Water Tossing Boulders

by Adrienne Berard

  The calm that followed Biscoe’s crisis quickly dissipated. In her rush to soothe her brother, Berda had forgotten the coin purse on the seat. The children worked their way back to the rear of the train. When they arrived at their bench, it was empty. All of the money was gone.

  A sense of dread passed over the children. Without money, there would be no food, no way to send a telegram home. There was nothing with which to purchase a return voyage if Ah Bok was not waiting for them in Michigan. Without any hope of recovering the coin purse, the children resigned themselves to their fate. After several hours, the train reached Cairo, where the track crossed over a wide river and turned northward, toward Chicago.

  It was long past nightfall when the lights of the city began to shimmer along the shoreline of Lake Michigan. As the engine slowed to approach the station, a ripple of excitement ran through the train car. The children stirred themselves awake and looked out at the magnificent spectacle of Chicago’s Illinois Central Station.

  Overhead, a thirteen-story clock tower glimmered above a giant pavilion. Its wide shadow darkened a string of wooden pilings that wandered into the surf, following one another to the end of the line, where the railroad’s lakeshore tracks met Michigan Avenue. For thousands of Southern blacks, the depot was far more than a destination, it was a beacon, the threshold to a promised land. The Illinois Central Station connected Chicago to the South and served as the city’s primary site of arrival for what came to be known as the Great Migration.

  Arriving at the station, passengers from the colored car exited in one steady torrent, filling the platform in a matter of minutes. Like Martha and her siblings, they carried with them all they owned for their new life in the North. They came wearing headscarves, holding rucksacks, and speaking in slow Delta drawls. Hundreds came every day. They arrived in swells, flooding the station by the carload, from every southern branch of the Illinois Central.

  Just three years earlier, a twenty-one-year-old trumpeter arriving from New Orleans stepped off the very same train onto the very same platform. His name was Louis Armstrong. “When the conductor came through the train hollering, ‘Chicago, next stop,’” the musician recalled years later, “a funny feeling started running up and down my spine.”

  The excitement that crawled down the spine of Louis Armstrong now found its way into Martha Lum. The children exited the car and crossed through the station. They boarded another train near the switching yards. Its engine jerked into motion and soon the lights of the city were behind them as they journeyed east along the southern shores of Lake Michigan.

  The train arrived at Jackson Station in the early-morning hours. At the west end of the depot, a gatekeeper swung open a fence that stretched across the tracks. He flagged the train toward the platform. Hungry and exhausted, the children exited the train car. A long, overhanging eave blanketed the depot, blocking the thin rays of morning light that were starting to move west along the rails and onto the city beyond. Martha and her siblings crossed out of the station and turned onto Main Street.

  The roadway was crowded with the chaotic choreography of an industrialized city at daybreak. Enginemen tromped to the track yards, coal shovels slung over their shoulders. Negro train porters hurried inside the station, their chests lined with polished brass buttons. Metalworkers gathered in packs outside iron and steel mills, as sparks flared onto the sidewalk from foundry furnaces along East Michigan Avenue. Paperboys shouted from street corners, hocking the labor party’s Square Deal newspaper to hundreds of factory workers, all flocking to build rims, wheels, nuts, bolts, lugs, and wrenches for Detroit’s automobiles.

  The children passed under awnings of fruit vendors, where old Italian men scolded their grandsons and unloaded crates of produce. A streetcar barreled past, making its way down the winding row of storefronts. Michigan was like no place Martha had ever seen. Even the air was different. Coal smoke burned like a scorched rag in her throat. Somewhere off in the distance shone the hazy gray peak of the power company.

  At the corner of Mechanic and Main, the children turned right. Just a few paces brought them to the doorstep of their uncle’s laundry, their new home. Mechanic Street teemed with life. At one end was City Hall and at the other a prison. Gow Lum’s laundry was somewhere in between. The small business was sandwiched between two boarding houses, a butcher, a coffee roaster, a fish market, a drugstore, the Union Restaurant, and the Grand Union Tea Company.

  Standing at the door to the laundry, waiting to enter, Martha was not so different from the young Jeu Gong, who had also arrived on the shores of Lake Michigan, holding in his memory all that remained of a life in a distant land. Yet Martha’s homeland was not the old country of her father. He spoke a language of nam fong and bok bok. He knew of ancient villages, of great dynasties, of deep family tradition. Martha spoke a language of “ain’ts” and “reckons.” She knew the taste of sweet tea and grits, the smell of pole beans boiled in salt pork. Arriving in the North, Martha became a migrant among immigrants, still a child, already twice removed from the ancestry she was taught to call her own.

  The laundry was a crowded place. Rows of flames flickered behind dark curtains of drying cloth. A machine called “the mangle” towered over the room, its two round pressing wheels crushing pile after pile of steaming white cloth. The children wended their way between great vats of boiling linens and strange men shouting strange words over the spit of irons. Their uncle spoke to his wife in Cantonese; neither was eager to greet the children. To Gow Lum and his wife, Martha and her brother and sister were simply three more mouths to feed. It did not matter that they were family or that Jeu Gong had cared for his brother after the war. Gow Lum would make it known to the children that they were a burden on him.

  Berda took her uncle’s rejection harder than Martha. Living in a home where she knew she was not welcome, Berda became spiteful. She learned Cantonese so she could curse at her aunt and uncle in their native tongue. She studied all the terrible words first and let them fall from her lips with practiced precision.

  Once Berda began to understand full sentences, her aunt, Ah Mo, retaliated with language far more hurtful than curse words. She told Berda that the children’s mother was not really a Wong, but a mui tsai, a slave. Katherine was bought from poverty, from a nothing family somewhere near the coast. She was traded for a red packet of money, sold like a beast. Jeu Gong’s wife was a stain on the face of the family and now the stain had made its way into Ah Mo’s home. Out of anger, Berda hid their mother’s secret. She kept it from her sister for another sixty years.

  Martha made no effort to learn Cantonese, and she complained about her aunt’s traditional Chinese cooking. Instead, Martha focused her energies on schoolwork and the labor of the laundry. As summer turned to fall and fall to winter, Martha studied with the other immigrant children, walking down Mechanic, through the snow to the schoolhouse. There were twenty public schools within the city limits, and Martha was not excluded from any of them. In Rosedale there was only one school and it was for the white children. In Jackson, there were schools for all kinds of children, most of them immigrants, Irish, Polish, German, Italian, Russian, and Chinese.

  Even with her immigrant roots, Martha had more in common with the colored children who lived in crowded city blocks on the other side of town. To keep Martha from being classed as colored, from being forced into colored schools and colored society, the Lum family joined an exodus as large as any wave of immigration, the exodus of millions of Negroes from the American South.

  It followed a current that traced the central spine of the continent, from the cotton fields of Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Arkansas to the industrial cities of Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh. In leaving Rosedale, the children became part of a protest that was taking place in homes all across the South.

  “Oftentimes, just to go away,” wrote John Dollard, a Yale scholar studying Negro migration in the 1930s, “is one of the most aggressive things that another per
son can do, and if the means of expressing discontent are limited, as in this case, it is one of the few ways in which pressure can be put.”

  Martha did not see herself as part of a greater movement. She was a ten-year-old girl, with worries far more immediate and personal. She did not know when she would see her mother again. She longed for the familiar things she used to taste, smell, and touch. She could not write in the language of her father and he could not write to his daughter in words that she could read. So Martha lived in isolation, a stranger in a cold world.

  One day in early spring, Martha’s mother arrived on a train from Chicago. When Katherine entered the laundry, she was alarmed at the changes her children had undergone. Their bodies were thin and fragile, their skin streaked with soot. Their clothing was torn, their shoes full of holes. For decades, Martha would remember the sting of ice against her feet. After one year in the North, Katherine’s children appeared to her as beggars. She packed their belongings and led them to the depot. She bought four tickets back to the South.

  CHAPTER VIII

  AUTUMN, 1925

  RAIN HAMMERED AGAINST THE roof of the Clarksdale courthouse. Along Delta Avenue, a trail of hooded figures lumbered through the storm toward the bright electric lights of the court. The meeting was called for eight o’clock, which was well past nightfall on this particular Saturday in late October. A row of ushers lined either side of the lobby, each dressed in matching white robes, their faces cloaked in ghostly triangular hoods. Greeting and shaking hands, local members of the Ku Klux Klan welcomed visitors to the evening’s lecture. The guest of honor was Dr. Sam Campbell of Atlanta. His topic, “The Making of a Klansman.”

  Pastor Macon Vick of the First Baptist Church began the evening with a sermon, his voice modulating with the deliberate reverence of a Sunday service. When he finished his invocation, Vick led the congregation in song. “My country ’tis of thee,” the pastor began softly. “Sweet land of liberty.”

  A chorus of cheers erupted from within the crowded hall as the audience joined in the singing. “Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride. From ev’ry mountainside, let freedom ring!”

  As applause filled the courthouse, Dr. Campbell made his way to the stage. He was a tall, forceful-looking middle-aged man with a high forehead, a pale, narrow face, and a stern mouth that seemed to tether one taut cheek to the other. He carried none of the markings of the stone-broke field hand he had once been. Sometime in his twenties, Dr. Campbell left behind his mule and plow in the high Georgia hills to be reborn a minister. He traveled the country preaching the doctrine of white supremacy and the teachings of the Holy Book.

  Campbell began his speech with a discussion of Congress and its recent ratification of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. He mentioned that while they never received credit, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were directly responsible for the passage of the bill. It was the Klan that “put it over,” he explained, and the Knights were well overdue for their public recognition.

  He warned the people of Clarksdale that America was under threat from the many different races living within its borders. “There is no melting pot, and never can be,” he declared emphatically. “It is impossible for the negro, Mexican, Jap, Chinaman, Turk and what-not to mix with true-blooded Americans.

  “We cannot allow foreign peoples to trample Christ under foot,” he continued, “and tear down our Christian institutions and ideals for which our forefathers have always stood, ever since our nation was founded. The Klan at the close of the Civil War came to the rescue and in this instance our ideals were preserved. The very soul of our country is at stake, and it is our sacred duty to protect the soul of our beloved America, just as much today as it was then.”

  As Campbell came to the end of his lecture, the audience grew silent, hanging on every word.

  “It requires three things to make a Klansman,” he concluded:

  purpose, material and time. The purpose of the Klansman is to promote and sustain a love of God and country, to protect the Christian ideals and institutions of our country, to uphold white supremacy, to aid in the enforcement of the laws of our nation. What sort of material is required for the qualification of a Klansman? “Not for self, but for others,” is a Klansman’s motto and if he fails in this, he has failed in his trust. When will the Klan die? Never! Not until victory is won and each Klansman and Klanswoman has done their bit.

  The audience leaped from their seats, clapping their hands with wild enthusiasm. They shouted and pounded their boots against the floor. The walls rattled inside Clarksdale’s courthouse.

  In a small, dimly lit jail one block away, a black prisoner stirred in his cell. The air was cold, near freezing, and John Fisher struggled to keep warm. He had been there for over a week and was starting to lose track of time. On the night of October 16, he’d awakened to torchlights and the howl of bloodhounds outside his cabin beside Traynham Plantation. Someone pounded on Fisher’s front door until it snapped on its hinges and swung open. A pack of dogs surged through the entryway and tore at Fisher’s clothes and body.

  Then the men came. More than a dozen of them, white and rabid in the eyes, lawmen and townsmen, shouting all the ways they would kill Fisher that night in the woods. The men held in their hands the instruments with which to carry out the attack; they had known before leaving their homes that morning there would be a lynching come nightfall. Such an assembly, so common to Mississippi, was described in chilling detail by James Howell Street, a journalist born and raised in Jones County. Street witnessed his first lynching at fourteen. He wrote:

  They called the neighbors. They pulled pistols from oiled rags in bureaus, lifted shotguns from pegs over the mantels. They needed dogs. Bob Gant’s were the best in the state. Three men piled into an automobile and thundered into the night—ninety miles over rough roads to Bob’s house.

  The Clarksdale men arrived at Traynham Plantation before midnight. They followed Gant’s hounds to the backwoods shanty that belonged to John Fisher. Had it not been for four of the sheriff’s deputies, who safely spirited Fisher to jail, he would have been dead by sunrise.

  The following morning, Fisher was charged with the murder of Grover C. Nicholas, the adopted son of a prominent Delta planter named James Traynham. Nicholas’s body had been found inside the plantation’s commissary, bludgeoned to death with the blunt end of an ax. Fisher denied any part in the crime, telling the officers he’d spent the previous day repairing an old car with his neighbor.

  By the end of October, the officers jailed four other Negroes for the same crime: Raeford Leonard, who worked on the Traynham plantation; Lindsey Coleman, a young tenant farmer who lived with Leonard; Smith Bunns, a local teenager; and Albert Hobbs, a former preacher.

  Throughout the course of several days, the sheriff’s deputies, led by a man named Hicks Ellis, employed what they called a “rope and water cure” to extract confessions from the five prisoners. Fisher recalled the group of men forcing him to the floor and binding his arms and legs with rope. Then Hick Ellis lifted Fisher’s chin and allowed water to pour over his face and into his nostrils. The last thing Fisher remembered before falling unconscious was the fear that he was drowning.

  After a week of this torture, Fisher finally cracked. He gave a confession on November 4. Leonard and Hobbs confessed shortly thereafter. Bunns died in jail. He was found dead in his cell with a broken neck; the authorities said he’d suffered an epileptic seizure. Lindsey Coleman was the only man who continued to proclaim his innocence.

  When it came time for trial, Hobbs turned on the other prisoners. Newspapers reported that he “made a splendid witness for the prosecution,” telling jurors, “how he fasted and prayed to God for guidance and help and finally decided that God would not help or hear him with a lie upon his lips.” For his service, Hobbs was released. With the help of his testimony, John Fisher was sentenced to death and Raeford Leonard was sentenced to life in prison.

  It was Coleman, the only man
not to break under torture, who was the last to face trial. On December 19, 1925, he stood before a jury and affirmed his innocence, just as he had when jailers poured water into his lungs, bent his fingers until they nearly broke, and called him “nigger” as they tied a noose around his neck. After eight hours of deliberation, Judge Alcorn read the jury’s verdict, his voice breaking in disbelief: “The jury finds the defendant not guilty.”

  Earl Brewer was not present for the trial. He, like everyone else in Clarksdale, assumed the Negro would hang. Instead, Coleman exited the courthouse on that cold December night a free and innocent man. Brewer was not there to see the way Coleman walked down the courthouse steps, dressed in the same jacket he wore as a soldier in the Great War, the finest suit he ever owned. Brewer was not there to see Coleman taken by a group of white men and forced into a waiting car. He was not there to see the men speed off down Yazoo Avenue.

  Instead, Brewer was there to read the coroner’s report, to learn that Coleman’s body, still dressed in his army uniform, was found riddled with twenty-six bullet holes and tossed onto the street just three blocks from the courthouse. He learned that the sheriff and his men refused to intervene to save the Negro’s life. He was told there were witnesses, including the sheriff himself, but that no one was willing to testify. A murder had been committed outside the town’s very hall of justice, and the city did not have the courage to prosecute the killers.

  Brewer could not know how the lynching of Lindsey Coleman would alter the course of his life, and therein alter the course of history. He had no idea that the seeds of an entire revolution were sitting in stacks of half-written briefs inside his law office. He did not know that in seeking retribution for Coleman, he would neglect another fight. He would forsake a case that could have brought one of the greatest civil rights victories in American history. He would lose sight of Martha Lum and, in doing so, abandon the first United States Supreme Court case to challenge segregation in public schools.