The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  What unthinkable evil did you commit in Asbury Park?

  * * *

  Ray Schindler understood that another ruse would be necessary to put even more pressure on Heidemann. He resorted to another trick he had used in Asbury Park—a phony article planted in a local newspaper.

  He had his operative Charles Severance compose the fake article and arrange to run it in the February 1 morning edition of the New York Staats Zeitung, which Heidemann faithfully read. By then Carl and Frank had changed rooming houses again. His previous landlady, Frank complained, had been “too nosy.” Carl paid for a room in a brownstone at 151 West 14th Street, and the men agreed to stay in the back parlor until repairs were made to an upstairs room. At 8:00 a.m. on February 1, a Wednesday, Carl announced he was going to the drugstore to buy soap.

  Frank asked him to bring back a copy of Staats Zeitung.

  A few minutes later, Carl returned with the paper.

  “Here, Frank, read that, you old reprobate,” Carl said, casually tossing him the paper.

  Carl discreetly studied Frank’s reflection in a mirror as his roommate scanned the paper. “He gritted his teeth continually while he read the article about himself,” he observed. The article read:

  For two months the Authorities in Asbury Park have done their utmost to find out who the murderer was of the ten-year-old Marie Smith, whose corpse was found in a lonesome spot. Then they let the matter rest to all appearances. In the last few days they have received new evidence however, which tends to implicate the gardener Frank Heidemann, who had already once been under arrest. Heidemann has absolutely disappeared as far as the authorities know. It is thought that he is in Europe.

  Frank was clearly flustered by the article. Carl said nothing, but stood there and waited for an explanation. For the first time, Frank spoke at length about what happened in Asbury Park.

  “I’ve never seen that girl in all my life,” he said. “The negro is the one who broke her skull, but he’s protected by politicians who don’t care who they hang as long as the negro goes free.”

  Frank’s story was that Tom Williams was a member of a Masonic lodge, and no lodge member had ever been convicted of murder in Asbury Park, and the authorities wanted to keep it that way.

  Carl took the offensive. “It was not right for you to deceive me and make me think that you are an angel,” he scolded. “I don’t care whether you did it or not! In a fix a man will do anything to save his neck.”

  “No, you’re right,” Frank said dejectedly, before quickly changing the subject to Carl’s inheritance. “You have to try and get an advance on it and take me West. Today if possible.”

  The men went for breakfast, but afterward Carl brought up the article again. He asked about Marie Smith.

  “She was found with her head crushed in and besides that was strangled, but not misused,” Frank told him. “The negro’s axe was found nearby and he is the guilty party.” Frank claimed that Marie’s mother and Tom Williams were lovers, and together they conspired to do away with Marie. “Or she might have been killed by a passing automobile,” he said.

  Carl acted as if he didn’t believe anything Frank was telling him.

  “Next time, you leave the little girls alone,” he said.

  “Yes,” Frank agreed, nodding his head.

  “If you want to pinch little girls’ legs again, don’t take ten-year-olds.”

  Frank said he wouldn’t.

  It was an opening. The murder of Marie Smith was now on the table. That night, Frank again begged to be taken west, to Colorado, or if not that far, to Omaha, and Carl seized on Frank’s desperation.

  “I still believe you did the crime,” he said, “but if you were on the square with me and would tell me the truth—why, anybody can get in a fix like that when passion controls conscience. If you were to tell me right now you had to do it to save your neck, why, old man, I would go through Hell for you. I would help you get to Omaha in a minute.

  “On the other hand,” he continued, “if you are innocent of it, I don’t see the necessity of getting away.”

  Which would it be—confess and escape the East Coast once and for all? Or continue to claim his innocence and be stuck in Manhattan?

  Frank was silent. Carl waited. But an answer never came. There was no confession. Instead, there was only more begging.

  “Help me get away as far as possible,” Frank pleaded. “I would be your debtor all my life and would do anything you want me to.”

  Carl had finally asked his crucial question.

  Frank Heidemann had simply refused to answer it.

  * * *

  Then, something unexpected happened.

  On February 27, Carl and Frank rented a horse-drawn carriage from the Lowerre Stables in Yonkers, a northern suburb of New York City. They took a ride up and down snow-covered, tree-lined Midland Avenue. At 4:15 p.m., they saw an Italian man jump out of the woods and come toward them. The man asked for a match. Carl tossed him a matchbook and kept going.

  “Don’t you want your matches back?” the man snarled.

  “To hell with them,” Carl replied.

  “To hell with you,” the Italian said, spitting out curses.

  The carriage stopped. There was an argument. Words and punches.

  Three gunshots rang through the quiet woods.

  When Carl Neumeister and Frank Heidemann pulled the carriage away and steered it hurriedly back to the stable, they left behind them a dead man lying facedown in the snow.

  CHAPTER 30 Angels Could Do No More

  November 28, 1909

  Cairo, Illinois

  The Illinois Central Railroad train—one locomotive, six coach cars—carried Ida Wells straight down the spine of the state, on her way to Cairo after the lynching of Frog James. The trip was neither speedy nor especially safe. Most steam engines could push trains to speeds above sixty miles per hour, but conductors rarely went faster than 40 miles per hour because of the poor condition of the tracks. Even so, in 1909 alone, there were several fatal wrecks and accidents along the Illinois Central line—a train crashed into a coal car, killing six; five dead when a train turned over; three dead and thirty-six injured after a train was upended by broken rails.

  Wells rattled through dozens of towns—Kankakee, Champaign, Tuscola, Carbondale—before reaching the very last stop in Illinois—Cairo, nicknamed “Little Egypt.” The trip took more than twelve hours. Wells had made arrangements to visit with Cairo’s colored A.M.E. minister, and was met at the station and taken to his home.

  There, in the minister’s parlor, she made a shocking discovery.

  When Wells asked the minister for his help in gathering facts about the lynching of Frog James, he said he believed James was guilty of murdering Pelley and deserved to be lynched. Most of the black people in Cairo, he added, felt the same way.

  What was their belief based on? Wells asked.

  “Well,” the minister said, “he was a worthless sort of fellow, just about the kind of a man who would do a trick like that.”

  In fact, many black people in Cairo had already written letters of support or signed petitions in favor of Sheriff Davis, and sent them to the governor, asking that Davis be reinstated.

  Wells was astonished. She jumped to her feet and stood above the minister in his chair.

  “Do you realize what you’ve done in condoning the horrible lynching of a fellowman who is a member of your race?” she demanded. “Don’t you know that if you condone the lynching of one man, the time might come when you will have to condone that of other men higher up than Frog James, providing they are black?”

  The minister wasn’t moved. Wells got her coat and bag. She’d been invited to spend the night, “but after he told me that, I had no desire to do so,” Wells wrote. The minister provided the address of a friend, Will Taylor, a Cairo druggist, and Wells left for his home in the dark of night. The minister’s wife went with her because it was so late.

  Will Taylor was more helpful
. He connected Wells to several black people in town, and spent the next day with her as she interviewed them. They spoke to twenty-five people that day. Taylor also took Wells to the alleyway where Mary Pelley was murdered, and to the steel arch on Eighth and Commercial Streets, where Frog James was lynched. That night, Taylor set up a meeting between Wells and the black citizens of Cairo. More people turned out than Wells had expected.

  At the meeting, she gave a speech about her background and activism, and spoke to some of the men in attendance. She learned many of them were friends with Sheriff Davis and believed he was good to black people. Davis was a Republican, the party that was more favorable to blacks, and they preferred him over any Democratic replacement. Others felt it would be too dangerous for them to speak out or take action against a white sheriff. Wells understood their fear.

  “I am willing to take the lead in the matter,” she assured them, “but you must give me the facts. If we don’t take a stand against this lynching, we are endangering the lives of other colored people in Illinois.”

  She asked a series of pointed questions.

  Did Sheriff Davis use his great power to protect the victim?

  Had he sworn in any extra deputies to help protect him?

  Had he called the governor and asked for reinforcements?

  No one who was present, including a few men who had served as sheriff’s deputies under Frank Davis, could honestly say that Davis had done all he could to protect Frog James.

  That was all that mattered to Wells. She put forward a resolution condemning Davis’s actions and collected signatures for it. The next morning, she showed up uninvited at a meeting of Baptist ministers and asked for more signatures and support. One elderly minister confessed he’d already sent a letter of support for Davis. “I was told that when the mob placed the rope around Frog James’s neck, the sheriff tried to prevent them and was knocked down for his pains,” the minister explained.

  Wells pleaded her case. She spoke of the horror and brutality of the lynching, and of why it mattered that the 1905 act be enforced.

  “All your actions in support of Davis will mean that we have other lynchings in Illinois,” she warned, “whenever it suits a mob anywhere.”

  By the end of her speech, Wells remembered, the Baptist minister was in tears. He agreed to sign Wells’s resolution.

  “When you meet with the governor tomorrow,” he told her, “tell him I take my letter back and hereby sign my name to this resolution.”

  Her job in Cairo done, Wells got back on an Illinois Central train, churning toward Springfield, the state capital, 237 miles to the north. It was another long, hard ride, and Wells was anxious. Her husband had drafted a legal brief and sent it to the Springfield post office, where she would pick it up and have a very short time to read it, correct it, and prepare to use it in the hearing.

  The good news, Barnett told her, was that—although there was no legal precedent for this kind of reinstatement hearing—it was likely the Illinois attorney general would be there to represent the people in the case against Frank Davis. Wells would not be alone.

  And then at 10:00 a.m. on December 1, 1909, Wells walked into an elegant chamber in Springfield’s grand State Capitol Building, an Italian Renaissance Revival masterpiece with a spectacular 361-foot-tall dome and hallways lavished with historic paintings and sculptures—a shining monument to white wealth and power.

  As soon as she entered the chamber, Wells saw the truth of the situation—there was Sheriff Frank Davis, surrounded by a half dozen men in suits, including a former U.S. commissioner, a member of the state’s Board of Equalization, and an elderly black man, T. A. Head, who was ready to speak on Davis’s behalf.

  Behind them was a gallery of spectators, all white. The attorney general had not come after all. Neither had any black supporters. There was no one to speak for James, except for a single black local attorney, Morris Williams, who’d heard about the hearing and showed up to offer Wells whatever little help he could.

  * * *

  At the head of the chamber sat the Illinois governor, Charles S. Deneen, forty-six years old and handsome, with wavy black hair and penetrating eyes. Deneen was popular in the state with both whites and blacks. He earned much credit for suppressing the Springfield Riot in 1908, and he’d just won a second term as governor, the first man to serve two four-year terms as head of the state. Deneen called the meeting to order and gave the floor to Davis’s personal attorney, Walter Warder.

  Warder, fifty-eight, projected all the confidence and authority of a successful career politician, and a man accustomed to getting his way. He was the best-known lawyer in southern Illinois. He’d spent nearly three decades in public office and served as president pro tempore of the State Senate. Twice he’d been named acting governor.

  Warder also lived in Cairo and was good friends with Frank Davis. He stood up and read aloud Davis’s petition for reinstatement. The sheriff’s chief argument was that the lynching was not a result of any miscarriage of justice in Cairo, but rather due to the fact that the leaders of the mob, and many of its members, came across the border from Kentucky. They were not citizens of Cairo or Alexander County. What’s more, they could not be stopped, no matter what level of heroics.

  Warder followed up with another petition, this one from the business leaders of Cairo. He also offered letters, telegrams, and affidavits from dozens of prominent men—lawyers, bankers, shop owners, judges, military officials, clergymen, even the man appointed to temporarily fill the office of county sheriff. All of them insisted Frank Davis had done everything he could to prevent the lynching of Frog James.

  Warder left his most persuasive document for last. He produced a petition signed by some five hundred black citizens of Cairo, including its leading ministers, who all supported the reinstatement of Davis as sheriff.

  Wells already knew about the petition, which had been circulated among three black barbershops in Cairo. When she was in Cairo, Wells visited the barbershops and met a handful of men who had signed the petition. “To the few who happened to be standing around,” Wells recalled, “I gave the most blistering talk that I could lay my tongue to.”

  But now, in Springfield, the petition spoke for itself. When he had finished reading it aloud, Warder, satisfied with his case, took his seat. The governor looked in the direction of Wells and Williams, who were sitting by themselves across the table from Davis and his supporters.

  “I understand Mrs. Barnett is here to represent the colored people of Illinois,” Governor Deneen said.

  Not until that very moment, Wells would later say, “did I realize that the burden depended upon me.”

  * * *

  She was not a lawyer. She had no legal experience. She hadn’t even been sure she would be asked to speak at the hearing. And yet, here she was, on her own, expected to shoulder the entirety of the case against Frank Davis. Her eldest boy, Charles, had been right.

  If not her, then whom?

  Wells took the floor. In her strong and clear speaking voice she read the legal brief she’d picked up at the post office on her way to the Capitol Building. The brief emphasized the 1905 Suppression of Mob Violence Act, and Wells read the important words from Section 6. She stressed the unambiguous penalty for failure to protect a prisoner: “the Governor shall publish proclamation declaring the office of such sheriff vacant, and he shall thereby and thereafter immediately be vacated.”

  Wells then described her time in Cairo. She began to lay out the facts of the lynching, but before she could finish, the governor interrupted her. It was twelve o’clock. In country towns, all business stopped at noon so people could go home for dinner. The governor declared a recess. The hearing would resume at 2:00 p.m.

  Wells had not prepared a formal speech, and had then been interrupted midway through her remarks. She had not been able to show her true power as an orator. Nor was the case she was presenting comparable in breadth and scale to the support for Frank Davis, so forcefully articul
ated by his attorney, Walter Warder.

  The recess, therefore, came at a good time. Instead of accepting Morris Williams’s offer to have dinner at his home, Wells retreated to Williams’s Springfield office to work on the rest of her speech. She felt better prepared when Williams came to get her a little before 2:00 p.m.

  Back in the State Capitol Building, Governor Deneen returned the floor to Wells.

  The chamber grew quiet. Wells got up and continued reading from the resolution she had prepared in Cairo.

  This time Walter Warder stopped her.

  “Who wrote that resolution?” he asked.

  “Don’t answer him,” Morris Williams whispered to Wells. “He’s only trying to confuse you.”

  “Isn’t it a fact,” Warder said, “that you wrote the resolution?”

  “Yes,” Wells replied. “I wrote the resolution, and I presented it. But the audience adopted and passed it. It was done in the same way as the petition which you have presented here.”

  Wells turned to face the governor.

  “But that’s not all,” she went on. “Governor, I have here the signature of the leading Baptist minister who has been so highly praised to you. I went to his meeting yesterday, and when I told him what a mistake it was to seem to condone the outrage on a human being by writing a letter asking for the reinstatement of the man who permitted it to be done, he rose and admitted his mistake. He wanted me to tell you that he endorsed the resolutions which I have here, and here is his name signed to them.”

  Wells passed the petition over to Governor Deneen. Walter Warder had no more questions for her. Wells went into her closing argument.

  “Governor, the state of Illinois has had too many terrible lynchings within her borders within the last few years,” she said, speaking directly to Deneen. “If this man is sent back, it will be an encouragement to those who resort to mob violence, and will do so at any time, well knowing they will not be called to account for so doing.