The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  She was wrong. Ida’s parents remained in Holly Springs with the rest of their children. For most, fear was greater than pity, but not for Ida’s father, Jim Wells. He stayed behind and busied himself with helping the least fortunate, bringing food to the dying and building coffins for the dead. For Jim and a small band of other young men who chose to stay, “the cry of humanity was like a bugle call to action,” one eyewitness, Mrs. John M. Craig, later wrote. Jim Wells surely knew that, historically, yellow fever was far more deadly for white people than for blacks, for reasons not yet known. Some even believed black people were immune to it. Indeed, through the first weeks of the epidemic, no one in the Wells family fell ill.

  Even so, it was a highly perilous time. The hometown that only sixteen years earlier had been nearly obliterated by Confederate troops was now utterly ravaged by disease and death, with bodies by the dozens being dragged out of homes and tumbled into shallow graves, and their clothing and bedding burned in great bonfires on the streets. “There were no sounds of lamentation, for grief was beyond expression in voice or tears,” the eyewitness Mrs. Craig wrote. “No tolling bells announced the lonely, unattended funerals, and a settled gloom seemed to have fallen upon every heart.”

  One September day in Tippah County, two months into the outbreak, Ida Wells felt the rumble of approaching horses outside her grandmother’s farmhouse. She ran to the door and recognized the three men dismounting their rides—they were her family’s next-door neighbors in Holly Springs.

  Excitedly, she led them in and asked if they had any news about her town. She was homesick and hadn’t seen her family in weeks. One of the men said he did, and handed Ida a long letter.

  She sat down to read the letter, but never got past the first page.

  The letter contained news of the epidemic. It included the names of victims. One passage stopped Ida cold.

  “Jim and Lizzie Wells have both died of the fever,” it read. “They died within twenty-four hours of each other.”

  CHAPTER 10 Gather My Race in My Arms

  September 1883

  Memphis, Tennessee

  The news that her parents were dead, delivered so starkly, had profound consequences for Ida Wells. Out of necessity, the orphaned Wells children would have to be separated, divided up among whoever might take them—one here, two there, however pity determined. Her family would be dissolved and scattered. Wells wanted to return to Holly Springs immediately to be with her siblings, but she was told the risk was too great—more than five thousand of those who remained in Memphis died of the scourge, along with fifteen thousand more victims across eight states. It was safer and smarter, Wells was told, to send a letter instead.

  But as she prepared the letter, “the conviction grew within me that I ought to be with them,” Wells later wrote. Ignoring the warnings, Wells boarded the next train out of Tippah County, and to Holly Springs.

  Passenger cars were no longer running in or out of infected cities, so Wells rode in the caboose of a freight train. The interior of the car was draped in black bunting in honor of two conductors who had just died of yellow fever. On board the train, the replacement conductor saw the teenaged Wells—his only passenger—and told her she was foolish to be returning to Holly Springs, where her infection and death were all but assured. Wells asked him why he was operating the same train that had seen two prior conductors felled.

  “Somebody has to do it,” he replied.

  “That’s exactly why I’m going home,” Wells said. “I am the oldest of seven children. There’s nobody but me to look after them now. Don’t you think I should do my duty, too?”

  The conductor shrugged and walked away.

  In Holly Springs, Wells found six siblings, not seven. The baby, Stanley, had caught the fever and died. Within a few days, members of the Masonic brotherhood, to which her father had belonged, assembled in the Wells home to divide the children.

  Two Masons laid a claim to each of Wells’s brothers, James and George, believing they could be trained into master carpenters like their father. Wells’s sisters, five-year-old Annie and two-year-old Lily, would go to the wives of Masons who desired little girls to raise.

  Wells’s other sister, Eugenia, who was crippled and bent at the waist, went unclaimed, dooming her to the poorhouse. “The unanimous decision among the Masonic brothers,” Wells would write, “was that I was old enough to fend for myself.”

  According to Wells’s telling of the story, as this clinical dividing of her family took place, she sat in a corner of the room and stayed perfectly silent. But as soon as it was over, she rose from her chair.

  “I calmly announced that they were not going to put any of the children anywhere,” she wrote.

  Instead, Wells declared, she would keep the children with her.

  The Masons scoffed—how could a sixteen-year-old possibly raise a family of six by herself? Wells, however, had a plan. The house belonged outright to her and her siblings, and their father, Jim, had left them three hundred dollars in the care of a friend—enough to survive until Wells found a way to support the family herself. They would be just fine, Wells assured the Masons, so long as someone could help her find work.

  A Masonic brother advised her to take the test to be a schoolteacher, which she promptly did. She found a teaching job at a school six miles away, for twenty-five dollars a month. She got there by mule and stayed the week in a rented room near the school while one of her mother’s old friends minded the children in Holly Springs. On weekends, Wells came home to do the cooking, cleaning, and laundering.

  What was left of the Wells family stayed a family, and got by.

  * * *

  After one term at the country school, Wells found a better-paying teaching position across the border in Tennessee, in the Shelby County town of Woodstock. Getting to her new public school meant a trip aboard a Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern train along an old Appalachian coal-hauling route.

  One summer day in 1883, when Wells was just twenty-one, she arrived at the Poplar Street Train Depot in Memphis, Tennessee. Wearing a linen duster coat and carrying a parasol, Wells passed thirty cents through a window to the station teller. The teller handed her a first-class ticket printed: One Continuous Trip, Memphis to Woodstock. Wells boarded the train and found a seat in the last of three passenger cars. She was the only black person in the car.

  She had just started working at her new job in Woodstock, ten miles north of Memphis. The position paid her thirty dollars a month, at a time when most black women in the South earned far less working as maids and helpers. Her previous teaching job had been at a small country schoolhouse outside her hometown of Holly Springs, Mississippi, near the Tennessee border, and the only way for her to get to the schoolhouse was to climb on a mule and ride six miles each way over barely passable roads. Her first-class train ride to Woodstock would be a big step up.

  Wells was a short woman with high cheekbones and sharp, pretty features. “She is rather girlish-looking in physique,” one colleague would later write, “with penetrating eyes, firm set lips and a sweet voice.” Her expression, however, tended to be severe. Those who knew her knew she could be rough-edged, and in photographs she rarely seemed to make much effort to smile. That had not always been the case—when she was young she’d been a “happy, light-hearted schoolgirl,” Wells would later write. But that had changed. Events had hardened her.

  Just after 4:00 p.m., the steam whistle sounded and the Covington train jolted backward, then forward. The conductor, William Murray, began his walk down the aisles, collecting tickets. The first station stop, in the town of Frazier, was only a short distance away, and the train slowed down to give Murray enough time to finish taking fares.

  The train was idling on a 1,200-foot-long trestle bridge over the Wolf River, just outside Frazier, when Murray reached Ida Wells. He looked at her, and at her first-class ticket. He saw that she was a black woman sitting in a car reserved for whites.

  “I cannot accept this i
n this car,” he told her.

  Murray left to collect other tickets, and Wells went back to reading the newspaper she had bought at the Polar Street station. A few minutes later, as the train pulled into Frazier, Murray was back.

  “You’re in the wrong car,” he told Wells. “You’ll have to go to the coach in front.”

  “I have a seat and I intend to keep it,” Wells said.

  “I will treat you like a lady, but you have to go to the front car.”

  “If you wish to treat me like a lady, you will leave me alone.”

  Murray grabbed the satchel, travel bag, and parasol Wells had placed in the seat next to hers and walked them into the front car. Then he returned for her. He told her he had a seat waiting for her in the front, and once again asked her to come with him.

  “I am in the ladies’ car, and I propose to stay here,” Wells replied.

  That was it. Murray put his hands on Wells. “I took hold of her and tried to lift and carry her,” he explained.

  He was met with surprising strength and resolve, summoned from a place far deeper than he could have known. Wells held tightly to her seat, and braced her feet beneath the seat in front of her. Murray kept pulling, but Wells would not be lifted.

  It was then, she later said, that “I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand.”

  Murray was bleeding now. Two white passengers in the seats in front of Wells stood up and pulled their seatbacks forward, so Wells could no longer hold on to them. Two more white passengers helped Murray wrestle Wells out of her seat. Together they lifted Wells in the air and carried her out of the train car as she thrashed and resisted. The sleeve of her linen coat ripped and nearly tore away. Some passengers cheered.

  “I used no more force than necessary and I got the worst of it,” Murray later insisted.

  The men finally set Wells down on a platform in between train cars. Still, Wells refused to go where they wanted her to go. Rather than ride in the forward car—where, she claimed, men were drinking and smoking—Wells took her bags and got off the train in Frazier. She stood at the station and watched the train rattle away down the tracks.

  It was the end of the incident, but not the end of the story. In the days that followed, Wells hired Thomas Cassels, a black attorney, and filed a lawsuit against the Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern Railroad. She asked for one thousand dollars in damages. Her case reached the highest court in the state of Tennessee.

  Barely out of her teens, Ida Bell Wells was about to take on an American industry.

  * * *

  Wells’s lawyer, Thomas Cassels, a Shelby County assemblyman, filed the suit in November 1883, two months after Wells was dragged from the train. On November 30, the Shelby County sheriff, W. D. Cannon, served a summons on J. W. Graham, the railway’s senior representative in the county. Depositions in the case were heard in January 1884.

  That November, the trial was held in the Shelby County Court House, an ornate three-story former hotel that during the Civil War had served as a Confederate hospital. The Chesapeake Ohio, with no financial constraints, hired Holmes Cummins, a prominent West Tennessee attorney and an expert on parliamentary tactics, as their lead counsel.

  It was a nonjury trial. The assigned judge, James O. Pierce, was a former Union infantryman from Wisconsin with a reputation for being fair and well read. On its face, the case seemed simple—Wells alleged that Chesapeake Ohio failed to give her what she paid for: transport aboard a first-class car. The ticket “entitled her to a seat in a first class coach of her own choosing,” read her complaint. “It contained no stipulation or provisions reserving to said defendant or its agents the right to direct into what coach or car she should go, and did, after that she had taken her seat in a first class coach car.”

  Instead of honoring her ticket, Wells’s lawyer claimed, Chesapeake Ohio “by its agents did unlawfully and forcefully lay violent hands on her and beat and mistreat and misuse her.”

  Holmes Cummins argued that the railway “offered Wells seating in another first class car equal in every way to the one she was in.” As for Wells’s forcible ejection, the railway disavowed its own conductor, William Murray, and claimed it “could not be liable for such unlawful acts of persons who chance to be in its employ.”

  The case, therefore, hinged not on Wells’s skin color, but on whether or not Chesapeake Ohio had offered her an alternate first-class coach car in which to travel. Technically, the trial was not about race.

  And yet, like so much in postbellum America, it was.

  Since the end of the Civil War, the process of securing civil rights for the millions of freed slaves had been haphazard. For every victory for black Americans, there was a setback or two, like rungs on a ladder being added and giving way. In 1875, Congress passed a Civil Rights Bill that awarded blacks the right to sue for discrimination in public accommodations, such as trains—a provision that opened the door for Wells’s lawsuit. That same year, however, in response to the Civil Rights Bill, Tennessee legislators passed House Bill No. 527, which granted proprietors the right to refuse business to anyone “for any reason whatever”—a provision that included railroad companies. Another statute in 1881 required the railways to furnish separate but equal train cars “for colored passengers who pay first-class rates,” establishing a legal basis for segregation.

  And in October 1883, four months after Wells was pulled from the Chesapeake Ohio coach car, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an eight-to-one ruling, repealed the 1875 Civil Rights Bill, finding that Congress had no authority over private individuals or organizations. Exactly how black Americans were to be transported by white-owned railroad companies was, after years of legislative battles, still largely undecided. Wells was the first black person to have a case against the railroads heard after the 1883 repeal of the Civil Rights Bill, which raised the stakes even higher. “The success of my case,” Wells wrote, would “set a precedent which others would doubtless have followed.”

  Wells sat in the Shelby County Court House, waiting her turn to testify, as her lawyer, Thomas Cassels, questioned a series of witnesses who were aboard the same train as Wells that day in September 1883. Two of them, G. H. Clovers and G. W. Maseley, were black ministers; a third, Silas Kearney, was a black man who lived in Frazier, the first stop on the train line. All three testified that Chesapeake Ohio’s claim of having provided two identical first-class train cars was false. The rear car, from which Wells had been ejected, was indeed a first-class car—which, in essence, meant that it was reserved for white passengers.

  But the forward car—which the railway argued was an identical first-class accommodation—was, the witnesses said, simply not. “There were drunken persons in there and some smoking,” Silas Kearney testified. “It was not a fit place for a lady to be.” When it was Wells’s turn to testify, her argument was the same—the forward car could not be considered a first-class car because it had not been properly reserved for respectable black passengers, as mandated by the separate-but-equal statute.

  Holmes Cummins’s chief witness was the conductor, William Murray, who by then had quit his railroad job and was operating a saloon. Murray explained the Chesapeake Ohio rule that “the rear coach should be reserved for white ladies and gentlemen, and colored passengers should ride in the forward coach.” He insisted the rear and forward cars “were alike in every respect, built, equipped and furnished alike,” and that he was zealous about policing the front car. “I am sure that I saw no smoking in the forward coach that afternoon,” he testified. “I saw no drunken or rowdy behavior there.”

  With many key facts in dispute, the trial came down to believability. If Judge Pierce accepted that Chesapeake Ohio had provided Wells with an adequate first-class seat, she would lose her case. If Pierce believed Wells’s claim that she had been denied the same accommodations afforded white first-class passengers, she would set an important precedent in a time of great racial upheaval, and strike a blow for the civil rights of all black Americans.

>   In the end, Judge James O. Pierce believed Ida Wells.

  “The allowance of smoking and drunkenness in [the forward] car reduced it to below the grade of first class,” Pierce decided, citing the separate-but-equal provision of the 1881 law. “The plaintiff,” he went on, “is a person of ladylike appearance and comportment, a school teacher, and one who might be expected to object to traveling in the company of rough or boisterous men, smokers or drunkards.

  “Judgment,” Pierce declared, “for the plaintiff.”

  * * *

  Pierce awarded Wells five hundred dollars—half of what she asked for—but still, her victory was all but complete. The Memphis Appeal Avalanche ran a story headlined “A Darky Damsel Obtains a Verdict Against the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad—What It Cost to Put a Colored School Teacher in a Smoking Car.” The consensus was that Wells had won a major success, and paved the way for more such lawsuits. Many, however, were convinced Wells was a scammer. She “is making a good thing out of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad,” read one Mississippi newspaper editorial. “She buys first-class tickets, attempts to ride in the ladies car, gets put out and brings suit for damages.”

  What mattered to Wells was that she had won the case, and in the process proven the power of a lone voice against the might of industry.

  Yet even then, even in victory, she had underestimated that might.

  Holmes Cummins immediately appealed Judge Pierce’s decision, and Chesapeake Ohio was granted a second trial.

  In 1887, the Supreme Court of Tennessee upended the first trial’s findings. “We know of no rule that requires railroad companies to yield to the disposition of passengers to arbitrarily determine as to the coach in which they take passage,” the court decided. “Having offered, as the statute provides, ‘accommodations equal in all respects in comfort and convenience to the first-class cars on the train’… the company had done all that could rightfully be demanded.”