They’re supposed to burn the city down. Sally Manigault strolls up Princess, giddy with fear as she carries the basket, but at every corner there is only another pair of men she knows, tipping their hats and warning her not to be long on the street. The only smoke in the sky is behind her, a long black tail from a steamer heading upriver. They’re still working at Sprunt’s and the other big places on the water, but most of the downtown businesses are closed for the voting. It is the quietest Election Day she can recall.
Myrtle Talmadge said he was up on Tenth, so she passes the corner sentries feeling like Little Red Cap from the Grimm brothers’ story, swinging the basket and smiling and greeting the men. Niles would be out here if he hadn’t had his tiff with the Judge and been forced to go out West. Sally is wearing the lavender dress with the leg-o’-mutton sleeves and gloves of a darker purple, embroidered in rose, and the pink and black chiffon touring hat she bought in Charleston last year. Her boots, of course, pinch like the devil, but there is no remedy for that short of surgery. If she had only gotten Niles’s slender, modest feet instead of flat monstrosities like Harry’s, but one is not consulted when physical attributes are being handed out.
The men carry shotguns and rifles and all have a white handkerchief tied on their left arm. They are ever so brave, volunteers all, and she gives them her brightest smile as she walks by. The Judge wanted to send her out of town like many of the other women in their acquaintance, but she told him if the men of Wilmington had suddenly discovered their backbone the least their women could do is be there to encourage them.
He is on the northeast corner of Tenth, as dazzling as Myrtle said, standing a few yards away from a crowd of rough-looking men outside an old carriage barn being used as a polling place.
“Excuse me, Miss,” he calls out shyly. “May I ask where you’re heading?”
“You may not,” she answers, sweetening her response with a smile.
The boy flushes. “It’s just that we have orders—public safety—”
“There are armed citizens on nearly every corner. I can’t imagine any harm coming to me.”
“We don’t know their plans. There’s been all kinds of rumors.”
The burning will be the most difficult to control. One deluded soul with a tin of kerosene, a waterfront piled with cotton bales and wooden shacks—
“Besides,” says the blue-eyed volunteer, “this is where the First Ward begins. You don’t want to be up here.”
Sally casts a glance at the men hanging about, joking and jostling, many of them wearing the red shirts the Dry Pond ruffians have adopted, crudely sewn garments with sailor-type collars bordered in white stitching. She can picture their wives, hair a mess, big feet working the treadle, hunched over the machine by a sooty oil lamp. If anybody is to burn the city down, these are the prime candidates.
“You believe there’s going to be trouble?”
“Pretty sure of it, M’am.” He shoots a look to be sure nobody is listening, bends close and lowers his voice. “In fact, it’s been planned. Gonna be a bit of a rush come time to count the ballots.”
“Indeed.” The Judge has been grumbling around the house about secret plots and cabals all week, more upset by his exclusion from them than by the fact that they seem to exist.
“I got to keep em under control till then.”
“All alone?”
“My—my fellow volunteer was—he had to attend to something.”
“How long do you think you’ll be out here?”
“Oh, as long as it takes, Miss. I haven’t laid eyes on a nigger all morning, which has got to make you suspicious.”
“Perhaps they’ve been discouraged from showing themselves—”
“That’s the general idea, Miss.”
Sally cocks her head and allows herself to look him over. He is a good foot taller than she, a few years older, clean-shaven. He looks a bit like the young man in the Arrow Shirt advertisements.
“I don’t believe we’ve met before—”
He straightens, touches the brim of his hat. “Robert Forrest,” he says. “I come down from Raleigh yesterday.”
“All the way from the capital just to help us out?”
“Least I could do, Miss. The stories in the paper—”
“We are so very grateful.” Sally offers her hand. “Sally Manigault.”
He takes her hand, once more looking to the crowd outside the old barn. Being forthright, she always needs to remind the Judge, is not the same as being forward.
“My father, Judge Manigault, is a great friend of Mr. Daniels of the News and Observer. We visit him there quite often.”
“Well, if you’re ever up there again,” says dazzling Robert Forrest, then leaves the rest to her. He is polite, this young man, and brave, but certainly not gallant.
“Have you and your companion had anything to eat or drink since you’ve commenced your duties here?”
“No, actually—”
“In that case you are in good fortune,” she smiles, and lays the basket on the ground. “I have a tureen of coffee here, sandwiches, some pie—”
“Oh—”
“In response to your initial question, Mr. Forrest, where I was headed was here—to lend my support to the cause, so to speak.” She flips the lid of the basket open and the boy looks into it, somewhat stunned.
“That is very kind of you.”
“Nonsense. It’s the least I can do. Let me pour you some coffee—”
Flirt with them, Myrtle Talmadge always says, and you win their hearts. Feed them, and you own their souls.
There are two dozen outside the icehouse, staring at him. One of them, a red-haired man with a face ruined by smallpox, steps out to block his way but is whistled back by Turpin the druggist.
“This is Dr. Lunceford,” he says with a hard smile.
Turpin is a Fourth Ward man, yet seems to be in charge of this bunch blocking a polling place in the Fifth. Dr. Lunceford himself would not be here were his house on the west side of Eighth rather than the east, though geography and race are not so closely wed in Wilmington. Colored and white are poor, uneasy neighbors in much of the Fifth Ward, and not an inconsiderable show of white workmen live north of the Creek in Brooklyn, outnumbered five to one in the First.
“How we know he supposed to vote here?”
“Dr. Lunceford represents this ward.” Turpin touches his hat and gives a tiny bow. “One of our distinguished aldermen.”
“If he was extinguished,” says the pox victim, “we’d all be better off,” and the white men laugh.
“Now, now,” says Turpin. “Make way for the gentleman. We don’t want any complaints once the numbers come in.”
They stand aside ever so slightly, eyes mocking.
Dr. Lunceford can’t help but think of the revolving gun. The cylinder that housed the barrels was on a swivel, and one could direct the torrent of projectiles easily, back and forth, like a fire hose. He imagines the crank in one of his hands, trigger finger of the other squeezing hard as he faces this clot of leering white men, imagines their flesh and bone tearing apart, the terrible swift justice of it, the job done in five quick heartbeats. His father must have killed men, white men, when he wore the blue uniform. It was, however, like his youth in bondage, a matter he would not elaborate upon.
“Expect we’ll have quite a turnout today,” says Turpin as Dr. Lunceford passes through their gantlet, eyes fixed straight ahead. “Hell, we got folks been buried five, six years coming out to vote.”
The white men laugh.
Dr. Lunceford feels his perspiration chill against his body as he steps into the icehouse. There are only a handful of men there by the table, a pair of kerosene lanterns hung from the rafters to light their task. Laughlin is behind the Republican box, and Dr. Lunceford wonders how many of the other white Fusionists have dared come out today. He fills his ballot out quickly, stuffs it into the slot. Laughlin meets his eyes.
“How is it out there?”
“About what you’d expect,” says Dr. Lunceford, “given the saber-rattling that has preceded. Will you be safe here?”
Laughlin looks to the other men in the room, two of them colored, all of them worried. “It’s the end of the day that worries me. When it’s time to count.”
“We petitioned the governor—”
“Yes, well, none of those famous yankee bayonets seem to be at our disposal. You be careful out there.”
The poll-watchers are less interested as he steps out, and he can’t help then but to think of the rest of it. The shredded flesh, the blood. He treated a man once who’d been shotgunned at very close range, a pox of buckshot on the parts of his body that had not been torn away by the blast, tissue crushed, bones snapped. He amputated what was left of the right arm, cut out a ruined eye, extracted a palmful of lead pellets. He is no surgeon, but none was available at the moment, and the man died a week later from blood poisoning. He can’t help but wonder, should the rapid-fire gun be turned today on its owners, on its inventors, if he would lift a hand to treat them.
“We know who you are,” calls the red-headed man as Dr. Lunceford turns to walk home, “and we know where you live.”
Jessie is rewriting her last letter to Royal in her head, for the hundredth time, when Dorsey steps through the front door. She can’t help but cry out, feeling guilty—
“Dorsey!”
He crosses to her, takes her hand. “You’re shaking—”
“I was so worried,” she says. “Worried about you, out there—”
She will no longer allow herself to lie, she tells herself, unless it is to spare the feelings of another.
“I’m fine.”
“How is it?”
He sits at the table, right where she was just thinking about her lover who she will never see again, and slumps like he has been carrying a great weight for a long time.
“I went around to see some of the boys.” He calls the men who work in the tonsorial parlors his boys. “Hoke Crawford say he was by the polling spot, there was a mess of white folks with guns outside, taking names.”
“So you didn’t go.”
Dorsey turns his face away from her. “No point to it. Won’t be an honest count.”
Jessie fills the coffee pot with water, places it on the stovetop. He says he drinks coffee when he comes home from work, that it helps him think.
“I expect my father voted,” she says and immediately regrets it. Now he looks at her.
“Dr. Lunceford treat colored,” says Dorsey, “so he got nothing much to lose. Half my business is white heads.”
“I’m glad you’re back safely,” she says, and it is no lie. “There’s been so much talk about violence—”
“Something else afoot, I can smell it.” He was on one of the Fusionist ward committees for a while, then quit it when the infighting boiled up. “Word is they got a couple reporters from up North in town, come to watch the ruckus, and it’s gonna wait till the yankees leave town. Something tricky afoot.”
He waits till she drifts to the piano stool, sits, and meets his eye again.
“You think bad of me? Cause the polls don’t close till—”
“You did the right thing,” says Jessie. What she means is that if men insist on keeping politics to themselves, they may do with it as they wish. With Royal the unsaid was always something you couldn’t risk yet because you weren’t certain, the unsaid was tantalizing and delicious—
“I can march right down there and look them in the eye, tell them here is Dorsey Love, make what you want out of it—” Dorsey has straightened up now. He sounds like Father— “—throw my ballot on the fire—cause that’s where it’s going—and let the Devil have his due. If it make you think better of me, Jessie, I am willing to suffer the consequences.”
Dorsey has no trouble with words. Maybe because he has never read the books, not the love stories anyway, and has not learned to lie from them. Dorsey hides nothing from her and at the moment it brings tears to her eyes and she crosses to put her arms around him. She has never been the first to touch before.
“You stay right here,” says Jessie to her husband. “I don’t want you to suffer a thing.”
There was some talk of using the Dance Hall for a polling place, but the Exalted Africans didn’t think it looked good. “Think of who we’ll be associated with,” said one of the reverends. “Put a ballot box among the low crowd that congregates there and we’ll look like a cartoon from the Messenger.”
Jubal doesn’t read the Messenger or any of the other white papers but has been forced to look at some of the comic pictures, inky coons smoking cigars and bug-eying at white women, and stood for the usual “Aint that you, nigger, how long you have to pose for that picture?” and sometimes wishes he could draw to point out how funny white people look. He doesn’t mess with the Exalted Africans either, the whole crowd with their clubs and their college degrees that his brother Royal been sniffing around, as if Dr. Lunceford was ever going to let that boy lie on his daughter and act happy about it. So it’s not any polling place, but when Jubal steps into the Dance Hall there are a pair of ballot boxes set up on the bar counter and you got to put your money in a slot if you want a drink, one with an old post-office WANTED FOR ASSAULT drawing of Pharaoh Ballard pasted on its front and the other with the same for Clarence Rice who disappeared some time ago. His drawing says WANTED FOR LARCENY and Jubal is about to drop a dime in the slot when Pharaoh Ballard himself calls out from the corner. “Don’t you be feedin that box, boy, or you answer to me.”
Gus Mayweather behind the bar takes his dime and puts it in Pharaoh’s box. “Right good turnout we had today,” he says. “Half the First Ward been in to vote.”
“Can’t get a drink nowhere else. You got beer?”
“Wet and cold.” Gus bends to pull a bottle from an ice chest at his feet, pulls the cap off. “Yeah, when we heard the mayor was thinking of closing down the saloons we laid in some supplies. Imagine that—no liquor on Election Day.”
Simon Green, the butcher’s man, steps up next to Jubal. “That mayor up for office this time around?”
“Not for another two years.”
“Well he aint getting my vote.” Simon drops money in Pharaoh’s box.
“You register?”
“No.”
“Then you can’t vote or not vote for the man. You aint even counted as a person.”
“They put somebody up that’s worth the trouble, that’s the day I register for their little game.”
“Like who?” asks Jubal.
Simon thinks a long while. “Mr. Miller.”
“Thomas Miller?”
“That’s the man. I owed Mr. Miller ten dollars, he let it ride for two weeks and didn’t charge me no extra.”
“That aint no reason to vote for a man.”
“Yeah, well he got white-people kind of money, owns lands, owns buildings, only he don’t try and act like them. These other high-tone sonsabitches—”
“Exalted Africans,” says Jubal—
“That’s the ones. I deliver to their houses all the time, mostly got to bring it to the back door.”
“You sellin em pig guts, Simon,” says Gus. “You think they want that mess coming through their parlor?”
“These ones won’t eat no innards, they rose above that. They eatin high off the hog.”
“Still, any kind of quality folks, you expected to deliver to the back.”
Simon isn’t having any. “Just cause a man is a nigger,” he says, “aint no reason to treat him like one.”
“How’s this vote going?” asks Jubal, sipping his cold beer and nodding at the ballot boxes.
Gus leans in and lowers his voice, glancing over to Pharaoh and Little Bit and some of the others sitting at a corner table. “The calculations won’t happen till late, but I’d say our friend there has opened up a fair lead since he come in to supervise the proceedings.”
“And old Clarence aint here—”
“Changed his name,” says Jubal. “Went off in the Army with my brother.”
“You heard of a absentee ballot?” says Gus. “Clarence a absentee candidate.”
“It’s pretty much that way outside, too.”
“You tried to get in?”
Jubal shrugs. In here it seems silly but their Mama took both him and Royal down to register the minute they came of age. “Your Daddy risk his life for that vote,” she always says, “and you boys damn well gonna use it.”
“You never know,” he says, feeling like it’s an apology, “maybe somebody you help to get in do something for you later. Get you a job or something.”
“Post office,” says Simon Green, nodding. “Wear that uniform. Or on the police like old Toomer.”
“That’s right,” says Jubal, feeling better about it. “Give and take. That’s politics, right? Or maybe the white folks got something planned, take one of our schools away, and we got a black man up there he can stop them.”
“So you get there?” asks Gus.
“Got close. But there was a line of peckerwoods outside, showin off their hardware.”
“Guns—”
“Pistols, rifles, shotguns—”
The bunch from the corner has drifted over, listening in.
“You got to pick your ground,” says Jubal. “Like they taught my brother in the 25th. The ground aint right, you back off and fight another day.”
“So you didn’t get in?”
Jubal feels them watching him. “It made me think. If the vote don’t mean nothin—how come they so set on taking it away from us?”
“How many was there?”
It is Pharaoh Ballard, leaning his back against the counter so his coat falls open to show everybody the pistol in his belt.
“Oh—nine, ten of em.”
There had been six, but two had shotguns and they looked desperate to shoot somebody.
“Don’t no white man deny me entrance, I wants to go in,” says Ballard.
Gus laughs. “You can’t vote, Pharaoh. You a convicted assaulter.”
“Maybe I just want to walk in the door, see how things is comin along—”
“You gonna mess with a posse of rednecks, you only got that old—what is it—”
“.45.”
“Man got a Colt was old when they buried Custer and he wants to start a war.”
“The point is how they get to strut about our section of town, wavin their iron? What happen if we march down Market Street all loaded up and ready to shoot?”
“That would be a war.”
“This is ours,” says Pharaoh, indicating the empty dance floor, but Jubal knows he means the whole of Brooklyn. “They want to block off the Fourth Street Bridge like they done today, keep us from crossin in, fine. But stay the fuck out of where we live, man. That aint nothin to ask. You may own the world,” says Pharaoh, pointing his finger toward the door, “but you don’t come in my house.”
Gus and Simon applaud, and there is no mockery on their faces.
“Can’t have a proper Election Day,” says Gus, “without a speech.”
The numbers make no sense. Even the big number—two years ago the Republicans outpolled the Democrats by five thousand, and now he’s supposed to set into the morning edition that the Democrats took this one by six thousand. Of course there should be a sizeable swing, everything they’ve printed in the last year has been pushing folks that way, to come back to responsible, white government, but if the colored were discouraged from the ballot how can they be showing up in the Democrat boxes? Milsap climbs down from his stool and goes looking for Mr. Clawson. The editor had just handed him the slip of paper with the election returns though the polls aren’t due to close for another hour. The big number is confusing enough, but these ward returns—
Mr. Clawson is in his office entertaining Mr. MacRae and the younger Taylor brother, pouring out liquor into the glasses he keeps in his bottom drawer. He raises his eyebrows at the interruption.
“Do we have a problem, Drew?”
“It’s these figures, Mr. Clawson,” says Milsap, holding up the slip of paper. “I think maybe somebody pulling your leg.”
Clawson smiles and winks to his guests. “And what makes you think that?”
“Every one of these precinct tallies is just way over—look here, the Third Ward, there’s not more than six hundred forty or fifty men registered to vote, but here just for the Democrats we got over eight hundred and—”
“I trust my source.”
“Yes, but—”
“Lots of new people been moving into the city,” says Mr. MacRae. “And this business with the colored editor got people motivated to come out and vote.”
“But I know the registration numbers,” says Milsap, frustrated. “It just doesn’t add up.”
“Got all those figures in your head?” asks Allen Taylor.
“Yes, sir, I make sure and bone up before Election Day, keep an eye on our reporters. We are the paper of record here in Wilmington.”
“Well I am impressed. City government could use a man with a head for figures and that kind of diligence.”
“Thank you, sir,” says Milsap, and now he realizes what this is, that the numbers are—what—symbolic of the will of the people, not actual counts. He feels like an idiot. “But I’m a newspaper man.”
“And an outstanding one,” adds Mr. Clawson. “Drew serves as my watchdog here—misspelling, grammatical infractions both grievous and minor, errors of punctuation. But facts,” and here the editor’s eyes lose their twinkle and his voice takes on an edge, “facts he leaves to the men in the field. Isn’t that right, Drew?”
“Yes sir.”
“The numbers may be a tad extreme, but these are extreme circumstances we are faced with, aren’t they Drew?”
“Yes sir.”
He indicates the paper in Milsap’s hand. “My source for these figures is unimpeachable.”
“I understand, sir.”
“I’m confident that you do. So you go ahead and set that front page. And this here—” he holds up another slip of paper, “goes in a box, bottom center. Bold.”
Milsap steps in to take the paper from him. “I get right on it.”
Milsap is not so far down the hallway to avoid hearing Mr. Clawson’s summation of the incident to his guests. “That is the most infuriatingly literal sumbitch,” says his employer, “that ever trod the earth.”
The other men laugh and Milsap feels his ears grow hot. He glances at the paper. It is an announcement not written in the editor’s hand, perhaps the work of one of his visitors. At the top, in thick capitals, it says
ATTENTION WHITE MEN!
The Judge understands why they’ve chosen to do it in the courtroom, but it makes him uneasy. There was no legality in the summons, an admonition on the front page of the Messenger for “every good white citizen” to meet here this evening, and though every man in the throng is white, he knows for a fact that several are not good. Merchants, lawyers, doctors, ministers, men of property—a large proportion of those who make the city function. No trial he ever judged here at a decent hour attracted as many spectators, the jury box filled, and the gallery, and men standing shoulder to shoulder in the aisles and on the floor watching MacRae and Sol Fishblate and the few others who, thankfully, have chosen to stand in front of the bench rather than rule behind it.
MacRae is holding some sort of document and Fishblate, who’s been mayor and clearly wants to be again, shouts for order.
“We’re going to make history here today,” he says, and calls up Colonel Waddell to read a statement.
There are cheers as the old man steps out of the crowd, looking pleased but puzzled. MacRae hands him the few typewritten pages and whispers something in his ear.
“I am as uninformed as the rest of you as to the purpose of this meeting, or the content of this document,” he says, holding the pages at arm’s length and cocking his head as if trying to make sense of a foreign script, “but I shall endeavor to do it justice.”
The Judge looks around the room. A handful of the men, all up by the bench, are clearly the impresarios here, standing with folded arms, confidently studying the faces of their public, while others seem either eager to be led or, like the Judge himself, annoyed to have been excluded from the decision-making.
“The White Declaration of Independence,” the Colonel intones, and there is wild cheering.
The election is not in question, the advantage gained will tip the scales and the city charter can be amended to negate the sway of pure numbers in local government. What they hope to gain with this display—
“ Believing,” the Colonel sings out, “that the Constitution of the United States contemplated a government to be carried on by an enlightened people; Believing that its framers did not anticipate the enfranchisement of an ignorant population of African origin, and believing that those men of the State of North Carolina, who joining in forming the Union, did not contemplate for their descendants’ subjection to an inferior race—”
This is all true, no doubt, but legally insignificant given the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in their own state legislature. The Judge recognizes the argument, has written statements not dissimilar, but that was when he was young and they were justifying the Secession. If this is indeed a declaration of independence they had better be damned clear about who they plan to be independent of—
“We the undersigned citizens of the City of Wilmington and County of New Hanover,” the Colonel continues, one hand holding the proclamation and the other held over his heart now like some touring Shakespearian, “do hereby declare that we will no longer be ruled, and will never again be ruled, by men of African origin.”
Cheers and stomping. The Judge is stirred, what white man would not be, but the arbitrator in him hovers above the clamor, awaiting the specifics—
“While we recognize the authority of the United States, and will yield to it if exerted—”
The Judge smiles. The lawyer’s hand reveals itself. Iradelle Meares is standing up there between the Taylor brothers, and this bears evidence of his precision. They will recognize and yield to preclude any whiff of sedition, but only if exerted, to maintain the boldness of the assertion—
“—we would not for a moment believe that it is the purpose of more than sixty million of our own race to subject us permanently to a fate to which no Anglo-Saxon has ever been forced to submit.”
Playing to the jury here, and not the judge, appealing to what even the most hard-hearted white yankee must admit—
“We hereby proclaim—”
It is the same appeal the great Calhoun made to the Senate when he was at Death’s door, his last plea to settle the differences of North and South or part amicably. That the original intent had been perverted, the original balance irrevocably lost, and that it was only the North with its numbers and control who could save the day, unless “her love of power and aggrandizement is far greater than her love of the Union.” The sine qua non here is not Union but the deeper, more holy sense of what it means to be a white man and a Christian—
“First—That the time has passed for the intelligent citizens of the community, owning ninety percent of the property and paying taxes in like proportion, to be ruled by negroes.”
It is common sense, but common sense and statutory law are distant cousins. The Colonel continues down the list of resolutions to much noisy approbation, that whites who manipulate the black vote to dominate the public sphere will no longer be tolerated; that the negro is incapable of understanding where his best interests lie; that the practice of hiring blacks to fill the predominance of positions in the workplace has encouraged their present impertinence and must be curtailed; that the responsible white citizens of the city are prepared and determined to protect themselves and their loved ones—
“We are prepared,” Waddell continues, with none of the vacillation of the unrehearsed, “to treat the negroes with justice and consideration in all matters that do not involve sacrifices of the interest of the intelligent and progressive portion of the community—”
The flattery is brilliant, for who will not desire to be included among the intelligent and progressive? Who will argue that the interests of such exalted citizens should not be paramount? And then, without ever mentioning his name, the Colonel comes to the fate of Alexander Manly.
“This vile publication, the Record, shall cease to be published and its editor banished from our environs within twenty-four hours.”
Men are standing on chairs to applaud now, pounding the walls in a frenzy. Were this a trial he would clear the courtroom, but it is no legal proceeding but an exercise in posse comitatus that he hopes will preclude a lynching, or, if that act be done, indemnify the citizens in this room from responsibility.
Sol Fishblate thanks the Colonel profusely and thanks the press, looking pointedly at Tom Clawson, for serving as secretaries for this historic gathering and for their vital efforts to inform and inflame the public preceding the election. Then the wily Jew recommends a few amendments to the Declaration, requiring the resignation of the mayor and the chief of police and the Board of Aldermen, and there is more celebration and the Judge feels the gear click into place, the machinery of it all too clear to him now. A coup has been planned, no waiting for the slow evolution of political reform, for the months of proposal and legislation to effect the needed changes—it is a coup d’etat, despite all the eloquent verbiage, and when his name is called to be on a Committee of twenty-five to enforce the provisions of the document he steps forward and agrees to join it.
MacRae is on the Committee, no surprise there, and Allen Taylor, and Meares and Frank Steadman and a pair of ministers and Dr. Galloway and a quorum of the intelligent and the progressive, of good white men, and he is proud to be included but relieved that there is no swearing in, no palms pressed to Scripture to legitimize the moment. His emotions are just as divided as he lines up with over four hundred others to put their names on the Declaration.
“This is how the Founders must have felt,” says John Bellamy, who will be their new congressman, “waiting to sign the parchment.”
Perhaps. But to the Judge it feels more like the uneasy night in the Masonic Hall, when, surrounded by his fellows in the Craft, he knelt bare-kneed beneath the blue ceiling, cable tow wrapped three times around his body and swore, upon no less a penalty than having his body severed in twain and his bowels taken hence, never to violate the Obligation—an emotion both solemn and false.
It takes the citizen behind him in the line, Junius Hargeaves, who butchers swine on Front Street, to cut to the bone of the matter.
“If it stick the niggers back where they belong,” he twangs, “I’ll sign any damn thing.”
Dr. Lunceford has never been in the Cape Fear Club before. The two white men in red shirts who came to get him with their pistols showing bring him in through the front door and lead him to a large meeting room. Inside are Hugh MacRae and two dozen white men neatly arranged on one side of a long table and a greater number of black citizens who have been summoned like himself crowded haphazardly on the other. His fellow alderman Elijah Green is here, and Dr. Alston and Henderson and Moore and Scott the attorneys and Tom Miller and his own son-in-law Dorsey and some other barbers and even Mr. Sadgwar, the old gentleman looking confused and upset to be awake at this hour.
“That should be enough,” says Mr. MacRae on the other side of the table. “Let’s get this thing started.”
The next surprise is that it is old Colonel Waddell who seems to be presiding over whatever this gathering is supposed to be.
“I’m going to read you a statement,” he says, “and you’re going to listen.”
Dr. Lunceford studies the faces of the white men as Waddell reads. A few meet his gaze with glares or stoic indifference, but none shows the slightest hint of the shame they should feel to be associated with the racialist tripe the old man is flatly reading. White Man’s Declaration of Independence indeed. It is a clever strategy, he admits, to adopt the language of patriotism and liberation to cloak their designs on absolute power, but it is also as vile and cowardly a course of action as he can imagine. He looks to his fellow “leaders,” whom MacRae has taken it upon himself to dub the Colored Citizens’ Committee. They have no doubt been escorted here at gunpoint as he was, and sit with a kind of stunned resignation as one preposterous resolution follows another. The election results have been tampered with beyond the credulity of even the most prejudiced observer, the Democrats apparently not content to merely threaten their competitors away from the ballot box, and this farce of a proclamation seems a pointless reiteration of their contempt—
“It is further resolved,” reads the old Secessionist, “to demand the immediate resignation of Mayor Silas Wright, Chief of Police John R. Melton, and the entire standing Board of Aldermen—”
Elijah Green makes a small groan beside him. This isn’t a declaration of independence, it is a demand for submission.
The Colonel finishes, lays the typewritten sheets of paper back on the table. “This is not a proposal,” he says. “There will be no discussion.”
Nobody on his side of the table speaks, so the Doctor clears his throat. “In regards to Editor Manly,” he says softly, “he has acted entirely on his own. His newspaper has ceased publication, and, I have it on good authority, he has already absented himself from the city.”
“We will require a written response as to your acceptance of these demands,” says Waddell without acknowledging him. “It shall be delivered to me personally at my residence by half past seven tomorrow morning. This meeting is adjourned.”
With that the white men remain seated, staring at the colored committee they have invented, insulted, and now dismissed. Tom Miller is the first to comprehend, standing without a word and walking quickly for the door. Dr. Lunceford takes a final glance at the faces across the table and finds no hint of bluff or reservation, only the florid glow of righteousness.
“I’d had my .44,” says Tom Miller when Dr. Lunceford catches up to him on Dock Street, “I’d have blown his cotton head off.”
Dorsey has never actually sat in David Jacobs’s shop before. He’s looked through the window in passing, David or one of his boys snipping over the white men who come in, a three-chair tunnel of a room. It is packed to the walls now as most of the men from what they’re calling the Committee and some others who have caught wind of this new threat have all crowded in. Dr. Lunceford stands in front of the middle chair and tries to pull them together.
“The mayor is useless,” he says. “Once the hope of Federal troops was gone he crawled under a rock to hide. Which means it’s up to us.”
“They got the guns, they got the power.”
“They’ve asked for a reply.” The Doctor seems almost calm. “We should give them one. We reject their declaration and all of its provisions. If they can achieve the same ends through legal means, let them try. There’s no reason we should take a part in our own disen—”
“There’s a couple hundred reasons still wandering around town,” says David Jacobs. “They’re just aching for an excuse to let fly at us.”
“I’m not talking about a physical confrontation. I believe it is important, for the record, to—”
“Who’s gonna write that record?” Tom Miller holds the lease on Dorsey’s Dock Street shop, owns the pool room he used to hang in before he married Jessie. “Anything don’t look good for them they just change it.”
“If there’s nothing to be gained by defiant language,” says Mr. Henderson, “I suggest we just distance ourselves from Alex Manly and appeal to the cooler heads among them. If those Red Shirts had their way—”
“Those Red Shirts don’t do a damn thing the big folks don’t put em to.” Miller is by the door, angry, holding up a fist studded with rings. “And no matter what we say in any letter it’s already been decided whether they be let loose or not. But lemme tell you, they come huntin niggers where I’m at, they gonna find one who bites back.”
Dorsey finds himself stepping up on one of the chairs by the back wall to be seen. “They think we got some say about how other colored folks act,” he says. “But the ones they worried about, all that wild Brooklyn crowd, them shack people live down south of town, they don’t go to no church service. And they sure as hell don’t care what we got to tell em—”
“Just like how we had nothing to do with what Alex Manly wrote in his paper.”
“That boy was here,” says Tom Miller, “I’d put my boot to his near-white behind.”
“So what will our response be?” asks Dr. Lunceford.
“You seen that gun they got,” says John Goines, who was Manly’s printer at the Record before it shut down. “Seen what it can do. You want to be responsible for that machine being turned loose on our people?”
“The responsibility rests on the head of the man who pulls the trigger,” says the Doctor.
“Yeah, and the man who gets caught in front of it,” adds David Jacobs, who is also the city coroner, “won’t have no head left.”
Jubal spends the long night down with his animals. Old Dan is still poorly, shedding the worms, and Nubia is flighty from the white people all day. They’ve been quieter and more sober than for the marching, but so many of them about, crowded around the polling places, laughing and waggling their rifles and looking their looks at you. Jubal take her out for her little trot, Nubia a horse you can’t leave in a stable all day, no matter what, and she got a sense for it, contention in the air make her shy just like a shotgun blast, and now her skin is still quivering on her back in sudden ripples, her ears switching this way and that listening for it to start for real. Jubal listening just as hard.
“Best thing for it,” he says softly as he moves around her stall, “is they drink some more and fall out from it, wake up happy they won this round. Things go back to normal.”
Dan is farting as he dozes, not a mule to worry about people business. There is hauling to do tomorrow and Jubal wants people back in their homes and forgotten about the election. He uses his time now, too jangled up to fall asleep, to put the tiny stable in order, hanging tack and polishing leather, talking soft to his nervous riding horse.
“Maybe this Sunday we head out to the beach,” he tells her. “Let you go on them mudflats. You like that, I know.”
It is a quiet night, a long night, and dawn is peeking in through the cracks between the planks before Nubia’s head finally drops low and her ears relax. Jubal eases the bar up silently and steps out onto Love Alley.
Across the way, sitting in the sand with his back against a slat-and-wire chicken coop, is old Caleb who used to drink with his father, who was a slave on the indigo plantations and then rolled turp barrels on the loading dock till the liquor made him useless, which he’s been as long as Jubal can remember, Caleb who never in his life give a damn about anything you couldn’t pour down your throat. There is no telling what shade the old man is under the crust on him, with yellow eyes and yellow nails thick as horse teeth on his toes.
“They done stole it back,” he says, looking in Jubal’s direction, the way he does, but not really at him. “Everthing we won in the War, everthing we built up, they done took it back.” He shakes his head, lets his turtle eyelids drop shut, tears making channels in the grime on his cheeks. “Aint that some shit?”
And then there are roosters crowing.