24

WPA Slave Narrative Collection

Interview with Henrietta Lee

Thursday, September 17, 1936

Now, Grace Williams, don’t be angry with me for making you wait a few days for the story. I’m old and needed time to think on it. Wrote me some notes, too. See? You can have them if you want, but I doubt you can read them.

“There we were in Black Hawk—the date? Hell, I don’t remember. August or thereabouts. Garet was in bed upstairs, unconscious, high on laudanum. Claire and I were downstairs in the kitchen, trying to figure out what to do. Storm came that night. Bad one. All the typical dramatics—thunder, lightning, rain hitting the roof so hard you thought it might burrow through, wind making the house creak so much you thought it might just give up the fight and fall down. No sensible person would’ve been out in it. But in walked the whore Ruby Steele, soaking wet and shivering.

“House went into an uproar. It ain’t every day that an Oriental walks into your house with gallons of water streaming off her clothes. Goes without saying she brought a lot of questions in with the rain.

“While Laurie, that was the boardinghouse owner, was taking Ruby to change into dry clothes, Frank, her husband (I remembered his name) made a new pot of coffee.

“Let me just stop right here and tell you something real quick. I mentioned how Jehu brought women to the ranch, to help them out? Laurie and her son were the very first ones. Long before my time. Saved from a cruel husband, I think. Anyways, whatever it was, Laurie was as loyal to Garet as I was.

“Back to the story. Waiting on Ruby to get dry, Claire asked me if I thought Garet was giving up.

“We’d seen Garet, she’d woken up to talk to us. Told us how she got to Black Hawk. Not many details, but she hadn’t been beaten, we knew that for sure. Fell off her horse trying to escape from Connolly. So he wasn’t blameless.

“I stayed after everyone left her room. I’d been shocked when Garet said she was ready to die. I sat on the edge of her bed and held her hand, stroked it. Garet had strong hands, all that work with the horses and on the farm. That blood vessel on the back of her hand stood out—weren’t no fat to mask it—and it always looked like a river branching off in all directions. Crazy the things the mind remembers. Can’t hardly remember what I ate yesterday, but I can remember tracing that blood vessel with my finger and trying to find words to get past the rocklike lump in my throat.

“‘Worried I’ve thrown up the sponge?’ she asked me with something close to a shit-eating grin. As close as a woman on her deathbed could come to one, I suppose.

“Told her the thought had crossed my mind. ‘You know me better than that,’ she said. And she told me her plan.

“So when Claire asked me if she was giving up, I said hell no. That woman always had a plan. I laughed and told Claire that Garet didn’t have any give up in her. And neither did I.

“Connolly thought she was dead, so we might as well finish the job. Obituary, funeral, plot, the whole works. That would give us a lot of leeway in what we did next, if robbing Connolly was still on her mind, and I guessed that it was.

“Not a bad plan, a hell of a sight better than what we’d come up with before. Then Ruby showed up and by God, everything went to hell.

“You know, Claire and I had spent a couple of weeks bored to tears of each other, of purple sashes, of nothing happening. But when things started moving, it happened all at once.

“Ruby told us her story: Spooner got tired of the lack of variety in Timberline and left the Hole to do some carousing up and down the line. A few days after Spooner left, Jehu decided to make his supply run to Rock Springs. Ruby went with him to pick up some new girls. The Hole was getting busy, and it was too much for two women. Luke Rhodes went, too. She never said what for. They all split up in Rock Springs to do their own business. They were staying overnight, so she didn’t see Jehu, or expect to see him, until the morning. When breakfast came around, no Jehu. Went to the stables where the wagon was, no Jehu. Luke found him easy enough. He’d been arrested the night before. Spooner saw him at the saloon and turned him in as part of our gang. A man was there who had been the gun for a couple of Jehu’s trips and he confirmed it, said he’d started to suspect him after the Gunnison stage. Didn’t matter to the Rock Springs sheriff that Spooner was an outlaw, and that the jobs took place in Colorado and not Wyoming. Angered Luke something fierce, Ruby said. Luke went to fetch Stella and Joan and sent Ruby to Denver to find us. We were all to meet up in Cheyenne.

“That was it. I was leaving, storm or no. Claire managed to hold me back, to ask me if I would ever go into a job half-cocked and upset like this. Course I wouldn’t, and it stopped me. I couldn’t have made it to Rock Springs. I wasn’t familiar with the territory around Black Hawk and would have most likely fallen down the side of a mountain. But we needed to get to Jehu, quick. The doc told me in no uncertain terms that Garet couldn’t leave that bed for a week, at least, or risk infection, the wound opening and her bleeding out. Doc would’ve got a lot bloodier in her descriptions ’cause she saw the determination in me, but we were interrupted by the bastard himself, Callum Connolly.”

Mrs. Lee pauses here for a good amount of time, but I don’t pressure her. I let her sit with her memories awhile.

“Those Pinkertons barged into that boardinghouse like they were breaking a strike instead of walking into a house full of women and one man. There might have been four guns between us, and there were three Pinkertons, including Salter. Yeah, that bastard was a Pinkerton. We were lousy with Pinkertons. He had a bandage on his left ear that was wet with rain and blood, and he looked none too happy. They held their rifles across their chests like an honor guard, and Callum Connolly walked into the room.

“Never met the son, but of course I recognized him with that mask covering half of his face. Injury in the war, I think. We were in trouble, and I knew it, so of course I got smart with them. Never a good thing for a black woman to sass an angry white man. But the longer I distracted them, the longer I had to figure out how to get us out of the mess. I’d managed to drop my gun belt and slide it under a worktable, and I had my knife at the small of my back, up under my vest. I’d heard those kinds of footsteps before and knew they forebode nothing good. Best for them not to know I’m armed.

“‘You must be Callum Connolly.’ I looked that man up and down like I was inspecting a prize hog. ‘Nice mask. Leather, isn’t it? Bet that’s gonna shrink up in this rain.’ Salter punched me in the face, but I was expecting it. I wiped the blood from my mouth easy as you please, even though my ears were ringing. Loosened my turban, too. I wouldn’t’ve lasted long beneath his fists. Connolly stared at me over his mask with these blue eyes that almost glowed when the lightning flashed. ‘You look more like a precious metals man than leather. Or is this your traveling mask?’

“‘Where is she?’ he asked.

“Told him he was going to have to be more specific and got another blow to the head for my trouble. Claire stepped between me and Callum. Told him to stop it. Callum looked right through her to me. “You must be … the slave. Prettier than I expected. So few of them are pretty,’ he said to the men. ‘You have to close your eyes when you fuck them.’ Grace leaned back against me, or maybe I pressed forward, but she stood her ground. ‘You seem to have survived your captivity unscathed.’

“I wanted to pull my knife out and gut him. Never wanted anything more in my life. What did he know of what I had and hadn’t been through? What did he know of the scars that crisscrossed my back? Course they never touched my face, I was worth more when I was pretty. Anything else, though. That was fair game, and let me tell you, they played. You’re goddamn right they played. For years. I knew then, and know now, that there are men who play, who torture us, abuse us, treat our bodies like they’re nothing but chattel, still. Nothing’s changed. All these years. Still black people are being punished.

“Connolly pushed Claire aside and she fell onto the floor. He got right up next to me, looked at me with an expression I’d seen many times before from a white man. It’s this queer mixture of lust and hatred. You know the look. ‘Tell me where she is and I won’t let my men touch you. You have my word.’

“It was a lie and everyone in that room knew it. Those men’s cocks were getting hard just thinking of it. I couldn’t gut him because I wasn’t sure his men would empty lead into me. Most like they’d injure me, beat me maybe, but keep me whole enough they could have their way. That was not going to happen. I’d been raped by my last white man back in ’68. I would’ve slit my own throat before I let another white man touch me. I couldn’t kill Connolly, though goddamn, a lot of trouble would have been saved if I had. No, I had to think of Jehu. I tried to tamp down my anger and stay focused on Jehu and what he was going through.

“So I told Connolly he was too late, that the cancer had finally got Margaret Parker. She wouldn’t leave the bed.

“He said he wanted to see her and Grace jumped up and said no. He looked at her then, and she quailed under those glowing eyes but caught herself. ‘This is my case, and these are my prisoners. I’ve been working for Dorcas for months, I infiltrated the gang, gained their trust.’

“‘Yet you’ve never turned them in,’ he said. I’ll never forget Claire’s laugh. She sounded plumb crazy, then what came out of her mouth sounded even crazier. ‘Of course not. What would have happened if I turned them in? Would it have made the papers? Probably not. You’ve done a stellar job of keeping their exploits out of the public eye. No, they would have been quietly dealt with.’ She gave Salter a disdainful look. ‘I know enough about Mr. Salter over there to not wish that on any woman, even if they are hardened criminals. I need Margaret Parker’s arrest to be a splash, you see. A spectacle, so I can open my own agency.’

“The Pinkerton men laughed at that and said some pretty offensive stuff. Claire, though, she stood toe-to-toe with Connolly. She knew the only thing that made those men dangerous was their guns.

“Claire went on about how she had planned on turning us in until she learned how extensive Margaret’s plan was. Garet wanted to humiliate Spooner, not just win. So Claire got rid of Dorcas so Callum would take Margaret to all his businesses. She knew enough about Margaret Parker’s cunning mind to rest easy that she would do it. ‘She’s an arrogant, greedy woman,’ Claire said. ‘Hubris is what would have brought her down, if the cancer hadn’t.’ She laughed that laugh again. ‘Guess my own ambition has worked against me. Margaret is almost dead, and no one will believe a nigger and two ignorant girls have the intelligence to pull off the jobs they have.’

“I believed her. I thought she was turning on us, confirming every goddamn suspicion I’d had of her from the beginning. She was that good. Then she said, ‘They’re no threat to you. They couldn’t pull off Margaret’s ideas if they wanted to, and honestly? They don’t. Margaret is manipulative and had three easy targets with her gang. They would do what she said because they admired her. I’ve lived with them for three months, I know them. All they want to do is to raise horses and live in peace.’

“I could tell Connolly wasn’t buying it, but Claire’s nonsense was giving me a chance to plot, to watch the men with him, to gauge their weaknesses. Connolly asked who the Chink was. I’d forgotten Ruby was there. I knew that whore well enough to know she was reading the room, figuring out where best to land. That woman, Ruby Steele, she was a stone-cold survivor.

“Claire told him Ruby was with her, she’d enlisted her help to spy on Spooner in the Hole. ‘She’s had no part in the jobs at all. Come on, I’ll take you to see Margaret. You can see for yourself that the threat against your business is over, from this gang at least.’

“Ruby went back with them, and I stood there, watching the Pinkertons, reading on their faces easy enough that there was no way in hell they would let me get back to the Hole alive. By the time Grace came back to the kitchen they’d taken my knife, found my gun belt, and put me in irons, but not without a fight. Busted one man’s lip pretty good, but got knocked out for my trouble. I’d just come to and stood up, leaning against the wall to hold myself up, when all the shooting started.”