Homeland

by John Jakes

  Both were journalists of the greatest repute. There the resemblance ended. As Captain Lee had suggested to Paul, Mr. Davis stood for society and the salons, Mr. Crane for the street and the slums. Crane hobnobbed with colleagues and ordinary soldiers, Davis with the generals and the admirals. Davis was uniformly friendly, never haughty. But everyone, including Davis himself, probably, knew there was a chasm: Richard Harding Davis alone and resplendent on one side, and on the other, the legion of the lower-paid, led by the writer some of them called Saint Stephen.

  One evening, late, Paul dragged himself up from the rathskeller to the rotunda. It was quiet; only a few couples drifting through and two Army lieutenants examining messages on the board. Walking toward the elevator at the east end, he entered the Solarium, a large room with tall windows, white wicker chairs, tropical plants in fancy urns. A man was seated there, alone, reading a Tampa Times. It was Paley.

  Weary as he was, Paul thought this an ideal moment to introduce himself. He approached. After a few seconds Paley closed his paper and deigned to notice him. Paul was shocked to see the man close up. His eyes had a sickly, sunken look, his skin a yellow cast.

  “Mr. William Paley? I have wanted to meet you. My name is Crown. I am a camera operator like you.”

  “Oh, yes, I heard there was another one in the hotel. Who do you work for?”

  “The American National Luxograph Company of Chicago. Our president is Colonel Sidney Shadow.”

  “Never heard of him.” Paley gave a dyspeptic belch, without covering his mouth. His breath was terrible.

  “But he is licensed by Mr. Edison.”

  “So is the Eden Musée, young man. So are a dozen others. Now if that’s all—”

  “No, please, I would like to buy you a glass of beer downstairs. I thought we might exchange ideas. I know you are very experienced.”

  Paley threw his paper on a wicker table. “I have no time to teach novices, and I sincerely doubt I can learn from one. Good night.”

  He left the Solarium with a slow, wobbly step. Obviously he was ill. Even so, the rebuff rankled. Paul felt small, stupid, and definitely the outsider.

  Next morning he awoke before daylight, as usual. His room was on the sunny side of the hotel, and at the end of each day the temperature seemed to be a hundred. At night the room hardly cooled at all. He was sweating as he collected his razor, soap cup, and brush from the accumulating clutter on the dressing table and headed for the bathroom.

  He shaved, dressed, and ate breakfast in the mammoth dining room with its ninety-foot dome and high windows, each framed by an elaborate mahogany arch. By half past seven he’d dragged Jimmy from sleep by repeated knocking. While Jimmy ate breakfast, Paul loaded their equipment into a rented wagon. Before nine they were driving along a sand road straggling its way toward the Bay, to film more drills. Suddenly Jimmy pointed. “Holy mother. Look!” Shadow’s alligator was sunning itself on the bank of a scum-covered lagoon beside the road. It was a great leathery specimen, twelve to fourteen feet from snout to tail.

  “At last,” Paul exclaimed softly. “He’s perfect.” He stopped the wagon.

  Anxiously eyeing the gator, Jimmy tied the horse to a shrub. Paul stepped quietly toward the lagoon, carrying the camera. He unfolded the tripod and set the legs in the sand without a sound. After checking the reading on the footage meter, he started cranking.

  The gator sensed the interlopers. It roused, opened its huge long jaws crowded with sharp teeth, and started to move.

  Toward the camera.

  Jimmy ran for cover behind the nearest palm. “Dutch, pack it up, that thing’ll eat you alive!”

  Paul kept cranking. He could feel his heart leaping in his chest. The alligator advanced in a slow, almost stately way, dragging its whitish belly, leaving a trail of disturbed sand and pine straw as it drew closer.

  Paul tilted the tripod forward with one hand to keep the gator in the frame. It kept coming.

  Paul set the camera down and let go of the crank. Hopping on one foot, he managed to tear off a shoe and throw it. The shoe bounced on the gator’s snout. The gator ground its belly in the sand and stopped.

  Little half-round eyes fixed on Paul with a baleful stare. Gingerly, Paul hoisted the tripod and carefully put a foot behind him. Took a step backward. Another.

  The alligator opened its jaws …

  And turned and rushed to the lagoon, leaping through the scum crust with a great splash and sinking from sight.

  “Godamighty, that was close.” Jimmy was sweating heavily. “You got balls. If that thing had put its lamps on me, I’d have peed my pants.”

  “One minute longer, me too.” They both laughed in a rare moment of camaraderie.

  Paul checked the film counter. He’d gotten seventy-five feet if it all came out. In terms of tension and fear, he’d paid dearly for every foot. It cost him a shoe, too.

  He remembered the moment in Indiana when he’d thought the Wabash Cannonball would run over him. He’d felt the same panic then, the same elation afterward. The moral was apparent. If you wanted exciting pictures, you had to take risks. That was why Jimmy would never last in the business.

  Later that afternoon, wearing a new pair of shoes charged to the company, he walked over the Lafayette Street bridge with a small wooden crate under his arm; the first two 400-foot magazines of exposed negative. He’d packed them in excelsior and painted warnings about fragility and heat on the crate.

  At the depot, the commercial agent helped him fill out papers for a C.O.D. shipment to Chicago. He watched carefully while the agent wired on the shipping tag. Using the agent’s paste pot, he fastened a hotel envelope to the crate. On the sheet of stationery inside, he’d indexed the subjects, using the meter numbers.

  He went next to the Western Union office on Franklin Street, where he laboriously printed Shadow’s name and address on a blank, then the message.

  SENDING SENSATIONAL FOOTAGE EXPRESS COLLECT.

  He wet the tip of the pencil stub on his tongue. He hesitated only a moment before signing Dutch.

  Paul soon came to recognize the most important officers headquartered at the hotel. Notable among them was a small, frail man who seemed to go everywhere at a rapid lope. General Joe Wheeler was one of several ex-Confederates wearing blue again. Another was the former United States consul from Havana, General Fitzhugh Lee, a big Santa Claus whom everybody liked as they did Wheeler.

  The commanding general of the expeditionary force, General William Rufus Shafter, was accorded proper respect, but few cared for him personally. The general’s nickname was Pecos Bill. He had a distinguished record as a Civil War officer and an Indian fighter, but the reporters said he’d changed considerably since those days. Now sixty-three, he weighed approximately three hundred pounds. His uniform was big as a tent and fit badly. His graying hair and walrus mustache always looked unkempt. Whenever he moved, or even stood still, he breathed hard and noisily. His aides trailed him closely, as if he might topple over with a heart seizure at any moment. The reporters said Shafter was too old and too fat for the exertions of a summer campaign in the hot latitudes.

  One evening when Jimmy was roaming again, Paul went down to the rathskeller. He’d become a regular customer; he liked the room because it attracted a comfortable crowd. Lieutenants and captains drank there, and once in a while a major, but the high brass preferred small private parties or spent the evenings in conference. So far he hadn’t seen a general or even a colonel downstairs.

  Tonight was the exception. He found himself near a colonel. His face seemed familiar, but Paul couldn’t identify it.

  The colonel was having a cup of coffee and complaining loudly to a couple of juniors. “Of course it’s a government conspiracy, and politically motivated. The intent is to punish me for my convictions by keeping me in Florida, out of the action.”

  The junior officers made sympathetic noises. Paul finished his beer and went upstairs for a stroll. Only then did the speaker’s identity regis
ter. His face and huge leonine head had appeared on Democratic posters all over Chicago two years ago.

  He asked questions next day to confirm it. Yes, Colonel William Jennings Bryan was serving with a regiment of Nebraska “silver soldiers.”

  Bryan was nearly invisible in the hotel. That wasn’t the case with a flamboyant lieutenant colonel named Roosevelt, of the 1st Volunteer Cavalry. The regimental commander, Leonard Wood, was a veteran professional. But his second got the attention.

  One morning as Paul was setting up the camera to photograph flamingos in a large reflecting pool on the grounds, Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt came striding along, wearing khakis and a blue bandanna with polka dots. Paul had seen similar bandannas on other men in the regiment the newsmen variously called Wood’s Wild Westerners, the Cavalry Cowpunchers, Teddy’s Terrors, or the Rough Riders.

  Roosevelt greeted Paul with a toothy grin and a booming hello. He stopped to watch Paul adjust the tripod feet. Jimmy had gone off for a new film magazine.

  Roosevelt pointed to the name stenciled on the camera. “That’s you, American Luxograph?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know a little something about this picture business. The American Biograph contacted me two years ago, shortly after President McKinley posed for them in Canton.”

  “Right, sir. Your estate in New York, I saw the footage.”

  “Fascinating, these flickers. They reach and influence so many. Or they have that potential. Too bad their moral tone isn’t higher.”

  “Colonel, if I may disagree—that’s a false impression. I admit that until now, most of the subjects have been—excuse me, I still have trouble with my English—in German I would say alltäglich. Is there a word ‘trivial’?”

  “Indeed so.”

  “The pictures have been trivial, but that will change. Serious films, films of actual events such as this war, will change it.”

  “I like a man who’s an optimist. And perhaps you’re right. After all, the flickers helped Bill McKinley win.” Looking thoughtful, Roosevelt polished his silver-wire spectacles on his sleeve. “What’s your name, lad?”

  “Paul Crown. Everyone calls me Dutch.”

  “Well, Dutch Crown, look me up if I can assist you in any way. Any way at all.”

  They shook hands. Roosevelt had a crushing grip. As he strode off, Paul was keenly skeptical of his friendliness. In the rathskeller it was said that the colonel had strong political ambitions and actively sought publicity.

  Thinking that, Paul was wryly amused. What a cynic he’d become at the old age of almost twenty-one.

  Officers around the hotel talked with a fair degree of candor. There might be music and dancing and gaiety at night, but there were problems, horrendous ones, discussed all day.

  Freight cars now blocked the rails for fifty miles north. Other boxcars sat idle on sidings as far away as Columbia, South Carolina. The cars contained vital arms, ammunition, food. But the Quartermaster Department couldn’t unload the cars and quickly route their contents to the proper storage sites because the department had no way to determine whether the shipment was for the Commissary Department, the Ordnance Department, the Engineer Department, or the quartermasters themselves. There were no bills of lading, no explanatory paperwork of any kind; nothing but the same painted legend Paul had seen on every car. MILITARY SUPPLIES—RUSH! The materiel needed for the expedition could be sorted and routed only by a search of individual cars, an effort requiring thousands of man-hours.

  Paul heard complaints about the vile food being supplied by government contractors, and the ineptitude of War Department purchasing agents who were sending men to the tropics in clothing more suited to the Yukon gold strike. One night in a ground-floor salon, he heard Roosevelt hold forth in front of a small crowd of officers and civilians.

  “Criminal, that’s what it is!” Roosevelt pounded a fragile table; a piece of porcelain statuary almost toppled. “In the 1st Volunteers we refused to accept those blue hair shirts. We procured our own khakis, at our own expense. If Secretary Alger doesn’t like it, he can court-martial us. But first I’ll knock the damned teeth of the damned little runt down his damned throat, you can count on that, boys.”

  His listeners clapped and gave several supportive huz-zahs. He certainly knew how to work a crowd.

  The War Department was derelict on many fronts. Through sheer mismanagement it had thus far failed to spend its latest fifty-million-dollar appropriation for modern equipment—enough Krag-Jorgensen rifles to replace old Springfields; the new smokeless powder.

  Port Tampa represented another potential disaster. Paul and Jimmy drove out there one day to survey the picture possibilities. It was hardly worth the bother. From a freight yard at the end of the single track owned by the Plant System, two spurs ran to twin wooden piers extending some three thousand feet into Old Tampa Bay. There were three tracks on the south pier, one on the north. The Plant line boasted that the piers could handle two dozen ocean-going vessels at one time. The British attaché, Captain Lee, told Paul that one dozen was more realistic. And thirty to thirty-five ships would be required for the expedition. Further, the channel was difficult; narrow and no deeper than twenty-three feet. The largest transports drew eighteen feet. There were only four pilots with enough experience to handle such ships in the local waters.

  Four regiments of Negro regulars had been sent to Tampa. Two infantry regiments, the 24th and the 25th, and the more exotic 9th and 10th Cavalry; the famous Buffalo Soldiers, who had policed the Plains and protected white settlers since the Civil War.

  The volunteers from Southern states and a majority of Tampa citizens didn’t like the blacks. There were incidents; taunting matches, fights with fists, rocks, barrel staves. Then, out in Lakeland, where the 10th was camped, a trooper from the regiment asked for a haircut at a barbershop and was refused. The black soldier protested and argued. He was driven out of the shop by the white owner’s invective and by threats from several customers.

  Soon after, a band of men from the 10th came marching down the center of the main street. They pulled their pistols, blew out the barbershop window, and shot up the street. Before they were disarmed and taken away under guard, a white bystander lay dead.

  “And he was just watching,” Jimmy said. He was in sympathy with the locals.

  Late one afternoon he and Paul were taking a short rest in rocking chairs on the front veranda, having spent the whole day in a fruitless search for exciting subjects.

  Jimmy had a Tampa Times and began to regale Paul with excerpts from an editorial. He mispronounced most of the larger words: “Enrolling the Negro in the Army has made him forget his place. Negro soldiers have made themselves offensive to the citizens of Tampa. They insist on being treated like white men, and display a pronounced insolence when they are not. The white officers in charge of the Negroes have done nothing to curb this arrogant behavior.”

  He lowered the paper. “Bang on the target, wouldn’t you say?”

  “No. Why should black men loyally serving their country arouse such fury?”

  “Jesus, Dutch, are you ever gonna understand America? Niggers are one step from slavery and half a step from apes.”

  “Is that it? They were slaves before your great Civil War, and everyone thought them poor low creatures who could only be field hands and housemaids, and even though the North won that war, people still feel the same way about the Negroes? That’s stupid. They didn’t choose to put on chains and do menial work, did they? Anyway, my uncle said the war freed them and made them equal with all other—”

  “Uh-uh, forget that. Free, maybe. But equal to a white man? Never. A nigger isn’t fit to stand in a white man’s shadow.”

  “But the Negro soldiers are Americans! They wear the same uniform as the white soldiers do. They stand the same risk of dying. They should be entitled to the same decent treatment.”

  “You say that too loud, some of these Florida crackers’ll fit you with a tar overcoat or a hemp nec
ktie.”

  “Come on. That is ridiculous.” Paul rocked a moment or two, thinking. “We should film some of the Negro cavalrymen, they’d be interesting subjects.”

  “Oh sure, let’s do that. And the first time they show the pictures at Iz Pflaum’s, the micks and the bohunks’ll tear out the seats and burn the place down. Nobody wants to see coon soldiers, for Christ’s sake. Right here it says the Army practically has to threaten white officers with court martial to get ’em to command one of those units. They should put the damn niggers up front, to save the white boys.”

  “How can you say such a thing?”

  “Because I’m a white man, and I look after myself. Anybody who gets in the way of Jim Daws when Jim Daws is looking out for himself—he’s in for it.”

  That night Paul was sipping beer at the rathskeller’s crowded bar when a chunky young man wearing a checked cap approached him. “Excuse me, you’re Crown, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  The stranger offered his card. “Billy Bitzer. American Biograph, New York. Thought I should say hello.”

  Billy Bitzer was older than Paul by perhaps five years; a neatly dressed fellow with a squarish, likable face. He laid his cap on the bar. “Another beer? My treat.” He signaled the barkeep. “I figure we may need to help each other in Cuba. We sure won’t get any help from the newspaper boys. They don’t think much of us.”

  “So I have discovered, though Mr. Davis is very friendly.”

  “You’re German,” Bitzer said as the beer arrived. “Me too.” He blew off some of the head and took a long drink. “I hear old Paley gave you the snob treatment.”