When we crossed over the bridge where Tommy and his gang had faced off against us, we were in the colored section of town. Neighbors who saw the gun screamed and ran inside. We were traveling on the same streets I had canvassed with Daddy, and I thought of all the men who were afraid to go to the polls. What would they think now?
“Lewis, I want to go home.”
Just to needle me, he pedaled faster and pulled up beside the gun.
“Hey, mister, how does that thing work?”
“Runs eight hundred rounds a minute. They used it at San Juan Hill,” one of the Red Shirts said.
“What are you going to use it for now?” Lewis asked.
“What’s with the questions, Sambo? Now scat.”
The two men on horseback closed ranks around the gun, as if to protect it, and we slowed down, putting distance between us and them.
That night at supper, I told my family about the Gatling gun. They looked concerned.
“I hear white folk is organizing block by block, military style,” Mama said. “They convinced our people gone torch the town.”
“Where did you hear that?” Daddy said.
“The Gilchrists talk.”
“Around a Negro?” Daddy said.
“Jackson, to these folk, I be the same color as that windowpane there. ’Cause long as the stew gets on the table and the dishes be cleared, I might as well be invisible.”
“White folk is arming theyself to the teef,” Boo Nanny said. “That’s what I heared at Walker’s Grocery.”
“We have to be careful not to do anything that will allow the civic leaders to blame the Negroes if there’s trouble. As long as we are quiet, orderly, and submissive to authority, and return home directly after voting, we’ll get through this election. Then, when passions cool, we can work on repairing some of the damage,” Daddy said.
“Is you going to vote?” Boo Nanny asked.
“Of course. It’s the most important thing I do as a citizen. Negroes form a majority in Wilmington. If everyone votes, we will win. It’s simple arithmetic.”
“I may be an unlettered old crow, but I knows the massa’s math,” she said.
“Our white friends in the Fusion party have a mutual interest in working with us,” Daddy said.
“You so-called white friends, they uses you till they don’t need you no mo’, then they toss you out quicker than three-day-old fish ’cause you stink and the only fixin’ it is to bury you.”
I hated it when Boo Nanny and Daddy argued. It was as if the election was tearing everyone apart in the worst way—from the inside out.
With less than a week to go before the election, fear was everywhere. You could feel it in the empty porches, the curtains drawn in the front windows, the deserted streets. Men and women on the way to work kept their eyes down and walked swiftly past the Red Shirts who stalked our neighborhood on foot, on mules, and on horseback, waving their weapons. One rowdy man on patrol shoved Crazy Drake off his soapbox with the butt end of his rifle. When Drake took a wild swing at him with his stick, the Red Shirt chased him down the street on horseback, laughing as the barefoot man whimpered and cowered by a stump like a wounded animal.
These days, wild persimmons hung in the bare branches, ripe for picking. But children were not up in the tree limbs, and women were not passing persimmon pudding over the fence to share with neighbors. Everyone stayed inside, waiting, expecting something awful to happen.
Daddy instructed me to come straight home from school and to avoid crowds of any kind until after the election. But one afternoon I saw a group of white men gathered in front of Thalian Hall, and curiosity got the better of me. I knew Daddy wouldn’t have approved, but I needed to test my independence.
I crept along the stone wall and slipped down into one of the basement window wells. From there, no one could see me, but I had a clear view of the man standing at the top of the steps between two massive columns. He was thin and had shaggy eyebrows and a full silver beard that glinted in the sun. I recognized him but couldn’t remember his name. It was Daddy’s nemesis, the one we had seen in the parade in Fayetteville. Today he wore a suit and tie and looked like a refined gentleman, but when he spoke, he looked crazier than Crazy Drake. Spit spewed from his mouth and his face turned red as he shouted, “You are Anglo-Saxons! You are armed and prepared, and you will do your duty. Be ready at a moment’s notice. If you find the Negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls, and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks. We shall win this election, even if we have to do it with guns.”
What I heard next I wished I could boast of to my friends and family, but then I would have had to admit that I had been there. News of the speech raced through Darktown, but I was not the source, nor had I seen anyone of my race at the speech. Still, everyone talked about it. Unlike most stories that changed in the retelling, in this story everyone repeated more or less the same quote, either because the horror of it was imprinted on their memories, or because there was no way to make it worse than it already was. What I heard at the end of the bearded man’s speech made my heart close up and harden like a clamshell. “We will never surrender to a ragged raffle of Negroes, even if we have to choke the Cape Fear River with carcasses,” he said.
Now that my parents wouldn’t let me play in the streets or go to Lewis’s house, I was bored and lonely. I didn’t have brothers or sisters like most people I knew. I needed a companion.
“Can I get a dog?” I asked at the supper table.
“I ain’t getting myself one more blessed mouth to feed or take care of,” Mama said.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said.
“You says you will, but if you forgets, am I gone let that poor beast starve?”
“I promise,” I said.
“White man promises,” muttered Boo Nanny.
“Please.” I had already picked out a name for the dog—Jim, after the boy in Treasure Island. I didn’t care what kind of dog it was, but I wanted it to be brave and adventurous.
“Daddy?” I said, appealing to him. I knew he could overrule the women if he wanted to.
“Listen to your mother,” he said.
By Saturday, I thought I might go crazy if I had to spend one more day inside alone. I got Boo Nanny’s permission to visit Daddy at work, provided I stayed off the main roads.
The new offices for the Record occupied the second floor of a two-story clapboard building near the corner of Seventh and Church, about a mile from the house. The first floor housed the Love and Charity Benevolent Society, a group of colored ladies devoted to raising money to build a Negro wing at the hospital. Whenever I stopped by to see Daddy, they offered me cookies and a pat on the head. I didn’t know any of their names, but I called them the Love Ladies.
The newspaper office was a big, open room, with desks at one end and the press at the other. Mr. Manly sat at the desk beside Daddy’s, looking at a mock-up of the paper.
While I waited for Daddy to return from reporting, I sat in his chair and stared at the typewriter, with its high black back and dozens of moving parts.
Mr. Manly looked up from his work and said, “Are you going to be a writer like your daddy?”
One thing I never wanted to be was a writer. Not after the bicycle contest. But Mr. Manly was an important man and I didn’t want to be impolite, so I said, “I don’t know.”
“Let me show you how that works,” he said. He rolled a blank sheet of paper into the cylinder and typed out the letters of my name, as quickly as someone drumming his fingers on a desk. When he pulled the silver lever, a bell sounded, and I jumped slightly.
“Does this make you a better writer?” I asked.
He smiled kindly. “No, but it’s faster, and that’s important in the newspaper business. Now you practice. I’ll be here if you need help.”
I stabbed at a key, and a long metal arm jumped up and slapped a letter against the page. I tried another. It was thrilling.
Before long, a tall
white man in a clerical collar approached Mr. Manly. After they greeted each other, he said, “We go a long way back, Mr. Manly. Some of my congregants are convinced there’s a vast Negro uprising brewing. Is there any truth to that?”
I typed slower so I could hear.
“Reverend, I can assure you unequivocally that there’s no organized uprising,” Mr. Manly said. “We’re the eyes and ears of the community here at the paper, and if anything were happening, we’d know. Our people can’t even buy guns—the white store owners won’t sell us ammunition. A few men have rusty muskets or hunting rifles, but you’ve been out on the streets. We’re up against organized militias and heavily armed Red Shirts. Our Negro citizens are terrified. They’re afraid to go to the polls.”
“I wanted your assurances before saying what I’ve come here to say. Mr. Manly, you need to get out of town. Today. Right this moment. Angry men are assembling at the armory as we speak. There’s talk of justice, and you know what that means.”
“I’ll go home and pack my things,” he said.
“No. There’s no time. You have to leave now.”
“Shouldn’t we wait until after dark?” Mr. Manly said. He was shaking.
“I suggest you leave in broad daylight, when they least expect it. You look as white as any man. It will be easy for you to pass.”
“But Red Shirts are posted at every waterway and roadway out of the city.”
“I know. We just need a place for you to hide until I can find someone who will give me the Red Shirts’ password.”
Mr. Manly suggested several hiding places, all of which were rejected by the reverend as too obvious.
“What about your church?” Mr. Manly said.
“My hand can’t be seen in this. I hope you understand. I have to strike a balance between being true to my convictions and keeping my job. But there is a young seminary student working for me—Curtis Hanson. He’s from Boston and holds the same views I do. We can trust him. For the moment, though, we need a hiding place.”
I was tired of being the timid one, the weakling who was forced to take the rebels’ side when playing war. I wanted to be brave, the way I had felt underground with Tommy. “I know somewhere no one will look,” I piped up.
They both turned to me. “That’s Jack Thomas’s boy,” Mr. Manly said.
I told them about the tunnel.
“That just might work,” the reverend said, impressed.
“I also know a back way out of town, if we can get past the sawmill.”
“Tell us,” the reverend said.
“It’s hard to describe. But I can show you. I go that way with my grandmother to look for plants.”
Together we made a plan. The reverend would take us to the tunnel entrance and park the carriage there until Mr. Manly was safely underground. Then I would go with the reverend to the Episcopal church and wait in the office. As soon as the reverend was able to find out the password, the seminary student would use the rectory’s carriage to drive us to the train station north of town.
On the way to the tunnel, Mr. Manly said very little. I could tell he was nervous. When we reached the entrance, the reverend stayed in the carriage while I went to work. The manhole cover was too heavy to handle alone, so Mr. Manly helped me roll aside the cast-iron disk.
A group of stevedores walked by, and the reverend distracted them with idle chatter. After they turned the corner and disappeared, I scooted down the ladder with the lantern I had taken from the Record offices. Mr. Manly followed. The curved brick ceiling was wet and gleaming. It was close to high tide, judging from the amount of water in the stream. The tunnel reeked of fish and human waste. I set a crate beside the stream among the shells, fish skeletons, and chunks of brick. Mr. Manly made quite a picture, sitting there in his derby hat, suit, cuff links, and silk pocket handkerchief. The smelly sludge reached up over the soles of his shoes.
I remembered well the terror I had felt in the absolute blackness of the tunnel, not knowing if Tommy and I would get out. How odd that now the tunnel felt like the safest place in town.
With the reverend’s help, I replaced the manhole cover. We left Mr. Manly behind and went to the Episcopal church, where I was introduced to Curtis Hanson, a young man with skin the color of a peeled banana. He looked sickly, in dire need of one of Boo Nanny’s remedies.
I waited in his book-lined office. On one wall was a framed picture of an angel with long, curly blond hair, playing a trumpet of some sort. The angel’s eyes were the same color as the flowering vine with heart-shaped leaves that covered our back fence. The bright blue flowers opened in the morning and closed in the afternoon. Boo Nanny called the flower Angel Eyes.
“Do angels have blue eyes?” I once asked her when I was quite a bit younger.
“Angels is just like people,” she said. “Some’s got theyselves blue eyes, some brown like me and you, some green.”
“But what color are angels? Their skin?”
“Angels is like they eyes—every color you could name.”
“Then why are the ones in the paintings at church always white?” I asked. Not to needle her—I truly wanted to know. It was a question I’d spent a fair amount of time trying to puzzle out.
Boo Nanny, acting like it was my dedicated mission to aggravate her, said, “You worry me to death with you questions, chile.” I never got an answer.
Now I considered asking Mr. Hanson, but I was too shy, and he was busy at his desk, writing. So I kept quiet and tried to find a book to read. There were no adventure stories on the shelf—only books about religion and philosophy. I pulled out a Bible, wondering how one book could be the source of such different reactions in Daddy and Boo Nanny.
Two hours passed, and I was beginning to think the reverend had forgotten us. The whole project was taking more time than I thought. It occurred to me that my family might be worried, but I couldn’t back out now. I thought of Mr. Manly waiting in that stinky tunnel, with the ceiling weeping brown tears onto his derby hat. I wished I had thought to bring an umbrella from the office.
At last the reverend returned, successful in his efforts to get the password.
“It’s Dog Wing,” he said.
“Dog Wing?” Mr. Hanson said, verifying. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Exactly. That’s what makes it a good password. It’s not a phrase someone could guess,” the reverend said.
It was late afternoon by the time the seminary student and I returned to collect Mr. Manly, who emerged from the tunnel shaken and damp. He rubbed his shoes in the grass to remove the slime, and then climbed into the front seat of the carriage. I rode in the back. We headed to the north edge of town.
Mr. Hanson held the reins in his quaking hands. Mr. Manly sat on his fingers and stiffened his arms to stop the trembling. It was so strange to watch the most famous man I knew shaking like a wet dog in a cold sack.
Even the horse acted skittish.
I was surprised by the number of men who were patrolling the streets with weapons. A stranger might think the city was at war. The men gathered around tar barrels at the corners and loitered in parks and medians. They did not look particularly prosperous or organized. Some wore tattered civilian clothes, others fragments of Rough Rider uniforms, Confederate grays, or the new outfit of choice, a red shirt. The White Government Union warriors wore white armbands. Many men were drinking. The aldermen had passed an ordinance outlawing alcohol within five days of the election, but there was no one to enforce it.
I remembered what Daddy had told me about the importance of the rule of law when I got caught skinny-dipping. He asked me to imagine what it would be like on the river if everybody made up his own rules, and I immediately pictured ships crashing into one another, masts crisscrossing, bodies going overboard. “Laws help keep order for public safety,” he had said. But today, just three days before the election, the city had been taken over by lawless bands of men. Where was the government now? I wondered.
We were out in th
e open, protected only by Mr. Manly’s light skin. To succeed, we had to fool every white man we passed. I clenched my buttocks in fear as we drove by several groups without incident, and the sense of dread kept growing. This caper was not quite the swashbuckling fun I had imagined.
Several blocks ahead, a cluster of men in civilian clothes and carrying rifles blocked the road.
“Uh-oh,” Mr. Hanson said under his breath.
A bleat arose from Mr. Manly’s throat. Embarrassed, he covered his mouth with a fist and cleared his throat loudly.
“What time is it?” Mr. Hanson asked.
Mr. Manly fumbled in his watch pocket and, after several tries, pulled out his watch—gold like Grandpa Tip’s, but without the teeth marks. He tried to open it, but his fingers weren’t working properly. I leaned forward in the seat and pressed the button that snapped open the lid. It was already 4:15, and the last train of the day was leaving from the station north of town in twenty-five minutes.
The man in the road held up his hand and shouted, “Halt!”
We did, and my heart skidded like a stone thrown sideways over water.
“Where are you gentlemen going?” the burly, unshaven man asked.
“Up north to buy horses. There’s an auction there,” Mr. Hanson said. His voice sounded remarkably casual, given the shaking of his hands.
“So late in the day?” the man said. He smelled of tobacco and leather.
“It’s tomorrow morning,” the seminary student said. “We want to be there first thing.”
“Well, we’re going to a necktie party for that scoundrel nigger editor,” one of the men said. “That oak tree by Morton’s Grocery is begging for action.”
“I’ll leave you to your business,” Mr. Hanson said. He tipped his hat and shook the reins, and the horse picked up its pace.
Mr. Hanson grimly set his jaw, and we continued on in silence. The sawmill was just up ahead, but before we could get there, a group of Red Shirts signaled for the carriage to pull over. I was certain that the loud pounding in my chest could be heard by the coarse man with bad breath and yellow teeth who approached the carriage with another man. Yellow was a color I was starting to associate with white people.
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