Fire in beulah, p.19
Fire in Beulah, page 19
“You cannot stop a mob’s fury in the midst of it,” Mr. Dunjee continued. “They rage with impunity. They seize battering rams and break down jail walls. Once they’ve made up their minds to lynch a Negro, there is no human force that can stop them. Their own people cannot stop them—and, yes, there are decent whitemen who try, men of conscience who will stand against them, but I tell you, brothers and sisters, decent whitefolks are not a force powerful enough to stop the bloodlust of a raging mob. One year ago, just last September, the very mayor of Omaha, Nebraska, died at the hands of a lynch mob when he tried to hold them back from taking a Negro prisoner—their own elected mayor! There have been others who died trying to stop them, and we thank God for the ones who will stand against them, but they can’t do no good.
“That was a throng of two thousand men, women, and children in Tulsa last Saturday night, and it is told that the Tulsa police directed traffic at the site! That’s the kind of crowd gathered in Tulsa to watch the life wrung from the neck of one of their own! If they will gather by the thousands to lynch one of their own race, if they will bring their wives and children to watch the festivities and scramble like hounds for snippets of the rope that choked the life from a whiteman, fight like snarling curs for little shreds of that whiteman’s clothes, tell me, ladies and gentlemen, what can we hope for? What can the black man expect in this Oklahoma? Governor Robertson has called for full investigations on both these lynchings, he’s calling aloud to bring the mobsters to justice, but I want to ask you, can we get redress from the law in Oklahoma? Who do you think is going to convene a grand jury to investigate the lynching of Everett Candler? Why, none other than Oklahoma County Attorney Cargill—the very man who had that boy brought from Arcadia to his own jurisdiction, where the sheriff was in sympathy with his views—in sympathy, folks! Yes, I will say it! And for what reason? For the crime of being a black man in the vicinity of the killing of a white man! For such ‘crime’ that young man was lynched!”
The low, angry hum began to swell out toward the windows.
“Now, I can make a prediction, ladies and gentlemen, I can tell you just as well as a gypsy what’s going to come of that investigation: the conclusion is going to be brought forth and declared to the world that Everett Candler met his death ‘at the hands of parties unknown’!”
The rumbling gave rise to angry voices, saying, “Yes, Lord. That’s how they do!”
“Always it is declared following another outrage that none of the participants was recognized; always it is the same old story: ‘death at the hands of parties unknown.’ I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, these parties are known!”
“They known! That’s right, brother! Amen!”
“And we may begin with the sheriff of Oklahoma County, for who else is responsible for the safekeeping of a prisoner in the county jail? Now, one of our purposes here this morning is to form a second delegation, one made up of our most learned and articulate men, gleaned from the Negro communities all over Oklahoma. We are going to go directly to the governor’s office tomorrow morning—”
Brother Dunjee stopped then, as did all the low, rumbling words of anger rising throughout the congregation, for the little whitewoman had stood up from her place at the end of the pew, and she opened her mouth and held it open as an ugly, featherless baby bird does.
“People,” she managed at last. Her voice was faint, screaky. “People, I … I …”
We were silent. We waited. She was perhaps sixty, though she may have been younger, a frail, pale, gray-headed lady with eyeglasses and bony arms protruding from silk sleeves. Her dress was stylish in an old-fashioned manner, and she had a cameo pin at her throat. No trace of the embarrassed smile remained. Her face was twisted with pain. She looked as though she might faint. At last she found her voice again. “I just wanted to say to you, that … I feel … terribly … sorry. I’m just so … so sorry.…” Her thin voice trailed away. She looked baffled, helpless, and it came to me that she had practiced over and over what she would say to us, and then, at the moment’s unfolding, she’d gone blind, gone mute and mindless. At last she turned and made her way back along the aisle toward the door. An elderly Negro in a chauffeur’s uniform slipped out of the pew behind her and followed. The people parted, watched in silence as the whitewoman walked out the open sanctuary door, the old man limping to catch up with her. After some time we heard an automobile motor start up in the distance.
Brother Dunjee did not speak again. None spoke, and yet there was not the silence as before. There was sound among us, coming from us, and yet it was not whispers and murmurs, not the hum of anger or the low, bitter rumbling. It was a kind of rustling, almost like the sough of wind. I’m not certain I can say what it was, but I do know this: the swell of our wrath was halted in its rise by that whitelady standing up to speak. Not her few useless words. The most well-spoken words of regret from a whiteperson could not have assuaged our fury that morning, and it was not, by any means, a fact that our anger had bled away. Quite the opposite. There were many of us whose ire was made worse by her presence, by her very presumption to speak. There were some who hated that whitewoman and her garbled “I’m sorry” with a horrible hatred, and I could feel that around me, too.
But there were others whose anger was tempered by embarrassment for the lady’s clotted tongue; some, perhaps, who grudgingly admired her courage to come among us. There were yet others, I believe, who felt compassion for her pathetic cry, or thought her sorrow genuine, if thin, innocent of the hard sources of true grief. No doubt there were even a few who were thrilled at the woman’s coming, as there will always be some among us who suck up to whitefolks and curry their favor and believe that a whiteperson’s good attention is better than God’s. As for Brother Dunjee himself, I believe he was simply thrown off stride. The climax, the crescendo of his speechmaking had been ripped from him, and he had to regather himself.
We were thrown out of unity. Yes. That is what it was. We had been, as a crowd sometimes is, of one mind, one heart rising, as we listened to Mr. Dunjee’s furious, articulate, truthful words—and that whitelady threw us wide from each other. She scattered us from one mind to many hundreds, made us pause to ponder or feel or think, and what had been building was in this way dispersed.
I was not angry then—I cannot say to this day what was within me, other than my curiosity at that strange soughing sound—but now, when I think back to all that happened afterward, I get angry. Because she may indeed have felt sorry, but regret is not repentance, and that is what we have not seen in Beulah, repentance that owns its part—that is, like the Word tells us, at once sorrow and self-knowledge and a changing of the mind. I saw no mind changed that morning. And yet, if that whitewoman, whom I had never seen before and have never seen since, had not come among us with her few choked words that came from sentiment and meant nothing, stopped nothing, but altered everything—if she had not appeared, the thing that was building among us would have come to its full power.
Many times I have asked myself what would have happened if she had not come, if we had remained, as we were that morning, of one mind. But we’d been scattered, and the oppression of the day’s heat began to press upon us, for it was almost noon now, and still no one spoke. Mr. Dunjee stood mopping his brow with his handkerchief as that strange sound, that disjointed murmur, like the fitful whispers of a dry wind in tall grass, passed among us, and then, after a long time, the big woman in the faded housedress stood up in the choirbox and began to sing “There Is a Balm in Gilead.”
In a few moments Reverend Shew joined his voice with hers as he got slowly to his feet and came front; he stood just a little behind Roscoe Dunjee, and I saw him reach out and place a hand on the editor’s shoulder. In another few moments Brother Dunjee also began to sing, and then we all began, and as the other hymn had swelled from the outside of that little church inward, now the sound arose from the front of the sanctuary and undulated slowly backward and out the windows and beyond, and it was way long out on the prairie, I’m certain, before it stopped its swell.
For two nights Althea prowled the rooms of her house in darkness, her terror growing more horrible with each tick of the mantel clock in the dining room, each hour chimed by the grandfather clock in the front hall. She napped fitfully Sunday afternoon on the fainting couch in the parlor, only to waken at dusk with the fright unabated, tindered now with a vague guilt and the sight of her face in the hall mirror: puffy, creased, with queer paisley lines swirled on her cheek from the imprint of the silk brocade. Monday dawn found her sitting sideways on her still-made bed as gray light swelled through the lace curtains to reveal the image in the mahogany mirror. The puffiness was gone now; the woman in the mirror looked simply haggard, aged, hawklike and bony. She was nearly mad with fear.
Abruptly she stood in the sullen light and went to the dresser. She sat down to brush her hair, savagely twisted it into a tight knot, arose and crossed the room, flung open the door to the wardrobe. Within moments she was dressed, had locked the door behind her, and was moving swiftly and with great purpose down the front walk. Carefully she trained her eyes front, that she might not by accident catch a glimpse of the ravaged rose garden in the side yard. She’d reached Fifteenth Street before she realized that she didn’t know how to get to Little Africa. The recognition gave her only an instant’s pause. It was north, wasn’t it? That’s how they called it: Little Africa, niggertown, North Tulsa. That was all she had to know. She stepped off the curb, crossed Fifteenth Street, walking north.
The obvious solution, of course, would have been to go right to Bill Sutphen’s office, order up a new girl, and tell him to make certain she arrived by early dark. But Althea didn’t want another girl; she wanted Graceful. It was her sudden recognition of that fact which had driven her up from the bed, out into the silent, dawn streets. She could not have, under direct questioning, said why. She might have answered, Why, the girl knows how to cook bacon just how I like it, or some such pointless answer. The truth was hidden from Althea’s conscious mind: that she felt her soul bound to the girl who bore her own birth name—the one who’d seen her terror and rage in the dark foyer, who had witnessed and turned away in silence, and so had become watcher and knower and silent, secret judge. Althea understood only that the urgency she felt to have Graceful back in the house on South Carson was as compelling as any of her many little driven hungers, and as easily remedied. Never did it enter her mind that the girl might refuse.
She walked so fast that in less than half an hour she’d reached the edge of downtown. The city of Tulsa seemed to rise up and close behind her as she entered. Though there’d been milk trucks and delivery wagons stirring in the residential area when she’d left it, not a vehicle, not a pedestrian broke the silence of downtown. The sun had risen in the east, but the many-storied buildings held her in shadow, the brick walls on either side echoed her footfalls. Once, she glimpsed herself in a department store window, and the image, so ghostlike and faded, made her breath catch, her already tense jaw clench harder. She rushed forward, cursing silently her kid leather shoes with their too-high heels, the impractical, narrow-at-the-knee hobble skirt that limited her stride.
When she emerged at last from downtown, stood panting and sweating on the street, looking north toward the community on the far side of the tracks, she didn’t realize she was looking at Little Africa. Never had she formed an image of the place clear enough for her mind to give shape to it, any more than she’d given thought to a last name for Graceful, a family, a house. The sunlit buildings gleamed like a distant city across a river. She’d heard stories of sporting houses and pool halls, choc joints and gambling holes in North Tulsa, of course, though she believed those places would be closed this time of morning and she could walk quickly through the shacks and shanties till she found the girl. The business district coming awake before her was too well appointed and prosperous for Althea to imagine that such a place could be Tulsa’s niggertown, and, staring at it, she thought only, with an inward groan and another silent curse for her shoes, of how much farther she still had to go. With gritted teeth, and limping slightly from the blisters coming on both heels, she walked toward the tracks.
She stopped just south of the crossing. Across the iron rails dozens of brick and stone and wooden buildings lined the streets, with printed signs overhead that declared them to be pharmacies and rooming houses, cafés and grocery stores, but the groceryman in his white apron sweeping the walk in front of the green awning was a colored man. The woman setting out a sandwich board in front of the café was colored. The men driving the delivery wagons were, and a man in a straw boater and bow tie driving an elegant roadster, and the bunches of young people, male and female, teasing one another and joking loudly at the trolley stop. The several women walking fast, holding tight to their children’s hands, were colored, and the children were colored, and the ones in motorcars and strolling along the sidewalk and opening doors to barbershops and drugstores and newsstands and moving everywhere as far as her eyes could see.
Althea felt faint. Her disoriented sense returned in full measure: this world was unbehaved, unreal, without proper order. She would have turned and fled, had she been able to move. But Althea’s feet were burning fire, not only the blistered heels now but the very soles burning, as if the brick street beneath scorched up through the leather; she could smell the scent of her own perspiration, could feel it trickling between her breasts, down her sides beneath the charmeuse middy she was wearing. A girl in a maid’s uniform came toward her, paused almost imperceptibly on the far side of the tracks, and then crossed them, stepping carefully over the wooden planks raised in the roadway to meet the rails. The girl moved decorously to the other side of the street, her head tucked properly, so that she might not stare at the strange whitewoman standing on the street in an ostrich-feathered hat and silk dress clothes, sweating and glaring.
Althea followed the girl with her eyes, took a step as if to go after her, and winced as pain shot from her blistered feet. She stood a moment longer, tears coursing down her face from the shock, though she made no sound, and her features did not scrunch with the look of crying. She seemed as unaware of the tears as she would have been of a stray eyelash on her cheek or a flick of lipstick on a tooth: she needed a mirror, or another human, to tell her that her face was marked by them. She stared north across the Frisco tracks once again.
Several of the Negroes moving along the avenue had become aware of her. She felt their scrutiny pass over her, taking in everything about her and registering nothing in that invisible manner they had, and the heat of resentment rushed over her, followed instantly by a deep, instinctive swelling of pride. Althea in that moment claimed inheritance to her mother’s defiance of pain. She squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, began to walk toward the railroad tracks again. She did not limp. She didn’t wince. She glided over the tracks effortlessly, unaware, even as she traversed it, that she was passing an invisible, inviolable boundary. A woman as self-absorbed as Althea held freedoms others might never win. By the time she reached the intersection she could hear the trolley bell clanging as the car crested the hill, coming south, carrying bootblacks and porters to their jobs on the southside, and motorcars were spewing fumes in all directions, and the bustle and movement had risen to full morning peak.
She walked on, and she would not look in the faces of the Negro people as she passed them; nor did they appear to look at her, but went on about their business of opening shop for the day or walking to work or standing on a street corner awaiting the jitney, but she felt eyes following her, could feel their stares burning into her back, and she moved forward briskly, with great purpose, as if she knew exactly where she was going, what she intended to do. The more swiftly she walked, the more a sense of panic began to push her, drive her, and though it was she who was moving, to her sleep-deprived and fearsick brain it seemed that the hundreds of dark faces were sweeping past her, rolling over her like a black sea tumbling and cresting in waves, and she rushed north, deep into the heart of Greenwood, because she felt herself drowning and knew only to keep moving, keep moving, before the sea swept her under.
“Ma’am?” a voice called out behind her.
Althea stopped, caught by something soft in the voice; she turned to find a black woman in a flowered dress, her hair pressed and fingerwaved tight to her skull, standing, broom in hand, beside an open door, above which ran a brightly lettered marquee that said BRYANT’S DRUG STORE. “You want a bandage or anything, ma’am,” the woman said, “we got everything right here.” Her glance dropped, and Althea’s eyes followed, and she saw for the first time the spots of blood that had begun to seep through the bone-colored leather of her shoes. “You welcome to come in and rest you feets awhile,” the woman said.
Althea stared blankly at her feet as if they were foreign objects entirely unrelated to her, then she turned vaguely and continued up the street, slower now, the sense of aimless panic still upon her, but subdued. She saw a glass-fronted brick building ahead, neat and square, the gold lettering on the window declaring in bold, crisp letters that the building was occupied by THE TULSA STAR, Fearless Exponent of Right and Justice, Oklahoma’s Largest Circulation Weekly, and though she’d never heard of the newspaper, she thought with a great shudder of relief that she was safe: she’d passed through the raging sea to the far and sacred shore. Nearly running now, she rushed toward the glass door, pulled it open, stepped in.
She was met by a sweetish, clean metallic odor, and complete silence.
