A Moment in the Sun (71 page)

One of the Red Shirts steps forward to pound on the door and there is shouting from the men who have flowed around and behind the structure and then Milsap is borne in a rush, feet barely touching the ground, in through the door just smashed open with axes and wrenched hard, fighting to keep from falling under the stampede of men squeezing into the downstairs hall, chairs and benches hurled shattering before them, Milsap grabbing a belt and lifted at the head of the crush up the steep incline to the crowded press at the top of the stairs. It is all he can do to avoid being brained by wood or glass or metal as the furies attack Manly’s den and wreak upon his tools of outrage what they had hoped to inflict on his person.

They have been, as Milsap often surmised, still setting by hand here at the
Record
, and he cannot help but make a hasty inventory as the smaller pieces of equipment whiz past his head to smash against the walls, as stacks of papers are flung about to carpet the floor and sloshed with kerosene from the lamps snatched up from below and a man next to Milsap is beating on a folding table with a compositor’s stick, smashing down again and again screaming “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” while four burly men struggle to tear the bulky rotary press from its moorings and, failing that, allow others to rush in and have at it with ax and sledgehammer. Then fire, the flames whooshing across the floor and the angry wave that has scoured this room becomes a desperate scramble of men fighting to escape, men leaping down the stairwell rolling over those still struggling upward to claim a shard of glory. Milsap is shoved and then rides another man’s back to the ground floor, someone stepping on his neck, then lifted and pulled to safety, hundreds of voices roaring in exaltation as white men pour out the bottom of the house and black smoke pours from the top.

Milsap doesn’t remember having grabbed the chunk of metal till he feels it cutting into the palm of his tightened fist. It is a rectangle of brass with a raised shape on one face, only a shape to most but to Milsap unmistakably a capital
N
when reversed in a newspaper headline. He jams it in his pocket and hurries back from the sudden wave of heat roaring out from the building, flames licking out from the smashed front window above now, nearly stumbling over the guts of the defenestrated printing machine.

They could have stripped the office of the equipment, he thinks, and given it to someone who would have used it responsibly. He learned his trade on an old four-cylinder press just like the one now busted at his feet, which Mr. Clawson himself had bought cheap then sold on credit to the Manly brothers. A pity to butcher the horses, he thinks, when the coachman is to blame.

The heat has driven them all to the west side of Seventh and the fire bells are sounding their alarm when Davey finds him in the throng. Tiny points of orange are reflected in the printer’s devil’s eyes.

“Manly wunt in there,” shouts the boy over the clanging of the bells and the cheers of their companions. “That bird done flew the coop.”

Milsap nods. His neck hurts where it was tromped on. “Then we’ve all got something to thank him for,” he says.

The alarm bells are clanging and then it’s their new hose wagon come rattling down Fourth behind those two big iron grays. Jubal ties Dan off to a light pole and runs alongside till Elijah Gause can pull him up to the siderail.

“What we got?”

“Seventh and Church,” shouts Elijah, pointing ahead to the left where the smoke is billowing up.

It is a mixed neighborhood and it might be three other companies there first. Jubal used to drive for these boys, the Phoenix Hose, before they went on the city payroll at the beginning of the year. Back then it was every company for itself and a race to be first at the scene for a crack at the insurance money. Uncle Wick told him once how he and Mance Crofut killed a bear years ago, how it reared up big as a hillside and threw their dogs through the air and took a couple pounds of lead shot and a smack on the head with a railroad spike before the light finally went out in its eyes. There are no bears left around here, though, and maybe a fire is the biggest thing left worth fighting, where at the end you feel like you done something important and come out alive.

They whip around the corner, wheels sliding in the dirt, and Jubal calls forward to Elijah. “You know what’s burning?”

“Not yet,” Elijah shouts back. “But I got a feeling it’s more than a fire.” And then Johnson has to pull back the reins as they come into the white people.

There is a shifting sea of them all around the fire at the Love and Charity Hall, men and boys, lots of them waving guns around. White men catch up the horses and surround the wagon, looking ugly, though Bud Savage is grinning as he struts up to hand them the word.

“False alarm, boys,” he says. “Chief says we gone let this one go to the ground.”

None of the other city companies have come. Heavy wood is shifting and cracking inside the building now, glowing embers floating down all around them, but not one of the Phoenix boys budges from the rig. Jubal can feel crackling heat from the blaze ahead and the acid glare of the white men closing in.

“You mean to let this church burn too?” asks Johnson, nodding to the St. Luke’s Zion. “Cause that’s what’s gonna happen next.”

An old gray-haired white man walks his horse over.

“What’s the problem here?” he says.

“Boy claims the church gonna burn,” says Bud.

The old man looks at the church and then back at the Hall, frowning. “Our work here is done,” he says. “Let them through.”

It takes a minute for the others to catch wind that they’ve been vouched for, every few yards another knot of white men throwing up their guns to challenge, but finally Elijah’s brother Frank jumps off and hooks them up to the hydrant as Jubal runs the hose out to within twenty yards of the fire with the other pipemen, his face feeling like it is blistering, and then Frank yanks the valve. The hose jolts stiff on his shoulder and then, despite themselves, the crowd of white men cheer as the first gout of water spurts skyward and smacks down on the St. Luke’s roof. Hot sweat boils off Jubal’s face, stinging his eyes as he wrestles the line with the others, water pressure pretty feeble here and thinking they could use one of the steam engines to pump while he hears the old white man’s voice, singing above the noise of the fire bells and the now roaring flames and suddenly the greater part of the white men start to move back north up Seventh, many of them ducking under the hose as they go. Something cracks under his feet and when he glances down he sees it’s a sign that’s been torn off the front of the house and hacked with axes, a sign you can still tell said
THE RECORD PUBLISHING COMPANY.

He helped carry the printing gear up into that house just a little while back and now it is burning away, and he has to wonder was anybody trapped inside or shot when they run out from it, such a low, spiteful thing to do when they already took their damn election, the faces on the couple hundred whites who stay to watch not twisted with meanness, but just looking happy and curious like it’s the 4th of July and next there’s going to be rockets. Johnson directs them to wet the outside of St. Luke’s and then do a quick knockdown of the fire on what’s left of the Love and Charity top floor.

“What’s the use setting it on fire,” says a disappointed white boy, stepping up close with two of his friends, “if you gonna let em come and put it out?”

Dorsey was born on the day of the Capitulation, when the rebels give up to the Union at Appomattox, and his mama says that’s why he’s bound to keep the peace. But nobody seems to be in the mood for that right now. There is a big crowd of them come out from the cotton press, maybe a hundred men, worried about their families or their homes or just so mad they want to fight back, all facing the double row of white men lined up across Nutt Street with rifles raised and ready to shoot, some with uniforms and some without, and a Gatling gun mounted on a wagon with a white man sweating at the trigger.

Dorsey stands in the middle with Mr. Rountree and Mr. Sprunt and old James Telfair.

“What we heard is they strung up Alex Manly and burned down the Love and Charity Hall and St. Luke’s Zion,” says James, who manages the floor for Mr. Sprunt and sometimes preaches at St. Stephen’s. “And now we hear they coming over to Brooklyn to shoot us up.”

“No truth to that at all,” says Mr. Rountree, whose hair looks like he hasn’t put a comb to it this morning. “You got to get these people back inside.”

“—
that if any persons, to the number of ten or more, unlawfully, tumultuously and riotously assemble together to the disturbance of the public peace—
” Mr. Roger Moore shouts out, reading from a paper and marching back and forth in front of the line of riflemen, “—
and being openly required or commanded by invested authority to disperse themselves
—”

“Dammit, will you stop that?” snaps Mr. Sprunt.

Mr. Roger Moore is in some kind of made-up uniform, wearing a sword. “We got to make this legal,” he explains.

“There hasn’t been any disturbance here and there’s not going to be any,” says the press owner. Dorsey was cutting Mr. Sprunt in his shop in the Orton when a couple men run in and yelled “Your niggers are coming out!” and then run off again. He should have just stayed and let the white man deal with it, but they put his name on that Colored Committee, which maybe was an honor but felt more like a responsibility, and so here he is in the middle of it. He knows they at least won’t start shooting while the man who owns the cotton press and the Orton Hotel and a good deal of the rest of the city is right beside him, but the big mounted rapid-fire gun keeps swiveling to follow every time his nerves force him to move a little bit.

“If there’s nothing to it about a mob coming,” says Dorsey quietly, trying to be still, “I don’t see why the men can’t go and see for themselves.”

“The situation has got beyond that,” says Mr. Roger Moore. There are stripes and other shapes on the shoulder of his uniform but Dorsey doesn’t know what rank they add up to. “We can’t let a whole gang of these people out into the streets when they supposed to be working.”

“It’s the rumors, suh,” says James Telfair, who belonged to the de Rosset family when he was a young man and knows how to talk to white folks. “Rumors beset a man’s mind. But if you let a few out, two or three at a time, they can go look and come back with the real story.”

“That would be fine with me,” says Mr. Sprunt. “They won’t get any work done till this is settled, one way or the other.”

Mr. Rountree turns. “How bout that, Roger? Two or three can’t do us much mischief.”

“I’ll let these two go,” he says, pointing to Dorsey and Reverend Telfair. “And then I want the rest of them inside.” He flips the Riot Act paper over, holds it out.

“Write your names here, if you can write.”

Dorsey writes, and thinks how this is the second time in two days the white people got his name on a paper.

“You hurry your asses back here,” says the man behind the Gatling gun as they pass. “This deal won’t hold water long.”

Men and boys are posing for photos when Jubal leaves the fire. It’s only just smoldering now and he’s got Dan tied across the Creek on Fourth with a wagon full of coal left to deliver. He tries to stay on the far side of the street from the white men who are drifting back toward Brooklyn in small groups, rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders, talking excitedly. The ones that got jobs must be taking the day off, as they are none of them in any hurry. When he crosses Chestnut he sees Toomer hurrying up in his uniform.

The police gives him a look. “Where you been, get all sooty like that?”

“With the Phoenix boys at the Love and Charity fire. Where were you, man?”

“Bad business popping up all over town. Somebody got a plan,” says Toomer, “but they aint let me in on it.”

Jubal nudges Toomer’s stick as they walk. “You gone ’rest somebody?”

“Not if I can help it. I be happy I get out of this day alive.”

There are a couple dozen black men outside when they get to Fourth and Bladen, glaring diagonal across the trolley track at as many whites carrying rifles who have bunched up between Brunjes’ store and the St. Matthew’s church. Dan is tied up by the white men.

“Help me with this,” says Toomer, heading for the black men.

“I aint no police.”

“Yeah, but you was over at the Love and Charity. You can put them straight.”

The one they call Little Bit who you don’t want to mess with at craps is out front of the men with his chest puffed out.

“Look who comin,” he says. “Pet nigger in a blue suit.”

Toomer steps very close to Little Bit. Jubal doesn’t understand stepping that close to a man known to favor a knife. “What you think you gonna settle out here?” says Toomer. “All this shit blow over fast if you let it.”

“They lynched a man.”

Toomer turns to Jubal.

“You see anybody swinging?”

Jubal shakes his head. “Burned down Manly’s paper but he wasn’t there. Not that I seen anyway.”

“Then what they all doin over here now?”

“Most of em lives here,” says Toomer. “Now why don’t alla you just—”

Little Bit pushes Toomer back a little and there is a pop and then another and a couple of the men around him have pistols out and there is a volley from the rifles across the street and a half dozen men fall. Jubal squats down as more shots are fired and glass shatters and one white man is down in the dirt with Dan rearing and bucking to tear himself loose while other white men take cover behind the wagon, shooting, shooting at him, and then Dan is down and screaming, kicking and writhing and Toomer stands tall and disgusted in the middle yelling “Damn you! Damn the bunch of you!” and then more white men with rifles arrive and Jubal is running, running with the rest, first down Fourth and then right up Harnett but there are men in houses shooting at them there and they retreat, a few men turning to fire back at the houses and then toward the river but more shooting now, whites chasing and black men coming out of their houses shooting and on Third another man goes down, Sam Gregory, he thinks, but Jubal just jumps over the body as it sprawls and keeps running, cutting back with three other men toward the railroad tracks and maybe a bridge to hide under, the fire bells ringing again all over town and marching up from Nutt Street to their right comes what looks like the Wilmington Light Infantry and a hundred of the Vigilance Committee with a rapid-fire gun mounted on a wagon.