The Invisible Line (38 page)

The unmooring of the younger generation plagued Wall with anxiety. His son Stephen, after six years in a supposedly secure position at the Government Printing Office, was fired by Democrats appointed by Grover Cleveland. Stephen opened a cigar shop in the Shaw neighborhood, not far from home. The shop doubled as a pool hall, and by the end of 1887 there was a room in the back with a counter and shelves stocked with demijohns of gin and rye, shot glasses, and cases of beer. In January 1888 police raided the establishment, and Stephen was arrested for operating a “tippling-house, bar-room, [or] sample room” without a license. O.S.B. Wall had to go back before Judge Snell in police court not to defend some illiterate, starving, tubercular wretch but to see his “stalwart” son—the boy he had named for his father—stand in shame. Wall had to hear witnesses testify, as one did, that “I bought a cigar and called for a drink—got a drink of gin, paid for it, and
drank it
,” and he had to bear the humiliation of watching Judge Snell pronounce Stephen guilty and hand down a sentence of $105 or sixty days in the workhouse.
¹⁷

Wall posted an appeal bond for his son, hired a white lawyer, and took the case to the criminal court for a jury trial. Stephen Wall and his employees testified that they had never sold beer and whiskey but rather had been serving it at private gatherings of Republicans gearing up for the 1888 presidential campaign. The liquor was meant to “advance his political interests,” Stephen said, and an employee clarified that he had advised Stephen that “if he would have some drinks on hand he could get the men to vote any way he wanted them to.” After Stephen's lawyer alleged that the police drank most of Stephen Wall's liquor during the raid, “leaving nothing except a pile of empty bottles,” the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Near the end of 1888 Stephen applied for a barroom license and was rejected. Soon afterward he sold his shop. When it was raided again in 1890, it was called the Columbia Social and Literary Club. Police found “half a hundred negro men in the shabby, low ceilinged rooms, many of them gathered around a rude table on which a spirited game of crap was in progress.”
¹⁸

O.S.B. Wall's other children were contemplating different lines to cross. His oldest son, Edward, left his job at the post office and moved all the way to Montreal. Like his brother, he became a saloon keeper. Unlike anyone else in the family to date, he married a French woman and presented himself to the world as a white man. Wall's daughter Bel, who had been working as a substitute teacher in the District's public schools, was dreaming of a life in the New York theater—and a new role offstage. She studied acting at the Martyn College of Elocution and Oratory. The school shared space with the Martyn Commercial College, which advertised “Colored students not admitted.”
¹⁹

The harder whites made it for blacks to earn a living, educate their children, and just make it through a single day without threat or insult, the greater the incentives grew for light-skinned blacks to leave their communities and establish themselves as white. If anything, the drumbeat for racial purity, the insistence that any African ancestry—a single drop of blood—tainted a person's very existence, accelerated the migration to new identities and lives. The difference between white and black seemed obvious, an iron-clad rule, a biological fact. But the Walls knew that blacks could be as good as whites and as bad, as smart and as stupid. Blacks had just as much claim to schooling and jobs and love and family, to common courtesies each day. The Walls knew that blacks could be every bit the equal of whites—and that their skins could be equally light. As the United States veered from slavery to Jim Crow, O.S.B. Wall's children did not stand up and fight. They faded away.

 

 

HIS FINANCES TIGHTENING, HIS people crushed, his family dissolving, Wall started losing his grip on his decorum and dignity. After an “aged white lawyer” called Wall “a—fool” during a break in court proceedings, Wall slapped him in the face, stunning onlookers. When a lawyer tried to claim one of Wall's clients as his own, Wall screamed in the middle of the police court that the lawyer should be sent to jail for “shystering.” Wall drew looks of “interest and dismay,” while an officer whispered to the old man to “Shut up!” On a third occasion at the courthouse, Emanuel M. Hewlett, who represented Frederick Douglass and his family, referred to Wall as a “50 cent lawyer.” In response, Wall promptly “sent out his right hand with terrific force, and the blow caught Hewlett on the jaw, forcing him against the door and sending his silk hat and cane in different directions across the witness room.” Hewlett punched Wall in the face, and Wall reportedly bit Hewlett's finger. The daily papers crowed that “Hewlett claimed the fight on a foul.”
²⁰

Wall's money problems were intruding into his family relationships. When his sister Sarah died in 1886, leaving valuable land and personal effects in Ohio and the District, John Mercer Langston was appointed executor of the will. Wall wrote “my dear professor” a series of increasingly insistent letters, practically begging for fees as well as for a larger, presumably more remunerative role in handling the estate. Wall described himself as “restless” and “anxious” to have his sister's property inventoried and divided as quickly as possible. He demanded prompt payment for every bit of aid that he had given Mercer. “I have received not one cent of my bill . . . after I spent a day with you to assist to get in your possession all the money of the estate in this District,” Wall wrote. After Wall left town to handle his sister's funeral arrangements, he sought reimbursement for the “
honest
and
necessary
” expense of keeping his horse at a boarding stable “for two or three days when I had no one in the world to take care of [it] while I was absent from home.” “I am not able to lay out of the use of my money and would not if I could help myself,” he admitted to Langston.
²¹

At work, Wall suffered occasional episodes of speechlessness. He would stand up to argue a case but find himself “unable to articulate a word,” seized with the feeling that his tongue was swelling. Each time Wall had an attack, he would need several days of rest. Then he would put on his suit and head back to the police court.
²²

 

 

ON APRIL 12, 1890, Wall readied himself for work—suit, tie, watch, papers. He appeared to one daughter to be “unusually bright and . . . in good spirits.” It was a Saturday morning, warm, breezy, and fair, the loveliest kind of day in the District's short spring. The police court was eighteen blocks south, and the ride into town would be beautiful. From Howard Hill the entire city unfolded before Wall. The foul swirling dust, deep muck, open sewers, and roaming livestock that he had first encountered after the war had given way to stately avenues and graceful parks, charming townhomes on tree-lined streets, mansions and monuments. Wall saw a Washington that was prettier than ever, and uglier at the same time. Two blocks down the hill, LeDroit Park was elegant, understated, and in bloom. Developed at the same time that Wall was building his house, the subdivision of picturesque Victorian homes and lush rose gardens had long been fenced and patrolled by guards, signaling that it would have nothing to do with the surrounding neighborhood and its black residents. Although Howard students tore a gap in the fence in 1888, LeDroit remained all white, its wrought iron reinforced with barbed wire.
²³

The Saturday police court was cleaning up Friday night's mess. On his arrival Wall took his place in the familiar choreography of defendants, police, bailiffs, lawyers, and onlookers. The courthouse had once been a Unitarian church, but few prayers were answered there now. In his well-cut suit and languid bow tie, his hair and mustache touched with gray and neatly trimmed, Wall occupied a different world from the ragged client beside him. Behind Wall were more of the same, shadows of men whispering with lawyers eager for their business or silently waiting their turn for justice, all accused of petty crimes—theft, profanity, assault, carrying a concealed blade. Police officers and bailiffs paced the vaulted chamber and the corridors outside, ready to testify, on guard for disturbances. Women and children sat on hard benches, craning for glimpses of loved ones.
²⁴

Surrounded by old acquaintances, friends, and enemies, Wall joined the procession of pleas and fines, crime and punishment. It seemed endless—his clients looking up to him, the judge looking down, Wall floating in the middle like dust trapped in sunlight, buffeted by contending currents, wealth and poverty, right and wrong, liberty and bondage, black and white. But then it stopped. He stood and faced the judge and opened his mouth to argue his client's case. His lips began to move, but there was only silence. He stopped and tried again. The silence stretched. He looked at the judge, bewildered. He could not say a word.
²⁵

Wall faltered and fell. His onetime slanderer Emanuel Hewlett gathered him in his arms and with another lawyer carried Wall out of the courtroom. On the street they hailed a carriage and raced back to Howard Hill. Charles Purvis was sent for from the Freedmen's Hospital. The doctor found a man paralyzed by a massive stroke.
²⁶

Though Wall could not talk, Purvis was encouraged by the fact that his patient could understand his questions and seemed to comprehend what was happening around him. Wall recognized his wife and children and the many friends who were making “anxious inquiries as to his condition.” Purvis told the press that Wall was a “very sick man” but held out hope that “with close watching and treatment he would pull through.”
²⁷

Immobile and anguished, Wall suffered through two months of pain and prayer. Howard University's president Jeremiah Rankin visited regularly. After blacks had been allowed to join the First Congregational Church more than two decades earlier, Rankin had become the minister and baptized Wall. Now he cheered O.S.B. and Amanda Wall “many times by his calls to sympathy in our affliction.” As spring ripened into summer, Wall rose from his bed. Writing to General Oliver Otis Howard of her husband's “wonderful” recovery that August, Amanda exulted that “God has again placed him on his feet + with use of a cane
only
he has been going, the past week, about the neighborhood.”
²⁸

As he gained strength, Wall's first thought was that he had to start working again. “When brought home from court,” Amanda wrote, “he had six dollars,
all
we possessed. Our home mortgaged for $1600.” Going back to the police court was out of the question “because of lameness + inability to use his pen.” Amanda took charge of finding something for him to do. She knew that William Windom, a former senator from Minnesota who had supported Wall during the Negro Exodus hearings, was now treasury secretary in the new Republican presidential administration. She asked General Howard to contact Windom on Wall's behalf to see if there was an opening for a “night or day's watchmen's position; day watchmen's preferred.” Upon receiving Amanda's letter, Howard immediately wrote the treasury secretary to see if Wall could get some “light work.” “Anything you can do for Wall,” Howard wrote, “will be greatly beneficial to a worthy man + his family and appreciated by me + his numerous friends.”
²⁹

Wall never got to use Howard's recommendation. He wilted in the late-summer heat. When the weather broke, he rallied again, but Amanda described a family left waiting “from day to day hoping for the fulfillment of our desires.” O.S.B. and Amanda now refocused their energy on getting Stephen reinstated at the Government Printing Office and securing their son's position as a respectable member of the middle class. Even though blacks had lost considerable clout in the fifteen years since the end of Reconstruction, the Walls had retained their ties to prominent whites—connections from Ohio, the war, and from Wall's days as a Republican official and activist. At the time of Wall's stroke, the family had just started lining up influential men to contact the public printer on Stephen's behalf. While an initial letter from an Ohio congressman tepidly described hiring Stephen as a “personal favor,” the entreaties took on a new urgency by the beginning of 1891. Alvred Bayard Nettleton, assistant secretary of the treasury, pleaded that rehiring Stephen would “make the difference between the comfort and the absolute distress of Captain O.S.B. Wall, who was a faithful Union soldier and officer during the war and now lies paralyzed and helpless.” “I do not often consent to write letters of this nature,” Nettleton said, “but the case of Captain Wall appeals to me so strongly and pathetically that I cannot refrain from asking your special consideration for it.”
³⁰

As winter turned to spring, Wall grew increasingly feeble. Practicing law, organizing his community, stumping for votes, and fighting for liberty before, during, and after the war—a journey of sixty-five years receded into the dim corners of his sickroom. From his bed he learned of Bel's stage performances and Laura Gertrude's studies at the Oberlin Conservatory. In March he quietly rejoiced in the news that Stephen had been summoned back to work at the Printing Office. A month later, “peaceful and without a struggle,” O.S.B. Wall died.
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F
OG SEEPED THROUGH THE hollows like a slowly spreading stain. First the ridges faded and disappeared, then the budding treetops up and down the slopes, followed by the hillsides themselves. The pale shroud poured through split-rail fences, smothered the fields, swallowed coops and cabins. Places where people had spent their entire lives became new and unfamiliar. No mountains above or hard ground below. Everyone was alone. People startled, lost their footing, bumped into things that were not there. It was widely believed that the fog was a playground for ghosts and haints. After a shivering moment, the calls of birds and people, the sandy grind of hoof on trail, or the bubbling rush of a spring creek grew crisp in the white darkness—sounds that kept a man from thinking he was dreaming, or dead.
¹