by Neely Tucker
“When Billy wasn’t pairing with somebody else.”
“You’re saying Billy was sort of a slut.”
“Not to speak ill of the dead.”
“Hunh. But, okay, Billy, he bring in any fights, weapons, scary drug dudes?”
“He’d be banned for that, I mean, bounced hard. We got a license, right? You think we’re going to get any love from the city council, police stage a drug raid in a queer bar?”
“So, Billy, what you’re saying, wasn’t a scary guy?”
“Billy made Little Richard look butch.”
• • •
Outside, he turned a corner into an alley and there were two guys standing back there. One of them smiled and said, “Ten bucks?” Sully said thanks but no and went back into the street and Alex was pulling up in the rental, shades on, windows down, saying, “You getting blown off in the alley? Jesus.”
He popped open the passenger door and plunked down in the seat. “I was committing journalism,” he said, “not fellatio.”
“In an alley?”
“That’s not where I was committing it.”
“The journalism or the fellatio?”
“Could you just drop me off at my house, Pocahontas? I got calls to make.”
She accelerated, skipping through the light on South Cap, a light more red than yellow. “You get anything back there? Seriously, I got dick. The cameras. I got kicked out of Traxx. Nobody said sweet fuckall.”
“I got a bouncer in the main club. Sounds like Billy was hanging out. Guy was saying Billy might have blown a joint, but he wasn’t a dealer.”
“So?”
“The family is making a big deal about keeping Billy’s dealing out of the paper.”
“So they paid the bouncer to shut up.”
“Might be,” he said, watching the neighborhood roll by, “but it wasn’t the guy’s vibe. He told me the cops had been down there. I asked about other guys, these investigators the family hired? Dude said he hadn’t seen nobody like that.”
“I repeat: He gets paid to shut up.”
He bit his lower lip, squinting. “Yeah, but the thing is? I believed him a lot more than I believed Shellie Stevens, the family shill.”
“Nobody believes lawyers. About anything. I did my will last year, did I tell you? I was running around the West Bank all the time and started thinking about it. Wanted to make sure my mom would get my payoff if I got popped, y’know? So I got this lawyer to draw it up, and the first thing I did? Hired another guy to review it. They’re shit, all of them.”
“So had the first guy fucked you over?”
“No, thank God, but who can tell? That’s the point. With lawyers, who can ever fucking tell?”
TWELVE
MARCUS YOUNG, THE retired chief historian at Howard University, was a quotable son of a bitch, so when he picked up on the fourth ring, Sully skirted around the edge of the kitchen table, surprised at getting him so easily, balancing the phone in one hand and a Basil’s over ice in the other, trying not to drop either or both.
“Dr. Young, hey now,” Sully said, sliding into a chair, phone and bourbon safe, reaching for his notebook. “It’s Sully Carter, at the paper. Calling about Frenchman’s Bend this time. Slave depots in antebellum D.C. Working on a story. Talk to me.”
Before he could get the top off the pen and open the notebook, Young harrumphed into the phone and said, “Is this about Billy Ellison?”
Sully squinted one eye shut. He hadn’t thought before dialing. Young had been born in D.C., never left, studied at Howard, then taught there, still lived in the Shaw neighborhood, a nice three-story row house. Had known Ellington, been onstage at the March on Washington, was longtime friends with Shirley Horn. . . . He wasn’t about to piss off Delores Ellison, who had probably given him a grant for half of his career, for a cause no better than a quote in a newspaper story.
“You read the paper,” Sully said, rolling with it, trying to make it work. “Yes. Ellison. Sure. It’s about Billy Ellison. And Frenchman’s Bend. The history.”
“Billy was killed in the Bend?”
“It appears so, though I can’t quite print it yet.”
“I feel badly for Delores,” Young said. He was emeritus these days, worked out of his home office. Sully could hear the man stirring about. A microwave beeped and started humming. His standard morning tea, for which he was famous. “I met Billy once or twice. In passing, at one function or another. William, his father, was of course a wonderful man.”
“Of course.”
“Did you know that Delores’s great-great-grandfather, Nathaniel Ellison, was founder of the Washington Trust Bank, in the late nineteenth century? First black-owned bank in the city, if not the region?”
“I had heard that,” Sully bluffed, scribbling fast to keep up, working in a sip from the drink. “Seems to have made a mint.”
“The richest black man in the city, in his day. One has to marvel at the accomplishment, a black making money when the controlling interests hated the very idea.”
He paused, Sully hearing the microwave door click open, the scuttlings of saucer and tea and milk. “So they know Billy was actually in the Bend when he was killed?”
“Unofficially, yes. Officially, not yet. Blood tests coming back, they found his shoe there, you’d have to believe it washed up on shore by accident. . . . Look, the piece I’m doing, it’s a nonstory if Billy wasn’t killed there. This is for Sunday. The police will have confirmed it or not by then. I’m just legging it out here, and you’re the guy who wrote all the books on the history of the city, so, I’m just looking for an informed source who can—”
“Can what?”
“—talk about, well, okay, slavery in the city, back in the day. All I know is that the Bend was a scary place, some sort of slave house, portal, what have you.”
“Is that the sum total of your knowledge?”
“On this?”
There was a sigh, followed by a long pause.
“I’m sure it’s old hat to you,” Sully said, looking up at the ceiling, “but I really don’t think—”
“The Bend was part of a very complex economic system,” Young said, sounding tired, an umph escaping his lips, Sully picturing the man sitting down at the kitchen table. “So. As I told my students, the ones who knew even less than you. Take the black and white out of it. Don’t confuse your modern thinking with yesterday’s. This was about profit and loss. It was trading in livestock, like cattle, sheep.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.”
“Okay.”
“Write that down: This was about profit.”
“I already did.”
“Now. The Bend wasn’t the only slave house in the area, that’s primary. You can’t think this was some special hellhole. There were several slave portals along the river and in the city proper. This is after 1807 and, for our purposes here, before 1850, you understand? It’s important. The international slave trade was outlawed by the U.S. Congress in 1807. The importance here is that it made African Americans already here much more valuable, because there wouldn’t be any more imported. Or not many, in any event. The domestic trade in slaves became all the more important.”
“Right.”
“So then. In our nation’s lovely capital, the District, the domestic slave trade was outlawed, again by Congress, in the Compromise of 1850. Slavery itself continued to be legal in D.C. until the reign of Lincoln, until April 16, 1862.”
“That’s the Emancipation Proclamation?”
A sigh.
“No. That much misunderstood document—which did not, for the record, end slavery in the United States—was still nine months away. This is the D.C. Compensated Emancipation Act.”
“Ah.”
“But here we’re talking prior to 1850. When one could
buy and sell slaves in the shadow of the Capitol. There were several such facilities. There was one, in a yellow house just behind what is now Independence Ave., about where the Department of Agriculture sits, but the exact location is disputed. They had a fence of wooden slats around the perimeter. Passersby wrote letters describing the place, shanties and poles, fingers wiggling through the boards. This is in full view of the Capitol even now, particularly so then. It is, I would surmise, half a mile. Downhill. In plain view.”
“Jesus.”
“It is your people, not mine, who—”
“I thought we were taking the white and black out of it.”
“—were trafficking in, no, you’re interrupting. But to the point: No other portals, locally, compared to the Bend. Infinitely bigger, infinitely worse. It was a holding pen for slave ships. It was often used as an adjunct of Franklin and Armfield, the slave-trading outfit across the river in Alexandria. You know of Franklin and Armfield?”
“Just the name.”
“One of the largest slave-trading houses in the nation. It’s a museum now. Thousands of slaves they sold down south. They used ships for slaves headed far down the coast, around Florida, up to the Gulf states. Those ships often docked at the Bend. But the Bend, it was larger than that. It was a staging, a holding point, for other slave houses. You could have hundreds of slaves penned up there, waiting for weeks and months.”
“Sweet baby Jesus.”
“As I noted earlier, African-Americans were, at the time, high-priced cattle and hogs. You could buy them in a lot, you could walk up and buy them one at a time. They had auctions the first Saturday of every month.”
“So there were trading blocks, like that?”
“Before 1850? Perhaps, but I don’t know about actual blocks. It was more of a small wooden stage they’d have slaves stand on so that the crowd could see. The Bend was isolated, out from the other wharves, from other buildings or houses along the southwest waterfront. It was an open area blocked off by a very high brick wall, almost like the fort that exists today, to the south. Inside the Bend’s perimeter wall were one or two brick buildings and a wooden shack or two, and a pier for loading ships. The slave narratives of people who were there are scattered but shocking, even for the period. Rape, sodomy, the most base forms of humiliation and violence.”
“Who ran it? Franklin and Armfield?”
“No. A man named Delacroix. A merchant who immigrated from Paris. Hence the name.”
“What became of him? The place, the business?”
“He died soon after the war started. The Civil War. The business had been all but killed by the Compromise of 1850, but even as a holding ground it totally collapsed after the war, of course. The outer brick wall was demolished shortly after Lincoln’s assassination. The rest just rotted and fell apart.”
“What about later, though? Why hasn’t the city done anything with it? It would seem—”
“If every former slave port or auction block was a national landmark, you couldn’t drive through most southern cities, Mr. Carter. You know that. D.C. being, in this context, a southern city. There is no marker for the slave house that was on what is now Independence Avenue. Who would want one? ‘Here, in the symbolic city of liberty, five blocks from the Capitol, was a small and petty dealer in human flesh’? What member of Congress is going to vote for that?”
“Okay, okay. Right. No one. So—”
“I grew up here, Mr. Carter. For all of my life and before, the Bend and the area around it has been a rough-hewn, ugly scab on the city’s rump. The race riots of 1919, the Red Summer—do you know of this, the Red Summer?”
“In general. Across the country.”
“Well.” Young sipped his tea, a slurp down the telephone line. The man’s wife had died twenty years ago and his daughter lived in Chicago. Sully pictured him in pajamas and a bathrobe, Granddad at home in the morning, eyebrows out of control and the bathtub needing attention. “This will answer the rest of your question. It was just after the end of the Great War, 1919. The black soldiers of that conflict were outraged to come home to the same old Jim Crow laws that they had left.
“Now. The white soldiers and sailors, however, came home to find what they considered to be a bunch of uppity Negroes in Washington. Some blacks even had federal jobs. Clerk, messenger, the like. Nothing like today. This was menial employment. Well. There were thousands of unemployed white troops just back home, congregated and milling about in Washington that summer and here were all these well-dressed Negroes taking the trolley back and forth to work like they owned the place. Now. At the same time, the newspapers—there were four of them—had been making headlines all summer with wild stories about Negroes raping white women.”
“Truly a southern tradition.”
“Indeed. So it is mid-July, a Saturday night, the nineteenth. Can you imagine this city—a swamp between two rivers, the heat, humidity, mosquitos, the misery in that time? Word went out—who knows, from hospital worker to friends, from soldier to sailor over a warm beer in a saloon?—that a nigger had raped a white woman.”
“Ah, shit,” Sully said.
“Do we need to describe the rest? For details only. Around Ninth and D streets in Southwest—this is not far from the National Mall today—a white mob fell upon a man named Charles Ralls, who had the misfortune of both being a Negro and being out in public that night. Another Negro named George Montgomery was walking home with groceries. His skull was fractured with a stone, a brick.”
“How big is this mob?”
“Attendance was not taken, regrettably. Multiple newspaper accounts of the time say about four hundred, which probably means it was about seventy-five drunks. The next day, The Washington Post published a completely fictional story about the previous night’s incidents and announced there was a general muster call of soldiers for a ‘clean-up operation’ downtown, to start about nine p.m.—that’s about full dark, that time of year—and all soldiers should report for duty. Well. Let us apply our imagination to that factual image. The heat, the drudgery, the utter lack of intelligence, the comedown from fighting the war to being back home, or to be pedestrian, the simple lack of diversion or other sport. It was something to do. So they did congregate, in actual crowds this time, and they set out on a proper rampage. Blacks were pulled off trolley cars, a girl was killed in her home. It went on for four days. Fifteen dead, more than one hundred wounded.”
“Newspapers being handy for inciting race riots.”
“You have not heard me through. The point here is, ironically enough, that more whites were killed than blacks. Ten of the fifteen corpses. The number of critically wounded was about equal. This is the part of the story I want you to pay attention to. This was not a white mob against cowering Negroes. Black men, many of them former soldiers themselves, brought pistols, brought shotguns, brought rifles, to counter the white mob. The records, at least deemed by body count and physical violence, are clear. Negroes shot and killed and beat white people. It became something of a point of pride in the black community here, Mr. Carter, that the Red Summer was when black Washington stopped taking shit from the white man.”
“And now it’s Chocolate City.”
“Mmmm.” He sipped his tea and cleared his throat. “So you ask me, a native Washingtonian, you ask me about slave chattel in the nation’s capital before the Civil War, about one of the places where black men, women, and children were kept in pens like pigs, half a century before the Red Summer? One such pen has been obliterated and built over. Another—the Bend—has been ignored and shunned, finding life only among drug dealers and criminals. What do I have to say? I say you are wading, Mr. Carter, into a very dark place. It is no place good. It should be dug up, dumped into the channel, added as landfill to Hains Point. Frenchman’s Bend, I would say, in its life before the Civil War and in the century and a half after it, is the antimatter of the American dream
.”
THIRTEEN
SHE OPENED THE door and was surprised to see him there. The half step back, the lips parting, the carefully threaded eyebrows lifting. Her left hand fluttered to her mouth, then went down, coming to rest on top of her right, both holding the door handle.
“Mr. Carter,” Delores Ellison said. “I wasn’t—wasn’t expecting you.”
“I know,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting me to be here, either. Could I come in? It’s just one or two questions that are bothering me. It would help a great deal. I want the story I write to be accurate, and there is no one who can clear it up for me but you.”
He was standing on her front step, the street out front empty of television trucks and black sedans, nothing but the manicured yard and the trees blossoming into life, shade from the sun that was coming through the clouds now. It was maybe an hour and change since he’d hung up with Young. He’d walked around the house and out in the yard, called Alex but gotten her answering machine, and then said, Screw it. The questions that had come to him that morning, the noninformation that was beginning to come through about Billy’s non–drug dealing, was bugging him too much; he couldn’t sit still.
“I—I—well, we are planning the funeral,” she said, looking at him, much more uncertain than during his first visit. “It is tomorrow. There’s so much—I thought you had spoken to Shellie.”
“I did,” he said, clasping his own hands in front of him, mimicking her posture as much as possible. He’d left the cycle jacket and helmet on the bike, standing there in black slacks and a blue dress shirt. “He gave me a statement, and I quoted just about all of it in the short piece I did. But I’m writing another, much longer piece, as much about Frenchman’s Bend as Billy, and Mr. Stevens’s statement, as helpful as it was, didn’t address everything. So I came to ask you about it.”
The house behind her was dark, quiet, empty. Her eyes had a vacant look as well, and he guessed she was still on some level of medication.
“Restraining order?” she said, a hand flicking up to touch her hair, coming back down, looking for a place to alight. “Shellie said something about a restraining order?”