How Few Remain (87 page)

Douglass rested easy. He heard his son take his overcoat off the tree in the front hall, put it on, open the door, and close it after him. Bells on the carriage jingled as Lewis drove home. Douglass looked at the decanter of wine. Like a voyage to Liberia, it tempted him. But, ever since his escape from slavery, he had seldom run away, and he had never been a man who drank alone. Picking up the cut-glass stopper, he set it in its place. Then, with a grunt, he rose once more and went off to bed. He listened to clocks striking one. He expected he would also listen to them striking two, but drifted off before they did.

Other than having a new calendar, 1882 seemed little different from the vanished 1881. Warships flying the Union Jack remained outside Rochester harbor, as they did outside other U.S. harbors along the Great Lakes. No warships flying the Stars and Stripes came out to challenge them. That sprang in part from the ceasefire, but only in part. The rest was that the U.S. Navy’s Great Lakes flotilla was incapable of challenging its British counterpart.

One day in the middle of January, the War Department announced that the troops of the Army of the Ohio were returning to U.S. soil. By the way the announcement sounded, no one would have guessed it meant the U.S. Army was abandoning the last foothold it held in Kentucky. The telegram made the move sound like a triumph.

“Look at this!” Douglass waved the announcement in his son’s face.
“Look
at this. How many dead men in Louisville?
They
won’t be coming back to Indiana. And for what did they die? For what, I ask you?”

“For President Blaine’s ambition,” Lewis answered. “Nothing
else.” The abject failure of the U.S. war effort had left him even more estranged from and cynical about the society in which he lived than he had been before the fighting started.

But Douglass shook his head. “The cause for which we fought was noble,” he insisted, as he had insisted all along. “The power of the Confederate States should have been kept from growing. The tragedy was not that we fought, but that we fought while so manifestly unprepared to fight hard. Blaine gets some of the blame for that, but the Democrats who kept us so weak for so long must share it with him. If we are to have a return engagement with the Confederacy, we must be more ready in all respects. I see no other remedy.”

“I never thought I’d live to see the day when you and Ben Butler were proposing the same cure for our disease,” Lewis said. “The Democrats like him, too.”

That brought Douglass up short. Butler had no more kept silent about the proposals he had made in the meeting at the Florence Hotel outside Chicago than Abraham Lincoln had about his. Both men were stirring up turmoil all through the battered country, and each one’s followers violently opposed the other’s. As Lincoln had joined with the Socialists, so Butler was indeed drifting back toward the Democrats, from whose ranks he had deserted during the War of Secession.

Reluctantly, Douglass said, “An idea may be a good one no matter who propounds it.”

“Nero fiddled while Rome burned,” Lewis retorted. “You temporize while the Republican Party goes up in flames.”

“I am not temporizing,” Douglass said with dignity. “I have done all I could to hold the party together. I am still doing all I can. It may not suffice—I am only one man. But I am doing my best.”

“You’d have a better chance if your skin were white,” Lewis said. Douglass stared at him. Negroes in the U.S. seldom spoke so openly of the handicap they suffered by being black. Lewis glared back in furious defiance. “It’s true, and you damn well know it’s true.”

But Douglass shook his head. “Not for me. Had I been born white—had I been born
all
white”—he corrected himself, to remind his son they both had white blood in their veins—”I suspect I would have drifted into some easy, profitable trade, never giving a second thought, or even a first, to politics. Being the
color I am, I have been compelled to face concerns I should otherwise have ignored. It has not been an easy road, but I am a better man for it.”

“I do not have your detachment, Father, nor, frankly, do I want it,” Lewis said. “I wish you a good morning.” He departed Douglass’ home without much ceremony and with a good deal of anger.

Douglass had to go out himself a couple of days later, when his wife developed a nasty cough. The new cough syrups, infused with the juice of the opium poppy, really could stop the hacking and barking that seemed such a characteristic sound of winter. Thanking heaven for modern medicine, Douglass bundled himself up and trudged off to the nearest drugstore, a few blocks away.

He thanked heaven for the day, too. As January days in Rochester went, it was good enough—better than good enough. It was bright and clear and, he guessed, a little above freezing. Not too much snow lay on the ground. Even so, he planted his feet with care; the sidewalks had their share of icy patches.

“Half a dollar,” the druggist said, setting on the counter a glass bottle with the label in typography so rococo as to be almost unreadable. His voice was polite and suspicious at the same time. Douglass’ fur-collared overcoat argued that he had the money to pay for the medicine. His being a Negro argued, to far too many white men, that he was likely to be shiftless and liable to be a thief.

He reached into his pocket and found a couple of quarters, which he set beside the bottle of cough elixir. Only after the druggist had scooped the coins into the cash box did his other hand come off the bottle. That care made Douglass want to laugh. He was stout, black, and well past sixty. Even if he did abscond with the medicine, how could he possibly hope to get more than a couple of blocks without being recognized or, more likely, tackled with no ceremony whatever?

He was carrying the bottle of cough syrup out of the store when three middle-aged white men started to come in. He stood aside to let them use the narrow doorway ahead of him. Instead of going on past, though, the fellow in the lead stopped, rocked back on his heels, and looked at him with an expression of mingled contempt and insult.

“Well, looky here, Jim. Looky here, Bill,” he drawled. “Ain’t
this a fine buck nigger we got?” His friends laughed at what they and he thought to be wit.

Douglass stiffened. “If you gentlemen will excuse me—” he said, his voice chillier than the weather outside.

“Listen to him, Josh,” either Jim or Bill exclaimed. “Talks just like a white man, he does. Probably got a white man inside him, that he ate up for breakfast.” All three of them found that a very funny sally, too.

“If you gentlemen will excuse me—” Douglass repeated, bottling up the fury he felt. He took a step forward. More often than not, his sheer physical presence was enough to let him ease through confrontations like this.

It didn’t work today. Instead of giving way before him, the white man in the lead—Josh—deliberately blocked his path. “No, we don’t excuse you, Sambo,” he said, and looked back over his shoulder. “Do we, boys?”

“No,” one of Jim and Bill said, while the other was saying, “Hell, no.”

Josh stuck a finger in Douglass’ face. “And do you know why we don’t excuse you, boy? I don’t excuse you because it’s all your goddamn fault.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” Douglass said, now alarmed as well as furious. This sort of thing hadn’t happened to him in Rochester for many years. He knew too well how ugly it could get, and how fast it could get that way. Carefully, he said, “I do not know what you believe to be my fault, but I do know I have never set eyes on any of you before in my life.”
And, if God be kind, I shall never see you again
.

“Not you, you—you niggers,” Josh said. “Hadn’t been for you niggers, this here’d still be one country. We wouldn’t have fought two wars against the lousy Rebels, and they wouldn’t have licked us twice, neither.”

“Yeah,” said Jim or Bill.

“That’s right,” Bill or Jim agreed.

They weren’t drunk. Douglass took some small comfort in that. It might make them a little less likely to pound him into the boards of the floor. He said, “Black men did not ask to be brought to these shores, nor did we come willingly. The difficulty lies not in our being here but in the way we have been used. I myself bear on my back the scars of the overseer’s lash.”

“Ooh, don’t he talk fancy,” one of the men behind Josh said.

“Reckon that’s why the overseer whupped him,” Josh replied, which was a disturbingly accurate guess. He didn’t attack, he didn’t make a fist, but he didn’t get out of Douglass’ way, either. “Ought to all go back to Africa, every stinking one of you. Then we’d set things to rights here.”

“No.” Now Douglass let his anger show. “For better and for worse, I am an American, too—every bit as much as you. This is my country, as it is yours.”

“Liar!” Josh shouted. His friends echoed him. Now he did fold his hand into a fist. Had the bottle Douglass held been thicker, he would have used it to add strength to his own blow. As things were, he feared it would break and cut his palms and fingers. He got ready to throw it in Josh’s face instead.

From behind him came a short, sharp click. It was not a loud noise, but it was one to command immediate, complete, and respectful attention from Douglass and from the three white men of whom he’d fallen foul. Very slowly, Douglass turned his head and peered over his shoulder. The druggist’s right hand held a revolver, the hammer cocked and ready to fall.

“That’s enough, you men,” he said sharply. “I’ve got no great use for niggers myself, but this fellow wasn’t doing you any harm. Let him alone, and get the hell out of here while you’re at it.”

Josh and Jim and Bill tumbled over one another leaving the drugstore. The druggist carefully uncocked the pistol and set it down out of sight. Frederick Douglass inclined his head. “I thank you very much indeed, sir.”

“Didn’t do it for you so much as to keep the place from getting torn up,” the druggist replied in matter-of-fact tones. “Like I said, I don’t much care for niggers, especially niggers like you that put on airs, but that ain’t the same as saying you deserved a licking when you hadn’t done anything to deserve one. Now take your cough elixir and go on home.”

“I’ll do that,” Douglass said. “A man who, for whatever reason, will not let another be beaten unjustly has in himself the seeds of justice.” He tipped his hat and walked out of the store.

Once on the sidewalk, he looked around warily to see whether the white ruffians might want another try at him. But they were nowhere around. They must have had enough. His sigh of relief put a fair-sized frosty cloud in the air.

When he got home, Anna was sitting in the parlor, coughing
like a consumptive. “Hold on, my dear,” he said. “A tablespoon of this will bring relief.”

“Fetch me a glass o’ water with it, on account of it’s gwine taste nasty,” she answered. She sighed when he brought the medicine and the water. “I ain’t been out of the house in a good while now. Anything much interestin’ happen while you was at the drugstore?”

Douglass gravely considered that. After a moment, he shook his head. “No,” he said. “Nothing much.”

Snow blew into Friedrich Sorge’s face. As it had a way of doing in Chicago, the wind howled. Sorge clutched at his hat. The Socialist newspaperman had an exalted expression on his face. Turning to Abraham Lincoln, he shouted, “Will you look at the size of this crowd? Have you ever in all your life seen anything like it?”

“Why, yes, a great many times, as a matter of fact,” Lincoln answered, and hid a smile when Sorge looked dumbfounded. He set a gloved hand on his new ally’s shoulder. “You have to remember, my friend, that you have been in politics as an agitator, a gadfly. From now on, we will be playing the game to win, which is a different proposition altogether.”

“Yes.” Sorge still sounded dazed. “I see that. I knew our joining would bring new strength to the movement, but I must say I did not imagine it would bring so much.” He laughed. The wind did its best to blow the laughter away. “Until now, I did not imagine how weak we were, nor how strong we might become. It is … amazing. Not since I left the old country have I been part of anything to compare to this—and in the old country, we were put down with guns.”

Lincoln had different standards of comparison. To him, it was just another political rally, and not a particularly large one at that. Muffled against the cold and the wind, men and women trudged south along Cottage Grove Avenue toward Washington Park. Considering the weather, it wasn’t a bad crowd at all. It was also, without a doubt, the most energetic crowd Lincoln had seen since the War of Secession.

Red flags whipped in the wind. It had already torn some of them into streamers. Men had to wrestle to keep the signs they held from flying away.
JUSTICE FOR THE WORKING MAN
, some
said.
TAX CAPITALISTS’ INCOME
, others urged.
REVOLUTION IS A RIGHT
, still others warned.

Some of the people on the sidewalks cheered as the marchers walked past. Others hurried along, intent on their own business or on finding someplace to get out of the cold. Policemen in overcoats of military blue were out in force. They had clubs in their hands and pistols on their belts. If peaceable protest turned to uprising—or, perhaps, if the police thought it might, this gathering too could be put down with guns.

Trees in Washington Park were skeletally bare. What little grass snow did not cover was yellow and dead. It was as bleak and forbidding a place as Lincoln could imagine. But it also struck him as the perfect place to hold a rally for the new fusion of the Socialists and his wing of the Republican Party.

“In the summer, you know, and when the weather is fine, the rich promenade through here, showing off their fancy carriages and matched teams and expensive clothes,” he said to Friedrich Sorge.

Sorge nodded. “Yes, I have seen this.” He scowled. “It is not enough for them that they have. They must be seen to have. Their fellow plutocrats must know they, too, are part of the elite, and the proletariat must be reminded that they are too rich and powerful to be trifled with.”

“Thanks to their money, they think it is summer in the United States the year around,” Lincoln said. “To the people coming into Washington Park now, blizzards blow in January and July alike.”