A Moment in the Sun (66 page)

“Daddy,” she says gently, stepping out on the lawn to touch his arm, “just come in and pull the shades down. This will only spur them on.”

“White Citizens’ Union,” he snarls, then raises his voice in a shout to the men on foot who follow the Red Shirts. “Passel of damned layabouts, got nothing better to do with their time! Shiftless trash—”

The men, singing, turn and wave their hats—

Christ the royal Master

Leads against the foe

Forward into battle

See His banners go!

“It’s just noise, Daddy. You know how elections are.”

“It is rebellion,” he says. “Armed insurrection.”

“Nobody has fired a shot yet.”

“The voting doesn’t start till tomorrow. There will be bloodshed.” The old man’s face suddenly drains of color. “And what is this?”

A group of men dressed as in the photographs of Roosevelt’s famous cavalry appear, riding two abreast. One of them carries the Stars and Stripes, what Daddy calls the Flag of Freedom, on a pole jammed into a scabbard on his saddle.

“How dare they?” says her father.

Miss Loretta feels her stomach clenching. If those men can use that flag for this purpose—

“Sacrilege!” cries Roaring Jack, striding forward to the fence, cheeks flaming now. “You have no damned right to drag those colors through the mud!”

A rider who seems too much the runt for his enormous campaign hat pulls his mount up on the other side of the fence, spurts a gout of black tobacco juice back over his shoulder.

“What’s your trouble, Granpaw?”

“That flag—”

“We fought the Dagoes for that flag, old man. It’s
ours
now.”

“Never.”

The runty man looks past Roaring Jack to Miss Loretta.

“You want to keep him tied in the yard the next couple days, M’am. Might could get dangerous for people who can’t control what they say.”

“If that was a uniform,” her father says, looking the rider up and down, “you would be a disgrace to it.”

A larger man with a beard walks his horse over. He touches his hat. “Afternoon, M’am.”

“There are laws in this country,” her father continues. “Men have rights by the Constitution. Anybody put themselves in the way of those rights commits treason.”

“You tell em,” says the big man.

“What’s your name?” asks the other.

“Daddy, come away from there.” Miss Loretta stays rooted where she stands, her father as likely to turn his wrath on her if she interferes. “You don’t need to tell them anything.”

“My name is Jack Butler. And you skulking sons of bitches know where to find me.”

Miss Loretta holds her breath. Rolling past the two Rough Riders, past the last of the white men parading on foot, is a carriage with two men in gray tailored suits and derbies sitting impassively in the front. The one with the reins is Frank Manly, beside him his brother Alexander, and though the latter is at least as light-skinned as she with her mother’s touch of Cherokee blood, the word has circulated that he is to be lynched on sight. The carriage is headed north.

Alex meets her gaze for a moment in passing, holds her eyes.

“You gentlemen will have to excuse my father,” she says, moving sideways to draw their attention. “Whenever an election comes up he can become somewhat in
flam
matory.”

Her mother said a lady can diffuse the most awkward of situations with a compliment and a soothing word. “You all make such a stirring sight, up there on your mighty steeds—” and here she sugars her words with the tiniest lilt of flirtation, “it’s no wonder you’ve got him all riled up.”

“I forbid you to speak with these scoundrels!” snaps her father, turning to her, furious. He slapped her once, only that one time.

The carriage is past, out of sight. In the one cartoon of Alex Manly she has seen, waved in front of her by her father during one of his jeremiads, he is depicted as a coal-black fiend in the loud clothing of a Dock Street procurer, leering at a young white woman with her leg uncomfortably exposed as she steps down from a carriage very much like the one he just drove past in.

Miss Loretta spreads her arms apologetically. “He can be so
dif
ficult,” she says, nodding at her father. “If you gentlemen don’t mind—”

The big one attempts a bow on horseback and leads away, while the runt turns to glare back at them as he follows.

“Names are being collected,” she says quietly to her father when the riders are gone. “Mischief is being planned. They have lists.”

“Well sign me
up
,” says Roaring Jack Butler, standing fast beneath his flag.

It is the piano that makes her cry.

All the way back to Wilmington in the carriage he’s rented she is strong, she is polite and respectful the way her father says she has to be. Dorsey is a good man, like her mother says, and mostly tends to the reins as if he isn’t used to driving, tipping his hat now and then to the loud collections of white men, carrying banners on horseback, who seem to have invaded the city. Dorsey makes no mention of them, as if not acknowledging nasty looks and leering comments means they didn’t happen, and instead compliments her dress, remarks on the Reverend’s beautiful voice. She understands how he can cut their hair all day. His house is on Eleventh just north of Red Cross, smallish, but his own house, he remarks with pride, bought and paid for.

I will bear this, she thinks, this is my life now and I will be strong. Then he opens the door and the first thing there, too big for the room, is the gleaming piano and Dorsey turns to her proud and hopeful, gleaming himself, and it is too much.

“I don’t need you to play for me,” he says when he has her sitting in the one soft chair, Dorsey perched on the arm of it holding her hand in his, patting the back of it as if comforting a child. “Just whenever you want—if you get the notion.”

“I am so sorry,” she says, wiping her eyes and trying to catch her breath. “I didn’t mean to do like this.” My room, she thinks, her heart racing. I won’t ever sleep in my own room again.

“We got lots of time, Miss Jessie.” She hasn’t called him anything yet, not Dorsey or Mr. Love or Dear or anything, just making sure he is looking at her before she speaks. He is always looking at her, sneaking sideways glances, and she wishes he wouldn’t. “Lots of time for everything,” he says. “Aint no hurry about it when you married. You just let me know when you ready for—you know. When you ready.”

She was hoping to get that over tonight, but now, with the piano filling up this room, pushing her back against the wall, maybe not.

“Thank you,” says Jessie. He’s looking at her again, looking at her like she could break and she’s feeling like she might just, might shatter into a million pieces. White men are singing on the street outside, drunken, and she wants him to pull the shades down.

“That’s the deal, being married,” he says again, squeezing her hand. “Aint no hurry about a thing.”

Later, when he is gone to return the carriage wherever he hired it from, she plays a chord on the piano. It wants tuning.

The gunfire begins when the sun goes down. There has been commotion all day, horns and drumming and the devil yells of the horsemen, and now the gunshots, singly and in volleys, accompanied by animal whoops and laughter. Dr. Lunceford can see the reddish glow over their bonfire on Chestnut, can hear the men shouting and carrying on from several directions, the rally having spread throughout the city. Yolanda, still mourning for their daughter, calls him in off the porch.

“No reason to give them the satisfaction,” she says quietly when he steps back into the parlor. “Those kind of people get into the drink, there’s no telling what they might do if they come by and see you out there.”

“This is my house,” says Dr. Lunceford, sitting heavily beside her on the settee.

They have only the one gaslight lit on the wall and the piano throws a long shadow. It is so quiet with Jessie gone.

“They see you on the porch of this house,” says Yolanda, “owning it, not doing the yard work, and it makes their blood boil. You know that.”

During his visits to Brooklyn the previous morning the people were tight-lipped and grim, near whispering when they spoke of the election. The positions at risk on the state level are not so vital in themselves, and this is not South Carolina, or Mississippi, God forbid—but every new day there has been another warning. In the evening yesterday he and a handful of the others prominent in the colored community were escorted with an undertone of menace out onto the water, that huge gun bolted on the foredeck, the white men smirking as they neared Eagle Island and the deadly machine demonstrated. A simple cranking motion, like operating a meat grinder, then the hammering of bullets, all of them covering their ears as they watched thick wood reduced to flying chips on shore in an angry hailstorm of destruction. All this followed by a quiet but pointed lecture on civics and security. His companions were duly impressed.

There is a crackle of gunfire, not too distant, and Yolanda puts her hand on his arm.

“They say they’ll be watching the polls tomorrow. Carrying weapons.”

“We’ve petitioned the governor,” says Dr. Lunceford. “He doesn’t want to know about it.”

More gunfire, and a distant, drunken cheer. “Do you suppose Jessie is safe?”

“They’re mostly down by the river.”

“But tomorrow—”

“She’ll have her husband with her.”

He knows this comforts his wife no more than it does him. They ran into the procession on the way back from Magnolia, a lot of white trash from Dry Pond strutting about, displaying their banners and their ignorance. But they are only the hounds, set loose to yowl and slather. The ones behind the hunt are the cigar-puffers in the Cape Fear Club, the planters and pressers of cotton, the lawyers and land-speculators and ambitious sons of the men who lost their city to the Union and now want it back. The ones who are listening to that old Confederate wind-bag in the gilded embrace of Thalian Hall, not those scorching pig and swilling whiskey behind the post office.

“Will you go out tomorrow?”

Yolanda asks in as neutral a tone as she can produce, neither a challenge nor an admonition.

“I am an Assemblyman, elected by the people,” says Dr. Lunceford. “I am responsible for more than my own personal safety. I am going to vote.”

It is very quiet in the parlor. This is the time of day Jessie would play. Not practice, just play a whole piece, Brahms perhaps, something slow and sweet while they all waited for Alma to call dinner.

“They say they’re out to hang the Manly boys,” says Yolanda. It is her attempt to caution him, to remind him of the atmosphere on the streets.

“They’re safe out of town,” says Dr. Lunceford. “Rode out this afternoon.”

Yolanda looks to him. “You had something to do with it?”

“Several people came together,” he says. “White and black. They’re long gone now.”

“There’s one thing we can be thankful for.”

Someone is walking up their street, singing loudly. As he moves closer the words become distinct—

The Paddy has his attributes

His love of drink and song

He’ll serenade the stars the whole night long

The Dutchman is a stolid chap

Beneath his heavy brow

But I don’t like a nigger—nohow!

Yolanda puts her other hand on her husband’s arm and leans into him.

“If I could go,” she says, “if I was allowed to vote, I would not allow anyone,
any
one, to steal the ballot from my hand.”

The Judge moves through the men standing at the back as the old Colonel begins his aria.

“We have seen our institutions destroyed,” says Waddell, standing wraithlike on the Thalian stage, “our ideals trampled upon, our women dis-honored.”

Most of them are up there behind him, basking in the reflected glory of the moment, MacRae and Parsley and Rountree and the Taylor brothers. The hall is packed with men and not a few women, emotion running high.

“But the time for smooth words has gone by, the extremest limit of forbearance has been reached,” Colonel Waddell’s voice trembles with righteousness as he exclaims, pounding the podium before him for emphasis, “and the blood of warriors rises in our veins!”

The Judge reaches Turpin, smiling as he leans against the center-aisle doorway, gazing out over the cheering throng.

“You know what’s going on outside?” calls the Judge over the shouts of the audience.

“Some of our brother Redeemers having themselves a barbecue,” says Turpin, not taking his eyes off the stage.

“We are Anglo-Saxons,” Waddell sings out, spreading his arms to include every person in the gathering, raising his eyes to the balcony—

“They’re a bunch of hooligans staggering around in the streets. I almost ran over two of them coming here, weaving straight up the middle of Princess passing a bottle between them.” The Judge is listed on the Businessmen’s Committee that has sponsored the evening’s oration, and he is a part of what is brewing, for better or worse.

“We are the sons and daughters of those who won the first victory of the revolution at Moore’s Creek Bridge, who stained with bleeding feet the snows of Valley Forge,” cries the old man on the stage, “and only left the service of our country when its independent sovereignty was secured.”

“It’s like the old coot been born again,” Turpin chuckles. “Just what you worried about, Judge?”

“If this whole deal is going to work we must operate within the law, we must be beyond reproach. We can’t have the rough element taking over and blackening the name of our city.”

“Our city got a pretty black name in the world as it is,” says Turpin. “That’s the whole problem right there.”

“We are the brothers of the men who wrote with their swords from Bull Run to Bentonville the most heroic chapter in American annals, and we ourselves are men who intend to preserve, at the cost of our lives if necessary, the heritage that is ours!”

Ben Tillman might hold an audience with his plainspoken grit, concedes the Judge, surveying the eager faces in the Hall, but this old Confederate has the gift, the voice—