Jam on the Vine (9780802191571)

by Barnett, Lashonda

  The fate of Willie Baker relied on the integrity of an all-white male jury. Dressed in his army uniform, his face betrayed no emotion while his attorney argued his fine demeanor and moral judgment. Baker was a veteran, a porter three years on the job with no absences, a home renter with no documentation of late payments. He had a bank account in good standing and no children. The motion stated that he could not have raped the Jones girl because he was aboard the Olympian, Seattle-bound. Three witnesses gave testimony in the matter, including two porters who worked the same shift as Baker the night of the alleged attack. It was a poor case, lacking evidence and showing neither motive nor opportunity. Even the accepted premise of black men’s uncontrollable lust for white women fell flat when Savannah Jones took the stand, detailing the slow, slow pace of their courtship and the fact that Baker had never met her sister, the alleged victim. Baker was firm in his innocence in a trial that ended in less than two hours.

  The jury’s “not guilty” cut through the hue and cry of the overcrowded courtroom. Ivoe tried to catch up to Mr. Baker for a quote on the outcome of his trial but he was whisked away as murmurs of disapproval escalated. News of Baker’s acquittal traveled fast. She had seen protests before—picketers at every trolley stop in Austin and those outside Kansas City’s meatpacking plants. Outside the courthouse, excitement ran high among the posse, infuriated that a black man could stand accused of tarnishing white womanhood and go free to tell about it.

  Ivoe wriggled past a group of bickering men and fell into a mob rushing from all sides of the building. A fusillade of bullets fired into the air failed to disperse the hunters, stirring the angry mob into greater frenzy. “Baker hangs or Omaha burns!” the crowd chanted. Several men overpowered the sheriff and his deputy and seized Mr. Baker, dragging him to the flagpole not twenty feet from the court. The whole weight of the crowd seemed to lunge at Ivoe’s back. She took a hard blow in the side and doubled over from the pain of it, when a man grabbed her arm to steady her. “You best get on away from here.”

  Finally, she breached the crowd and ran.

  For four days she had not seen one policeman. Now a cordon of officers brooded over the heart of Casey’s Row’s “Street of Dreams.” Uniformed men raided businesses and homes, ransacking. The door to one house stood open; inside an officer forced a woman to the floor, his foot on her back, while a crying child stood nearby. The smell of gasoline was very strong against a rising incantation: “Come out or burn out.” When a fire truck arrived, several white men pulled out knives to sever the hose. She darted across the street, ducked behind a house, climbed a fence, and found herself not far from the Liberty Boardinghouse.

  Harney Street was quiet. The chalkboard inside the boardinghouse read: VERDICT SPELLS TROUBLE. SEEK PROTECTION. She took the backstairs to her room. With one sweep of her arm, she brought dresses and their hangers from the closet to her valise as a terrific crash sounded. A woman screamed. A man laughed. A shower of stones rained against the house. The loud crunch of broken glass in the hallway made her jump. “Any coloreds in here?” She eased the valise shut and hid behind the draperies, grateful for narrow hips, betrayed by the fine toe of her shoe.

  A crowbar pulled the curtain back. The boy was no more than sixteen, his hands neither bruised nor bloodstained from the riot. Raggedy from head to toe with pitiful shoes, he was poorer than they had ever been. He opened a mouth of chipped, discolored teeth as a rattle of revolver shots nearly drowned him out. “Stay in and get roasted. Run out—they gonna get you too. My daddy say he gonna catch enough of y’all to make hisself good and tired.” His grip on the crowbar was slight but he could give her up to the men outdoors if smoke didn’t overcome her first. The air lumped in her chest and her eyes started to burn. Just then a deafening blast blew her to the ground, hurling window glass across the room.

  As with all journalists, people often shared more with Ivoe than they intended. Earlier that week, the Liberty’s owner thought little of removing the key to her safe box from the register, motioning Ivoe to follow her to the back room, where she pulled the cashbox down from the pantry shelf to deposit Ivoe’s payment. “The lady who runs this place showed me where she keeps the money. Be a shame for it to burn too.”

  They flew down the back staircase to the dining room, past the windows crawling with flames to the register drawer—ajar and empty. The pit of Ivoe’s stomach dropped as she glimpsed the chalkboard again. Whoever had written the message had probably taken the cashbox. She dashed for the storeroom anyway, the crowbar fast on her heels. She reached into the pantry shelf, behind the bags of rice, a shudder passing through her with an image of Ona just as her hand landed on the cold metal box.

  “We ain’t got no key.”

  “You’ve got a crowbar. Be quick about it before somebody comes and takes all that money from you.”

  A look of gratitude passed quickly over the boy’s face as he snatched the box and took off. She was not far behind, her throat full of smoke, her feet lead weights. A choking cough seized her as she dodged the grasp of a man.

  Voices were far enough away when she finally stopped to catch her breath. The houses here were larger, some had garages; she felt safe enough to duck behind one and rest. When she emerged a few hours later, walking the vacant and unrecognizable streets, she wondered where to go. She turned into an avenue that would lead her back to Casey’s Row, hearing footsteps not far behind. She walked faster, wondering if she should run for her life or beg for mercy. A few paces more and she turned around. A brigade of black boys carrying bricks and clubs made her sigh. What did they intend to do? In a stern voice she ordered them to give up their foolhardy enterprise and go someplace safe. “Where?” In times of trouble where had they always gone?

  Flurries of black ash rained down on them but her gaze remained lifted. Frightened children lagged behind adults up the street where yesterday dogwood trees had flowered in the yards of row houses made of inexpensive yet sturdy clapboard. Efforts of the fire department had been extreme: take an ax and smash in—even where no fire had spread. She led the boys into an ash-smeared lane, opened a wood gate, and mounted the steps to the small-frame AME church.

  Before the pulpit, an oil lamp burned on a table of meager provisions: water, bread, soup. As the evening wore on many came wearing fear and grief in place of their Sunday best. They rested on pews, under pews, packed like cattle in pens before the slaughter. At half past eight Ivoe alighted from the choir loft to ask the preacher, or anyone, for the afternoon newspaper. The facts of Baker’s verdict were scant yet enough to give rise to rumor and more violence. In the morning, the preacher sat in his office awaiting calls from the chief of police, the mayor, the governor, while station 8ZAE’s broadcast issued reports of increasing numbers of injuries and lost lives. At ten A.M., a mere four hours after all riot activity had ceased with the aid of the Twentieth Infantry, Ivoe thanked the minister for his help.

  Outside the train depot a man sold goods from a flatbed wagon. He raised a box above his head and the small crowd jeered. Ivoe moved in closer, watching money exchange hands swiftly. What were the trinkets tied by a bit of rope? She backed away, hoping to get a better look from a distance. “What is he selling?” she said. A stranger explained the prices and his reason for parting with a whole dollar. Had he not told her what dangled from the tiny piece of rope she would never have known, so crisply cooked it was. She rushed into the station, pausing only for the newspapers hanging on wooden stalls. Copies of the Omaha World-Herald, Omaha Bee, North Omaha Booster, and Jewish Bulletin under her arm, she boarded the train. In the twelve hours it took before she saw Ona, the papers would calm and help to restore her. She settled into her read, disturbed by the headlines of each. There was no getting beyond the second paragraph of the World-Herald’s “Frenzied Thousands Join in Orgy of Blood and Fire.” All her life she had revered periodicals, until that morning. Reports from the Omaha press were untrue and unfair. She kicked
the pile of Omaha papers under her seat. If they could defend lynching and distort facts, certainly an eyewitness account and the call for self-protection was grist for her newspaper’s mill. When her train pulled into Kansas City’s station there was a draft for the weekend’s front-page editorial:

  MOB KILLS COLORED MAN AFTER TAKING HIM FROM OFFICERS:

  A WARNING

  COLORED CASUALTIES:

  32 KILLED—81 WOUNDED—COUNTLESS ARRESTS

  WHITE CASUALTIES:

  6 KILLED—13 WOUNDED—0 ARRESTS

  By Ivoe Leila Williams

  OMAHA, Neb.—Today the grief and astonishment in Casey’s Row, a black neighborhood in North Omaha, Nebraska, is overwhelming. On September 27, Grant Street, known by locals as the “Street of Dreams,” housed black businesses and modest, well-kept homes not unlike those on the Vine. Today the neighborhood is burned out, the brains, limbs, and eyes of innocent people scattered like dung on the soil. The scene is hell’s half acre.

  On September 28, Tennessee native Willie Baker, a 41-year-old colored Pullman porter, who fought in the Great War and bore a proud and solid reputation, was killed by white mob violence just minutes after his acquittal at Douglas County Courthouse. Contrary to erroneous reports in Omaha’s largest newspapers, Mr. Baker was not a vagrant. In Casey’s Row, Baker shared a home with Savannah Jones, a white woman who vouched for his whereabouts during the time he was said to have raped Anne Jones, age 16. Here is a familiar story: the sense of dread regarding the black man’s “savage pursuit of white women . . . his tendencies toward miscegenation that spoil the pristine white flower of womanhood” that permeates not only the Deep South but also midwestern and northern cities.

  Following Mr. Baker’s acquittal, when the court doors opened, avengers of white womanhood stormed the courthouse yard with bullet, knife, and flame, demanding Baker. Bailiffs had only revolvers while more posses emerged with high-powered rifles and a rope. Within minutes, Mr. Baker was apprehended. His ankles were tied together and he was hanged on the flagpole, head downward, and beaten with iron bars. Before the torch was applied Mr. Baker was deprived of his ears and fingers. Members of the crowd looked on with complacency, if not pure pleasure. Some howled with glee. Newspaper dispatches report that no persons have been indicted for complicity in the lynching.

  You may wonder what role the police played in restoring order. A hundred officers did little more than disarm those trying to protect themselves and haul the most injured whites to the hospital. Preparing to leave the station for my return to Kansas City, I heard a cop say, “I arrested my share of Negroes yesterday. I arrested so many I let a paddy wagon of them wait for two hours while I took my supper.”

  At last count, more than two hundred colored people have been burned out of their North Omaha neighborhood. Some have expressed the determination to leave. Thirty-two are dead. At the train station your editor witnessed the selling of human remains. Small bones went for 10 cents; digits for a quarter; charred organs sold for a dollar.

  Reader, I put the question to you: Would the citizens of Casey’s Row have met with such casual deaths had their president and local leaders poised a watchful eye in a season of repeated mob violence? Surely President Wilson belongs to that class spoken of in the Bible: “which have eyes and see not; which have ears and hear not.” When the so-called American isolationism was weakened in April 1917, President Wilson did not hesitate to address Congress asking for a declaration of war against Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. “Make the World Safe for Democracy” became the slogan of his administration, when an essential element in the conduct of the war for democracy here at home—“A World Safe for Negroes”—remains curiously absent. Being both blind and deaf, President Wilson is guilty of perpetuating a national climate ripe for mob action.

  The events of Casey’s Row are but one example of how white mobs overpower police officers and take the law into their own hands. Omaha now joins Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Knoxville, Charleston—sites of a bloody spate of lynchings, riots, and the razing of black communities. Our secretary of the esteemed NAACP has called this season the Red Summer, and it appears it may well lead to a Red Autumn.

  Jim Crow is among us baring teeth. His henchmen wear badges, carry guns, wreak havoc, and murder in the name of justice. It is a foregone conclusion that the colored race will not receive equal protection by police. Heed the story of the unoffending Willie Baker, an upstanding member of his community, a law-abiding citizen, severed from his life. In our wide-open city, where men consume alcohol and gamble freely, how soon before the blood of black Kansas City runs through the West Bottoms? Let this record of the tragic fate of Willie Baker appeal to every colored Kansas Citian who has any regard for the sacredness of his own life.

  Before federal troops are called to dismantle a hellish nightmare like Omaha in the Vine district, we must raise our voices with this important message: Whitecappers, Ku Klux Klan, police, and lynchers beware! The black worm has turned. The United States has done much to stoke the embers of unrest. But a race that has furnished thousands of the best soldiers that the world has ever seen will no longer be content to turn the left cheek when smitten upon the right. Vigilante rule shall not prevail in Kansas City. Mobs will have to pay the cost and pay it in lives!

  Ennis walked for miles in eerie quiet listening to the first sounds of freedom. Dimmed by the grueling journey without so much as a bone to sustain him, he approached a henhouse and set the birds to squawking as they closed ranks around him. A man came out of the cabin; his voice boomed and prompted Ennis to duck for cover, remaining until nightfall. Hunger gnarled his stomach as he slinked farther into the deep purple gloaming of a new day. The next morning, he milled around abandoned lean-tos—rusty tools, metal scraps, not a single crumb. So much for life on the prairie, he thought, scratching his beard on the recollection of the 1912 drought. The guards had talked about it all summer, hoping the prison farm’s crops wouldn’t rot.

  The moon was directly overhead when Ennis set out from Little Tunis on July 21, 1911. He traveled for days just to empty his head. Work seemed to follow him. If he stood still long enough someone, taking in his size and quietude, made him an offer. Leaving his family had been the right thing to do; for the first time in his life he was on a first-name basis with “No,” able to say it without fear of reprisal. What could they take from him? A knapsack? A few tools? He reached Titus in early August. For two months he shod horses. He thought of sending Lemon the money but decided it was better to save it all for their plot in Kansas. He moved on to Oklahoma, master of his own fate. It might have continued that way except for one gold pear near the top of the tree filling him with such longing for Lemon he had to stop and rest. Before he knew anything the sun was going down behind the strangest-looking man he’d ever seen. The hair on his face and head had not been shaved but plucked. He wore a patch over his left eye, and from his left ear an orange feather dangled. Blood or red paint was drawn around the sockets of his dark beady eyes. Ennis tried to make sense of him while holding on to the last bit of his dream: he had come up on Lemon in the garden. “Shoot,” she’d said, stomping the ground with nervous laughter. “Big as you is, you’d think I’d hear you coming.” He laughed too, picked her up, and took what he came after, a kiss. Now he watched the man carving something and realized it was the snapping of the dry branch that had woke him. After a while the man sat down and stared at him for a long time until finally he stood up and motioned for him to follow. Inside a strange dwelling that looked like a giant beehive made of grass, he learned the man’s name. Misae’s wife, Niabi, spoke English, but Misae refused to.

  October in Little Tunis often brought hot days and chilly evenings like the one they were in now. Food was prepared. Ennis sat with the men in a circle while the women and children sat against the walls of the hut, waiting. After the men finished their meal, Niabi brought Misae an earthen jar. Whatever it was that tickled En
nis’s nose, Misae drank it in one gulp and picked up his pipe. He filled the room with thick clouds of red-and-black smoke that made the women and children cough a little before he spoke. Ennis figured it to be a prayer. Misae took up his carved branch and bored a few holes on the top before handing it to the youngest child.

  While the little boy blew into his flute, Ennis talked with Niabi. Her bronze face was serious and beautiful, her arms looked strong enough to lift a bale of cotton. In the middle of a sentence, she swung her head to scold one of the children, her long black braid flying like a lasso. Pointing to the patch on her husband’s eye, she warned that the people beyond the forest on the hill could not be counted on for fairness in any matter. She asked Ennis if he was like the others northbound, expecting to find a land and a mule waiting for them. “No.” It raised the question then: What did he hope to find? Honest work was all. He aimed to put down roots in Kansas where he knew colored settlements lived well out on the prairie. He should be sure to homestead near a river, Niabi said, looking him over. Strong. Misae and the other men left fieldwork to the women while hunting game, fishing, and logging. Ennis could work the field fast. For each pound of buffalo grass he picked she would give him three cents. Buffalo grass wasn’t like other crops; they’d be harvesting clean up to December. Steady pay. After their talk, Niabi pointed him up the ladder where the children had disappeared earlier and where a straw mat was laid out for him.

  In the morning, when Ennis awakened the children were gone. He climbed down, surprised that the men too were already at their hunt. Niabi’s eyes told him to sit while she ladled out a porridge of corn and honey. She talked about the Christian missionary school the children attended, obliged him with paper and pencil, and agreed to post his letter to Lemon. Before nine they were through the latched straw door entering the fields, where the air was heavy and sweet. Bees fed on alfalfa, Niabi said. He should keep a lookout for hives in the corners of the fields. She showed him where to locate scythes and sickles for cutting the hay and how to strip the stem from the leaves, to smooth out each leaf and put the “rights” in a pile. Work commenced at sunrise and continued until sunset with the exception of one hour in late afternoon when Niabi called them in for a musty soup made from turkey carcasses. Ennis liked to watch her pound the hominy for the flatbread they dipped in the soup, her back flexing as she squatted on the ground, driving the big rock between her legs, thick and shapely like Lemon’s. After lunch they returned to work. “Come on now. Roll away, roll away, roll. Roll!” Ennis called to stout women pushing bales. Long after the women had worked to a fever heat and collapsed inside one of the huts, he worked. Strong from lifting anvils and large scraps of iron, his arms and back were suited for anything, but this work also suited his mind. Out in the dark blue fields he couldn’t help but think of Lemon. It comforted him to know she was out there, meddling in the earth, talking to the wind.