The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  It was black workers who filled nearly all these jobs.

  Bradley understood this necessity, and by the mid-1880s there were some two thousand full-time black residents living in or near Asbury Park. They settled mainly in an unincorporated stretch of land adjacent to Asbury Park in Neptune Township, across the railroad tracks from the gilded part of the city, in an area known as West Park. Despite his friendship with the former slave John Baker, Bradley was, at heart, a fierce segregationist. As the unofficial mayor of Asbury Park, and owner of most of the land (he chose to lease out lots instead of selling them), Bradley made it his mission to keep the white and black populations of his bustling resort separate.

  Bradley, however, could not control the flow of black tourists into Asbury Park, nor did he think to regulate, at least early on, the access black workers would have to his beach and boardwalk.

  It was the opinion of many white observers that black workers were abusing their proximity to the resort’s finer features, “intruding themselves,” as the New York Times reported, “in places where common sense should tell them not to go.” Black women, for instance, “flocked by the hundreds to Bradley’s beach, jostled for room on the plank walk, and said impudent things to persons who resented any effort at familiarity.” The most egregious example, the Times explained, was a blacks-only picnic hosted by vacationers from Newark, who “took possession of the [beach] and left it strewn with peanut shells.”

  The picnic was a final straw. It led Bradley’s newspaper, the Asbury Park Journal—and possibly Bradley himself—to craft a blunt editorial titled “Too Many Colored People.” They “are becoming a nuisance in Asbury Park,” the paper declared. “We allow them to vote, to have full standing and protection in the law… but when it comes to social intermingling, then we object most seriously and emphatically.”

  It was not a toothless complaint—Bradley had already forbidden black people from using the boardwalk or pavilion between 7:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m., a near-total ban, and he could impose similar limits on access to the beach if he wished. The reluctance of most whites to mingle with blacks was a simple truism in the South, if not in the presumably more enlightened northern states, such as New Jersey. But Bradley’s angry editorial, the New York Post observed, revealed that the reality of segregation “is also true to some extent in the North.”

  With the editorial, Bradley drew a stark color line in Asbury Park. It was as if, in his battle against all the evils that might befall his seaside idyll, what he deemed the “impudence” of blacks was just another evil for him to combat. Equal rights for all, Bradley believed, was a practical impossibility. As long as that was true, he would not allow Asbury Park to become an experiment in integration.

  The Journal editorial, however, roused the black population. Its harshness “irritates every negro stepping in the borough,” the New York Times reported three days later. “Every drop of blood under a black skin smarts with indignation.” Rev. John Francis Robinson, pastor of the African Methodist Church in Asbury Park, said in a speech that “we colored people fought for our liberty some years ago, and we do not propose to be denied it at this later date. We will not be dictated to in this manner by Mr. Bradley or any other man.” Rev. A. J. Chambers, pastor of the Bethel Methodist Church and a traveling minister, marched into the office of the Asbury Park Journal and declared the charges in the editorial “uncalled for, unwarranted, un-Christian-like and cruel.”

  In the end, Asbury Park in the 1880s did become a kind of test case in integration, in that it forced whites and blacks to find a way to coexist in relatively close quarters.

  James Bradley, holder of all the legal power, won most of the battles, but not all of them. He eventually permitted black workers full access to their own stretch of beach—albeit the section nearest the pipe spewing sewage into the ocean. The editorials and sermons subsided, then flared up again. Ground was gained and lost. Bradley even came to call himself “a friend” of the black race, and explained away his segregationist efforts as necessary to protecting “the vast amounts of capital” invested in Asbury Park.

  It was only in his later years that Bradley, in trying to shape the foundational myth of Asbury Park, began to share the story of his old friend, John Baker, who had long since left his employ and moved away from New Jersey. Though Baker’s characterization of their relationship was never recorded, Bradley wrote fondly of their pivotal night in the cleansing surf—ironically, the very first full and peaceful integration of the sands on his hallowed property.

  That the spirit of that moment had been so thoroughly lost in Asbury Park did not seem to dawn on Bradley, or at least not to trouble him. Perhaps he didn’t realize that he could no more keep every evil out of his town than he could hope to calm the waves that frightened him.

  * * *

  Around the time Bradley was grappling with racial strife in his wonderland, an evil far worse than any he had ever encountered visited a small town just seven miles north of Asbury Park. It happened in Eatontown, a borough west of Long Branch, on March 5, 1886.

  Earlier that day, a blond, twenty-two-year-old woman named Anna Herbert walked home by herself through the woods. Someone snuck up from behind and struck her with a club on the left side of her head. She struggled with her attacker, but he was bigger and choked her to unconsciousness. When she came to, she staggered to a neighbor’s house and gave the name of the man who attacked her—a sixty-six-year-old black stable hand named Samuel Johnson, better known as Mingo Jack.

  A constable was summoned, and Mingo Jack was arrested while eating dinner in the home he shared with his wife and twenty-two-year-old daughter, Angeline, in a marshland called Hog Swamp. Asked about Anna Herbert, Mingo Jack denied knowing anything about her. The constable took him in anyway, and put him in one of the two cells in a small brick prison house by the banks of a frozen pond, across from the Eaton Mill. Word of the assault spread quickly, and within an hour an angry crowd surrounded the prison. Police managed to disperse it, and at 10:00 p.m. the warden left Mingo Jack unattended in his locked cell, alone in the prison.

  Sometime around midnight, the prisoner heard a gunshot and crashing glass. Someone had shot out the window above the wooden prison door. Then, more gunshots and more breaking glass, and the thudding sounds of a sledgehammer, stolen from a nearby marble cutter’s shop, bashing the prison’s brick wall. When the wall held, Mingo Jack heard the wrenching sound of a pickax prying open the double-thick wooden door. He knew full well what was happening. He knew he was trapped. He screamed out in the night:

  “Murder! Murder!”

  The door fell away. Men rushed in and pulled Mingo from his cell. He struggled hard, but the men beat him so badly they cracked his skull and gouged out one of his eyes. The floor was drenched with his blood.

  The next morning, a young black boy on his way to trap muskrats saw the bullet-torn body hanging from a thick rope tied to the prison transom bar. The boy ran into town crying, “Mingo Jack is dead!”

  At a coroner’s inquest in the town’s broad hall, witnesses sat on a piano stool and told what they knew. The final verdict was vague. “We find that Samuel Johnson was willfully murdered… by being beaten upon the head by clubs and by hanging by the neck,” it read. “Said beating and hanging having been done by some person or persons to the jury unknown.” Most in Eatontown knew the names of the men who had been at the jail that night: they were the fathers and brothers and sons who walked among them, some of them prominent men. But no one ever served any time for the lynching.

  At the African Church in Eatontown, Rev. John Hammett read a sermon over the body of Mingo Jack. He chose a scripture from Matthew: “We must all die, and after this the Judgment.” Mingo’s body was buried in a pauper’s plot in the South Eatontown Cemetery. Newspaper accounts called him a “bad character” and a “dangerous and desperate man.” Many said the town was better off without him. At least two other men would, in later years, confess to the rape and beating of Anna Herber
t. Most likely, Mingo Jack was innocent of the crime.

  He was the first black man ever lynched in the northern state of New Jersey.

  * * *

  Just seven miles away, in Asbury Park, the lynching had little impact. James Bradley relentlessly kept up the façade of innocent splendor he wished so desperately for his city. There wasn’t a dispute or distraction, he believed, or even a lynching, that couldn’t be drowned out by the shrill jangle of some shiny new attraction.

  No event in Asbury Park better reflected this philosophy than the lavish parade Bradley dreamed up and launched in 1890, four years after the Mingo Jack killing. He called it the Baby Parade.

  It was a simple idea. Mothers pushed their infants and toddlers in decorated wagons and carriages single file along the boardwalk, led by a marching brass band. And that was it. Bradley saw it as a patriotic celebration of motherhood, as well as an emblem of the wholesomeness of Asbury Park. He persuaded two hundred mothers and nurses to participate in the first parade, held on a hot July afternoon. Some fifteen thousand people lined up to cheer them on.

  Bradley’s instinct paid off, and within a few years the Baby Parade was an extravaganza, drawing national coverage, hundreds of participants, and many tens of thousands of spectators. Judges awarded prizes to the most elaborately festooned floats and carriages, and the parade became part of a weeklong, family-focused carnival. In 1910, the twentieth anniversary of the parade, special trains from New York, Philadelphia, and Trenton brought in more than one hundred thousand spectators.

  The 1910 Baby Parade, twice postponed by bad weather, still became the biggest single event in the short history of Asbury Park. “Midget Marchers Present Magnificent Pageant,” boasted the Asbury Park Press, which devoted several full broadsheets to their coverage. Public buildings were covered with flags and bunting; trolley cars and automobiles stalled in the heavy traffic. At 3:00 p.m., Arthur Pryor, dressed in white, led his band in their signature song, “Jersey Shore,” to start the procession. All kinds of toddlers were on display: “fat babies and lean babies; babies with tow hair and red-headed tots; consummate little actresses, diminutive bosses,” the Press described. A panel of dignitaries judged the costumes and carriages for originality and spectacle.

  The top winner was two-year-old Ruth Klatenbach. In an exhibit her mother titled “Our Jewel,” little Ruth was displayed as “the Tiffany setting of a huge diamond ring,” according to the Press. “The ring was mounted in a huge box, with an open purple plush lid and white silk lining,” while Ruth’s small body “was squeezed within the pronged forks of the ring.” The judges awarded her the grand Gold Trophy prize—five hundred dollars provided by the Eskay Food Company.

  It would have been, by all accounts, the most successful Baby Parade ever—James Bradley’s crowning achievement—had it not been for a shocking and gruesome incident that marred the proceeding.

  That morning, a thin, sharp-jawed man, Dewitt Moore, traveled from Newark with a friend to watch the parade.

  Moore and his friend pushed aggressively through the crowds, using profanity and subjecting women “to improper embraces,” the Press reported. A bystander, Herald Smith—a young photographer who lived in town—was at the parade with his business partner, Earle Williamson, and his sister Mabel. As babies and children in floats rolled by, Smith and Williamson noticed the commotion and confronted the unruly men.

  At first, there was only yelling and fist-waving. Then a roar went up from the crowd for an especially festive float. For just an instant, Herald Smith turned to see what the crowd was cheering for.

  And in that instant, Dewitt Moore took out a small folding knife and pushed it into Smith’s back just below the shoulder.

  Before Smith could even turn around, Moore stabbed him again, sticking the knife just below his ear and dragging it downward. Smith cried out and was stabbed again, a vicious swipe to his left arm that tore open an artery. A fourth thrust nearly cut off two of Smith’s fingers.

  Before Moore was done, he had stabbed Smith seven times.

  As Moore made his escape, Smith, dazed and bleeding, staggered out of the crowd and into the parade route, crying in pain and panic.

  Some mothers saw the blood streaming from his head and spurting from his arm and he fell to the ground in full feint. Others pulled their babies out of their wagons and hurried away. Screaming children called out for their parents and ran blindly into the crowd to flee the bloodied creature stumbling toward them. The band stopped playing and the parade was halted as police officers scrambled through the throng.

  Herald Smith was rushed to his nearby house and tended to by Dr. George Potts. He survived the attack. Dewitt Moore was stopped from escaping by a burly eighteen-year-old Native American named Clarence Tahamout, and quickly arrested. After a short break, the parade resumed, at least for those mothers and babies who were not too shaken to continue. The crowd trampled away most of the blood that remained.

  There, in one grisly incident, lay the inexorable tension between James Bradley’s dream and the reality of his playground—the battle between good and evil, between the wholesome and the carnal. The battle that never ends and cannot be won, only waged.

  Bradley hoped for Asbury Park to be a promise of goodness and godliness. Instead, it became a promise of indulgence and satiation—a place where pure and impure instincts could not be separated.

  Asbury Park, after all, was not a real city, so much as it was an illusion of community, forced and transparent, built on myth, and ultimately no more or less moral than any other human meeting ground.

  Bradley had always been wrong to believe he could manage the behavior of his hordes with posted signs and printed rules—the sheer humanity that flocked to his shore was never his to control. So it was that his dream of purity became like the brass ring that hung forever out of reach of the gleeful riders on his glorious carousel.

  “Oh, what people of God we ought to be!” Bradley’s idol Francis Asbury once said, as if to Bradley himself. “And grace can make us so!”

  But what grace was there to be found in the bloody boardwalk stabbing of an innocent, virtuous man, or, just two months later, the disappearance of the young schoolgirl Marie Smith?

  CHAPTER 5 The Wanamassa

  November 1910

  Asbury Park, New Jersey

  On the morning of November 12, uniformed soldiers from the New Jersey National Guard—among them expert horsemen from the elite cavalry Essex Troop—marched into Asbury Park.

  By then, Marie Smith had been missing for three days. The Guardsmen re-canvassed the woods near Deal Lake, inching through the slog alongside ten- and eleven-year-old boys recruited from the Bradley School to beef up the ranks of the searchers. The boys quit the hunt at nightfall. The Guardsmen kept going through daybreak.

  “If the girl is anywhere within a twenty-mile radius of Asbury Park,” a town official said, “she ought to be found within twenty-four hours.”

  Investigators had three theories of what might have happened—kidnapping, accidental death, and murder. The first theory made little sense. Marie’s parents were far from wealthy. Who would believe they could extract any significant amount of money from them? Beyond a ransom, any other motive for a kidnapping was too heinous for authorities to publicly discuss.

  The second theory, that Marie had been murdered, suffered from a lack of any evidence of an attack or struggle. The same was true of an accidental death. If Marie had been struck by a car, surely there would have been some sign of it, a tire track, a spatter of blood. But there wasn’t. Nothing pointed to anything. The only early suspects were the wandering gypsies living in campgrounds in and around Asbury Park. They were European immigrants and nomads who set up temporary tent villages and isolated themselves from townspeople, resisting all assimilation and, often enough, surviving through theft and con games. The Guardsmen rooted through their camps and dug through tents looking for clues, but once again found nothing.

  By the morning of S
unday, November 13—a full four days after Marie’s disappearance—no evidence of any kind had turned up anywhere. In the stores and on the streets, the people of Asbury Park whispered the same sad question to each other.

  “Has the girl been found?”

  * * *

  At noon that Sunday, William Stewart Benson walked into the Wanamassa woods.

  A groundskeeper and landscaper, Benson, fifty-eight, owned a greenhouse and flower plant in Bradley Park, just north of Asbury Park. His fresh flower business was one of the best and most modern in New Jersey. Benson didn’t look like the hard laborer he was—his narrow shoulders and small rimless glasses made him seem soft, and he had a guileless smile that hid his teeth. That morning, Benson delivered a flower arrangement to a client on Central Avenue in Asbury Park. After the delivery, he walked north on Central Avenue, turned left on Third Avenue, and headed to the woods.

  He entered the Wanamassa on an unpaved drift road that ran through the forest—a shortcut to the stone bridge that would lead him back to his town. But Benson wasn’t going home just yet.

  He left the traverse road and walked among the trees for a reason. Benson was looking for something, and he knew that what he was looking for would not be found in the open. It would be hidden away.

  He was after the two-hundred-dollar reward.

  He chose a random direction and took one hundred fifty steps over a dense carpet of dead leaves and fallen branches. To his left he could see the deep gully that was used as a town dumping ground for cartloads of leaves, which just a week earlier had caught fire and been put out by the Enterprise Hose Company. The crackle of dry wood beneath his shoes and the croak of pond frogs may have been the only sounds he could hear. Benson was in a place now that was stripping itself of green, of life, leaving only the dark blacks and browns of dormancy.