Frings still found it jarring to drive into the Hollows and find a place like this: blocks and blocks of abandoned buildings, slowly crumbling in on themselves. Some not so slowly. Past these blocks, a huge fallow field—maybe a dozen acres—and scattered about, like motionless livestock, rusting railway cars. The rails themselves, long out of use, lay half-hidden in the weeds. Frings met Warren Eddings, Mel Washington’s right-hand man, at the edge of the field. Eddings wore a dark suit and bow tie, sweat beading below his skullcap. Behind him, waves of yellow humidity rose from the tall weeds.
They walked into the field, through the loose maze of train cars. Some, Frings noticed, seemed to serve as homes of a sort, clothes hanging off roofs, makeshift furniture visible through the sliding gates.
“Mel couldn’t make it.” Eddings left it at that.
“That’s okay,” Frings said. “Why did he … why did you want me out here?”
Eddings laughed a little, but his face stayed tight. He didn’t look at Frings.
“Mel’s concerned that you might not understand about the Community. You know, Mel feels like you think he’s got the Community wired. Like Father Womé just attracts all these people and then Mel takes over; that Womé’s okay with that arrangement somehow. It’s not like that, bo. And Mel wants you to see that. You know, we do what we can with the Community and we’re proud of what we’ve done, but if you think it’s about us—about Reds—you don’t have the picture.”
“Okay,” Frings said, wondering what was out here that would give him the picture. His collar was soaked. His shirt was pasted with sweat to his chest. He took off his straw fedora to get some air on his head and wiped his face with his sleeve. He watched a thick black snake push its way through the weeds to their right.
Eddings continued, “So, Mel wanted to make that clear to you. Father Womé isn’t just some cat with a hoard of money and a shantytown full of people he supports. He’s more than that. He’s got his ideas that we have to work around. That and the Square.”
Frings gave him a questioning look but Eddings’s eyes were straight ahead.
“Okay, you’ve got my attention. What are we here to look at?”
“You’ll see.”
They walked around a line of boxcars, each identically labeled TRANSCON in a feminine cursive, each rusting through. On the other side, looking as out of place as diamonds in the mud, were four passenger cars, gleaming an immaculate black in the sun. A thin horizontal stripe of gold ran under the scarlet-curtained windows. Above the windows in the center of each car BLACK COMET LINE was written in golden block capitals. Negroes were at work on these cars, crouching on the roofs, working on the undercarriages, entering and exiting through narrow doors, maybe three dozen in all.
“Wow,” Frings said, using his hand to shield his eyes from the sun. “What is this?”
Eddings nodded a greeting to a group of workers who were drinking water from a ladle they pulled from a wooden trough.
“Nice to see you, Mr. Eddings,” one of the men said, casting a curious look at Frings, who hung back a little, still taking in these elegant railcars marooned in this field.
Eddings shook hands with a few of the men, not bothering to introduce Frings.
“Come on.” Eddings led Frings to one of the cars, grabbed the handrail, climbed up. Inside, a narrow corridor was lined with doors on either side spaced at short intervals—a sleeper car.
“I hear you’ve talked to Womé, so maybe you know a little about where he’s coming from; how Negroes need to have our own, separate institutions if we’re going to have any measure of justice or equality. It’s an interesting thought and I’m not sure I disagree. That’s what the Community is all about, as I guess you know.”
Eddings pushed open a door to a sleeping compartment. It was almost comically luxurious: upholstered seats, wall sconces with maroon shades, maroon curtains on the windows, a narrow Oriental rug on the floor.
“Amazing,” Frings said. “But I’m not sure I get it.”
“Like I was saying about Womé, he thinks we need our own institutions to be equal, and one of the things he thinks is important is that Negroes be able to travel like the wealthy white folks. So he decided to create the Black Comet Line so that Negroes can travel in luxury.”
“Wait. Are there that many Negroes who can afford to travel like this?”
“More than you’d think. But that’s not the point. The tickets will be cheap. He’ll see to it.”
They stepped back out into the corridor.
Frings said, “So, Womé thinks he’s going to further Negro equality by subsidizing luxury train rides on his special rail line? Really?”
“Crazy, right? You think that me and Mel and Betty, we’re worried about people sitting in luxury sleeper cars? It’s beyond crazy. But that’s Womé. He’s got his ideas and he’s got the money to make it work. You ask him, ‘How’re you going to move these cars around? You going to buy an engine? You going to hitch it up to someone else’s engine, get connected to all those ofay cars?’ You ask Womé that and he just smiles and says that it’ll all work out; you know, trust in Father Womé. Crazy. But, you see, this is what the Community is about. It’s about Negroes finding their own, separate place; and it’s also about the Square. What we’re trying to do—creating a just and principled community—it’s way down the list.”
They walked back across the broad field toward Frings’s car. Frings felt dehydrated, dizzy. The ambient noise of crickets in the weeds seemed oppressive. Had the noise been there when they arrived, or had some cricket instinct kicked in, causing them to create this din? Frings noticed rats, too, scattering as he and Eddings made their way through the weeds.
Frings asked, “You been thinking about the girl?”
Eddings nodded.
“Come up with anything new?”
“Nothing new. It’s not Community people.”
“You sure about that?”
Frings hadn’t meant it as a challenge, but Eddings stopped and faced him. “It’s not Community people.” Eddings shook his head. “Something as big as this … Look, most of the violence in the shanties is because someone messed with someone else’s wife or kids being kids. That kind of secret don’t last long at all. You think someone murders a white girl and nobody knows anything?”
Eddings shook his head in disgust. “You’ve been down in the shanties, you know what they’re like. There’s no locking doors. You think folks down there want some killer walking around, could just walk in any door at night? You think they aren’t the most anxious people out there to catch this guy if he’s Community?”
Frings conceded the point. Of course, this wasn’t actually proof of anything, merely a good argument and based on a premise—there are no secrets in the Community—that sounded dubious. But, all the same, Frings thought—or maybe it was hoped—that Eddings was right.
Eddings said, “You know if Westermann’s making any progress?”
Frings shook his head. “You know, you’d have to ask him. He’s keeping me caught up, but who knows if he gives me everything.”
The car was a hundred yards or so ahead, the waves of heat making it look as if it were beneath the surface of water slightly disturbed by the impact of a stone. It was kind of an interesting effect, Frings thought.
“How do you feel about all this?” Eddings asked Frings.
“What? The girl? Pushing the body back in the river?”
“Yeah. That, and now with the second girl—”
Frings stopped. “Second girl?”