The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  Today, the association has five hundred thousand members around the world, and an annual budget of $25 million.

  In nearly every historical account, Ida B. Wells-Barnett is considered one of the founders of the NAACP.

  * * *

  Exactly fifty years after he bought five hundred acres of scrub oak and sand dunes by the Atlantic Ocean, James A. Bradley died in his Manhattan apartment, at 10:00 p.m. on June 6, 1921. He was ninety-one, and the cause of his death was cancer and bladder disease.

  The city he created and sought to bend to his will mourned his passing and celebrated his life, and the newspaper he founded devoted its first two full pages to an appreciation of his vision and resolve. Clarence Hetrick, the former sheriff who became mayor of Asbury Park—largely on the strength of his role in the Marie Smith case—eulogized Bradley in the Asbury Park Evening Press: “He reared unto himself a monument that is everlasting… on the sands of the sea he builded a city. He left us a heritage of high ideals, of character eternal, of work accomplished and things done.”

  The year Bradley died, officials commissioned a statue of him, lean and bearded, gazing out at the ocean, and placed it in Bradley Park, across from the Convention Hall, in the heart of Asbury Park. In recent years, there have been efforts to have the statue removed because of Bradley’s support of segregation. The statue has stayed, though the Asbury Park Historical Society did acknowledge Bradley’s history of racism.

  So there he stands today, high above his boardwalk, in sight of the stretch of beach where he once sat with his black friend, John Baker, and dreamed of a bright and shining city, godly and free of sin.

  As for the city Bradley actually did build, it is but a shell of the glittering resort it once was. The two hundred swank hotels, the carnival rides and dance halls, the Carousel and the Baby Parade—all gone. A shift to the suburbs, a 1970 race riot, new casinos in Atlantic City, crime, and poverty came together to turn Bradley’s paradise into something like a ghost town. There have been spurts of urban revival, even today, but what has been lost will likely never return. America does not spend its summers as it used to, with petticoats and parasols and carriage rides and fortune-tellers. Asbury Park is a city of shadows cast by its own past.

  And the place in the world where Marie Smith’s body was found—the gloomy Wanamassa woods on the northern edge of town, by the sparkling waters of Deal Lake—is gone, too. Houses are there now.

  Max Kruschka’s home and greenhouses are gone as well, replaced by an auto body shop. Whether or not Kruschka knew of Frank Heidemann’s crimes, or helped him in any way, remains unknown.

  * * *

  On March 21, 1931, Ida Wells-Barnett, then sixty-eight, wasn’t feeling well and went to bed early. The next day, she skipped church and stayed in bed. Her husband, Ferdinand, noticed she did not look well—she was restless and burning up. He got her to a hospital, and she remained there, unconscious, for three days.

  At 1:00 a.m. on March 25, Wells died of kidney disease.

  Crowds filled and surrounded Chicago’s Metropolitan Church, where a simple, poignant memorial service was held. Her sons Charles and Henry helped carry her coffin, and a man sang a mournful ballad:

  I’ve done my work, I’ve sung my song

  I’ve done some good, I’ve done some wrong

  And I shall go where I belong

  The Lord has willed it so.

  Long ago, Wells realized her strength lay in her stubbornness, and when the press remembered her, they remembered that strength. “Her militant attitude and uncompromising stand for racial rights made her an outstanding figure,” wrote the New York Age, while the Oakland Tribune said, “she was great because she was fearless… she was one of the greatest Negro women the world has ever produced.”

  The New York Times chose not to run an obituary for Wells—a mistake they acknowledged eighty-seven years later, admitting that for more than a century “obituaries in the New York Times have been dominated by white men.” As recompense, the paper ran a belated tribute:

  Wells is considered by historians to have been the most famous black woman in the United States during her lifetime, even as she was dogged by prejudice, a disease infecting Americans from coast to coast. She pioneered reporting techniques that remain central tenets of modern journalism. And as a former slave who stood less than five feet tall, she took on structural racism more than half a century before her strategies were repurposed, often without crediting her, during the 1960s civil rights movement.

  Ida Wells was, in simplest terms, a participant in the battle. She refused to be told how things were, when she could use her own eyes and ears to determine the truth. “When we had a riot in Chicago, she went out every day,” her daughter Alfreda M. Duster recalled in an interview years later. “Everyone else was disposed to be holing up and boarding up, but she wanted to be in the action. She wanted to see for herself.”

  This, too, was Wells’s message to the downtrodden—you have more power than you know, and your power is in your individuality, the richness of your divinity, the glory of your humanity. “My mother had a constant drive and desire to make conditions better,” Duster said, “so that persons would have an opportunity to fulfill their own potential.”

  Ida Wells wrote names where before there were none. She demanded the admission that the lynching victims she fought so hard for were once beautiful human beings, with families and dreams and loves and hopes, each a unique child of God, each far more than their struggles and suffering, each flowing with beauty and talent and song. She did this by using the language of her oppressors—who called the black race savage, beastly, barbaric—and flipping it to apply to the practices of oppression. It was the slavers and lynchers who were savages. It was their doings that were demonic.

  And the men and women of her race—these were not beasts to be extinguished by “person or persons unknown.” There was true greatness and unfathomable grace in what they endured, in what they overcame, in how they grasped at the tools of freedom and pushed their bloodlines through time and history, until their power and culture came to matter, and they began to claim as theirs what rightfully belonged to them.

  This was the blessed work of Ida Wells, and this is the brilliant idea that persists:

  We are never better than when we give our voice to the voiceless, our strength to the weak, our lives to the battle between the darkness and the light.

  Author’s Note

  Seven miles over the Brooklyn Bridge, through the stone arch gates of Holy Cross Cemetery, I found a forgotten grave.

  I went there in July 2017 because I’d heard the story of Marie Smith, a young schoolgirl who was murdered in Asbury Park in 1910. Her killing was a notorious crime that was covered nationally, and the defense of the primary murder suspect was the third case ever handled by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The story sat at a historic intersection of sweeping national forces—religious extremism, class struggle, the infancy of criminal psychology, and Jim Crow racial violence. Yet there was hardly any literature about it.

  There existed, however, a record of where the young victim was buried in 1910—Holy Cross Cemetery in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. That seemed like a good place to start learning more.

  The grave wasn’t easy to find, even with a map of the plots. It was supposed to be in the western end of the ninety-six-acre cemetery, in an area near an old white chapel. I walked along a row of mismatched headstones, many tilting or leaning with age—but I couldn’t find the number of the plot I was looking for. It just wasn’t there.

  I saw a green work truck parked along a walkway and went over. The driver was Fred, the cemetery superintendent. He walked me back to the row of stones and helped me look. About halfway down the row we stopped at a short gray slab with the name O’Brien on it. A few feet to the left was the headstone marked Antoinette Calvello, who passed in 1905. In between the stones, in a space of just two feet across, several clumps of overgrown ryegr
ass weeds sprouted three feet high. Fred looked at the drooping weeds for a minute before he could be sure.

  “That must be it, then,” he said, pointing.

  “No headstone?”

  “No, sir.”

  I crouched down and pulled the weeds apart. There was a small dirt clearing, the size of a shoe box, where no grass or weeds grew—a spot where a small marker or headstone might go.

  But there was nothing there. Just rocks and dirt. All there was in the world to mark that someone’s bones lay below. And not just someone—two someones. Young Marie Smith, and her brother John, who died of accidental poisoning at eighteen months. Each in their own box, stacked vertically. Buried more than a century ago.

  Buried, and now lost beneath the weeds. As close to forgotten as you can get, without having nothing or nowhere at all.

  That bare plot of earth is where this book began.

  * * *

  A few weeks after the book was finished, in the summer of 2019, I went back to Holy Cross.

  This time, it was easy to find Marie’s spot. I knelt beside it and pulled up some weeds and dug up three inches of dirt. Then I lay a small bronze-plated marker in the empty space and secured it there. It was a simple marker, the size of a brick, and it was engraved with two names.

  John Smith, the beloved son, and his sister, Marie Smith.

  The inscription below the girl’s name reads:

  Marie was the flower.

  —Alex Tresniowski, 2019

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Lorraine Stundis—I did this book because you believed I could do it, and that meant everything. Thank you to Earlene Williams, who I love and admire so much. Thank you to Tamara Tresniowski, always there for me, my hero and champion at every turn. Thank you to Will Becker, a great guy who taught me what true friendship looks like.

  Thank you, Susan Schindehette, for clearing the way for me to do this book. You are and will always be the most beautiful writer I know. To Peter Lucia, the world’s top expert on the Tom Williams case—thank you for shining a light on this story. Thank you to my great literary agent, Frank Weimann, who probably has the best left hook among all agents. A big thank-you to the brilliant Dawn Davis, who took a chance on me, encouraged me through all my delays, and made the book so much better than it was. Thank you to Chelcee Johns, for all your help and kindness. And thank you to the incredible historian Paula Giddings, whose definitive book about Ida Wells was my touchstone.

  Thank you, Laura Schroff—your support and belief in me means so much more than you will ever know, and so does your unconditional friendship. When I met you, everything changed. Thanks to Mark Apovian, for the golf tips and inappropriate texts. Thanks to the great book lover Lucinda Williams, for always being interested in what I do. Thank you to Jeremy Sabatini, for all your help and support. Thank you to Ricci Adan, for your faith in me, and to Henry Howard, a true badass to the end.

  Thank you dearly to all these folks, and to all the people who give my life meaning and joy—to my sister Tam, and Howie; to my sister Fran Lanning, and Rich, Zach, and Emily; to my brother, Nick Tresniowski, and Susan and Humboldt; to Mark Stundis and Janice, Sam, Andreas, Dino, Holly, and Nicky; to Grace Jepson and Rob and Quincy, Henry, and Elizabeth; to Jessie Mignoni and Paul, Celeste, and Charlie; to the one and only Willie Spellmann; to Jordie, Chelsea, and Beau; to Laurentiu, Natalia, and Victor Stroia; to Lindsay, Amy, Neil, and Angela; to Paul Fronczak, Crystal McVea, Steven Carino, Lisa Reburn, Joy Mangano, Roger Woodward, Susie Spain, Nino Perrotta, Maurice Mazyck, Dr. Alan Felix, and Laura Lynne Jackson.

  And of course, thank you to all the wonderful little ones who live in my crowded heart—Mischa, Nickie, Billie Boy, BeBe, Nino, She She, Guy, LaLa, Manley, Baby Girl, Bitsy, Pony, Matilda, and Maise. You bring me so much love.

  —Alex Tresniowski, 2020

  More from the Author

  Angels on Earth

  Chasing Heaven

  Waking Up in Heaven

  An Invisible Thread

  An Invisible Thread

  About the Author

  © LORRAINE STUNDIS

  Alex Tresniowski is a writer who lives and works in New York. He has written for both TIME and People magazines, handling mostly human-interest stories. He is the author or coauthor of more than twenty books, including the 2005 true-crime thriller The Vendetta, which was used as a basis for the 2009 movie Public Enemies starring Johnny Depp. For more about this story and the author, please visit alextres.com.

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  Names: Tresniowski, Alex, author. Title: The rope : a true story of murder, heroism, and the dawn of the NAACP / Alex Tresniowski. Description: First 37 INK/Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. | New York, NY : Simon & Schuster, [2020] Identifiers: LCCN 2020046660 (print) | LCCN 2020046661 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982114022 (hardback) | ISBN 9781982114039 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781982114046 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Murder—New Jersey—Asbury Park—History—20th century. | Murder—Investigation—New Jersey—Asbury Park—History—20th century. | Heroes—New Jersey—Asbury Park—History—20th century. | National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Classification: LCC HV6534.A62 T74 2020 (print) | LCC HV6534.A62 (ebook) | DDC 364.152/3092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046660 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046661

  ISBN 978-1-9821-1402-2

  ISBN 978-1-9821-1404-6 (ebook)