Ragtime

29

Father had been born and raised in White Plains, New York. He was an only child. He remembered moments of light and warmth in the days of summer at Saratoga Springs. There were gardens there with paths of washed gravel. He would stroll with his mama down the large painted porches of the great hotels. On the same day every year they went home. She was a frail woman who dies when he was fourteen. Father attended Groton and then Harvard. He read German Philosophy. In the winter of his sophomore year his studies ended. His father had made a fortune in the Civil War and had since used his time losing it in unwise speculations. It was now entirely gone. The old man was the sort that thrived on adversity. His confidence rose with every loss. In bankruptcy he was beaming and triumphant. He died suddenly, all his expectations intact. His flamboyance had produced in his lonely son a personality that was cautious, sober, industrious and chronically unhappy. Coming into his majority, the orphan took the few dollars left to him and invested it in a small fireworks business owned by an Italian. Eventually he took it over, expanded its sales, bought out a flag manufacturing firm and became quite comfortable. He had also found time to secure an army commission in the Philippine campaigns. He was proud of his life but never forgot that before going into business he had been to Harvard. He had heard William James lecture on the principles of Modern Psychology. Exploration became his passion: he wanted to avoid what the great Dr. James had called the habit of inferiority to the full self.

Now every morning Father rose and tasted his mortal being. He wondered if his dislike for Coalhouse Walker, which had been instantaneous, was based not on the man’s color but on his being engaged in an act of courtship, a suspenseful enterprise that suggested the best of life was yet to come. Father noted the skin mottling on the back of his hand. He found himself occasionally asking people to repeat to him what they’d said. His bladder seemed always to demand emptying. Mother’s body did not arouse his lust, only his quiet appreciation. He admired her shape and softness but was no longer inflamed. He noted that she had grown heavier in the upper arms. Once accustomed to life together after his return from the Artic, they had slipped into an undemanding companionship in which he felt by-passed by life, like a spectator at an event. He found distasteful her promotion of the black girl’s marriage. And now that Sarah was dead he felt altogether invisible, Mother’s grief having directed her attention solely on Sarah’s boy.

He recognized that he took satisfaction in going to the police. It was not an entirely righteous feeling. Perhaps in compensation, he represented Coalhouse as a peaceful man driven mad by circumstances not of his own doing. This was exactly the argument Younger Brother made at home. Father confirmed the account of events in Coalhouse’s letter. He was a pianist, Father said, using the historical tense. He was always courteous and correct in his dealings. The police nodded gravely. They wanted to know if the Negro was likely to strike again. That is what the Police Chief said, strike again. Father said that once Coalhouse had set a course for himself he was nothing if not persevering. Largely upon this advice a defense was organized. Police guards were assigned to all the firehouses in the city. The main roads were placed under watch. In the headquarters a wall map was installed showing the deployment of forces. On the basis of Father’s information the New York City Police Department was persuaded to assign detectives to look for Coalhouse in Harlem.

Father had expected criticism from the police. This was not forthcoming. They regarded him as an expert on the character of the criminal. They encouraged him to spend as much time at headquarters as he could. They wanted him to be on hand for their deliberations. The walls of the rooms were painted light green to a line at waist level, dark green below. There were cuspidors in every corner. Father agreed to make himself as available as he could. This was his busiest time of the year. All the orders for rockets, sparklers, Roman candles, crackers, flares and bombs had to be shipped in time for the Fourth of July celebrations. He went back and forth between his office and the police. To his disgust he found himself at the station in the company of the Emerald Isle Chief, Will Conklin. Conklin smelled of whiskey and the experience of being a hunted man had turned his florid face the color of veal. He was by turn bombastic and craven. He offered counsel of the same level of wisdom that had triggered the crisis in the first place. He wanted to go to the black neighborhood and clean all the niggers out once and for all. The officers heard this with disinterest. They teased him about his fate. We may have to give you to the boogie man, Willie, they said. Just to get some peace around here. Conklin could take little of this. Are we not in this together? he said. God love you, you were cruel lads at St. Catherine’s and yet cruel now. Willie, the Police Chief said, we had to wait to hear from the black man himself that one of you shenanigans is what started this, you dumb Mick, telling us now we’re in this together.

But the Fire Chief’s character and mentality seemed appropriate to the place. There was a constant traffic through the glass doors of felons, lawyers, bondsmen, policemen and hapless relatives. Drunks were brought in by the collar and thieves with their hands cuffed. Voices were loud and language was vile. Conklin owned a coal and ice business and lived with a wife and several children in an apartment over his yard office. It dawned on Father that the man was spending so much time at the police station because he felt safe there. Of course he would not admit it. He boasted of the precautions he had taken at his yard. Not relying on the two posted policemen, he had enlisted all the survivors of the Emerald Isle to billet themselves at his place. They were armed. The nigger might as well attack West Point, he said.

Father felt demeaned by the man. Conklin spoke to him differently from the way he addressed the policemen. His diction improved. His assumption of social equality was galling. It’s a tragic thing, Captain, he would say. A tragic thing indeed. Once he actually put his hand on Father’s shoulder, a gesture of such alarming brotherhood that it felt like an electric shock.

Nevertheless Father found himself spending more and more time here. He found it difficult to go home. On the day of the mass funeral for the victims of the Emerald Isle fire, he went to hear the eulogies. Half the city turned out. A large brass cross swayed over the heads of the crowd. Will Conklin did not leave the police station. I’d be a perfect target for the rifle shot, he said. Questions about his behavior began to circulate through the city. Then the news that the killing of the Night of the Emerald Isle stemmed from a grievance was published in the New York City dailies, where reporters were not constrained by the interests of the local chamber of commerce. The World and the Sun printed the text of Coalhouse’s letter. Will Conklin became a despised person everywhere. He was hated as the stupid perpetrator of events leading to the death of men whom he ostensibly commanded. On the other hand, among certain elements he was scorned as someone who knew how to bait a Negro but not to put the fear of God onto him.

A man wearing a derby now sat in a car every day up the street from the house on Broadview Avenue. Father had not been officially told of this but he advised Mother that he had asked for a police guard, feeling it would be less wise to share with her his speculation that for all their gratitude at his coming forward the police weren’t entirely above keeping an eye on him. He wondered what suspicion they might be entertaining.

Exactly one week after Coalhouse’s attack on the Emerald Isle, at six in the morning, a White town car drove slowly up Railroad Place, a narrow cobblestone street in the West End. In the middle of the block was Municipal Fire Station No.2. As the car drew abreast of the building it stopped and the two policemen standing sleepily before the doors were astounded to see several black men disembark holding shotguns and rifles. One of the policemen had the presence of mind to drop to the ground. The other just stood open-mouthed as the raiders efficiently formed a line, like a firing squad, and upon signal fired their weapons in unison. The blast killed the standing policeman and shattered the windowpanes of the firehouse doors. One of the Negroes then ran up and tossed several small packages through the broken windows.

The man who had given the command to fire came up to the terrified survivor lying on the sidewalk. He placed a letter in his hand and said calmly This must be published in the newspaper. Then he joined the other Negroes, who had returned to the car. As it drove off two or perhaps three explosions, coming one on top of another, blew out the doors of the firehouse and instantly turned it into an inferno. The flames quickly engulfed an adjoining saloon and the establishment of a coffee distributor who also roasted his blends for customers off the street. The sacks of beans produced a yellow pall and left a fragrance of roasted coffee over the neighborhood for several weeks. Eventually four bodies were recovered, all of city firemen. An elderly woman, presumably dead of fright, was found in her rooms across the way. A Reo fire engine and an ambulance were destroyed.

And now the city was truly in panic. Children did not appear for school. Cries of outrage were directed against the city administration and against Willie Conklin. A delegation of firemen marched to City Hall and demanded to be sworn in as police deputies and given arms to defend themselves. The flustered Mayor sent a telegram to the Governor of New York appealing for help. The story of Coalhouse’s second attack made the front pages of every newspaper in the country. Reporters in droves came up from New York. The Chief of Police was condemned for allowing the black killer to do his murderous work again. The Chief made a statement to reporters gathered in his office. The man uses automobiles to get around, he said. He strikes and disappears, God knows where. For several years the Association of Police Chiefs of the State of New York has passed a resolution calling for the licensing of automobiles and automobilists. If that were the law today we could track the brute down. The Chief as he spoke emptied the drawers of his desk. He puffed a cigar. He walked out with the reporters. The next day a bill to license automobiles was introduced in the State Legislature.

Father employed two Negroes at his manufactory, one as a janitor, the other as an assembler of rocket tubes. Neither reported to work the day of the second disaster. In fact Negroes were to be seen nowhere in the city. They stayed home behind locked doors. That night police arrested on the street several white citizens carrying pistols and rifles. The Governor responded to the Mayor’s appeal by sending in two companies of militia from New York City. They arrived the next morning and immediately set up their tents on the baseball field behind the high school. Children gathered to watch. Special editions of the local papers were published and each carried prominently the text of Coalhouse’s second letter. This is what it said: One, that e white excrescence known as Willie Conklin be turned over to my justice. Two, that the Model T Ford with its custom pantasote top be returned in its original condition. Until these demands are satisfied, let the rules of war prevail. Coalhouse Walker Jr. President, Provisional American Government.

At this point everyone’s most urgent need was to know what Coalhouse Walker looked like. The newspapers competed fiercely. Newsmen stormed the offices of the Clef Club Orchestra in Harlem. There were no pictures to be had that included the face of the infamous pianist. Hearst’s American triumphantly went to press with a portrait of the composer Scott Joplin. Friends of Joplin threatened to sue, the composer being in the last stages of a terminal illness and unable to see to his own interests. Apologies were tendered. Finally a newspaper in St. Louis came up with a picture that was reprinted widely. Father recognized it to be accurate. It showed a somewhat younger Coalhouse sitting at an upright piano in white tie and tails. His hands were on the keyboard and he was smiling for the camera. Grouped around the piano were a banjo player, a cornetist, a trombonist, a violinist and a drummer bent over a snare drum. They were all in white tie. They were posed as if playing but were clearly not. A circle was drawn around Coalhouse’s head. This became the standard photo. The ironies of a smiling black man with a neat moustache, an altogether cheerful and forthright physiognomy, were too delicious for the caption writers to resist. Smile of a killer, they said. Or the President of the Provisional American Government in happier days.

Under the intense and widespread investigation by the press the family’s role in the entire affair could not be kept hidden. Reporters, first in ones and twos, later in larger groups, began to knock on the door, and then, being refused admittance, to camp outside under the Norwegian maples. They wanted to see the brown child, they wanted statements of any kind about Coalhouse and his visits to Sarah. They peeked through the windows of the parlor and came around to the kitchen door to try the lock. They wore straw boaters and carried pads in their pockets. They chewed tobacco and spit it on the ground and crushed cigarettes under their heels in the grass. Pictures of the house appeared in the New York papers. There were inaccurate accounts of Father’s explorations. The blinds were drawn and the boy was not allowed to go out. The house was stifling and in the night Grandfather moaned in his sleep.

Mother might have withstood all of this if a debate did not rise concerning the family sheltering of Coalhouse Walker’s son. S steady parade of cars came up the hill in the long evenings as sightseers craned their necks for a glimpse of a face in the window. An official of the Child Welfare Board in New York gave an opinion that the still-unchristened illegitimate child should be given over to one of the excellent asylums that existed for the care of orphans, waifs and children born out of wedlock. Mother kept the baby in her room. She would no longer take him downstairs. She enlisted her son to watch over him when she had to see to something. She did not take the time to put her hair up but let it hang to her shoulders all day. She was uncharacteristic in her bitterness toward Father. Why don’t you unlock your treasure chest, she said and get me some proper help. This was a reference to his financial conservatism which she had never before questioned. Always they had lived less well than he could afford. Father was stung by the remark but he went out and found a woman to do the cooking and another woman to be laundress and housemaid, both to live in. He hired the man who had been the part-time gardener and installed him in the rooms above the garage stable. Grandfather already had a registered nurse to tend him in the day. The house, under siege, now bustled like a wartime camp. The boy was constantly admonished to get out from under people’s feet. He watched his mother pace her room, her hands clasped in front of her, her unbound hair hanging down the sides of her face. She looked gaunt, and her chain, which had always inclined to roundness, seemed ungenerous, even pointed.

It was clear the crisis was driving the spirit from their lives. Father had always felt secretly that as a family they were touched by an extra light. He felt it going now. He felt stupid and plodding, available simply to have done to him what circumstances would do. Coalhouse ruled. Yet he had been to the Artic, to Africa, to the Philippines. He had traveled out west. Did that mean only that more and more of the world resisted his intelligence? He sat in his study. Everyone he thought about, even Grandfather, he saw in terms of his own failed concern. He had treated Grandfather with the arrogant courtesy one gives the senile even before the condition has set in. From Younger Brother he was completely estranged. Toward his wife he felt drastically slipped in her estimation, an explorer in body only, the spirit trapped in his own father’s prejudices. He was beginning to look like him, too, going dry and juiceless in everything, with a mad glint showing in the corner of his eye. Why did that have to be?

He condemned himself most for the neglect of his son. He never talked to the boy or offered his companionship. He had always relied on his presence in the child’s life as a model for emulation. How smug that was, how stupid, as the tactic of a man who had acted in his life to distinguish himself from his own father. He looked for the boy and found him on the floor of his room reading in the evening paper an account of the successful play of the New York baseball nine under the masterful coaching of John J. McGraw. Would you like to see that team? he said. The boy looked up, startled. I was just thinking of it, he said. Father went to Mother’s room. Tomorrow, he announced, I am taking the boy to see a game of baseball. He said this with such resolve in its rightness that she was checked in her response, which was to condemn him for an idiot, and when he left the room she could only wonder that she had had that thought in the first place, so separated from my feeling of love.

30

The next afternoon, when father and son left the house, two reporters followed them part of the way on their brisk walk to the railroad station on Quaker Ridge Road. We’re going to the Giants baseball game, Father advised them. That’s all I will say. Who’s pitching? one of the reporters asked. Rube Marquard, the boy said. He’s won his last three chances.

Just as they reached Quaker Ridge a train pulled in. This was the New York Westchester and Boston railway. It did not go anywhere near Boston, nor did it provide service all the way to New York. But it gave a smooth ride to the Bronx and left them with a trolley connection, the 155th Street crosstown, which went over the Harlem River to the Polo Grounds at Coogan’s Bluff.

It was a fine afternoon. Large white clouds moved briskly under a clear blue sky. As the trolley came across the bridge they could see on the bluff overlooking the wooden stands several huge trees which, lacking leaves even in this season, supported derbied figures of men who preferred not to pay to enter the park but to watch the game festooned in the branches like black flowers swaying in the wind. Father caught some of the boy’s excitement. He was immensely pleased to be out of New Rochelle. When they reached the park crowds were streaming down e stairs from the El, cabs were pulling up and discharging their passengers, newsboys were hawking programs of the game, and there was a raucous energy everywhere in the street. Horns blew. The overhead tracks of the El left the street mottled with sun. Father bought the expensive fifty-cent admission, then paid extra for a box, and they entered the park and took their seats behind first base in the lower of the two decks where the sun would for an inning or two cause them to shade their eyes.

The Giants were dressed in their baggy white uniforms with black pin stripes. The manager, McGraw, wore a heavy black cardigan over his barreled trunk with the letters NY emblazoned on the left sleeve. He was short and pugnacious. Like his team he wore socks with thick horizontal stripes and the small flat cap with a peak and a button on the crown. The opponents of the afternoon were the Boston Braves, whose dark blue flannels were buttoned to the neck with the collar turned up. A brisk wind blew the dirt of the field. The game began and almost immediately Father regretted the seats he had chosen. The players’ every ragging curse could be heard clearly by his son. The team at bat shouted obscene taunts at the opposing pitcher. McGraw himself, the paternal figure and commander of his team, stood at third base unleashing the most constant and creative string of vile epithets of anyone. His strident caw could be heard throughout the park. The crowd seemed to match him in its passions. The game was close, with first one team then the other assuming the lead. A runner sliding into second base upended the Giant second baseman, who rose howling, limping in circles and bleeding profusely through his stocking. Both teams came running from their dugouts and the game was stopped for some minutes while everyone fought and rolled in the dirt and the crowd yelled its encouragement. An inning or two after the fight the Giant pitcher Marquard seemed to lose his control and threw the ball so that it hit the Boston batsman. This fellow rose from the ground and ran out toward Marquard waving his bat. Again the dugouts emptied and players wrestled with each other and threw their roundhouse punches and beat clouds of dust into the air. The audience this time participated by throwing soda pop bottles onto the field. Father consulted his program. On the Giant side were Merkle, Doyle, Meyers, Snodgrass and Herzog, among others. The Boston team boasted a player named Rabbit Maranville, a shortstop who he noted roamed his position bent over with his hands at the end of his long arms grazing the grass in a manner that would more properly be called simian. There was a first baseman named Butch Schmidt, and others with the names Cocrehan, Moran, Hess, Rudolph, which led inevitably to the conclusion that professional baseball was played by immigrants. When play was resumed he studied each batsman: indeed, they seemed to be clearly from the mills and farms, rude-features, jug-eared men, sunburned and ham-handed, cheek bulging with tobacco chew, their intelligence completely absorbed in the effort of the game. The players in the field wore outsized flapping leather gloves which made them look like half-dressed clowns. The dry dust of the diamond was blotched with expectorant. Woe to the campaigns of the Anti-Spitting League in the example of these men. On the Boston side the boy who picked up the bats and replaced them in the dugout was, upon second look, a midget, in a team uniform like the rest but proportionately minute. His shouts and taunts were piped in soprano. Most of the players who came to bat first touched him on the head, a gesture he seemed to invite, so that Father realized it was a kind of good luck ritual. On the Giant side was no midget but a strange skinny man whose uniform was ill-fitting, who had weak eyes that did not align properly and who seemed to shadow the game in a lethargic pantomime of his own solitude, pitching imaginary balls more or less in tie to the real pitches. He looked like a dirt eater. He waved is arm in complete circles, like a windmill turns. Father began to watch the game less than he did this unfortunate creature, obviously a team pet, like the Boston midget. During dull moments of the game the crowd yelled to him and applauded his antics. Sure enough, he was listed in the program as mascot. His name was Charles Victor Faust. He was clearly a fool who, for imagining himself one of the players, was kept on the team roster for their amusement.

Father remembered the baseball at Harvard twenty years before, when the players addressed each other as Mister and played their game avidly, but as sportsmen, in sensible uniforms before audiences of collegians who rarely numbered more than a hundred. He was disturbed by his nostalgia. He’d always thought of himself as progressive. He believed in the perfectability of the republic. He thought, for instance, there was no reason the Negro could not with proper guidance carry every burden of human achievement. He did not believe in aristocracy except of the individual effort and vision. He felt his father’s loss of fortune had the advantage of saving him from the uncritical adoption of the prejudices of his class. But the air in this ball park open under the sky smelled like the back room of a saloon. Cigar smoke filled the stadium and, lit by the oblique rays of the afternoon sun, indicated the voluminous cavern of air in which he sat pressed upon as if by a foul universe, with the breathless wind of a ten-thousand-throated chorus in his ears shouting its praise and abuse.

Our in the center field, behind the unroofed or bleacher seats, a great display board indicated the number of outs and the inning and the hits and runs made. A man went along a scaffold and hung the appropriate marked shingles that summarized the action. Father sank into his chair. As the afternoon wore on he entertained the illusion that what he saw was not baseball but an elaborate representation of his own problems accounted, for his secret understanding, in the coded clarity of numbers that could be see from a distance.

He turned to his son. What is it you like about this game, he said. The boy did not remove his gaze from the diamond. The same thing happens over and over, he said. The pitcher throws the ball so as to fool the batter into thinking he can hit it. But sometimes the batter does hit it, the father said. Then the pitcher is the one who is fooled, the boy said. At this moment the Boston Hurler, Hub Perdue, threw a pitch which the New York batter, Red Jack Murray, swung at. The ball soared into the air in a high narrow arc and seemed then to stop in its trajectory. With a start Father realized it was coming directly at them. The boy jumped up and held out his hands and there was a cheer behind them as he stood with the leather-covered spheroid resting in his palms. For one instant everyone in the park looked in their direction. Then the fool with the weak eyes who imagined he was a player on the team came up to the fence in front of them and stared at the boy, his arms and hands twitching in his baggy flannel shirt. His hat was absurdly small for his abnormally large head. The boy held out the ball to him and gently, with a smile almost sane, he accepted it.

An interesting note is that this poor fellow, Charles Victor Faust, was actually called upon to pitch one inning in a game toward the end of this same season when the Giants had already wan the pennant and were in a carefree mood. For a moment his delusion that he was a big-leaguer fused with reality. Soon thereafter the players became bored with him and he was no longer regarded as a good luck charm by Manager McGraw. His uniform was confiscated and he was unceremoniously sent on his way. He was remanded to an insane asylum and some months later died there.

31

At the end of the ball game a great anxiety came over Father. He felt it had been stupid to leave his wife alone. But as they left the park borne by the streaming crowd he realized his son had taken his hand. He felt an uplift of his spirit. On the open trolley he put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. Arriving in New Rochelle they walked briskly from the train station and when they came in the door they gave a loud hello! and for the first time in days Father felt like himself. Mother appeared from the back of the house. Her hair was bound, she was groomed and smiling and neat. She embraced him and said Look, I have something to show you. Her face was radiant. She stepped aside and walking down the hall, holding the hand of the housemaid, was Sarah’s child in his nightshirt. He tottered and swung against her skirt, righted himself and looked at Father in triumph. Everyone laughed. We can’t hold him, Mother said. He wants to walk everywhere.

The boy knelt and held out his arms and the child shook his hand free of the housemaid and lurched toward him, picking up speed as he went, outracing his instability and falling happily against the boy’s chest.

A kind of resolute serenity carried them through the evening. In the quiet of Mother’s room toward midnight she and father discussed everything on their minds. The chances were that Coalhouse would continue for some time to elude capture. In that case they foresaw a community from which they would be increasingly alienated. Already a few of Mother’s acquaintances from her service league had reacted to the publicity given the family. She dreaded actions of spite and bitterness in which Sarah’s baby would be taken away under protection of a vengeful authority. Father could not deny that might happen. But they were in this moment so calmly in possession of themselves that there was no need for false assurances or for either of them to dissemble an optimism not truly felt. Father said he would not put it past the authorities to decide to use the child in some way to persuade Coalhouse to surrender. What we have to do, Father said, is get away. But how can we, Mother said. My father is invalid, school is not yet out, we have just taken on the responsibilities of a household staff. Each of these problems she enumerated with her right index finger tolling the fingers of the left hand. So she had been thinking the same thing and Father now perceived that she awaited his solutions in good faith. He told her to leave everything to him. His assumption of responsibility produced in her warm feelings of gratitude. Their conversation reminding them that they were after all friends of long standing, they went to bed and spent the night together. She let him make love to her, responding with such cooperative huggings and movements of her hips, and with so many caresses of encouragement to represent her best wishes to have him succeed in his efforts, that he felt for the first time in many months she appreciated she had a good man in her arms.

The answer to everything seemed to be Atlantic City. Father located a fine hotel there, the Breakers, which had available a suite of rooms facing the ocean for something less than would be expected, the season having barely begun. The South Jersey shore was easy to reach, a few hours by rail, not too near, but not too far to keep him from going back Sunday evening as his business dictated. The change of air would do everyone good. Grandfather’s doctor, who had submitted him to the latest orthopedic procedure fro broken hips, a metallic pin implanted like a internal splint, advised them that he should be on his crutches or in his chair as much as possible, bed rest comprising the greatest danger for one of his age. The boy would have to leave school a few weeks early but was so adept at his studies that this was not considered a serious disadvantage. The house would not be closed with the covering up of furniture and shutting off of rooms this required, but maintained with the staff for those periods in which Father would have to be in New Rochelle. The housekeeper would stay with mother at the shore. She was a stolid, conscientious Negro woman who would provide, in addition, the obvious and erroneous explanation for the presence of a brown child in their party.

Thus armed with a plan of action the family prepared for their departure. They maintained a good cheer that became almost hysterical as the situation grew in its ugliness. The new Police Chief, a retired inspector from the New York City Department of Homicide, proposed lines of investigation that were ominous. His first day in the job he told reporters that the explosive used on Municipal Station No. 2 was very sophisticated, a combination of gun cotton and fulminate of mercury that could only have been concocted by someone who knew his stuff, which Coalhouse Walker, a piano player, did not. He asked where the Negro got the money for the car he used or for the assistance of a gang of colored men all armed and all presumably motivated by hard cash. He has to pay his cohorts. He has expenses. Where does he get his money? Where does he stay between his mad raids on this gentle city? I know a half-dozen Reds I would love to have in detention here. I bet I would get some of my answers.

These remarks, which were widely disseminated, had in their suggestion of a conspiracy of radicals the worst possible effect on an already agitated townspeople. Militia patrolled the streets. There were several instances of abuse of Negroes who were seen out of their neighborhoods. There was rash of false alarms from fireboxes all over the city, each bringing out engines with police guards and a convoy of reporters in cars. Reporters were everywhere, and along with the troopers and the highly visible police in their wagons, produced in the community a painfully swollen sense of itself. The churches on Sunday morning had never known such crowds. The hospital emergency room reported a higher than usual number of household accident victims. People were burning themselves, cutting themselves, tripping on rugs and falling down flights of stairs. Several men were brought in with gun wounds inflicted in the cleaning and handling of old weapons.

Meanwhile the press seemed to be ahead of the authorities in dealing with the specifics of Coalhouse’s letters. Probably for the pictures it would make they agitated for several editions to raise the Model T from Firehouse Pond. This was finally done. A crane was move to the site and the automobile was brought up like a monstrous artifact, mud dripping from its tires, water and slime pouring out of its hood. It was swung over to the bank and deposited on the ground for everyone to see.

But now the authorities were embarrassed. The Ford stood as tangible proof of the black man’s grievance. Waterlogged and wrecked, it offended the sensibilities of anyone who respected machines and valued what they could do. After its picture was published people began to come and see it in such numbers that the police had to cordon off the area. Feeling that they had compromised themselves the Mayor and the Board of Aldermen issued a new series of condemnations of the colored madman and said that to negotiate with him in any way at all, to face him with less than an implacable demand that he surrender himself, would be to invite every renegade and radical and black man in the country to flout the law and spit upon the American flag.

Even if there was at this point a public demand for a strategy of negotiation, which there was not — not even the press suggested it — no one could had any idea of how to get in touch with the killer. Coalhouse had not announced how much time he granted them till the next attack. Indeed, there was an opinion delivered by an alienist hired by the New York World that the second of the letters, signed Coalhouse Walker, President, Provisional American Government, was much advanced beyond the first in its signals of mental deterioration, and that to deal with someone in the throes of a progressive delusionary madness as if he were open to reason would be a tragic mistake.

However, it was left to the plain citizenry of New Rochelle to come up with the most practical idea for dealing with the problem. From every neighborhood and every class the cry arose for Willie Conklin to leave town. Some irate citizens even communicated with Conklin himself. He brought into police headquarters several unsigned letters delivered to his mailbox, all suggesting that if he did not pack up and leave New Rochelle they, the writers, would do Coalhouse Walker’s job for him. Like all of Conklin’s moves, sharing his correspondence with the authorities was a mistake. I did not generate their sympathy, as he had hoped, but simply made up their minds to sponsor the idea. From the beginning Conklin had been unable to understand how anyone who was white could feel for him less that the most profound admiration. The more unpopular he became the more piteous his bewilderment. The miserable fellow understood nothing and saw the public outcry for his exile not in its larger strategy, as a means of defusing the situation, nor even in the small, as a means perhaps of saving his own life. He felt martyred by what he called the nigger lovers, even though these now seemed to constitute virtually the entire population of the city. He drank himself into a state of torpor and became dumbly complaisant as his wife and associated made arrangements for their departure.

Thus, with no one completely in command of the situation, with municipal authorities, police, state militia and citizenry all nervous and unsure in their continuing vulnerability to the black guerrilla, two things were caused to happen more or less by public consensus that were roughly analogous to a recognition of his demands: the Model T Ford had been raised, possibly foretelling some kind of negotiation, and he could read, if he was in range of the New Rochelle papers, both of which gave the largest headlines in their history to the intelligence, that the Conklin family had gone into hiding in New York City. No concessions had been made and the streets bristled with military and paramilitary deployments. But the situation was altered. Let him now burn down the entire metropolis of New York, one editorial said. Or accept the principle that any man who takes the law into his own hands places himself against a civilized and resolute people and defames the very justice he seeks to enforce.

In contrast to all of this the family’s departure was private and unreported. Father contracted with the Railway Express to transport their baggage — a matching pair of wicker trunks he had bought for the occasion, each with several drawers and compartments and a commodious closet for hanging clothes, a brass-studded footlocker and several suitcases and hatboxes — and they rode out of New Rochelle on a train that came through at the crack of dawn. Later that morning in New York they made connections with an Atlantic City train in Pennsylvania Station. This was the station designed by the firm of Stanford White and Charles McKim. Its stone colonnade façades, modeled on the Roman baths at Caracalla, spanned 31st to 33rd Streets, and 7th to 8th Avenue. Porters helped with Grandfather’s wheelchair. Mother was wearing a white ensemble. The laundress held Sarah’s child. The station on the inside was so vast that although it was filled with people their voices were no more than a murmur. The boy gazed at the roof, an exposition of corrugated green glass vaults and arches supported by steel ribs and needlelike steel columns. The light fell through this roof like a soft crystal dust. Descending to the concourse of trains he looked right and left and saw as far as he could see in either direction the encouched locomotives waiting in an impatience of steam and shouts and tolling bells to be released on their journeys.

32

And what of Younger Brother? His absence from home since his passionate defense of Coalhouse had caused no undue concern. They were used to his sullen temper. He appeared intermittently at the flag and fireworks plant. He drew his salary. He was not on hand for their departure and so Mother sealed a note and left it on the table in the front hall. The note was never claimed.

Some days after the attack on the firehouse Younger Brother had gone back to the Harlem funeral parlor from which Sarah had been buried. He was met at the door by the proprietor. I should very much like to speak with Mr. Coalhouse Walker, Younger Brother said. I shall wait every evening under the arcade of the Manhattan Casino until he is satisfied that it is safe to receive me. The mortician listened impassively and gave no sign that he knew what Younger Brother was talking about. Nevertheless, every evening thereafter the young man stood at the Casino enduring the stares of the black patrons and timing the intervals between trains of the Eighth Avenue El that periodically rumbled past the building. The weather was warm and through he ornate glass doors of the theatre, which were opened sometimes after the evening concert began, he could hear strains of the syncopated music of Jim Europe and the applause of the audience. Of course Coalhouse had quit his orchestra job and moved out of his rooms weeks before his attack on the firehouse. To the police who tried to trace him it was as if he had never existed.

On the fourth night of Younger Brother’s vigil a well-dressed colored youth approached him and asked him for a dime. Hiding his astonishment that someone so well turned out should beg for a coin, he dug in his pocket and produced it. The fellow smiled and said he seemed to have more change than that, could he manage another quarter? Younger Brother looked in his eyes and saw there the intelligent appraisal of someone empowered to make a decision.

The next night he looked for the colored fellow but did not see him. Instead he became aware of someone else standing under the arcade after the audience had gone inside. He too was a young man in a suit and tie with a derby upon his head. He suddenly began to walk away and Younger Brother Impulsively followed him. He followed him along streets of shabby row houses, across intersections paved with brick, down alleys and around corners. He was aware of going down several streets more than once. Finally on a quiet side street he followed him down under the front steps of a brownstone to a basement door. The door was open. He stepped inside, and went through a short hall to another door and found himself facing Coalhouse, who was seated at a table with his arms crossed. The room was otherwise bare of furniture. Standing about Coalhouse, like a guard, were several Negro youths, all dressed as he was in his characteristically neat and well-groomed manner, with well-pressed suit, clean collar, tie and stickpin. Younger Brother recognized both the one he had followed and the one who had asked for a dime the night before. The door was closed behind him. What is it you want? Coalhouse said. Younger Brother had prepared himself for this question. He had composed an impassioned statement about justice, civilization and the right of every human being to a dignified life. He remembered none of it. I can make bombs, he said. I know how to blow things up.

Thus did Younger Brother commence his career as an outlaw and revolutionary. The family was for a while spared knowledge of this. Only one thing was to link him circumstantially to the black man and that was the disappearance from Father’s factory storeroom of several kegs of gunpowder and packages of dry chemicals of various kinds. The pilferage was duly reported to the police and duly forgotten by them. They were busy working on the Coalhouse case. Over a period of several days Younger Brother transported the materials to the basement apartment in Harlem. He then went to work and concocted three powerful package bombs. He shaved his blond moustache and he saved his head. He blackened his face and hands with burnt cork, outlined exaggerated lips, put on a derby and rolled his eyes. Having in this way suggested his good faith to Coalhouse’s other young followers by appealing to their sense of irony, he went out with them and threw the bombs into Municipal Firehouse No. 2, thereby proving himself to everyone including himself.

Our knowledge of this clandestine history comes to us by Younger Brother’s own hand. He kept a diary from the day of his arrival in Harlem to the day of his death in Mexico a little more than a year later. Coalhouse Walker had militarized his mourning. His grief for Sarah and the life they might have had was hardened into a ceremony of vengeance in the manner of the ancient warrior. It was Younger Brother’s impression that Coalhouse’s eyes with their peculiar gaze of unswervable intention appeared now to be looking beyond what they saw to the grave. His command of the young men’s loyalty was absolute, probably because he had not asked for it. None of them was a mercenary. There were five besides Younger Brother, the oldest in his twenties, the youngest not yet eighteen. Their respect for Coalhouse bordered on reverence. They lived together there in the basement of the brownstone pooling their wages as stock clerks and delivery boys. Young Brother added several comparatively munificent pay envelopes from the flag and fireworks plant before he abandoned New Rochelle altogether. The bookkeeping of the communal treasury was scrupulous. Every penny was accounted for. They mimicked Coalhouse’s dress and so the suit and carefully brushed black derby was a kind of uniform. They came and went from their rooms like soldiers on patrol.

At night they sat for hours and discussed their situation and what it could leas to. They studied the reactions of the press to what they had done.

Coalhouse Walker was never harsh or autocratic. He treated his followers with courtesy and only asked if they thought something ought to be done. He dealt with them out of his constant sorrow. His controlled rage affected them like the force of a magnet. He wanted no music in the basement. No instrument of any kind. They embraced every discipline. They had brought in several cots and laid out a barracks. They shared kitchen chores and housecleaning chores. They believed they were going to die in a spectacular manner. This belief produced in them a dramatic, exalted self-awareness. Younger Brother was totally integrated in their community. He was one of them. He awoke every day into a state of solemn joy.

On both of Coalhouse’s attacks he used automobiles the younger men stole for him in Manhattan. The autos were returned without damage to their garages and if the phenomenon of their disappearance and return was reported to the New York Police it was never connected by them to the events in Westchester. After the bombing of the Municipal Fire Station, when Coalhouse’s picture was published on every font page in the country, he sat down with sheet over his shoulder and permitted one of the young men to shave his head and his neat moustache. The change in him was striking. His shaven head seemed massive. Younger Brother understood that whatever its practical justification this was no less than a ritualistic grooming for the final battle. A day or two later one of the band brought in the daily papers with photographs of the Model T raised from the pond. This tangible proof of the force of Coalhouse’s will made them all feel holy. By the time they received news of Willie Conklin’s flight and sat down to discuss the proper response, they were so transformed as to speak of themselves collectively as Coalhouse. Coalhouse gone to that coal and ice yard, one of them said, Willie be a dead man now. We missed our chance. Naw, Brother, another said, he better to us alive. He keeping Coalhouse in the folks’ minds. He a plague. Now we going do something so terrible bad in this town, no one ever mess with a colored man for fear he belong to Coalhouse.

33

Ah, what a summer it was! Each morning Mother opened the white-curtained glass doors of her room and stood looking at the sun as it rose above the sea. Gulls skimmed the breakers and strutted on the beach. The rising sun erased the shadows from the sand as if the particled earth itself shifted and flattened, and by the time she heard Father astir in the adjoining room the sky was beneficently blue and the beach was white and the first sea bathers had appeared down at the surf to test the water with their toes.

They breakfasted in the hotel at tables covered with starched white cloths. The service was heavy hotel silver. They dined on half grapefruit and shirred eggs and hot breads, broiled fish, ham slices, sausage, a variety of preserves dispensed to oneself from tiny spoons, coffee and tea. And all the while the breezes from the ocean lifted the bottoms of the window curtains and shivered their salt thrill along the high fluted ceiling. The boy was always eager to be up and out. After the first few days they allowed him to excuse himself and watched from their table as he appeared moments later running down the wide steps of the porch with his shoes held in his hand. They were on nodding acquaintances with several of the guests. This would yield to speech eventually and then the mild curiosity aroused by this one’s looks on that one’s dress would be satisfied. They were in no rush. They felt they looked grand and prosperous. Mother brought beautiful summer ensembles from the boardwalk shops. She wore white ad yellow and in the informality of afternoon abandoned herself to no hat and only carried a sun parasol. He face was bathed in soft golden light.

They would swim in midafternoon, when the air became still and the heat oppressive. Mother’s bathing costume was modest but she required several days to feel comfortable in it. It was black, of course, with skirt and pantaloons that came below her knees and low-cut swim shoes. But her calves were exposed and her neck, almost to the bodice. She insisted that they separate themselves by several hundred yards from the nearest bathers. They encamped under a hotel umbrella with its name imprinted in orange upon its escalloped fringe. The Negro woman sat upon a straw chair some yards away. The boy and the brown child studied the tiny crabs that buried themselves with a bubbly trail in the wet sand. Father wore a horizontal striped blue and white sleeveless one-piece bathing suit that made cylinders of his thighs. Mother found it distasteful to see the outlines of his maleness in that costume when he emerged from the water. Father liked to swim out. He lay on his back beyond the breakers spouting water like a whale. He came in staggering through the waves, laughing, his hair flattened on his head, his beard dripping and his costume clinging to him immodestly, and she felt momentary twinges of dislike, so fleeting she didn’t even recognize what they were. After sea bathing everyone retired for a rest. She would remove her costume with relief, having wet it only for a few moments in the foamy surf, and sponge the salt from her skin. She was so fair that the shore was dangerous for her. Yet cooled by her ablutions, powdered and loosely gowned, she could feel the sun stored in her, spreading in her blood, lighting it as the noon it did the sea, with millions of diamond flashes of light. After-the-swim was soon established by Father as the time for amour. He would make his lusty heedless love every day if she allowed it. She silently resented the intrusion, not as in the old days but with some awareness of her own, some sort of expectation on the skin that was only pounded from her. She thought about Father a good deal. The events since his return from the Artic, his response to them, had broken her faith in him. The argument he had had with her brother still resounded in her mind. Yet at moments, for the whole days at a time, she loved him as before — with a sense of the appropriateness of their marriage, its fixed and unalterable character, as something heavenly. Always she had intuited a different future for them, as if the life they lead was a kind of preparation, when the manufacturer of flags and fireworks and his wife would lift themselves from their respectable existence and discover a life of genius. She didn’t know of what it would consist, she never had. But now she no longer waited for it. During his absence when she had made certain decisions regarding the business, all its mysterious potency was dissipated and she saw it for the dreary unimaginative thing it was. No longer expecting to be beautiful and touched with grace till the end of her days, she was coming to the realization that whereas once, in his courtship, Father might have embodied the infinite possibilities of loving, he had aged and gone dull, made stupid, perhaps, by his travels and his work, so that more and more he only demonstrated his limits, that he had reached then, and that he would never moved beyond them.

Yet she was happy to be in Atlantic City. Here Sarah’s child was protected. For the first time since Sarah’s death she could think of her without weeping. She enjoyed being viewed in public, as in the dining room at the hotel or on the veranda in the evening, or strolling on the boardwalk down to the pavilions and piers and shops. Sometimes they hired a chair in which she and Father sat aside and were slowly pushed along by a porter. They made lazy examination of the occupants of chairs going in the opposite direction, or glanced discreetly at the other riders they happened to pass. Father tipped his straw. The chairs were wicker, with fringed canvas tops that reminded her of the surreys of her childhood. The two side wheels were large, as on a safety bicycle; the small wheel in front swiveled and sometimes squeaked. He son loved these chairs. They could be hired too without a man, and he loved that best of all, for then he pushed the chair with his mother and father seated in it and he could direct it as he would, at whatever speed, without their feeling the need of instructing him. The great hotels stood behind the boardwalk, one next to the other, their awnings flapping in the sea wind, their immaculately painted porches lined with rocking chairs and white wicker settees. Nautical flags flew from the cupolas and at night they were lighted by rows of incandescent bulbs strung along their roof lines.

One night the family stopped at a pavilion where a brass band of Negroes stoutly played a rag, she didn’t know which one, that she remembered ringing from her piano at home under the fine hands of Mr. Coalhouse Walker. She had for days lived not in forgetfulness of the tragedy but in relief from it, as if in this resort city by the sea painful thought were blown off by the prevailing breezes as soon as they formed. Now she was almost overcome by the music which was associated in her mind also with Younger Brother. And immediately her love for her brother, a wave of passionate admiration, broke over her. She felt she had neglected him. An image of his lean moody impetuous being flashed in her mind, somewhat reproachful, somewhat disgusted. It was the way he had looked at her over the dining table at home as Father cleaned his pistol. She felt a slight vertigo, and looking into the lights of the pavilion where the indomitable musicians sat in red and blue uniforms with their shiny trumpets and cornets, tubas and saxophones, she thought she saw under each trim military cap the solemn face of Coalhouse.

After that evening Mother’s joy in the seashore was more tenuous. She had to concentrate on each day as it came. She attempted by sheer resolve to make it serene. She as affectionate to her son, her husband, her invalid father; she was affectionate to her Negro woman and most of all to the still-unchristened and beautiful son of Sarah, who was thriving here and seemed to be growing visibly. She began to consider the attentions that were being paid her by various of the hotel guests. They hovered on the edges of her consciousness, waiting for some consideration from her. For simple occupation she was now prepared to bestow this. There were several impressive Europeans at the hotel. One was a German military attaché to his embassy who wore a monocle and always saluted her with discreet gallantry. He was tall and wore that cropped hair they affected and came to dinner in his formal uniform of white, with black bow tie. He made a great show of ordering wines and then rejecting them. There were no women in his party but three or four men, somewhat coarser-looking, whose rank was apparently inferior to his. Father said he was a Captain von Papen and that he was an engineer. They saw him every day walking the beach and unrolling charts and pointing to sea and speaking to his aides. Usually there was at the time a small craft slowly traversing the horizon. It is some kind of engineering survey, Father said lying on the beach sand with his face to the sun. I can’t imagine why the South Jersey coast should interest Germans. Farther was oblivious to the man’s speculative notice of his wife. Mother was amused by this. She knew from the first careless glance she returned to the officer that he presented to her only the most lascivious intentions focused, as it were, in the imperiousness of his monocled gaze. She decided to ignore him.

There was an elderly French couple with whom she learned to exchange pleasantries; she laughed to recall her schoolgirl French and they very generously complimented her accent. They never appeared in the sun except cocooned in endless swaths of linen and gauze topped with Panama hats. For good measure they carried parasols. The man who was shorter than his wife and quite heavy, had liver spots on his face. He wore thick glasses. He had enormous pendent ear lobes. He carried a butterfly net and jar with a cork stopper and she a picnic hamper so heavy that she could not walked upright with it. Each morning she struggled after him over the dunes and they disappeared in the distant haze where there were no hotels, no boardwalk, only the gulls and sandpipers and the dune grasses, where sat the trembling wings for which he lusted. He was a retired history professor from Lyons.

Mother tried to interest Grandfather in the French couple on the basis of their academic background. The old man would have none of it. He was totally engrossed in his condition and too irritable to engage in civilized discourse. He defeated all the diversions she thought up for him — except one, a daily ride in a boardwalk chair in which he could sit and be wheeled without being thought infirm. But he carried a cane across his lap and whenever the pedestrian traffic did not move fast enough for him he lifted the cane and prodded women and men alike, who would turn and stare, outraged, as he sailed past them.

There were other guest, of course, who where not Europeans: a gigantic stockbroker from New York with a huge wife and three immense children, who spoke not a word when they dined; several family groups from Philadelphia, who could be placed quickly by the nasalities of their speech. But Mother found that the persons who interested her were invariably foreigners. They were not a substantial number but seemed to beam more life than her countrymen. The most fascinating of all was a small, limber man who wore jodhpurs and a white silk shirt open at the neck and a flat white linen cap with a button. He was a flamboyant, excited person whose eyes darted here and there, like a child’s, afraid of what they might miss. He carried on a chain around his neck a rectangular glass framed in metal which he often held up to his face as if to compose for a mental photograph what it was that had captured his attention. One cloudy morning on the hotel porch it turned out to be Mother. Caught in the act he came over and in a thick foreign accent made profuse apologies. He was, he said, the Baron Ashkenazy. He was in the moving-picture business and the glass rectangle was a tool of the trade which he could not forbear using even when on vacation. He laughed sheepishly and Mother was charmed. He had shining black hair and his hands were delicate and small. She saw him next on the beach leaping about some distance away, entertaining a child at the edge of the sea, picking up things, running this way and that, and holding up his peculiar rectangular glass. With the sun behind him he was no more than a silhouette. But she immediately recognized his energetic figure, even at that distance, and she smiled.

The Baron Ashkenazy was the first guest to join Mother and Father at their table. He arrived with a beautiful little girl whom he introduced as his daughter. She was astonishingly lovely, about the same age as the boy. Mother had immediate hopes that they would become friends. Of course they sat there and said nothing and didn’t look at one another. But she was a remarkable creature, with the darkest eyes and thick hair like her father’s and a Mediterranean complexion. She wore a fine white lace dress with a satin bodice shaped by the smallest suggestion of a bosom. Father could not take his eyes off the girl. Through dinner she said nothing, nor did she smile. But the explanation was soon forthcoming, after the appetizer, in fact, when the Baron in a lowered voice, his hand going out to touch his daughter’s hand, explained that her mother had died some years before although he did not say of what. He had never remarried. A moment later he was again his ebullient self. He talked incessantly in his European accent, with malapropisms he himself recognized and laughed over. Life excited him. He dwelled on his own sensations and liked to talk about them: the taste of the wine or the way the candle flames multiplied in the crystal chandeliers. His simple delight in everything was infectious and soon Mother and Father wore constant smiles on their faces. They had forgotten themselves. It was enormously pleasurable to see the world as the Baron did, alive to every moment. He held his rectangular glass aloft, framing Mother and Father, the two children, the waiter walking toward the table and, at the far end of the dining room, a pianist and a fiddler who played for the patrons on a small platform decorated with potted palms. In the movie films, he said, we only look at what is there already. Life shines on the shadow screen, as from the darkness of one’s mind. It is a big business. People want to know what is happening to them. For a few pennies they sit and see their selves in movement, running, racing in motorcars, fighting and, forgive me, embracing one another. This is most important today, in this country, where everybody is so new. There is such a need to understand. The Baron lifted his wineglass. He looked at the wine and tasted. You have of course seen His First Mistake. No? A Daughter’s Innocence. No? He laughed. Don’t embarrass! They are my first two picture plays. One-reelers. I made them for under five hundred dollars and each has brought ten thousand dollars in receipt. Yes, he said laughing, it is true1 Father had coughed and turned red at the mention of specific sums. Misunderstanding, the Baron insisted on explaining to him how this was a good profit but not unusual. The film business was at this time booming and anyone could make money. Now, the Baron said, I have become myself a company in partnership with the Pathé exchange for a story of fifteen reels long! And each reel will be shown, one a week for fifteen weeks, and the customers will come back every week to see what next happens. With a mischievous look he took a shiny coin from his pocket and flipped it into the air. The Baron caught the coin and flattened his hand on the table with a loud smack. The silver jumped. The water shook in the glasses. He lifted his hand, revealing one of the popular new five-cent pieces, a buffalo nickel. Father couldn’t understand why he was doing this. How I named myself, the Baron said with delight. I am the Buffalo Nickel Photoplay, Incorporated!

As the Baron went on talking, Mother looked across the table at the two children sitting next to each other. The idea of examining through a frame what was ordinarily seen by the eye intrigued her. She composed them by her attention, just as if she had been holding the preposterous frame. Her son’s hair was combed back from his forehead for the occasion and he wore a large white collar with his little-man suit and flowing tie. His blue eyes, flecked with yellow and green, looked up at her. All the beautiful child next to him needed in her white lace and satin dress was a veil. Her eyes were raised now and she returned Mother’s gaze with a directness that verged on defiance. Mother saw them as the bride and groom in a characteristic grade-school exercise of the era, the Tom Thumb wedding.

34

And so the two families met. The sun spread over the sea each morning and the children sought one another down the wide corridors of the hotel. When they rushed outside the sea air struck their lungs and their feet were chilled by the beach sand. Awnings and pennants snapped in the wind.

Every morning Tateh worked on the scenario of his fifteen-chapter photoplay, dictating his ideas to the hotel stenographer and reading the typewritten pages of the previous day’s work. When he was alone he reflected on his audacity. Sometimes he suffered periods of trembling in which he sat alone in his room smoking his cigarettes without a holder, slumped and bent over in defeat like the old Tateh. But his new existence thrilled him. His whole personality had turned outward and he had become a voluble and energetic man full of the future. He felt he deserved his happiness. He’d constructed it without help. He had produced dozens of movie books for the Franklin Novelty Company. Then he had designed a magic lantern apparatus on which paper strips printed with his silhouettes turned on a wheel. A wooden shuttle passed back and forth in front of an incandescent lamp like a loom. The apparatus was accepted for mail-order distribution by Sears, Roebuck and Company, and the owners of Franklin Novelty offered to make Tateh a partner. In the meantime he had discovered that others were doing animated drawings like his except for projection on celluloid film. From this he became interested in film itself. The images did not have to be drawn. He sold his interests and went into the movie business. Anyone with enough self-assurance could get backing. The film exchanges in New York were desperate for footage. Film companies were forming overnight, re-forming, merging, going to court, attempting to monopolize distribution, taking out patents on technical processes and in all ways exemplifying the anarchic flash and fireworks of a new industry.

There were commonly in America at this time titled European immigrants, mostly impoverished, who had come here years before hoping to marry their titles to the daughters of the nouveaux riches. So he invented a barony for himself. It got him around in a Christian world. Instead of having to erase his thick Yiddish accent he need only roll it off his tongue with a flourish. He dyed his hair and beard to their original black. He was a new man. He pointed a camera. His child was dressed as beautifully as a princess. He wanted to drive from her memory every tenement stench and filthy immigrant street. He would buy her light and sun and clean wind of the ocean for the rest of her life. She played on the beach with a well-bred comely boy. She lay between soft white sheets in a room that looked into an endless sky.

The two friends every morning went to the deserted stretches of beach where the dunes and grasses blocked the hotel from their sight. They dug tunnels and channels for the sea water, walls and bastions and stepped dwellings. They made cities and rivers and canals. The sun rose over their bent backs as they scooped the wet sand. At noon they cooled themselves in the surf and raced back to the hotel. In the afternoons they played in sight of the beach umbrellas, collecting sticks of wood and shells, walking slowly with the little brown boy splashing after them in the ebb tide. Later the adults retired to the hotel and left them alone. Slowly, with the first blue shadows reappearing in the sand, they followed the tide line beyond the dunes and lay down for their most serious pleasure, a burial game. First, with his arm, he made a hollow for her body in the damp sand. She lay in this on her back. He positioned himself at her feet and slowly covered her with sand, her feet, her legs, her belly and small breasts and shoulders and arms. He used wet sand and shaped it in exaggerated projections of her form. Her feet were magnified. Her knees grew round, her thighs were dunes and on her chest he constructed large nippled bosoms. As he worked, her dark eyes never left his face. He lifted her head gently and raised a pillow of sand under it. He lowered her head. From her forehead he built lappets of sand that spread out to the shoulders.

No sooner was the elaborated sculpture completed than she began to destroy it, moving her fingers gently, wiggling her toes. The encrustation slowly crumbled. She raised one knee and then the other, then burst forth altogether and ran down to the water to wash off the crust of sand on her back and the back of her legs. He followed. They bathed in the sea. They held hands and squatted and left the surf break over them. They went back to the beach and now it was his turn to be buried. She built the same elaborate casing for his body. She enlarged the feet, the legs. The small prominence in his bathing suit she built up with cuppings of sand. She built out his narrow chest and widened his shoulders and gave him the lappeted headdress he had designed for her. When the work was done he slowly broke it to pieces, cracking it carefully, as a shell, and breaking out then for the run to the water.

In the evenings, sometimes, their parents took them to the amusements on the boardwalk. They would hear the band concert or see the road show. They saw Around the World in 80 Days. Clouds floated through the theatre. They saw Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But the real excitement was in the attractions the adults would not dream of patronizing: the freak shows, the penny arcades, the tableaux vivants. They were too shrewd to express their desires. Then after a few visits downtown, when the trip seemed not so formidable, they persuaded the adults they were capable of making it by themselves. And fortified with fifty cents they ran along the boardwalk in the dusk. They stood looking into the lights of the mechanical fortuneteller’s glass case. They put in a penny. The turbaned figure, its mouth clacking open on shining teeth, turned its head right and left and raised its hand in a jerking way; a ticket was extruded and the entire apparatus lurched to a halt in mid-smile. I am the great He-She, the ticket said. They put money in the claw machine, directing it by means of wheels to drop the steel claw where it would clutch the treasure they wanted and release it into the chute. In this way they received a necklace of shells, a small mirror of polished metal, a tiny cat of glass. They viewed the freaks. They walked quietly among the exhibition stalls of the Bearded Lady, the Siamese Twins, the Wild Man from Borneo, the Cardiff Giant, the Alligator Man, the Six-Hundred-Pound Woman. It was this behemoth who stirred on her stool and quivered as the children came before her. She was seized with an irrepressible emotion and rose on her tiny feet and came toward them mountainously. The great gardens of her flesh closed and opened, going out and in, out and in, as she spread her arms in oscillations of sentiment. They moved on. Behind each fence the watchful normal eyes of the creatures tracked their odyssey. From the Giant they bought a ring from his finger which went around their wrists; from the Siamese twins, a signed photo. They ran out.

Their desire for each other’s company was unflagging. This was noted with amusement by the adults. They were inseparable until bedtime but uncomplaining when it was announced. They ran off to their separate rooms with no a glance backward. Their sleep was absolute. They sought each other in the morning. He did not think of her as beautiful. She did not think of him as comely. They were extremely sensitive to each other, silhouetted in a diffuse excitement, like electricity or a nimbus of light, but their touching was casual and matter-of-fact. What bound them to each other was a fulfilled recognition which they lived and thought within so that their apprehension of each other could not be so distinct and separated as to include admiration for the other’s fairness. Yet they were beautiful, he in his stately blond thoughtfulness, she a smaller, darker, more lithe being, with flash in her dark eyes and an almost military bearing. When they ran their hair lay back from their broad foreheads. Her feet were small, her brown hands were small. She left imprints in the sand of a street runner, a climber of dark stairs; her track was a flight from the terrors of alleys and the terrible crash of ashcans. She had relieved herself in wooden outhouses behind the tenements. The tails of rodents had curled about her ankles. She knew how to sew with a machine and had observed dogs mating, whores taking on customers in hallways, drunks peeing through the wooden spokes of pushcart wheels. He had never gone without a meal. He had never been cold at night. He ran with his mind. He ran toward something. He was unencumbered by fear and did not know there were beings in the world less curious about it than he. He saw through things and noted the colors people produced and was never surprised by a coincidence. A blue and green planet rolled through his eyes.

One day, as they played, the sun grew dim and a wind began to blow in from the sea. They felt the coldness on their back. They stood up and saw flights of heavy black clouds coming over ocean. They started back to the hotel. The rain began. Raindrops pelted craters in the sand. Rain left streaks on their salted shoulders. It poured into their hair. They took shelter under the boardwalk a half-mile from the hotel. They crouched in the cold sand and listen to the rain spatter the boardwalk and watched it collect in droplets between the planks. Debris was under the boardwalk. Broken glass and staring putrefied fish heads, torn parts of crabs, rusted nails, broken boards, driftwood, starfish as hard as stone, oiled spots of sand, bits of rags with dried blood. They stared out at the sea from their cave. A storm had risen and the sky glowed with a green light. Lightening broke the sky as if it were a cracking shell. The storm punished the ocean, flattened it, cowed it. There were no waves now but aimless swells that did not break or roll into the beach. The weird light increased in intensity; the sky was yellow. The thunder broke as if the surf were in the sky and the wind now blew the rain along the beach, whipped it into the sand, rolled it down the boardwalk. Coming through the wind and water and golden light were two figures walking with their heads down, their arms shielding their eyes. And they would turn and with their backs to the wind look up and down the beach and cup their hands to their mouths. But they could not be heard. The children watched them without moving. They were Mother and Tateh. On they came. They stumbled through the wet sand. They turned and the wind blew their clothes against their backs. They turned and the wind blew their clothes against their chests and legs. They cut away from the water toward the boardwalk. Tateh’s black hair, flattened over his forehead, shone in the bright water. Mother’s hair had come undone and lay in wet strands about her face and shoulders. They called. They called. They ran and walked and looked for the children. They were distraught. The children ran into the rain. When Mother saw them she dropped to her knees. In a moment the four were together, hugging and admonishing and laughing; Mother laughed and cried at the same time with the rain pouring down her face. Where were you, she said, where were you. Didn’t you hear us call? Tateh had lifted his daughter to hold her in his arms. Gottzudanken, said the Baron. Gottzudanken. They walked back along the beach in this rain and light, happy, huddled al together, soaking wet. Tateh could not help but notice how Mother’s white dress and underclothes lay against her so that ellipses of flesh pressed through. She looked so young with her hair down on her shoulders and matted around her head. Her skirts stuck to her limbs and every few moments she would bend to pluck them away from her body and the wind would blow them back against her. When they had discovered that the children were missing they had run down to the beach and she removed her shoes at the bottom of the boardwalk stairs and held his arm for support. She walked with her arms around the children. He recognized in her wet form the ample woman in the Winslow Homer painting who is being rescued from the sea by towline. Who would not risk his life for such a woman? But she was pointing to the horizon: a lead of blue sky had opened over the ocean. Suddenly Tateh ran ahead of them all and did a somersault. He did a cartwheel. He stood on his hands in the sand and walked upside down. The children laughed.

Father slept through the incident. He was unable to sleep at night lately and had begun to nap in the afternoons. He was restless. He had read in the newspaper of the growing movement in the Congress for a national tax on income. This was his first presentiment of the end of summer. He took to making regular telephone calls to his manager at the plant in New Rochelle. Things were quiet at home. Nothing more had been heard from the black killer. Business was holding up as he would know from the copies of the orders sent out to him every day. None of this put him at ease. He was becoming bored by the beach and no longer cared to bathe in the ocean. In the evenings before bed he went to the game room and practiced billiards. How could they resume their lives if they remained in Atlantic City? Some morning he awoke and felt that time and events had gone on and left him more vulnerable than ever. He found their new friend, the Baron, a momentary distraction. Mother thought he was endearing but he felt no special sympathy from him or for him. He wanted to pack up and leave but was constrained by Mother’s security in the place. Here she believed it might be possible to wait for the Coalhouse tragedy to conclude itself and hope it could be outlasted. He knew this was an illusion. To the consternation of the hôtelier she had taken to having the brown child at her table in the dining room. Father gazed at the little boy with grim propriety. At breakfast the morning after the rainstorm he opened the newspaper and found on the front page a picture of the father. Coalhouse’s gang had broken into one of the city’s most celebrated depositories of art, Pierpont Morgan’s library on 36th Street. They had barricaded themselves inside and commanded the authorities to negotiate with them or risk having the Morgan treasures destroyed. They had thrown a grenade into the street to demonstrate the capacity of their armaments. Father crushed the paper in his hands. An hour later he was paged to the telephone for a call from the District Attorney’s office in Manhattan. That afternoon, borne by Mother’s anxious good wishes, he climbed aboard the train for New York.

35

Even to someone who had followed the case from its beginning, Coalhouse’s strategy of vengeance must have seemed the final proof of his insanity. By what other standard could the craven and miserable Willie Conklin, a bigot so ordinary as to be like all men, become Pierpont Morgan, the most important individual of his time? With eight people dead by Coalhouse’s hand, horses destroyed and buildings demolished, with a suburban town still reverberating in its terror, his arrogance knew no bounds. Or is injustice, once suffered, a mirror universe, with laws of logic and principles of reason the opposite of civilization’s.

We know from Brother’s journal that the actual plan had been to make Morgan a prisoner in his own home. The band’s thinking had been that Conklin hiding in an Irish neighborhood was as undetectable as Coalhouse was in Harlem, and that therefore he had to be flushed out. What was needed was a hostage. Two nights of discussion had turned up the candidacy of Pierpont Morgan. More than any mayor or governor he represented in Coalhouse’s mind the power of the white world. For years he had been portrayed in cartoons and caricatures, with his cigar and his top hat, as the incarnation of power. The great fiefdom of New York could be made to pay an army of fire chiefs and a fleet of Model T’s for the ransom of its Morgan.

But Coalhouse had entrusted the reconnaissance of the Morgan home to two of the youths who knew little about the city below 100th Street and less about the ways of the wealthy. When they reconnoitered the Morgan establishments, the one a brownstone town house, the other a palace of white marble stone, they chose the white marble for the residence. Younger Brother would have seen the error. But he was the ordnance man; he lay in the back of a covered van loaded with explosives and supplies. He could hear the attack under way. The wan was backed up to the Library gates and he was given the signal to unload. When he lifted the canvas flaps and looked out he screamed that it was the wrong building. But at that point there was no turning back. A guard lay dead, police whistles were heard. The sound of gunfire had alerted the entire neighborhood. The conspirators unloaded the van, bolted the great brass doors and took up their assigned positions. Then Coalhouse made a quick inspection of the premises. Nothing is lost, he assured them. We wanted the man and so we have him since we have his property.

As it happened Pierpont Morgan was not even in New York. He was two days to sea on the S.S. Carmania bound for Rome. He was making a slow pilgrimage to Egypt. Coalhouse had not known this either. So the entire action, misdirected and poorly timed, seemed to enjoy some special grace.

Almost immediately aides of the J. P. Morgan Company were informed of the situation. They cabled the Carmania to receive the old man’s instructions. For some reason, possibly a breakdown of telegraphy equipment aboard the ship, they could not learn if their message had been received. With Morgan not available to tell them what to do the police did nothing but cordon off the block, from 36th to 37th Street, from Madison Avenue to Park Avenue. Traffic was diverted and mounted city policemen galloped back and forth to keep the crowds behind the lines. The sounds of the city, its traffic, its horns, its life, seemed walled out by the silence of the scene. The thousand that gathered were as quiet as people can be who are thoroughly engrossed. When night came, flood lamps run by portable generators were trained on the edifice. The rumbling of the generators were trained on the edifice. The rumbling of the generators was felt under the feet of the onlookers, like the growling of an earthquake. Police were everywhere, in their wagons, on foot, on their mounts, but they seemed to be as much spectators as the crowds they held back.

The grenade that was thrown, after the shouted warning by Younger Brother, had ripped up the sidewalk and left an enormous crater in the street in front of the Library gates. At the bottom of the crater a broken water main bubbled like a spa. Windows had been blown out all up and down the block. There was a brownstone across the street, a private residence, that had been particularly hard-hit by the blast. Its owners had fled and had given the Police Department permission to establish its headquarters on the ground floor. The police discovered that they could run up and down the brownstone steps with impunity and move freely along that side of 36th Street if they did not attempt to step over the curb. The house filled with Police Department officials and other city authorities, and gradually, as the nature of the confrontation became clear, one authority after another ceded his responsibility to one higher. Until finally, with lieutenants and precinct captains and inspectors and the Police Commissioner, Rhinelander Waldo, all present, the control of the operation fell to District Attorney of New York, Charles S. Whitman. Whitman had gained considerable fame prosecuting a corrupt police lieutenant named Becker and securing for him the death sentence for ordering four thugs — Gyp the Blood, Dago Frank, Whitey Lewis and Lefty Louie — to murder a well-known gambler named Herman Rosenthal. This monumental case had made Whitman a natural candidate for governor of New York. There was even talk of his eventual nomination for the Presidency. He had been about to leave New York with his wife for a vacation in Newport at the forty-room summer cottage of Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish. He had recently been introduced to society by Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont. He valued these connections but could not resist dropping over to 36th Street when the news reached him. He thought it was his duty as President-to-be. He liked to be photographed at the scene of the action. Upon his arrival everyone immediately deferred to his judgment, including an enemy of his, the choleric Mayor William J. Gaynor. He thought this was a significant acknowledgment of political realities. He looked at his watch and decided he had a few minutes to take care of this matter of the mad coon.

Whitman called for the plans of the Library from the architectural firm of Charles McKim and Stanford White. After a study of these he authorized a reconnaissance by a single athletic patrolman who was to gain access to the Library roof and look in the domed skylight over the central hall and the East Room to determine how many niggers were in there. A patrolman was found and dispatched through the garden that separated the Library from the Morgan residence. Whitman and the other officials waited in the improvised headquarters. No sooner had the officer entered the garden that the sky flashed and there was a loud report followed by an agonized scream. Whitman went pale. They’ve got the goddamn place mined, he said. An officer came in. From what anyone could tell, the patrolman in the garden was dead, which was his only bit of luck because nobody could have gone in to get him out of there. The police officials were grim. They looked at Whitman. He now knew that the numerical strength of Coalhouse’s band was not crucial intelligence. But he called the press around and announced that they numbered a dozen and perhaps as many as twenty men.

36

In the hours following, District Attorney Whitman conferred with several advisers. The colonel in command of the New York militia in Manhattan urged a full-scale military action. This so alarmed one of Mr. Morgan’s curators, a tall nervous man with a pince-nez who held his hands clasped at his chest as if he were a diva at the Metropolitan, that he began to tremble. Do you know the value of Mr. Morgan’s acquisitions! We had four Shakespeare folios! We have a Gutenberg Bible on vellum! There are seven hundred incunabula and five-page letter of George Washington’s! The colonel waved his finger in the air. If we don’t take care of that son of a bitch, if we don’t do in these and cut off his balls, you’ll have every nigger in the country at your throat! Then where will you be with your Bibles? Whitman paced back and forth. A city engineer told him that if they could repair the broken main they might be able to tunnel in through the Library foundations. How long would that take, Whitman asked. Two days, the engineer said. Someone else thought of poison gas. That might get him, Whitman agreed. Of course every one else on the East Side would die, too. He was beginning to feel fretful. The Library was built of fitted marble blocks. You couldn’t get a knife blade between the stones. The place was wired for dynamite and a pair of watchful coon eyes looked out of every window.

Whitman now had the good sense to ask for ideas from the police officers in the room. An old sergeant with many years on the street, a veteran of Hell’s Kitchen and the Tenderloin said The crucial thing, sir, is to get this Coalhouse Walker engaged in conversation. With an armed maniac, talking calms him down. You get him taking and keep him talking and then you have a wedge into the situation. Whitman, who was not without courage, took a megaphone and stepped into the street and shouted to Coalhouse that he wanted to speak with him. He waved his straw hat. If there’s a problem, he cried, we can solve it together. He repeated such sentiments for several minutes. Then for a moment the small window adjacent to the front entrance opened. A cylindrical object came flying into the street. Whitman flinched and the men in the house behind him dropped to the floor. To everyone’s astonishment there was no explosion. Whitman retreated to the brownstone and only after several minutes did someone using binoculars make the object out as a silver tankard with a lid. An officer ran into the street, picked up the tankard and sprinted back up the brownstone stairs. The object, now dented, was a medieval drinking stein of silver with a hunting scene in relief. The curator asked to see it and advised that it was from the seventeenth century and had belonged to Frederick, the Elector of Saxony. I’m really please to hear that, Whitman said. The curator then raised the lid and found inside a piece of paper with a telephone number that he recognized as his own.

The District Attorney himself took the telephone. He sat on the edge of a table and held the speaker in his left hand and the receiver attached by a cord in his right. Hello, Mr. Walker, he said heartily, this is District Attorney Whitman. He was stunned by the calm businesslike tone of the black man. My demands are the same, said the voice on the phone. I want my car returned in just the condition it was when my way was blocked. You cannot bring back my Sarah, but I want for her life the life of Fire Chief Conklin. Coalhouse, Whitman said, you know that I as an officer of the court could never give over to you for sentencing outside the law a man who has not had due process. That puts me in an untenable position. What I can promise is to investigate the case and see what statutes apply, if any. But I can’t do anything for you until you’re out of there. Coalhouse Walker seemed not to have heard. I will give you twenty-four hours, he said, and then I will blow up this place and everything in it. And he rang off. Hello, Whitman said. Hello? He ordered the operator to get the number again. There was no answer.

Whitman next sent off a telegram to Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish in Newport. He hoped she read the newspapers. His eyes, which tended to bulge when he was excited, were now quite prominent. His face was florid. He removed his jacket and unbuttoned his vest. He asked one of the patrolmen to find him some whiskey. He knew that red Emma Goldman, the anarchist, was in New York. He ordered her arrested. He stared out the window of the brownstone. The day was overcast and unnaturally dark. The air was closed and a fine rain made the streets glisten. The lights of the city were on. The compact white Grecian palace across the street shone in the rain. It looked very peaceful. At this moment Whitman came to the realization that the deference shown by Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo and everyone else in the Police Department had tricked him into identifying himself with a politically dangerous situation. He had on one hand to guard the interests of Morgan, whose various Simon Pure reform committees of wealthy Republican Protestants had funded his investigations of corruption in the Democratic Catholic Police Department. He had on the other hand to preserve his own reputation as a tough D.A who dealt handily with the criminal classes. For that nothing would do but the speediest unhorsing of the colored man. A glass of whiskey was brought to him. Just this one, to calm my nerves, he said to himself.

In the meantime police knocked at the door of Emma Goldman on West 13th Street. Goldman was not surprised. She always kept packed and ready to go a small bag with a change of clothes and a book to read. Ever since the assassination of President McKinley she had been routinely accused of fomenting by word or deed most of the acts of violence or strikes or riots that occurred in America. There was a national obsession of law enforcement officials to connect her to every case just as a matter of principle whether they believed she was guilty or not. She put on her hat, picked up her bag and strode out of the door. She rode in the police wagon with a young patrolman. You won’t believe this, she said to him, but I look forward to a spell in jail. It is the one place where I can get some rest.

Goldman did not know of course that one of the Coalhouse band was the young man she had pitied as the bourgeois lover of an infamous whore. In front of the sergeant’s desk at police headquarter on Centre Street, she made a statement to reporter as she was booked for conspiracy. I am sorry for the firemen in Westchester. I wish they had not been killed. But the Negro was tormented into action, so I understand, by the cruel death of his fiancée, an innocent young woman. As an anarchist, I applaud his appropriation of the Morgan property. Mr. Morgan has done some appropriating of his own. At this the reporters shouted questions. Is he a follower of yours, Emma? Do you know him? Did you have anything to do with this? Goldman smiled and shook her head. The oppressor is wealth, my friends. Wealth is the oppressor. Coalhouse Walker did not need Red Emma to learn that. He needed only to suffer.

Within an hour extra editions of the newspapers were on the streets featuring the news of the arrest. Goldman was liberally quoted. Whitman wondered it had been wise to give her a forum. But he did derive one clear benefit from the move. The president of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Booker T. Washington, was in the city to do some fund-raising. He was delivering an address downtown at the great hall of Cooper Union on Astor Place and he departed from his prepared text to deplore Goldman’s remarks and condemn the actions of Coalhouse Walker. A reporter called Whitman to tell him of this. Immediately the District Attorney got in touch with the great educator, asking if he would come to the scene and use his moral authority to resolve the crisis. I will, Booker T. Washington replied. A police escort was sent downtown and Washington, apologizing to the hosts of the luncheon in his honor, left to ringing applause.

37

Booker T. Washington was at this time the most famous Negro in the country. Since the founding of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama he had become the leading exponent of vocational training for colored people. He was against all Negro agitation on questions of political and social equality. He had written a best-selling book about his life, a struggle up from slavery to self-realization, and about his ideas, which called for the Negro’s advancement with the help of his white neighbor. He counseled friendship between the races and spoke of the promise of the future. His views had been endorsed by four Presidents and most of the governors of Southern states. Andrew Carnegie had given him money for his school and Harvard had awarded him an honorary degree. He wore a black suit and homburg. He stood in the middle of 36th Street, a sturdy handsome man with all the pride of his achievement in the way he held himself, and he called out to Coalhouse to let him in the Library. He disdained the use of the megaphone. He was an orator and his voice was strong. There was nothing in his manner to indicate any other possibility than that the desperadoes would grant him his demand. I am coming in now, he called. And he stepped around the crater in the street and walked through the iron gates. He climbed the steps between the stone lionesses and stood in the shadow of the arched portico between the double Ionic columns and waited for the doors to open. There was now a silence and a stillness in the scene that allowed the horn of a cab many blocks away to be heard clearly. After some moments the door opened. Booker T. Washington disappeared inside. The doors closed. Across the street District Attorney Whitman wiped his brow and sank into a chair.

What Booker Washington found was the awesome gilded library of paintings and tiers of rare books, statuary and marbled floors, damask silk walls and priceless Florentine furniture, all wired for demolition. Fascia of dynamite were strapped to the marble pilasters of the entrance hall. Wires led from the East and West rooms along the floor to the rear of the entrance hall, where there was a small alcove. Here sat a man straddling a marble bench. On the bench was a box with a T-shaped plunger which he held with both hands. His back was to the brass doors and he was leaning forward so that if a bullet were to kill him instantly the weight of his falling body would depress the plunger. This fellow now turned to look over his shoulder at Washington and the great educator drew in his breath sharply as he saw it was not a Negro but a white in blackface, as if this were some minstrel show. Washington had entered in a stern and admonitory frame of mind but with the intention to be diplomatic. He disdained persuasion now. He looked in on the West Room and then walked across the hall to the doorway of the East Room. He had expected to find dozens of colored men but saw only three or four youths standing each side a window with a rifle in his hands. Coalhouse stood waiting upon him in a well-pressed hound’s-tooth suit and a tie and collar, although he carried a pistol in his belt. Washington looked him over. His handsome brow furrowed and his eyes flashed. Summoning all his declamatory powers he spoke as follows: for my entire life I have worked in patience and hope for a Christian brotherhood. I have had to persuade the white man that he need not fear us or murder us, because we wanted only to improve ourselves and peaceably join him in enjoyment of the fruits of American democracy. Every Negro in prison, every shiftless no-good gambling and fornicating colored man has been my enemy, and every incident of faulted Negro character has cost me a piece of my life. What will you misguided criminal recklessness cost me! What will it cost my students laboring to learn a trade by which they can earn their livelihood and still white criticism! A thousand honest industrious black men cannot undo the harm of one like you. And what is worse you are a trained musician, as I understand it, one who comes to this famous enterprise from the lyceum of music, where harmony is reverenced and the strains of the harps and the trumpets of heaven are the models for song. Monstrous man! Had you been ignorant of the tragic struggle of our people, I could have pitied you this adventure. But you are a musician! I look about me and smell the sweat of rage, the impecunious rebellion of wild unthinking youth. What have you taught them! What injustice done to you, what loss you’ve suffered, can justify the doom you have led them into, these reckless youths? And, may you be damned, you add to this unholy company a white who smears with color and adds mockery to your arsenal.

Every word of this speech could be heard by every member of the band. They were not so steeped in revolution that the sentiments of Booker T. Washington, of whom they had heard since they were children, could not awe them. It must have been crucial for them to know Coalhouse’s reply. Coalhouse spoke softly. It is a great honor for me to meet you, sir, he said. I have always stood in admiration for you. He looked at the marble floor. It is true I am a musician and a man of years. But I would hope this might suggest to you the solemn calculation of my mind. And that therefore, possibly, we might both be servants of out color who insist on the truth of our manhood and the respect it demands. Washington was so stunned by this suggestion that he began to lose consciousness. Coalhouse led him from the hall into the West Room and sat him down in one of the red plush chairs. Regaining his composure Washington mopped his brow with a handkerchief. He gazed at the marble mantel of the fireplace as tall as a man. He glanced upward at the polychrome carved ceiling that had originally come from the palace of Cardinal Gigli in Lucca. On the red silk walls were portraits of Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach the Elder and several adorations of the Magi. The educator closed his eyes and locked his hands in his lap. Oh Lord, he said, lead my people to the Promised Land. Take them from under the Pharaoh’s whip. Free the shackles from their minds and loosen the bonds of sin that tie them to Hell. Over the mantel was a contemporary portrait of Pierpont Morgan himself when he was in his prime. Washington appraised the fierce face. In the meantime Coalhouse Walker had sat down in the adjoining chair and together the two well-dressed black men were the picture of probity and serious self-contemplation. Come out with me now, Booker Washington said in a soft voice, and I will intercede for the sake of mercy that your trial shall be swift and your execution painless. Dismantle these engines of the devil, he said waving his hands at the dynamite packs strapped in the corners of the carved ceiling and against every wall. Take my hand and come with me. For the shake of your young son and all those children of our race whose way is hard, and whose journey is long.

Coalhouse sat lost in thought. Mr. Washington, he finally said, there is nothing I would like more that to conclude this business. He raised his eyes and the educator saw there the tears of his emotion. Let the Fire Chief restore my automobile and bring it to the front of this building. You will see me come out with my hands raised and no further harm will come to this place or any man from Coalhouse Walker.

This statement constituted Coalhouse’s first modification of his demands since the night of the Emerald Isle, but Washington did not understand this. He heard only the rejection of his plea. Without another word he rose and walked out. He went back across the street believing his intervention had accomplished nothing. Afterwards Coalhouse paced the rooms. His young men stayed at their posts and followed him with their eyes. One lay on the roof atop the domed skylight of the portico. He lay in the rain on guard and felt, though he could not see, the presence of thousands of quietly watchful New Yorkers. During the night he thought they made a sound, some barely detectable mourning sound, not more than an exhalation, not louder than the mist of fine rain.

38

After Booker T. Washington conferred with the District Attorney he spoke with reporters in the parlor of the temporary headquarters. Mr. Morgan’s library is a dynamite bomb ready to go off at any moment, he said. We are faced with a desperately brainsick man. I can only pray the Lord in His Wisdom will bring us safely out of this sad affair. Washington then made a number of phone calls to friends and colleagues in Harlem — church pastors and community leaders — and invited them to come downtown and demonstrate the opposition of responsible Negroes to the cause of Coalhouse Walker. This took the form of a vigil in the street. District Attorney Whitman granted his permission even though the report brought back from the Library was grim enough to cause him to order an evacuation of every house and apartment within two-block radius. Such was the state of things when Father arrived. He was escorted through the police lines and marched past the bareheaded silent black men standing in prayer. He looked for a moment at the Library and then went up the stairs of the brownstone. Inside he was left to himself. Nobody spoke with him or wanted anything from him. He turned around, facing this way and that, waiting for some word or notice from the authorities. None was forthcoming.

The house was filled with police in uniform and men of indeterminate responsibility. Everyone milled about. Father wandered back to the kitchen. Here were the reporters. They had eaten the food in the icebox. They sat with their feet on the table and stood leaning against the cupboards. They wore their hats. They used the sink for a spittoon. Father listened to the conversation and heard the details of Booker T. Washington’s interview with Coalhouse. He marveled at the fame of the man who had played piano in his parlor. But it sounded to him as if Coalhouse had modified his demands. Was this so? Nobody seemed to perceive it. Yet if the life of Willie Conklin the Fire Chief was either conceded or at least negotiable, he ought to inform someone. He looked for an official and came upon the District Attorney himself, whom he recognized from his pictures in the paper. Whitman was at the bay window in the parlor, a pair of binoculars in his hands. I beg your pardon, Father said, and introducing himself he told Whitman what he thought. The District Attorney regarded him with startled eyes. Father noted small broken veins in his face. Whitman turned back to the window and raised his binoculars and stared out like a sea admiral. Not knowing what else to do Father remained with him.

Whitman was waiting for the replay from Morgan. He kept looking at his watch. Then someone ran by in the street. There was a commotion in the hallway. A boy came into the parlor followed by the curators and several policemen. He had a wireless from the Carmania. The District Attorney tore at the envelope. He read the wire and shook his head in disbelief. Goddamnit, he muttered. Goddamnit to hell. Suddenly he was shouting at everyone in the room. Out! Get out! He herded everyone through the doors. But he held Father’s arm and kept him there. The doors closed. Whitman thrust the cable into Father’s hands. GIVE HIM HIS AUTOMOBILE AND HANG HIM, the text read.

Father looked up and found the District Attorney glaring at him. This is the one way I would never consider, Whitman said. I can’t give in to the coon. Even to hang him. I can’t afford it. It would finish me. Goddamnit, I took care of that son of a bitch Becker. The crime of the century. That’s what the papers called it. And now the D.A. giving in to a nigger? No, sir! It can’t be done!

Whitman paced the room. Father experienced an infusion of boldness. He was holding in his hands a private message from J. Pierpont Morgan. It enabled him to accept immediately and without question his investiture as confidant of the District Attorney of New York.

Father saw clearly that the situation was ready to be negotiated. Even across the world Morgan had understood this. Coalhouse seemed to have softened on one of his demands, that Conklin be turned over to him. It was Father’s opinion, furthermore, that since Sarah’s death Coalhouse Walker’s most fervent wish was to die. He informed the District Attorney of this. The whole matter might be resolved quickly, he said. The car has no real value. Besides, it’s Mr. Morgan’s idea. I’ll say, said Whitman. Only Pierpont Morgan could think of it. Who else would have the nerve. No, Father said, I mean it’s his idea. Of course I don’t anything about politics, but doesn’t that absolve you of the responsibility? Whitman stopped in his tracks and gazed at Father. Right this minute, he said, I am supposed to be in Newport with the Stuyvesant Fishes, he said.

And so it happened just after midnight that a team of dray horses was backed up to Coalhouse Walker’s ruined Model T sitting by Firehouse Pond in New Rochelle. The rain had gone and the starts were out. The horses were hitched to the bumper and they pulled the car up to the road. Then they began the long journey to the city, clip-clopping along, the driver standing up in the front seat holding the reins in one hand, grasping the steering wheel with the other. The tires were all flat, the car rocked as it went, and every revolution of the wheels grated on the ears.

Even as the Ford was advancing toward Manhattan, Whitman managed to get Coalhouse on the phone. He told him he wanted to talk about his demands. He proposed Father as the intermediary to carry the discussion back and forth. This was more private than the telephone. You can trust him and I can trust him, Whitman said of Father. After all, he’s your former employer. No, Father said in Whitman’s other ear. I was never his employer. Father now had grave misgivings. In too few minutes he found himself outside in the chill early morning, walking across the floodlit street around the crater and up the steps past the state lions. He reminded himself that he was a retired officer of the United Stated Army. He had explored the North Pole. The brass doors opened, not widely, and he stepped in. He heard his own footsteps ring on the polished marble floor. His eyes took a moment to adjust to the dim light. He looked for the black man and saw instead his brother-in-law undressed to the waist but with his face blackened and a holstered pistol under his arm. You! Father cried. Younger Brother pulled out the pistol and tapped the barrel against his temple in a kind of salute. Father’s knees buckled. He was helped to a chair. Coalhouse brought him a canteen with water.

The first agreement between the two sides was that the twenty-four-hour deadline be extended. The second agreement was that wooden planks should be laid over the hole in the street. Father went back and forth doing his job capably but in a state of peculiar numbness, like a sleepwalker. He did not look at his relative. He could feel queer pulses of bitter glee breaking over his back.

While these points were being settled Whitman was on the telephone using all the means at his disposal to find Willie Conklin. He had the police looking for him in every borough. Then he thought of calling Big Tim Sullivan, Fourth Ward leader and the grand old man of the Tammany machine. He roused him out of his sleep. Tim, he said, there’s a visitor in town, a Willie Conklin from up in Westchester County. I don’t know the feller, Big Tim said, but I’ll see what I can do. I’m sure you will, Whitman said. In less than an hour Conklin was brought up the stairs of the brownstone by the scruff of the neck. He was wet and disheveled and frightened. He had lost the lower buttons of his work shirt and his belly protruded over his belt. He was shoved in a chair in the hallway and told to shut up. A policeman stood guard over him. His teeth were chattering and his hands shook. He reached in his back pocket where he carried his pint in a paper bag. The cop grabbed his arm before he could withdraw it and swung a pair of handcuffs like a whip against his head.

By dawn the crowds, somewhat diminished during the night, filled up again four and five deep behind the barricades. The rusted-out Model T stood on 36th Street along the curb in front of the Library. At a designed moment, the door of the brownstone opened and out on the stoop came two policemen holding between them the forlorn figure of Willie Conklin. He was held there on exhibit. Then he was taken back in, and Whitman, having in good faith brought forth the two item of debate, the car and the Fire Chief, now gave his terms. He would urge his counterpart in Westchester to bring charges against Willie Conklin for malicious mischief, vandalism and illegal detainment of a citizen. In addition the Fire Chief would right there in the street in full sight of everyone help to restore the Model T. It would be a humiliation that he would live with for the rest of his life. And the car of course would be made over new. Whitman wanted in return the surrender of Coalhouse and his men. And then I guarantee that you will have your full privileges and rights under the law, he said.

When Father brought these terms to the Library the young men laughed and hooted. We got him, they called to each other. He givin in. We gonna get the whole pie. They had been buoyed by the sight of the car and the exhibit of Conklin. But Coalhouse himself was silent. He sat alone in the West Room. Father waited on him. Gradually Coalhouse’s somber reflection overcame the spirits of the young men. They became apprehensive. Finally Coalhouse said to Father I will surrender myself but not my boys. For them I want safe passage away from here and full and total amnesty. But stay here, please, until I have a chance to tell them.

Coalhouse rose from his chair and went out to talk to the young men in the hall. They gathered around the detonation box.. They were stunned. You don’t have to give him nothing, they said. We got Morgan’s balls! You don’t have to negotiate nothing. Give us Conklin and that car and let us out of here and you get the Library back! That’s the negotiation, man, that’s the kind of negotiation!

Coalhouse was calm. He spoke softly. None of you is known to the authorities by name, he said. You can disappear into the city and reclaim your life. So can you, came the answer. No, Coalhouse said. They would never let me out of here, you know that. And if they did they would spare no effort to hunt me down. And everyone with me would be hunted down. And you would all die. To what purpose? For what end?

We always talked before, one of them said. Now you doing this. You can’t man! We all Coalhouse! We can’t get out we’ll blow it up, another said. Younger Brother said What you are doing is betraying us. Either we all ought to go free or we all ought to die. You signed your letter President of the Provisional American Government. Coalhouse nodded. It seemed to be the rhetoric we needed for our morale, he said. But we meant it! Younger Brother cried. We meant it! There are enough people in the streets to found an army!

Certainly no theorist of revolution could have denied the truth that with an enemy as vast as an entire nation of the white race, the restoration of a Model T automobile was as good a place to start as any. Younger Brother was shouting now. You can’t change your demand! You can’t reduce the meaning of your demands! You can’t betray us for a car! I have not changed my demands, Coalhouse said. Is the goddamn Ford your justice? said Younger Brother. Is your execution your justice? Coalhouse looked at him. As for my execution, he said, my death was determined the moment Sarah died. As for my Godforsaken Ford it is to be made over as it was the day I drove past the firehouse. It is not I who reduce my demands but they who magnified them as long as they resisted them. I will trade your precious lives for Willie Conklin’s and thank God for him.

A few minutes later Father walked back across the street. To get justice, Coalhouse Walker was ready to have it done to him. But the people following him were not. They were another generation. They were not human. Father shuddered. They were monstrous! Their cause had recomposed their minds. They would kick at the world’s supports. Start an army! They were nothing more than filthy revolutionaries.

Coalhouse’s famous stubbornness had now become a fortress against the arguments of his men. It was he who stood between Mr. Morgan and disaster. Father confided none of this to the District Attorney. He felt Whitman would have trouble enough with the official terms. This turned out to be the case. Whitman threw back several shots of whiskey. Stubble covered his face. His protuberant eyes were red and his collar was wilted. He paced. He stood at the window. He made a fist of his right hand and several times smack the palm of his left. He looked again at the wire from Morgan. Father cleared his throat. It does not say you have to hang the confederates, Father said, What? said Whitman What? All right, all right. He looked for a chair to sit down in. How many of them are there, did you say. Five, Father said, unconsciously excluding Younger Brother. Whitman sighed. Father said I think this is the best you can do. Sure, said the District Attorney. And what do I tell the newspapers. Why, Father said, you can tell them, one, Coalhouse Walker is captured, and two, Mr. Morgan’s treasured are saved, and three, the city is safe, and four, the entire facilities of your office and the police will be used to track down the underlings until every last one of them is behind bars where he belongs. Whitman thought about that. We’ll tail them, he muttered. Right back to the woodpile. Well, Father said, that may not be possible. They’re taking a hostage and they won’t let him go until they know they’re safe. Who is the hostage, Whitman said. I am, Father said. I see, Whitman said. And what makes the coon think he can hold the building alone? Well, Father said, he will be out of the sightlines of skylight or windows with his hands on the dynamite box. That would do it, I should think.

Perhaps Father at this moment nourished the hope that after his release he could lead the authorities back to the criminals’ lair. He thought without Coalhouse they would lack the spirit and intelligence to continue successfully to defy the law. They were anarchist murderers and arsonists but he was not personally afraid. He knew their stamp and was a better man than any of them. From Younger Brother he was so totally alienated that he felt at this moment only joy in the thought of being responsible for his capture.

Whitman was staring into space. All right, he said. All right. Maybe if we wait till dark nobody will see what we’re doing. For Mr. Morgan’s sake, and his goddamn Gutenberg Bible and his five-page goddamn letter from George Washington.

And so the negotiations were completed.

39

Several calls to the Ford motorcar people had brought forth by eight in the morning a truck carrying all the interchangeable parts for a Model T. The Pantasote Company delivered a top. Aides of Morgan had agreed that he would be billed for everything. As the crowd watched from the corner, Fire Chief Conklin, under the direction of two mechanics, piece by piece dismantled the Ford and made a new Ford from the chassis up. A block and tackle was used to hoist the engine. Sweating, grunting, complaining and at times crying, Conklin did the work. New tires replaced old, new fenders, new radiator, magneto, new doors, running boards, windshield, headlamps and upholstered seats. By five in the afternoon, with the sun still blazing in the sky over New York, a shining black Model T Ford with a custom pantosote roof stood at the curb.

All day the followers of Coalhouse had come to him with appeals to change his mind. Their arguments became wilder and wilder. They said they were a nation. He was patient with them. It became apparent they wouldn’t know what to do without him. They recognized his decision as suicide. They were forlorn at their abandonment. By the late afternoon the Library was in gloom. The young men watched listlessly from the windows as the automobile in which Coalhouse had done his courting reappeared at the curb.

Coalhouse himself never once went to the window to look at it. He sat at Pierpont Morgan’s desk in the West Room and composed his will.

Younger Brother had withdrawn in silent bitterness. Father, who was now closeted in the Library as an official hostage, wanted to talk with him. He was thinking what he would have to tell Mother. Only when it grew dark and the hour of the departure was approaching could he bring himself to confront him. It might be the last privacy they would have.

The young man was in the lavatory behind the entrance hall. He was wiping the burnt cork from his face. He glanced at Father in the mirror. Father said I myself require nothing from you. But don’t you feel your sister deserves an explanation? If she thinks about me, Younger Brother said, she will have her explanation. I could not transmit it through you. You are a complacent man with no thought of history. You pay your employees poorly and are insensitive to their needs. I see, Father said. The fact that you think of yourself as a gentleman in all your dealings, Younger Brother said, is the simple self-delusion of all those who oppress humanity. You have lived under my roof and worked in my business, Father said. Your generosity, Younger Brother said, was what you felt you could afford. Besides, he added, I have repaid that debt, as you will discover. Younger Brother washed his face with soap and hot water. He used a vigorous motion, his head over the basin. He dried himself with a hand towel embroidered with the initials JPM. He threw the towel on the floor, put on his shirt, dug in his pockets for cuff links, buttons, placed his collar over the shirt, tied his tie, raised his suspenders. You have traveled everywhere and learned nothing, he said. You think it’s a crime to come into this building belonging to another man and to threaten his property. In fact this is the nest of a vulture. The den of a jackal. He put on his coat, ran his palms over his shaved head, placed his derby on his head and glanced at himself in the mirror. Goodbye, he said. You won’t see me again. You may tell my sister that she will always be in my thoughts. For a moment he gazed at the floor. He had to clear his throat. You may tell her I have always loved her and admired her.

The band met in the entrance hall. They were dressed now in their Coalhouse uniforms of suit and tie and derby. Coalhouse told them they should pulled their brims down and turn up the collars of their jackets to avoid identification. Their means of safe conduct was the Model T. He explained how to set the spark and throttle and how to turn the crank. You will ring the telephone when you’re free, he said. Father said Am I not to go? Here is the hostage, Coalhouse said, indicating Younger Brother. One white face looks just like another. They all laughed. Coalhouse embraced each of them before the great brass doors. He embraced Younger Brother with the same fervor he accorded to the others. He looked at his pocket watch. At this moment the floodlights in the street went out. He took his place in the alcove at the back of the hall, straddling the white marble bench with his hands on the dynamite detonation box. There is slack in the plunger to a point halfway down, Younger Brother called to him. All right, Coalhouse said. Go on now. One of the young men unbolted the doors and with no further ceremony they filed out. Then the doors closed. Bolt them, please, Coalhouse commanded. Father did so. He put his ear to the door. All he heard was his own heavy and frightened breathing. Then after what seemed a torturously long interval, in which almost all his hope for his own life flowed from him, he heard the sibilant cough and sputter of a Model T engine. A few moments later the gears were engaged and he heard the car drive off. There was a thump thump as it went over the planks laid over the crater. He ran to the back of the hall. They’re gone, he said to Coalhouse Walker Jr. The black man was staring at his hands poised on the plunger of the box. Father sat down on the floor with his back to the marble wall. He raised his knees and rested is head. They sat like that, neither of them moving. After a while Coalhouse asked Father to tell him about his son. He wanted to know about his walking, whether his appetite was good, whether he’d said any words yet, and every detail he could think of.