The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

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  To Lorraine Stundis Rainey, your support, intellect, silliness, and beautiful heart make everything possible. The history of me is you.

  This book is in memory of the 3,446 African Americans lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968—people who lived and mattered.

  ASBURY PARK

  — 1910 —

  Preach as if you had seen heaven and its celestial inhabitants, and hovered over the bottomless pit and beheld the tortures, and heard the groans of the damned.

  —Francis Asbury

  CHAPTER 1 Black Diamond

  November 1910

  Asbury Park, New Jersey

  For Thomas Williams, it was better to be no one than someone in Asbury Park.

  Williams lived in a city that was not meant for him. It was designed as a haven for godly and wealthy white people. The purest air in the bluest sky, the gentlest spray from a perfect ocean, wide boulevards and candy-colored homes—the very best America. Williams lived there, but only in the shadows of other people’s lives, a peripheral figure, a black man for hire, no one of note. This was how both he and the city wanted it. Williams took all kinds of jobs—chopping wood, painting houses, corralling hogs and cows for widows. He did these jobs and then he was gone, to somewhere on the edges of town. He was forty years old and complained of lumbago—chronic back pain—but there wasn’t any kind of work Tom Williams wouldn’t do, if it meant a few dollars for him.

  He was not from Asbury Park, or even New Jersey. He came from Lynchburg, Virginia, where he’d been an amateur prizefighter and went by his ring nickname, Black Diamond. He had a boxer’s build—six feet tall, broad shoulders, hard hands—and he wore a sweater coat that was dark with grime and pants held up by suspenders. He liked his liquor—gin and whiskey—and many mornings he could be found in the barroom at Griffin’s Wanamassa Hotel, out past Wickapecko Drive, eating his breakfast and taking his drinks as early as 8:00 a.m.

  In New Jersey, the record of Williams’s life was a crime sheet, though not a violent one. In 1907, a state prison supervisor riding a train spotted a six-shooter sticking out of Williams’s coat. He had him searched and turned up several gold watches and $375 in cash. Williams confessed to larceny and served eighteen months in state prison. He served a separate, shorter stretch for being drunk and disorderly.

  For the fourteen months he’d been in Asbury Park, though, he’d had no trouble with the law.

  That is, until an unspeakable crime happened in the fall of 1910, and Tom Williams became someone in Asbury Park.

  * * *

  Wherever he went, Williams carried with him the long, heavy history of racism in America, and in 1910 no part of his life would have been unaffected by it.

  Education, land ownership, voting rights, due process, equality, self-determination—Williams would have been guaranteed none of these. By 1910, black people had been free from bondage for forty-five years, but the dark-hearted mentality behind slavery remained in place, not in the corners and fringes of the country but on its main streets and in its town halls and courtrooms. One race fought steadily and openly to keep another race as near to a state of subjugation as possible. The weapons used—black codes, Jim Crow, disenfranchisement, segregation, lynching—were insidious, suppressive, and terrorizing.

  Williams lived in a time the historian Rayford Logan called “the nadir of American race relations”—a period from the late 1800s to the early 1900s that saw a violent, bloody backlash against any gains made by black Americans after the Civil War. During this half century some states identified crimes and passed laws “specifically written to intimidate blacks—changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity, or loud talk, with white women,” wrote Douglas A. Blackmon in his Pulitzer Prize–winning study of the era, Slavery by Another Name. Black landowners lost billions in wealth as white mobs drove them from their homes and stole their land from beneath them. Many thousands of black men were lynched, many tens of thousands of families displaced, black neighborhoods purged or burned down, death sentences passed for stealing bread or “acting too white.”

  A voice in the world, dominion over his body, the barest of dignities—people like Tom Williams were denied these things, and had to fight for them every day.

  They were often alone in this fight, but not always.

  The story of Tom Williams is also the story of two individuals, a man and a woman, one white, one black, born at different times in different parts of the country, fated never to meet but linked by a passion for justice, and by a single legal case in a town called Asbury Park.

  One of them, Raymond C. Schindler, was a cerebral private detective who never once shot a gun or even carried one, the son of a preacher and a prison librarian, a believer in redemption but relentless in pursuit of the criminals who needed it—a gentleman bloodhound.

  The other was Ida B. Wells, a black woman born a slave and driven by personal tragedy, a crusader against racism and a champion of her race, barely five feet tall but towering in her righteousness and influence—the most famous black woman of her time.

  Schindler was a raw-boned rookie only a few years out of high school when he crossed paths with Tom Williams; by then, Wells had been an activist and reformer for decades. Schindler came to know the dark corners of Asbury Park; Wells never set foot there. They were unaware of each other’s efforts, and neither foresaw the full impact of the case that united them. Today, they are not linked in any textbooks, or in any telling of the crime and its aftermath.

  Yet both Ray Schindler and Ida B. Wells, in their resolute pursuit of equal justice for all, emphatically answered the question posed to every citizen, every day—what kind of America do we wish to live in?

  Their efforts demonstrated the power of an individual—a single, steadfast warrior—to collide with history and meaningfully shift its course. Their separate heroism, in the form of small, principled decisions and actions, day after day, against all odds and resistance, in service to the unheralded and the vulnerable, had a clear impact on one specific case, but also helped give shape to an ongoing struggle that was bigger than any one man or crime. They were part of a chain of unlikely events in 1910 and 1911 that galvanized the fledgling National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and set it on its way to becoming the most powerful force in America’s long battle for civil rights.

  Those events—and the moral audacity and persistence of Raymond Schindler and Ida B. Wells—are the story of this book.

  * * *

  “In small towns, such crimes are not soon forgotten,” declared the sheriff of Asbury Park, in the days after the terrible crime. “There must be punishment. The man must be made to pay.”

  So it was that they came looking for Black Diamond.

  When they found him and brought him in, some people had bad things to say about him. One woman told a reporter she always locked her doors when Williams was around; she didn’t like him because “he was so black and dirty.” Others said he was shifty, lazy, a drunk. The Asbury Park Press called him “a bad man generally.”

  Most people had no opinion of him at all.

  Emma Davison, a key witness in the sensational case that was to come, could recall only a single prior incident involving Tom Williams—an innocuous
encounter relayed to her by her young son.

  According to the boy, he was playing with a little hop toad on a dirt path in the Wanamassa woods, on the northern edge of Asbury Park, when Williams walked by. The boy announced he planned to kill the toad.

  “Don’t do it,” Williams told him.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it would be cruel.”

  The boy considered his choice, and opened his hand and let the toad go, and watched it spring and scoot away, into the indifferent woods.

  CHAPTER 2 The Flower

  November 1910

  Asbury Park, New Jersey

  The young girl woke up happy in the dark of early dawn. Happier than usual, her father noticed, though it was not a special day, not her birthday or a holiday. It’s true that she was a sunny child, the way some children are sunny, but on this day she was even more cheerful than usual, which was fine by her father, even if he didn’t know why.

  Little Marie Smith, ten years old, hopped out of bed in her family’s white frame home on West Monroe Avenue, in the roughneck Whitesville section of Asbury Park, and sat at the kitchen table for a hot breakfast. Marie was hungry and ate heartily—fried smoked beef bologna, wheat bread, and a cup of baker’s cocoa.

  It was a sharp fall day, but her mother, Nora, dressed her for winter—a fleece-lined cotton undershirt and cotton underdrawers, a green Scotch plaid dress, black stockings, and a brown winter coat Marie had long since outgrown. Her black leather shoes were boys’ shoes with the clunky metal hooks cut off and the laces slipped through slits in the leather. Marie’s light, sandy hair, trimmed short just below the ears, had a blue satin ribbon in it, covered up by her gray knit skating cap.

  Just before she left for school, at 8:00 a.m., Marie took her favorite bracelet, made of shiny red plastic, and slipped it on her slender wrist.

  Marie was pretty, with blue eyes and fair skin. She was small for her age; most people mistook her for seven or eight. Her life was hard and plain. Peter, her father, stocky and mustached, was a driver for a local rendering plant. His job was to visit butchers and gather leftover fat, bones, hides, tallow, skin, and grease and take his haul back to the plant to be made into soap. He kept the noxious smell of the plant in his nose around the clock, and at night he brought it home with him on his clothes and hair and skin.

  Marie’s mother was also pretty and fair, but she was frail and drank too much. Sometimes she sent Marie to buy bottles of beer off John Griffin’s wagon, or whiskey from an Italian on the shadowy outskirts of town. At home, little Marie did much of her mother’s work—cooking, cleaning, mending. She had an older brother, John, who died at eighteen months after swallowing horse liniment. Now she had two younger brothers, Thomas and Joseph, whom she helped to care for.

  Marie’s parents fought often, mostly over her mother’s drinking, but sometimes because, when Peter Smith drank, he became cruel and violent. Six weeks earlier, Peter came home drunk and hurled a fork and plate at his wife. Before he could do any further harm, Nora’s sister Delia stepped up and stopped him.

  “I told him if he didn’t let his wife alone, I would hit him myself,” Nora would later testify. “That’s when the trouble ended.”

  Yet as lacking in grace as Marie’s life could be, she remained bright and cheerful. She was mature and strong-minded beyond her years. “Marie could not be coaxed in doing things she would set her mind against,” one neighbor said. “She was a dutiful child.” She went to Sunday Bible school and she knew to stay away from strangers, and she was properly frightened of the dark woods just behind her elementary school. After classes, Marie and her aunt Delia’s mixed-race daughter liked to skip through the town dumping grounds on their way back from school, like a lot of kids did, but she was never, ever late getting home.

  “She still had her first licking to get from us,” her father would say. “She had no immoral habits. We never had to correct her for anything. She was too good for that.”

  “Her family were hard people,” another relative said. “Marie was the flower.”

  At 8:00 a.m. on November 9, 1910, Marie and her brother Thomas left their home, bound for school. They walked up West Monroe Avenue, past a row of modest folk Victorian homes much like theirs, and took a right turn onto wide, curving Whitesville Road. They climbed up a small hill and crossed Asbury Avenue, onto the narrow sidewalk of Third Avenue. They followed Third all the way to the three-story, redbrick Bradley School on Pine Street. The walk was one mile long and it took Marie twenty minutes. She made the same walk every day she had school.

  Marie led Thomas by the hand to his kindergarten class, then hurried off to her all-girls class, taught by Miss Wilde. Two hours later, at 10:30 a.m., the bell rang for morning recess. Some mornings, Marie’s mother would slip a few pennies in her skirt pocket for buying lunch at the school, but on that day Marie had instructions to come back home at recess. She would eat lunch there and then drop off her father’s lunch at the plant near her school, before going back for afternoon class.

  At 10:30 a.m., Marie walked out of the Bradley School and headed down Third Avenue, toward her home. She was skipping and singing.

  Emma Davison, who lived in the town across Deal Lake, along the northern border of Asbury Park, was turning onto Third Avenue just a few paces away from Marie. A dog jumped out from behind a hedge and barked at Davison, and she hit it on the nose to make it stop.

  “I turned after hitting the dog and looked around, and when I looked around I saw this little girl coming,” Davison later recalled. She heard Marie singing and watched her skipping and wondered whose child she was. She watched as the dog barked at Marie, too. But after that, Emma said, “I throwed my fur around my neck, for it was cold, and I didn’t look around anymore.” She walked away in the opposite direction and didn’t give the child another thought.

  And then, little Marie Smith disappeared.

  * * *

  She did not make it home. Not after morning recess, not after school was over. Her mother expected her back no later than 11:00 a.m., but figured the school had held all the children back for some reason. It was only when Marie didn’t return from the afternoon session that Nora began to worry. “I thought she should be home around 3:00,” Nora said. When she wasn’t, “I walked out as far as the schoolhouse.”

  On her way, Nora stopped by the rendering plant to tell her husband, Peter, their daughter hadn’t come home. He said to go to the Bradley School and ask her teacher about Marie. Miss Wilde told Nora she saw Marie leaving the schoolhouse at 10:30 a.m. Nora asked if her daughter looked as if anything was wrong. “She said she seemed to be all right,” Nora said. “She didn’t say she was sick or complaining.”

  Nora left the schoolhouse and ran down Third Avenue, toward the Asbury Avenue home of Marie’s aunt, Delia Jackson. Perhaps the girl had gone there. But no, Delia told her, she hadn’t seen her. Nora ran back home and called the Asbury Park Police headquarters to report that her daughter was missing. Then she called her husband, who came straight home and phoned the police, too.

  It was almost dusk. Peter and Nora joined the Bradley School’s principal, Helen Emery, and two of their neighbors—Tom Dean and Ed Ayres—and set out on a door-to-door search of the houses along Third Avenue. Peter carried a lantern and searched every bush and hedge and stretch of woods. “I went up through Whitesville Road because I seen the track of an automobile and I thought maybe it hit her and chucked her into the bushes,” Peter said. The search lasted until 2:00 a.m.

  Early the next morning, her eyes red and swollen from crying, Nora Smith dressed in black and stood woefully in the cold outside the girls’ entrance to the Bradley School, watching students file in for morning class. She looked at their faces, desperate to see Marie’s. Maybe her daughter had slept over with a classmate, she thought. It wasn’t likely, but it was possible. But then, so many things were possible. Marie might have crossed one of the bridges over Deal Lake and stumbled off and drowned. She might have been hit by
a car and ferried away to cover up the accident. She may have even tried to walk all the way back to Brooklyn in New York City, where Marie and her parents had lived before moving to Asbury Park eighteen months earlier. She could be anywhere.

  That day, November 10, marked the beginning of the official investigation into the disappearance of Marie Smith.

  Asbury Park police chief William H. Smith assigned two officers, Thomas Broderick and Walter Ireton, to lead the case. It began as a search mission. Peter Smith teamed with dozens of friends and neighbors, firemen and volunteers, police officers and even schoolboys let out of class, to comb the dreary woods around the schoolhouse. Swimmers dragged Deal Lake, while officers in heavy coats and rubber boots scoured the sand hills and backcountry, in automobiles and horse-drawn carriages, beating at the underbrush and looking in every house. The footprints of an adult and a child were found in the soft mud along the lake banks at the old Drummond brickyard on Asbury Avenue, but it was determined the smaller footprints were too large to belong to Marie.

  Two days later, November 12, Police Chief Smith summoned every able man in Asbury Park to meet on the corner of Ridge Avenue and aid in the hunt. The police announced a two-hundred-dollar reward for information about Marie. At night, the jittery beams of flashlights sliced through the dark woods and side streets. In her home, Nora Smith wept and stayed awake, into her fortieth hour without sleep, and neighbors worried for her sanity.

  There was nothing to show for any of it. No piece of ripped fabric, no blood on the ground. No sign of little Marie at all. The girl was simply gone—“vanished,” one newspaper put it, “as thoroughly as though the earth had opened up and swallowed her.”

  Then came Sunday, November 13—the Lord’s Day.