“I’m sorry,” Siegling repeated.
Dawson saw he was not sorry; the word was simply a way to end the conversation. He could feel Siegling withdrawing, hoisting sail, setting off, out of reach, smug and unassailable, with his financial heft, his banal musical aperçus.
“Siegling.” Dawson leaned forward, over the desk. “You can’t do this.”
“I can’t lend you the money,” Siegling said.
Dawson knew this was not true; Siegling was drawing a line between them. But he was prepared for this. He’d been stalled before; they’d tried to stop him from buying the Courier. He’d found a way. There was always a way.
“I’ll apply for a personal loan,” said Dawson. “I’ll put up my News and Courier shares as collateral.”
Siegling spread his palms open, the cigar held between thumb and forefinger. “We’ll be glad to oblige.”
When Dawson left the bank he felt energetic and powerful. He had the money. He knew he was right. It wouldn’t take long, he just had to hold out.
24.
Is it probable that the white people of the South, for any reason or motive, under any circumstances that are likely to arise, will ever regard the negroes among whom they live with much less aversion,—or with more favor, if that term be preferred,—than they now entertain towards them?
The answer must be an emphatic, unqualified negative … The prejudice of race has always been exhibited, and is still exhibited, by every white man, woman and child in the South. It is rooted in the minds of fifteen millions of people. Argument does not touch it …
There is not a white person in the old Slave States—not one—who advocates a change in any respect in the social relations of the two races; not one entertains the thought of change.
—CARLYLE MCKINLEY, AN APPEAL TO PHARAOH: THE NEGRO PROBLEM, AND ITS RADICAL SOLUTION, 1889
February 5, 1889. Charleston
BROAD STREET WAS empty. The night was dark, and the wind was spitting rain. From the sound against the pane it might have been sleet. The windows in Dawson’s office were blurred with moisture. The gas chandelier hissed steadily and the wall clock, hanging between the windows, repeated its modest hurrying tick. The building was quiet; it was past nine, the day shift gone.
Dawson sat at his desk with a manuscript before him. He edited with big sweeping marks, crossing out, underlining, making query marks, scribbling notes. His pencils wore down quickly, he bore down hard. He carried extras in his pocket, and a small penknife for sharpening.
When McKinley appeared in the door Dawson looked up.
“McKinley, good. I can’t read any more of this.” He leaned back in his chair. It was dark red leather and starting to crack. Dawson was hard on objects.
McKinley came in and sat down, folding his long body into the chair. His clothes were always slightly rumpled, and he seemed never to have quite grown into himself. Though he was forty-two, married, and the father of two, he was always trying to find room for his arms and legs.
Carlyle McKinley was from Georgia. After college, and the war, he’d gone on to seminary in Columbia. He’d planned to become a minister, but he had a certain unbending quality, and some thistly part of the Presbyterian doctrine stuck in his craw. He could not swallow it, and so he coughed it out. He left the ministry to teach in Columbia, and started sending pieces to The News and Courier. He’d left teaching nearly fifteen years ago and had become a trusted colleague. Since Riordan had left, Dawson depended on McKinley even more. Particularly on ethical questions, moral ones. McKinley was a man of absolute principle. Dawson trusted him in all ways.
But the sight of him here, late at night, was unexpected. Dawson hoped McKinley wasn’t going to ask for a raise or announce he was leaving for the World. He couldn’t afford to give him a raise, and he couldn’t afford to lose him. The thought of the World was sickening. He felt the silver blade twist inside him.
“What brings you here?” he asked, and McKinley shrugged and shook his head.
“Tell me everything. What’s going on in Columbia?” Dawson leaned back in his chair. “What’s Tillman up to?”
“Making trouble,” McKinley said. “Riling up the backcountry against the Low Country. Which has too much power.”
It was true that the Low Country had disproportionately large representation in the state legislature. This caused resentment, but it wasn’t new. Dawson waited, but McKinley said nothing more. He seemed oddly quiet.
“Why’s he doing this?”
“He’s planning to run for governor.”
“Again? Didn’t we make it clear? We don’t want him.”
“He’s giving speeches about Hamburg,” said McKinley.
“Hamburg?” Dawson frowned. “Ten years ago.”
“He’s boasting that he was a ringleader,” said McKinley. “Claiming credit.”
“He wants credit for Hamburg?” Dawson asked. “There was a congressional investigation. It made us look like savages. Why would he want credit for that?” He took the penknife from his pocket and snapped it open.
“It did just what he wanted,” said McKinley. “The Negroes were terrorized and the white men went free. Hampton was elected. All according to the Bald Eagle’s plan. It was a victory for him.”
“It was a disgrace for us,” said Dawson. “We should put it behind us.” He drew the scrap basket over between his knees and took up the pencil and the knife. He leaned over and began whittling at his pencil. Each stroke lifted a pale curling chip. There was a silence.
“But we haven’t,” said McKinley. “Put it behind us.”
Dawson looked up. “Meaning?”
“Things are getting worse,” said McKinley. “For the Negroes.”
“In what way?”
“All ways,” said McKinley. “They’re no better off now than they were at emancipation.”
“I hardly think that’s true,” said Dawson. He looked down again. He turned the pencil, scraping at the point.
McKinley raised his eyebrows and said nothing. Behind him on the wall hung the office clock, the pendulum hurrying back and forth in the case.
“All this takes time,” said Dawson. “During Reconstruction men were elected to office who couldn’t read or write. We can’t have illiterate officials.” He looked up. “We can’t. Education takes time.”
“It’s twenty-five years since emancipation,” said McKinley. “They’re no better off now. Worse, in some ways. They’re still dirt-poor, and still uneducated. They’ve gotten nowhere. We don’t let them. We keep them impoverished. We allow them only the worst jobs,” he said, “the ones we don’t want. The Negro can’t move forward unless we allow it. We don’t allow it because we don’t want it.”
“Hold hard,” Dawson said, raising his hand. “We have quite a solid black middle class in Charleston. Master carpenters, mechanics. Ministers. Doctors. Distinguished members of the bar.” Dawson held the pencil up to look at it. He set it down, folded the knife, and slid it into his pocket.
“Mostly craftsmen,” said McKinley. “If they’re professionals they only work for each other. White men wouldn’t use a Negro lawyer. Would you send your wife to a Negro doctor?”
“People tend toward their own kind,” Dawson said. “That’s a fact.”
“The fact is that we keep them subordinate in every way.”
Dawson shook his head. “You make this sound like a concerted effort,” he said. “I’ve always supported their progress. I’ve done so from the beginning, and old Barnwell Rhett nearly fired me for it. I tried to get Negroes on the aldermanic ticket, in 1868. I arranged the first meeting between Negro candidates and Democrats. I hired the hall and I carried the chairs down the street. At the paper we’ve always supported them.”
“Whatever we do,” said McKinley, “is not enough.”
There was silence in the room.
“What’s your point?” Dawson asked.
“We should never have brought them here,” said McKinley.
&nbs
p; “True. But we did,” said Dawson. “They’re here.”
“And we’ve freed them. And now what? We don’t take care of them and they can’t take care of themselves. They’re destitute. They’re in rags. They’re starving.”
“We do take care of them,” said Dawson. “We have an obligation. I pay our coachman a good salary. I also let him live rent-free in our backyard, with his wife and his many children. They raise chickens on our property. They feed them on scraps from our kitchen. Then they sell us the eggs. They raise vegetables on our land. They make jam from our fruit trees. They sell it all to us. They take advantage of us; we both know it. But that’s the system.”
“It’s based on inequality. White people own everything. The Negroes need a way out of poverty,” said McKinley. “They’re dying, you know. Their mortality rates are twice ours.”
“Poverty,” said Dawson, frowning. “Poor hygiene. Lack of education.”
“But that’s their lot: poverty and poor hygiene and no education. How can they make progress?”
“What progress do you have in mind? Social equality?” asked Dawson.
“Not even Lincoln suggested that,” McKinley said. “God made them members of a lesser race. But they’re human beings. We can’t treat them this way. Their misery is our fault.”
The room was silent. The sleet rustled coldly against the windowpane.
Dawson sighed. He tapped the pencil once on his desk. “It’s the problem of the age. Our duty to solve it.”
“Giving them the vote made things worse,” said McKinley. “The Red Shirts have started the war all over again. Now we have rule of violence instead of rule of law.”
“Do you have a solution?”
“Liberia,” said McKinley.
“Send them all back to Africa?”
McKinley nodded.
“They don’t all want to go, you know,” Dawson said.
“Hundreds have signed up,” McKinley said. “It’s the only fair thing. Lincoln thought so.”
“But we can’t decide for them,” said Dawson. “Langston thinks it’s absurd. He’s the president of a law school. He doesn’t want to be bundled off to Liberia.” Dawson shifted in his chair. “We owe them something, but not summary deportation.”
“But we do owe them something,” McKinley said. “Besides two centuries’ pay.”
“A legitimate claim,” Dawson said. “Though hard to carry out.”
“We owe them a place where their rights are honored.”
The room was silent except for the clock.
“And where is that place?” McKinley asked.
There was a long pause. The clock gave its percussive hurrying tick.
“What I can’t bear is the lynching,” Dawson said.
* * *
McKINLEY WAS WRITING a book about this; that’s why he’d come.
As he finished them he sent the chapters to Dawson, who read them at night. Sometimes he read them to Sarah, while the two of them sat alone at the top of the house. They were incendiary.
“‘We brought him here for purely selfish reasons, under horrible conditions, and bred him, and worked him, and bought and sold him … for our own profit. His back and breast are scarred with the stripes we inflicted on him,’” Dawson read. “‘It’s a dreadful story from beginning to its end. We cannot bear to have it told in its naked truth, and we have no love for him who tells it, even though he be one of ourselves. It must be told and retold, however. We have sinned against him, and against ourselves, and against God.’”
Sarah looked up, frowning. “Why must this be told and retold? Does he want to start the war over again?”
“Race is the problem of our age,” Dawson said.
“McKinley makes it sound like some hideous torture chamber. It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?” Dawson was sitting in his armchair. “Having slaves?”
“They were servants, and part of our family,” Sarah said. “We’d never have hurt them. I didn’t know anyone who hurt their servants. All that about stripes and scars is Northern talk.”
“I’m sure your family was kind,” Dawson said, “but the institution was not. Your own servants lived in the house, but what about the ones who worked in the fields?”
“You have no idea what it was like. We belonged to each other.” Sarah remembered Tiche holding her, kissing her, the night her father died, so she’d wake to the news in the arms of someone who loved her. “The time we ran from the Yankee bombardment, Tiche carried the family silver. She and I shared a quilt on the floor during the war. I used to give the maids Bible lessons. We looked after them. You and I took on Levi, after Jem sold Hampton’s. We took care of him when he was ill, until he died. He wrote to me while I was in France, I still have his letters.” She looked up. “In England, did you look after your servants for their entire lives?”
“We didn’t own them,” Dawson said. “We banned slavery in 1830.”
“Just stop,” Sarah said. “Are you going to publish all this? It will make trouble. Why do you keep stirring things up? And don’t do it while I’m away. I don’t want anything to happen while I’m gone.”
“I’m not going to publish it. It’s a book, not an article,” Dawson said. “And nothing will happen while you’re away.”
“Nine days,” she said. “I’ve never been away from the children that long in my life.”
“You were away from me for two years in Europe,” he said.
“That wasn’t my idea.”
“It was your idea to stay with the children,” he said.
“But it was yours, my darling chuck-chuck, to send the children away.”
“All I wanted was for them to have a good education,” he said.
“All you wanted was to send them to boarding school in England,” said Sarah. “Which was much, much too far away, and they were too young.”
“Any boarding school would have done,” he said. “Any one that taught them what I was taught.”
“They don’t have schools like that here,” she said. “All those languages. Classical literature and the catechism. Anyway, I don’t approve of boarding schools. In my family we taught the children at home.”
“And in my family we sent them to boarding school. Where they learned all those languages, and art and music, and classical literature and the catechism,” he said. “I was sent away to St. Mary’s at eight years old, and it ruined me, as you can see.”
Sarah said nothing. She tucked her scissors into their case and began swiftly winding the loose thread onto the spool.
He rose from his chair and went over to her. He sank onto his knees and took her hands.
“My darling,” he said. “I’m teasing you.”
“Ah, now you love me,” she said, not looking at him.
“Now I do love you, chuck-chuck,” he said. “And now you’re back home again, with our children, who now speak French, and all is well. And you’ll be gone only nine days.”
“Which is quite a long time,” Sarah said, still not looking at him. “Longer than I’ve ever spent apart from them.”
“Your children will be absolutely fine. They are nearly grown up,” said Dawson, “and you have an excellent and reliable staff in me. And Hélène.”
He didn’t read her more of McKinley’s book. Each chapter was an elaboration on his four points: it had been a mistake to bring the Negro to America, a mistake to keep him there, a mistake to make him a slave, and a mistake to give him the vote. The Negro race, as inferior, could never achieve equality with the white; still Negroes could achieve more than they had. It was whites who were preventing their progress. It was whites who were entirely responsible for the Negroes’ misery.
As Dawson read it he thought of that meeting he’d arranged, on Haynes Street. He’d brought pitchers of cold water, and glasses. After one of the black members of the group had poured himself a glass, the white members wouldn’t even touch the pitcher.
And he kept thinkin
g of Langston, the way he’d seemed to change from race to race before his eyes. The memory made him uncomfortable, as though there were something he’d forgotten, something he should be doing that he was not.
25.
February 7, 1889. Charleston
THE BOARDING HOUSE was on a side street. It was shabby, the whitewash peeling off the bricks, and inside it smelled of fish. The woman who came out into the hall told Thomas McDow that his brother was on the third floor, last on the left. Thomas went upstairs and walked quietly down the hall. At the door he stood still for a moment, then seized the handle, trying to wrench it open. It was locked. Arthur was five years younger than he; Thomas felt he shouldn’t have to knock. He stood before the door, waiting. He knew Arthur was listening.
Finally he said, “Open.”
Arthur opened the door and the brothers faced each other. They both had pale skin, dark hair, and dark eyes, but Arthur was taller. His face was broader, and pockmarked. He stepped back warily, letting Thomas inside.
The room was small, with an iron bedstead, a wooden chair, and a tall hulking wardrobe. A curtainless window gave onto the alley. Thomas sat on the chair, Arthur on the unmade bed. The springs creaked as he settled.
Thomas took a flask from his breast pocket and offered it. Arthur took a short swallow and passed it back to Thomas, who took a long one, the burn rising in his throat. He put the flask back in his pocket.
Arthur asked, “What’s the important business you wrote?”
Thomas didn’t want Arthur to take charge.
“How you doing?” he asked. “Job all right?”
Arthur nodded.
“Wondered if you could use some cash,” Thomas said.
“Depends.” Arthur kept his eyes on his brother. “On what I have to do for it.”
“Not much,” Thomas said. The gas lamp on the wall above him cast black shadows on his face.
Arthur said nothing. He didn’t trust Thomas.
“I have a problem,” Thomas said. “Need someone to help me out. The person would come into a good bit of cash.”
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