A Moment in the Sun (68 page)

ELECTION DAY

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.