brand that Mr. Brann brought back from St. Louis for her twelfth birthday. I hadn’t smelled it in over fifty years, but I immediately recognized it. I suddenly felt a warm feeling of calmness and contentedness like I had had so many times when I was with Inez. They had spared me.

  The tornado raced on towards East Waco, destroying areas along Elm Street, Dallas Street, and Waco Drive. I felt it was Mr. Brann and Inez taking out their ire on the city, because no one had been brought to justice.

  In Mr. Brann’s own words, “I am credibly informed that at least ‘half a dozen’ of my meek and lowly Baptist brethren are but awaiting an opportunity to assassinate me, and that if successful they will plead in extenuation that I ‘have slandered Southern women.’ I walk the streets of Waco day by day and I walk them alone. Let these cur-ristians shoot me in the back if they dare, then plead that damning lie as an excuse for their craven cowardice. If the decent people of this community fail to chase them to their holes and feed their viscera to the dogs, then I’d rather be dead and in Hades forever than alive in Waco a single day.”