“No,” Canby said, “that was four years later. When Sherman came. A longer story for another time.”
Underwood was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Mind if I ask what was it happened between you and Mamie O’Donnell?”
“What’ve you heard?”
“That you went down on a bribe,” he said in a low voice. “That you were taking protection money from her.”
“I took money from her, Underwood. A loan, between friends.” He looked up at the lowering clouds. “I had others I could have asked but I was too proud to go to them. I knew Mamie would not tell.”
“But she did.”
“She was approached by a detective, I’m not sure which one. Maybe Maddox. Whoever it was had the Ring behind him, I’m sure. I guess they didn’t give her much choice.
“She and Vernon had their own interests to protect. And I had sided with the Republicans. Sticking up for me would have cost them. Dearly. But I did not believe Frances would have truckled. We go back, you know. But she did. By the time I believed it, it was too late.”
Underwood nodded, staring down at the ground. “Mind if I ask what the loan was for?”
“You’ll be a detective yet,” Canby said. He made a sound he had intended to be a laugh. “That’s the question you should ask. Something for a lady.”
Canby rose and stretched his legs. “We’ll work separately for a day or two. Get a few hours’ sleep if you can. I want you to go to the Cotton Exposition, nine o’clock sharp.” He took his wallet from his jacket and counted out fifteen dollars from it. He handed the bills to Underwood. “Spend this there, all of it. Conspicuously. I’ll be about town. We will see what happens.”
Underwood looked at the money in his hand as through it were dirty. “Conspicuously,” he repeated. “Like a sitting duck.”
“You’ll be a moving duck,” Canby said, “unless you refuse the assignment.” His eyes locked on the black man’s until Underwood folded the bills and tucked them into his breast pocket.
Canby looked out over the sodden campus, at the rain still falling. Dawn would be a muted affair, in this weather. Over by the stables the creek had now come out of its banks. The swollen water was lapping at the base of the privies, fresh rain and overflowing waste licking at the weathered clapboards. He remembered again his father’s laugh at Emory those years ago, the sound more like a cough than one of mirth.
“Tonight’s done for us, Underwood,” he said. “It’s all a bunch of shite.”
ANSON BURKE stepped off the seven-thirty Western & Atlantic train with a large flowered carpetbag in one hand and his hat in the other, his big Colt revolver tucked under his chambray shirt but bulging enough beneath it to be clearly outlined against the cotton. He stared about him at the activity of Union Depot without noticing Canby’s approach, the country mouse awash on the swelling tide of noise and movement that were Atlanta at this hour—at most hours. When Canby touched the big man’s arm, Anse flinched and seemed to take a moment to focus on the one familiar face before him.
“Good God, Thomas. How many are there here?”
Canby smiled. “Not many with a grip as pretty as yours.”
Anse blushed and looked down at the bright bag. “It was Mama’s,” he said slowly.
Half an hour later the carpetbag was safely ensconced with the porters of Kimball House and Anse, penthouse key of his own in his pocket, was following Canby through the streets of Atlanta as they made their way northward through town. Anse’s pace seemed to quicken as the homes they passed grew smaller and more modest and the faces of their fellow pedestrians grew darker. Sprinkled among the residences here was industry of all types that could process whatever was brought in on the rail lines, from cotton and timber to mercantiles and ores. Every building that was not a house, it seemed, belched forth either smoke or steam into the Georgia sky.
“How’m I supposed to keep track of a single nigger in Atlanta, Thomas?”
“Negro, Anse. You’re going to have to get that right.”
“All right, then, Negro. How will I know him?”
For answer Canby pulled him into the shadows of a lumber kiln that sat radiating heat from its walls as it cured its contents on the west side of Marietta Street. He nodded toward a whitewashed two-story house across the road that had seen better days.
“He boards there. His name is Cyrus Underwood. I want you to follow him to the Cotton Exposition and keep track of him. If anybody asks, you’re just in town for the fair. But don’t let him out of your sight, not till he’s back here. Follow him home this evening and keep south on Marietta. You’ll see the top floor of Kimball House soon enough.”
After a time the front door of the boardinghouse opened and Underwood strode out of it and down the front steps. He settled his hat on his head and set out south on Marietta Street toward the roundhouse and the depot, where the W&A was running trains out every fifteen minutes for the exposition.
“Note the suit and the hat, Anse. Don’t lose him.”
Anse nodded and tugged at his belt, whether to reposition the Colt or to adjust his prodigious belly, Canby could not tell. He looked like a man readying himself for battle as he stepped out from the shadow of the kiln.
“And Anse?” Canby said, trying not to smile. “Try to blend in.”
THE SMALLER BLADE of Canby’s penknife fit the lock easily enough. With a jiggling turn of it he was inside Underwood’s quarters, taking in the spartan room. An iron bed, neatly made, two spindle-backed rocking chairs with a side table between them, heaped with books. Night jar in the corner. He stepped to the bureau, which was missing one of its drawers, and on which sat the apparatus of Underwood’s toilet, catching as he did a hazy reflection of himself in the smoked mirror pegged to the wall above it. Canby regarded the lather brush, the well-worn hone, and the razor itself. A folding straight-edge, cheap but sharp enough. The washbasin in which it lay was chipped but the blade was unmarred—no nicks or burrs to indicate rougher usage than that for which it was made.
The stack of books on the rockers was another matter. Canby recognized a name from several spines of the books. George Fitzhugh. One of his father’s particular bêtes noire from the days of heated debate and then open rancor that led up to secession. He picked up Sociology for the South and read a passage that had been underlined: “We have fully and fairly tried the experiment of freeing the Negro . . . and it is now our right and our duty, to listen to the voice of reason and experience, and reconsign him to the only condition for which he is suited.” Another of Fitzhugh’s treatises, Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters, had been similarly marked. “Free laborers have not a thousandth part of the rights and liberties of negro slaves,” Fitzhugh argued, adding, “Where a few own the soil, they have unlimited power over the balance of society.” Canby remembered how he had been startled from his lessons one evening by the report of Cannibals All! hitting the mantel above the fireplace, where it had struck after being thrown from Angus’s hand.
That copy, he assumed, had been returned in damaged form to the Emory College library. The one he now held, he noted from a bookplate pasted inside its front cover, was checked out from the Young Men’s Library Association. He set it with Sociology for the South on the bed for the moment, then took another look around the room and decided to pay a visit to the Y.M.L.A.’s quarters up from Pryor Street next. But his eye fell to the open pages of the book he had uncovered when he moved Fitzhugh’s works. A worn Bible, left open on the rocking chair’s seat, a passage from Revelations highlighted, in contrast to the other books, with a red ink: “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.”
“Underwood,” he muttered, “goddamn you.”
ANSE SETTLED HIMSELF into the leather seat and looked around balefully as the train began to pick up steam. His was the only white face in t
he car and, worse, this man Underwood was staring right at him on account of it. Forty years of living in the mountains and Anse had seen nary a black face in that time, save for his rare visits down to this capital city. Had also seen the famous sign at the Forsyth County line in north Georgia that read NIGGER DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU HERE. Talk had circulated about putting up a similar signpost at Ringgold’s corporate limits but Canby would have nothing of it, elections be damned. Now Anse felt the distance of every mile that separated him from home. And he was surrounded.
A hand settled on his shoulder and he jumped.
“First time in the big city?”
Anse looked up and saw that the voice, and the hand, belonged to a white man outfitted in the uniform of the Western & Atlantic. He also wore a conductor’s cap.
“Naw,” Anse said.
“Could have fooled me. You’re in the colored car, Hiram. Move on up to the next one. I think you’ll be more comfortable.” He dismissed him with a shooing gesture and began taking up tickets from the black passengers. Anse made his way to the front of the car, turning his wide hips sideways to navigate the narrow aisle, and slid open the vestibule door to the rushing air outside. He balked at opening the door to the car ahead, although he could see it was filled with white people, the ladies seated and men standing with hands slung in the leather straps that hung from the brass rails above. Instead he stood on the steel platform and breathed in the whistling air. So many smells in it: coal smoke, wood smoke, creosote, people, every kind of food. God knows what else.
When the train pulled into the Oglethorpe Park station he was the first one off, climbing down the car’s welded steps to the decking of the depot. When Underwood came down from the colored car Anse fell in a few yards behind him, hands in his pockets, trying his best to look like a man strolling through the exposition for the third or fourth time.
But it took an effort not to gawk. He followed the rail passengers making their way to the I.C.E. entrance and his gaze went up to its gate, which seemed to loom five or six stories high in wrought iron, with INTERNATIONAL COTTON EXPOSITION welded right into its arching metal. Next to it a fountain spewed water nearly as high. The fairgoers, white and black, formed a single line, there being too many of them, he guessed, to be segregated here. As he walked under the arch, he followed the lead of those in front of him and dropped a quarter into an iron box at the turnstiles. The usher smiled at him. The man wore a uniform of blue, buff, and green with brass buttons, all of it trimmed in gold braid. Dressed for the circus, Anse thought as the turnstile trundled behind him.
Whatever notion of pandemonium Anse still had from the Sunday school days of his youth was here confirmed. Pandemonium sped up, no less. He walked down a boulevard lined with stalls of vendors selling everything but livestock. A weird cacophony of music and noise, of pianos and organs playing in their stalls and the cries of vendors hawking wares—tobacconists, haberdashers, sellers of painted china, antique bronzes, iron novelties, jewelry and art. He paused for a second at a booth that had been set up to sell concertinas. The man in the booth a Chinaman, he guessed, with a long, braided ponytail hanging down his back, the hair as black and shiny as a crow’s wing. He stood behind his display table playing one of the concertinas, the little accordion breathing melodies in and out in his small hands.
And apparently there was more yet to be built. Carpenters and bricklayers were working everywhere, trying to finish the construction that seemed to be running far behind schedule. Anse saw aproned and sawdusted men harangued by foremen who exhorted them with cries for haste. On the hillside west of the park he saw that a city of tents had sprung up, overlooking the racetrack that marked the park’s boundary. He wondered how many of them housed these tradesmen.
Ahead of him Underwood had nearly reached the main building, a giant structure, cross-shaped, with windows high in each wall of it, flags from every state in the Union snapping on poles set at the edges of the building’s roof. He saw from its signage that it was the model cotton factory and he hurried, lest he lose the black man in the crowd pouring in.
Inside was quiet. Though the factory was outfitted with all manner of outsized cotton gins, presses, looms, and sewing machines, all were silent, inert. A man atop a ladder, balance uncertain as though he had just climbed it, cleared his throat and spoke.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the man the newspapers call a steam engine in breeches, the exposition’s director general, Hannibal Kimball, ladies and gents.”
The speaker climbed down and another man, with a sizable mustache and hair swept to one side of his head, took his place. A robust round of applause greeted him.
“Thank you, ladies. Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “I thank you all for joining us and welcome you to another day of Atlanta’s exposition. We have gathered exhibitors from New England to the Middle West and from six foreign countries, eleven hundred exhibits in all. I believe you will see that it is a new kind of South we herald—one of energy and industry. It can’t all be seen in a day. Perhaps you’ll stay and spend a night at the new Southern Hotel here on the grounds. Or at the Kimball House downtown.”
He nodded and smiled at the scattered laughter.
“I say a new kind of South, ladies and gentlemen, because the old one is dead. The old system is completely overturned. Sherman, in his rather flammable way, did us a kind of favor. As Henry Grady likes to say, the war also freed the slaveholder—of the obligation of hungry mouths to feed. We were too much dependent on slavery, and too much dependent on growing cotton without milling or weaving it. For too long we have shipped our staple to the north to be processed. We are now bringing the mill to the cotton. Atlanta will lead the charge from the fields to the factory.
“Folks, I’m glad you’re here. We’re witnessing a birth, you see. The birth of the New South. Here and now.”
“Attends! Attends!” someone cried from the back of the crowd. Anse followed the turning of heads and saw that a tall man had climbed up the side of a loom, where he clung with one hand and waved a handkerchief from the other. “One week, Monsieur Kimball, one week since opening day we have waited for the booths for the industrial pavilion!”
Kimball smiled. “My friend, the lumber that is to go into that exhibit is not sawn yet. But I told you ten days, and we will make it.”
The man wiped at his brow with his handkerchief. “But the money!” he said.
As if to answer in kind, Kimball pulled his own handkerchief from his breast pocket and waved it. All the cotton machinery sprang to life instantly and simultaneously, it seemed, gins and combs raking back and forth, sewing machines chattering into motion. The man on the loom sprang down from it just as the loom’s arm swung into the place his hand had been a moment before. Still smiling, Kimball tucked the handkerchief back into his pocket, climbed down the ladder, and began shaking hands.
Underwood was moving again, scanning the crowd as he made his way through the factory. Anse dropped back a bit. After fifteen minutes of walking through the place like a patrolman on a beat, Underwood had made it to the factory’s north door. He seemed to be looking at the black faces in the place most intently.
Just outside the factory he looked back in Anse’s direction and Anse turned away and stepped a few yards to a steaming tin cart from which a black boy was selling boiled peanuts. Once the money had changed hands, Anse turned back with his soggy paper sack in hand and saw Underwood enter a wood-framed building designated as the Arts & Industrial Pavilion, though “PAVILION” was yet unfinished, a painter on a scaffold brushing the last letters into place.
He found him inside, in yet another line. This building housed the truly heavy equipment, machinery for lumber and manufacturing that ran so deafeningly loud that the floor vibrated beneath his feet. Hemp ropes had been strung in front of the exhibits to queue the fairgoers before each machine at the closest safe distance. He took his place between the ropes. While he waited, he picked peanuts from the bag, splitting the shells
with a thumbnail and dropping them to the plank floor.
The machine ahead of him was turning a length of pine log before feeding it into a circular saw that screamed like a fury each time it bit into the wood. It was steam-powered and he could see from his place in line that it was operated by a man raising and lowering an iron lever at intervals. With each raising of the lever came a great pneumatic hissing of steam and with each lowering a softer exhalation. In between, the log jumped and danced in the carriage thunderously, bark chipping and flying. He could see Underwood now directly in front of the machine, holding up the line. Underwood’s eyes moved from the machine itself to the little sign that had been erected in front of it to explain its function, this one being far too loud for the operator to talk over. He lingered on the sign itself the longest. His face bore a strange expression of curiosity and distaste, as though he suspected that the little plaque might spring into motion as well. After a long minute the white man behind him in line said something to him and he looked up, moved on.
Anse inched forward with the others. He could see now that the lever powered two metal cylinders: one that pushed the log over and the other out of which sprang a hooked metal arm that pulled it back. At each turn the carriage carried the log forward, into the saw, where the blade sheared off side boards. After four turns and shuttles the log was rendered into a perfectly square length of pine, fit for a column or to be cut down smaller into boards for framing lumber. Anse had spent hours cutting each log to build his own house; here, one was planed in a minute. He had never in his life seen so many machines as he had this morning, and this one perhaps the granddaddy of them all. By the time he got to the prime place in the queue another huge log had been dropped onto the carriage and he was able to watch the process all the way through.
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