Red, White, and the Blues

by Walker, Rysa

  They were history.

  Looking back, I believe this second goal, the one we discussed in an essay upon our return, was supposed to remind us that we are scholars. That our goal in the field is to be objective, analytical observers, and to uncover the history that is all too often obscured by the biases of those who lived during the time frames we study. As part of our research, we might play roles that revolve around war, death, and disaster, but those are just roles. The people we interact with in the past are history—our history. And while catastrophes like the Triangle fire are tragic, the girls on that sidewalk would have died eventually anyway.

  I understood the message being delivered and dutifully gave the expected response on the essay, which earned full points. But it didn’t sit well with me. Maybe it would have if I had been standing a few feet to the left and hadn’t seen one of the bodies move. It was one of the girls who’d jumped to escape the fire, and given what passed for medical care in the era, I suspect she died from her injuries anyway. And yes, no matter what happened to her on March 25, 1911, she would have died at some point during the 1900s, centuries before I was born.

  But in that moment, the girl wasn’t dead. She was alive and clearly in pain, reaching out to a nearby officer who was looking in the other direction. I opened my mouth to call out, to alert him, but Rose squeezed my shoulder.

  “Tyson, no. If the man is supposed to see her, he will. If she’s supposed to live, she will. We’re observers. We do not interfere.” Her words seemed clinical and carefully chosen. Not we cannot interfere, but we do not.

  In the dreams that haunted me for quite some time after that jump, the girl is reaching not for the officer but for me.

  Except now, from what Madi has just told me, it’s pretty clear that Rose was wrong. Sometimes we do interfere. Or at least, Saul interfered. Will interfere, rather, if we manage to restore CHRONOS.

  Apparently, it was just a series of tiny tweaks at the beginning. Things so isolated that they weren’t flagged during his checks by the Temporal Monitoring Unit. A minor miracle at one church, a bit of prophecy at another. All laying the groundwork for the day when he would destroy CHRONOS to break free of its constraints and emerge as the leader of his own religion.

  In the end, it doesn’t work. He strands himself and others at various points in the past, and none of them can use the key. Am I one of the historians who gets stranded? Or one of those killed when CHRONOS is destroyed? Madi didn’t have answers to a lot of my questions. She’s offered to let me read the diaries in the library back in Bethesda, and eventually I will probably take her up on that. Right now, however, we need to focus on the problem at hand. The only questions for me are how much Katherine knows and why she hasn’t told us. I’m certain that she knows something based on her reaction to seeing the Cyrist temple not long after the time shift erased HQ. The fact that she’s keeping anything from us is troubling, and I hate having even a small doubt about whether we can fully trust her. Opening this can of worms at the very moment we desperately need to be working together as a team seems like a bad idea, especially since I know from past experience that no matter how close he and I may be, Richard’s first instinct is always to protect Katherine. But I’m not sure how we can avoid discussing it.

  The couple from the bushes, their clothes now back in place, passes me on the walkway. He shoots me a dirty look, which is completely fair. A hotel room will likely set him back a day’s wages. The two of them scurry across the street to the sidewalk where the bodies were stacked, unmindful of the ghosts beneath their feet, and I hear Rose’s voice again—We do not interfere.

  I turn the opposite way, toward Waverly Place, keeping to the park side of the street. About ten minutes later, I arrive at Café Society. A year or so from now, the place will be too popular for someone to simply walk in off the street and expect to get a table. But the club has only been open for about six weeks. The fact that Lawrence Dennis even knows about it is a bit surprising.

  It makes me wonder if maybe he lives a double life.

  His race is one of those odd open secrets that anyone who cared to investigate could have uncovered even a century before the advent of the internet and social media made it almost impossible to reinvent oneself. Born Lonnie Lawrence Dennis, he began work as a child evangelist at age five, touring African American churches in both the US and Britain. One of the accounts I read told of his visit to a church in Brooklyn, where a member of the congregation called out to ask the then-five-year-old child, “Why are you here?” to which he responded that he was there to save New York like he had saved thousands before. It became something of a call-and-response after that. Whatever city he toured, someone would shout out Why are you here? And he’d say he was there to save Chicago, or Boston, or London.

  As a teenager, however, the “Inspired Child” stopped touring and cut all contacts with his family. Lonnie Dennis was now Lawrence Dennis. He attended Exeter and Harvard, and worked as a diplomat, until he grew disillusioned with US foreign policy. He then worked as an advisor to a stock brokerage, until he grew disillusioned with capitalism, although he didn’t think communism or socialism were viable alternatives and wrote a book to that effect at the height of the Great Depression. While he’s often hailed as the intellectual voice of the fascist movement, his views were a bit too complex to pigeonhole into one ideology.

  If Dennis did not explicitly argue for racial equality, he didn’t argue against it, which made him a bit unusual, given that he worked with political figures who proclaimed the white race supreme. Some within those circles clearly suspected that he was of mixed race, using vague code words to describe his appearance, such as the occasional mention of “woolly hair” or his “swarthy” complexion. Charles Lindbergh, with whom Dennis worked closely, speculated that Dennis’s ancestors may have come from the “Near East.”

  Mostly he just avoided the topic altogether, mentioning race and racism only twice in The Coming American Fascism. Dennis argued that there were two ways an American fascist state might deal with racial minorities. He “devoutly hoped” that the focus would be on assimilation and accommodation for racial differences, because the only other option would be to exterminate, deport, or sterilize them. In his view, free speech and freedom of the press were almost meaningless buzzwords, so the leader should dispense with the notion that these are rights, and simply determine what degree of freedom was possible without disrupting the social and economic order. Women were to be restricted, for the most part, to the role of housewife, since that suited them best and would ensure full employment for men, who he said would do the job better anyway, in the vast majority of cases.

  I’ll admit that Dennis fascinated me, not just as a research subject, but for intensely personal reasons. In my time, being mixed race is the norm. In his, any hint of nonwhite blood would have been a major barrier to his career, and the complete kiss of death for anyone professing fascist beliefs. After Glen and I returned from a training jump to view the 1944 sedition trial of Dennis and nearly thirty other fascists, I convinced Angelo to let me schedule, as one of my first solo day trips, a jump to a small book signing and reading here in New York for Dennis’s The Coming American Fascism, which was published in 1936.

  When I returned from that trip, I wrote up a brief official account, but I omitted the fact that I botched the trip. I didn’t even note that in my personal log. Not because I’d done anything that marked me as being outside the timeline or made any real mistakes. I was just embarrassed. Embarrassed that I’d let my personal interest in Lawrence Dennis’s views affect my work, for one thing. Thinking about that jump also dredged up the question at the core of my research agenda. Not the question that I would be answering, but the one the jump committee had attached to me. With whom would I identify? Would I choose the side of the KKK or those they terrorized? It was never really a question I had debated. From the beginning, I took the part of the oppressed. I couldn’t imagine how someone could choose otherwise.


  But then I discovered the enigma of (Lonnie) Lawrence Dennis, who had come to the same fork in the road and opted to, as they say, hug the viper to his breast. It bothered the hell out of me that someone could face that dilemma and make the wrong choice. That felt a lot like self-loathing to me.

  Of course, I was nineteen, idealistic, and more than a little naive. It was a relatively cost-free decision for me, at least when I wasn’t in the field playing a part. When I walked outside of CHRONOS, I faced no discrimination of any sort. I faced no real discrimination inside CHRONOS, either, aside from occasional jokes and the nickname Chameleon (Cham for short) given to me by assholes like Saul, and I simply chose to avoid those assholes to the extent possible.

  But Lawrence Dennis had chosen to bed down with them. Why?

  On that evening, Dennis had closed out his formal presentation and asked if there were questions. I looked around at the dozen or so men in the room . . . all white, all obviously wealthy, and, judging from the questions that followed, all smugly assured of their innate superiority. After five or six questions, Dennis’s dark eyes paused on my face as he searched the room to see if anyone else had raised a hand. The scrutiny made me uncomfortable, as if he could tell I didn’t belong in this group, even though I was dressed to fit the part, complete with the stupid blue contacts. He motioned for me to go ahead, clearly reading on my face that I had a question. And I did, although I hadn’t planned to ask it. But every eye was on me now, and I blurted out the only question on my mind, the one that the woman had asked in the newspaper account of his tour as a child evangelist—Why are you here?

  I realized the question was a mistake as soon as the words left my mouth, of course, and quickly added a clarification. Why did he choose to speak so often in New York? Wasn’t the most receptive audience for his message outside the cities filled with immigrants? It was a lame cover. Given the population density, he could easily reach more budding fascists per square mile right here in Manhattan.

  The addendum might have fooled the others in the audience, but it didn’t fool Lawrence Dennis. His eyes narrowed, and then he smiled slyly. “Why, obviously, I’m here to save New York.”

  A wave of polite laughter followed, even though the others almost certainly didn’t get the full context. I joined in, but I didn’t feel comfortable enough to stick around to chat afterward. Watching Dennis work the crowd was a little too much like looking into a mirror of the future. The reflection wasn’t mine. But could it become mine? If I spent long enough studying the Klan from the inside, would their arguments start making sense to me?

  When no one was looking, I slipped out of the signing line and headed for the stable point two blocks over. I was so unnerved by the whole thing that I’d run the last stretch, half certain the security guy at the door was following me.

  I’d eventually chalked the whole thing up to beginner’s nerves, but it stuck in my mind. And so tonight, when I began thinking about what I could say to get Dennis’s attention, I knew there was only one possible thing to scrawl on the back of the business card I presented when asking for an interview. On the front it said Harold Fletcher, Reporter, Time Magazine. On the back, I scrawled four words: Why are you here?

  As I draw closer to Café Society, I debate jumping back and waiting for Rich. He’s the only reason I’ve even heard of this club. The racial integration of 1930s jazz clubs was the focus of his first project after we became roommates. But while Richard’s experience might come in handy, having him here would make it far less likely that I’d get anything of substance out of Lawrence Dennis. This is a conversation we need to have one-on-one. And while my expertise is nowhere close to Rich’s, we trade off duties as proofreaders and sounding boards for our proposals. That gives me at least a nodding acquaintance with 1930s jazz and blues clubs, especially those establishments that pushed the color barrier, in much the same way that I’d learned everything there was to know about the Beatles by osmosis when he was getting ready to pitch that plan to the jump committee.

  Café Society is located in the basement of the building that faces Sheridan Square, which isn’t a square at all, but an elongated triangle of greenspace. The club is generally heralded as the first integrated club in New York, although Rich claims that’s only partially true. It’s true that, with only a few exceptions, there are black jazz clubs and white jazz clubs in 1930s New York. Black performers play both venues, but there are rules against the performers mingling with patrons. And while black patrons might occasionally be allowed at the white clubs, they aren’t exactly encouraged.

  Barney Josephson, the owner of Café Society, wanted the club to be a place where patrons of all races and classes mingled freely. He also wanted a place where performers would be paid fairly, and not treated as second-class citizens. Even the name of the establishment was intended as a bit of a snub to the elitist, segregated clubs, and the walls were decorated with murals created by artists with the New Deal–era Federal Arts Project. The paintings included vignettes of snooty society couples staring down their pince-nez at the common folk. Matchbooks given out at the bar proudly proclaimed the club’s motto: The Wrong Place for the Right People. The club attracted famous performers (and made a few unknowns famous). It also attracted famous guests, including Eleanor Roosevelt, in perhaps her only visit to a nightclub during her time as First Lady.

  Josephson’s idea was largely a success. He even opened a second, swankier location uptown, although some of his social-justice principles seem to have fallen away at that location due to pressure from patrons. In February 1939, however, Café Society is only just beginning to attract attention, mostly among the theater and literary crowds. When I arrive at the door, I’m greeted by an unshaven doorman dressed in rags and gloves with the fingers worn out. It’s part of the club’s schtick about being the place where class and race are irrelevant—the waiters are clad in tuxedos and the doorman looks like he wandered in after sleeping off a bender in the park.

  The only music I hear as I head down the stairs is a soft, jazzy background number by the pianist, so they must be between sets. About half of the tables are occupied, mostly by white couples, although there’s one table with two women near the back and quite a few guys, both black and white, hanging out at the bar. The dance floor is almost nonexistent, something I remember Rich mentioning. Josephson wanted the focus to be on the performers.

  A dense cloud of cigarette smoke hovers beneath the low ceiling, making me wish I’d packed nasal filters. I also wish I’d packed the fake smokes that the prop department gives me when I’m in the field as Klan member Troy Rayburn. In an era where almost every man in a bar, and many of the women, have cigarettes in their hands, you’re less likely to stand out if you do, too. I’m not worried enough about it that I’m willing to actually order a pack and light one of the foul things up, however.

  The waitress seats me at a table near the back next to the two women, which is the only empty table with a clear view of the doorway so that I can keep an eye out for Dennis. I order a Rheingold and a rib eye, mostly to give me something to occupy my time while I wait and set a stable point both at the table and in the restroom, in case I need to pop back in quickly in the future.

  A comedian named Jack Gilford takes the stage. He’s funny, but the humor is kind of topical, so I don’t catch a number of the jokes. The women sitting behind me clearly find him hilarious, especially the blonde. Her laughter and her voice are both distinctive, deep and raspy, possibly a result of the steady stream of smoke coming from her table. And there’s something familiar about the woman’s voice. For some reason it’s evoking memories of my mentor, Glen, and one of our training jumps to the mid-1960s.

  The steak is gone and I’m on my second beer when Dennis comes through the door. For a moment, I don’t even realize it’s him. He’s abandoned the suit and tie that he wore at the rally in favor of a tweed jacket, and instead of the usual businessman’s hat, he’s wearing a newsboy cap and glasses that look slightly tinted. Wh
ile it’s possible that this is just his everyday casual look, I don’t think so. This is Lawrence Dennis in disguise.

  He spots me at the table, nods, and then heads to the bar. This seems to be a regular haunt, since the bartender greets him as Mr. Lawrence, and one of the men on the barstools claps him on the shoulder. He chats with the guy for a moment, then brings his drink over to the table.

  “Ah, Mr. Fletcher.” He pulls out the chair opposite me and sits. “Wasn’t sure you’d still be here.”

  “Wasn’t sure you were coming,” I say. “Or that you’d remember me.”

  “I didn’t remember the name. In fact, I’m not sure you ever gave me your name at that event. But I did recall what you scrawled on the back of the card.” He leans forward, lowering his voice. “You think you’re the only dumbass kid to show up at one of my events thinking he’s morally superior? I will give you this, however . . . you’re the only one who did his research. Why are you here? Ha. So I guess you’re more a smart-ass kid. Let me just say up front that if that’s what this is about—”

  “It’s not.”

  “What happened to your eyes?”

  Surprised that he noticed the difference, I improvise an answer. “Contact lenses. Got a friend who does makeup in Hollywood. She fixed me up with a pair like the ones they use to change eye color in movies.” It’s a couple of years off. From his point of view, he saw me in 1936, and the first use of colored contacts in a film won’t happen until around the end of 1939. But he’ll have a hard time dredging up that information. “The lenses bothered me, though, so I stopped wearing them.”