by Tonya Bolden
“Father says the men who put it out are also atheists!”
“Yes, Yolande, they are socialists and …”
Savannah didn’t know what to do with “atheists.” She didn’t know anyone who wasn’t Baptist or Methodist, who flat-out just didn’t believe in God.
I’m not a party member. But I see eye to eye with a lot of the thinking. That’s what Lloyd had said. Was he an atheist too?
“And socialists are like anarchists, like Reds, Savannah!” Yolande was hysterical, pale cheeks flaming red.
“I’ve never heard of socialists planting bombs or calling for the obliteration of government. Seems to me they simply want people—well, like factory workers, builders, mechanics—to have better lives all around.”
“You’re wrong! Father says that people like that Eugene Debs, they want people like us to give up everything we have. They want common people to run things. And Debs looks a lot like that devil Lenin who’s behind all that Bolshevik Red Terror in Russia. They’re killing rich people right and left.
“The Messenger isn’t calling for anyone to be—”
“I’m telling you, Savannah, getting caught with a magazine like that could—”
“What?”
“Land you in big, big, a heap of trouble.”
“Yolande, I don’t need you to—”
“I’m trying to save you, Savannah!”
“From what?”
“From yourself!”
“I don’t need saving!”
“Girls … Everything all right in there?”
Mother on the landing.
“We’re fine,” replied Savannah. “Just having a lively debate.”
After Yolande practically fled the room, Savannah returned to the Messenger. Between one page and the next, she found a newspaper clipping.
“The New Politics for the New Negro” by Hubert H. Harrison.
Magnetic. Commanding. Insistent. A subtle poetry in the prose as he wrote of something called Swadesha, something called Sinn Fein, of the Negro plight.
One line stood out. “The world, as it ought to be,34 is still for us, as for others, the world that does not exist.”
As for others? Who are these others?
When Savannah was next out at Lincoln Heights, this time assigned to the store, Lloyd was nowhere to be found.
She left an envelope for Nella. Inside, a note:
Dear Nella,
Please return this magazine to Lloyd and tell him that I thank him for it.
The time after that, Mona handed Savannah a thick package. “Nella left this for you.”
Inside the package a note:
Dear Savannah:
I thought you might find this interesting. This book is about thirty years old but millions of people in the land of the free still live like this. Thousands in this city. Negroes in the shadow of the Capitol.
Note tucked into the book, Savannah scanned the title. The red lettering made her think of a Charles Dickens tale.
Above the title a sketch of three barefoot boys huddled together, shivering maybe.
Beneath the title a warren of bleak, haunted-looking tenements.
Later that night, in an eyelet-trimmed ice-blue nightgown and tucked between crisp, clean sheets, Savannah went randomly through the book’s drawings.
“In the home of an Italian rag-picker, Jersey street,” read one caption.
Home? More like a closet or stall.
Rough walls, wooden bucket, tin tubs, bundles stuffed, Savannah assumed, with rags. And the woman cradling a baby, she was looking up. In anger? Fear? Despair?
“Lodgers in a Crowded Bayard Street Tenement—‘Five cents a spot.’ ”
Grimy men on pallets. Clothes hanging haphazard on nails in walls. A pair of beat-up boots before a filthy little stove.
Her home was a palace in comparison.
Whole families living in a single room; some looked to be about half the size of their parlor, Charlie’s old room, Mother’s sewing room that doubled as another guest room.
Savannah paged back to the introduction: “Long ago it was said that ‘one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.’ That was true then. It did not know because it did not care.”
Savannah studied more illustrations.
“Upstairs in Blindman’s Alley.”
“Bandits’ Roost.”
“Bottle Alley.”35
And these were mostly whitefolks.
Dear Lloyd,
Thank you for the book. I want to see how the other half lives here. Our people. You said in the shadow of the Capitol.
There was no note needed as it turned out on that April day. Lloyd was whitewashing outbuildings. He was just about done with one near the largest garden plot, ground already sown with early crops. Cucumbers. Lettuces. Spinach. Pole beans.
“So you feeling yuhself brave enough?” He was playful, not mean.
Savannah nodded her head. “Plenty brave!”
Lloyd paused, whitewash brush in mid-air. “Can you get away Tuesday afternoon?”
Savannah thought fast. “Yes, I can manage that.” Tuesday was cold dinner day because Mother spent the afternoon and early evening at Cedar Hill. “Say four o’clock?”
Lloyd nodded. “We meet on the edge of the Capitol lawn?”
Savannah nodded, then dashed off to the library with a satchel of books she was donating. After that she headed to Pioneer Hall to assist Mona with paperwork.
It seemed a forever walk, deeper, deeper into Southwest. On they walked until they came to a place Savannah found more frightening than that street of drab row houses, Barrows’ Meat Market, and the Open Eye Saloon.
Alley after alley, crammed-together shanties.
Crude wood.
Crumbling brick.
Tar paper roofs.
“They call this area Beggars’ Bay,” said Lloyd. He had stopped at the mouth of an alley. Entering, he reached back for Savannah’s hand.
Savannah was glad for that hand, rough but warm and pulsing good, as she sidestepped broken glass, rusted tin cans, spied pot-bellied barefoot boys, girls. A shriveled old woman in a battered bonnet, filthy striped skirt, and plaid blouse staggered past.
Grown-ups cussed, babies wailed.
Savannah smelled grease, gases, greens, human waste.
A rat skittered across their path.
How many newspapers report scenes like this?
A one-eyed mangy cat gave chase.
And this?
Savannah tightened her grip on Lloyd’s hand.
“No indoor plumbing,” he whispered.
Newspapers to windows.
On page one, or two—anywhere in the paper?
Pipes, busted buckets, table legs, rags, fence planks, strewn upon the ground.
Mother’s sermons on how blessed she and Charlie were …
Random stories about people to whom the Association gave food, clothes …
Passing by, in the street, grinders, cart men, washerwomen, chimney sweeps, tinkers …
The sight of veterans missing arms, legs …
Illustrations of Bandits’ Roost, Bottle Alley …
None of it compared to standing amid such dense and pressing need.
Her emerald velvet-and-chiffon dress … her silver dancing shoes, the white evening gloves, that silver-and-rhinestone peacock-shaped hairpin … It could probably feed a family for a week—or more, maybe a whole month! Now that would be some real renewal.
“No electricity,” Lloyd whispered, giving Savannah’s hand a squeeze.
One home had an old headboard as a door. Faded lettering on the brick revealed the dwelling’s history as a stable.
A little boy, watchful, wary, hunched atop a mound of rubble, was wolfing down a piece of bread with one hand, clutching a well-worn book in the other.
The forgettable, the forgotten.
“Lloyd!”
A husky man with a bent back lumbered down into the alley.
&n
bsp; “Brother Spencer!”
The two men embraced.
“You coming to the meeting on Thursday night, right?”
“Be there!”
“Bring everybody who work with you at the Navy Yard.”
“Lined up already!”
“Good man!” said Lloyd. “I’ll see you then.”
Seconds after the bent-back man headed farther down the alley, Lloyd checked his pocket watch. “Enough for one day?”
Savannah nodded. “What happened to him, his back? Spencer, is it?”
“He fell off a scaffold at the Yard. He didn’t stay bandaged up and in bed long enough.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Mouths to feed.”
“He lives here?”
Lloyd shook his head. “But he got family here.”
They were near a home outside of which a middle-aged woman in a housedress and boots was working a water pump. Nearby a girl in a faded red-check pinafore dress, with a proud, alert bearing, was sweeping three crude wooden steps.
This needs to be on the front of every newspaper, every day!
“You are right, Lloyd,” Savannah whispered, heartsick and roiling with rage. They were back again at the mouth of the alley. “People need more than patches. They need …”
Steps away and they were still holding hands.
“It’s so much,” said Savannah. “It’s so big.” She multiplied that alley by ten, twenty. And that was just in the District.
“We need a big change,” said Lloyd. “Big change in how we all see, how we all think.”
“ ‘The world, as it ought to be,’ ” Savannah whispered.
They passed small churches, saloons, pawnshops, dilapidated wood-frame buildings, barrels and bushel baskets, a barbershop with its prices stenciled in the window. Shave ten cents. Haircut twenty-five. In the cellar below a cobbler’s shop.
A streetcar clanged by.
Savannah found an excuse to retrieve a handkerchief from her handbag—self-conscious, unnerved by how long she and Lloyd had walked hand in hand.
“You’re more brave than I thought, Miss Ting,” he said. “You held up good.”
Back at the edge of the Capitol lawn, Lloyd tipped his hat, tapped the top of Savannah’s nose. “Smile, Miss Ting. When you get too down about people’s plight, then you’re in no shape to act.”
Savannah managed a half smile, held it, wishing her hand again in his.
Lloyd was just a few feet on his way back deeper into Southwest when Savannah called out, “Lloyd?”
He spun around, returned. “Yeah?”
“That meeting you mentioned to Spencer, what is that about?”
“I give talks about how capitalism works, how the big-big wealth grows on the backs of we little people, how the system need to change.”
PATHETIC!
Yolande flew from her house when Savannah turned onto the block.
She was on the bottom step when Savannah reached her walkway.
“I saw you!”
“Saw me what?” Savannah’s eyes narrowed.
“I saw you leave your house looking like you were about to work in the garden! I followed you. I saw you meet that common-looking man too black for comfort.”
Yolande took a step back. Savannah was spitting mad, and for a moment Yolande feared Savannah might even slap her.
“Have you forgotten that my father is dark-skinned?”
“But he’s not blue black. And he’s a credit to the race.”
Savannah rolled her eyes. “How do you know that this ‘common-looking’ man, as you put it—his name is Lloyd, by the way, and he’s Nella’s cousin—how do you know he’s not a credit to the race? Huh? Tell me that, Miss Know-It-All! Or perhaps I should make that Miss Know-Nothing!”
Yolande swallowed. “Well, I’m going to tell your parents!”
“Go ahead. Tell them! After what I’ve seen today …”
“What?”
Savannah turned away. “Nothing that you would care about.” She took a few more steps, then made an about-face.
Yolande jittered inside beneath Savannah’s steely glare.
“You know what, Yolande … I don’t want to walk with you to school, from school. I don’t want you to talk to me at school.” Her voice was low but hard. “I don’t want to go with you to Board’s or anywhere else ever again!”
“But—”
“I can’t take you anymore, Yolande! You’re a worm, ridiculous, pathetic! And if you also want to tell my parents what I just said, fine!”
As Savannah hurried into her house, tears flooded Yolande’s face.
Why did I follow her? Why did I say those awful things? Why can’t I stop myself from making her angry? Yolande beat her fists against her temples, slid down the fence, still sobbing.
Surely the friendship was now blown to smithereens.
A few days later, real bombs were in the news—a bomb plot that shook the world as Yolande knew it.
MORE CHAOS TO COME
“U.S. HUNTS ANARCHISTS36 AS MAY DAY MAIL PLOT FAILS TO GAIN VICTIMS.”
More than thirty bombs.
Packages the size of biscuit tins.
Dressed up as samples from Gimbel Brothers in New York City.
Thanks to insufficient postage, about half never reached their destinations.
Targeted: Seattle mayor Ola Hanson, proud of his iron-fist approach toward striking workers.
Targeted: Former Georgia Senator Thomas W. Hardwick, proud cosponsor of a bill that gave the government free rein to deport immigrants who were anarchists, even immigrants caught with anarchist propaganda.
Targeted: Other champions of kicking immigrants out of the country, especially Italians, Germans, Russians.
Targeted: capitalists John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan.
Targeted: Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. He had penned the High Court’s unanimous ruling upholding a lower court’s decision to sentence Eugene Debs to ten years’ imprisonment and to strip him of his citizenship.
Postmasters everywhere were on high alert and Savannah seized by a sense of more chaos to come.
She turned to page two of the Star for more on the bomb plot. Immediately her eyes fastened upon a diagram.
Percussion caps.
Metal burrs.
Bottle filled with acid.
Dynamite.
She felt out of body, out of time as her eyes glided down to a big ad for Leverton’s on G Street, boasting “THE LARGEST BLOUSE DEPARTMENT IN THE CITY.”37
Who could care about new blouses at such a time as this?
Savannah put down the Star.
By sundown Father had gotten word to his employees that the office would be closed the next day. He later brought up from the basement a metal chest, and from the garden shed, a stake and a toolbox. “Pumpkin, bring me a sheet from one of your large sketch pads and a marking pen.”
When a still-numb Savannah joined Father in the front yard with its petunias, begonias, its dogwood tree, she began to tremble as she watched him put the metal box on a patch of lawn right behind the gate, pound the stake into the ground. Then he took the sheet of paper, the pen, stooped down on the ground with both, wrote:
Mr. Parker, please deposit all mail in this box.
Father nailed the sign to the stake.
“Just a precaution,” he said, closing up that toolbox. “I don’t think we have anything to worry about. Just a precaution.”
“Please, Lloyd, be careful,” Savannah whispered to the night. She was standing on her balcony trying to be calm, trying not to cry.
The authorities wouldn’t just round up anarchists. They’d hunt down Reds, socialists, anybody branded radical.
I give talks about how capitalism works, how the big-big wealth grows on the backs of we little people, how the system need to change.
“Please, Lloyd, be careful.”
TWO WEAK WHIMPERS
Like a peregrine clutching prey in its claws,
fear had a tight grip on the capital.
People jumped, scattered when a car backfired.
Streets eerie like at the height of Spanish flu.
Talking less.
Whispering more.
No strolling. Hurried gaits.
Eyes straight ahead or cast on the ground.
Savannah was returning from school on the Monday after May Day when two Model Ts whipped around the corner. They screeched to a halt before the Pinchbacks’ Tudor-like townhouse.
Out poured one, two, three, four, five burly white men.
Black suits.
Black fedoras.
They barreled to the door.
“Open up!” one boomed as he banged.
Another began banging. “Open up!”
Quick as she could, Savannah made it to her house, saw Mother in the living room window, saw Yolande and her mother in theirs.
“Mother! Mother! What’s going on?”
By the time Savannah joined Mother at the window, the Pinchbacks’ front door was kicked in, the last of the white men surging forward.
Bumping. Banging. Thudding. Slaps. Punches.
Angry, growling commands.
Things crashed, shattered.
Shouts.
Mrs. Pinchback’s screams.
Between a tick and a tock two men dragged pudgy Mr. Pinchback from the house. His collarless white shirt, suspenders, trousers splattered with blood that ran down the side of his face, from his nose. Without his glasses, he was a stumbler in the night.
Two more men hauled out a squirming Mrs. Pinchback, her housedress ripped in places. She bit. She kicked.
They slapped.
Little Sebastian scampered out growling, yapped, snapped, nipped at ankles.
The fifth man emerged from the house, drew his revolver.
Savannah looked away, buried her head in Mother’s bosom, heard—
Bang!
Then two weak whimpers.
FROZEN
He was a haberdasher: Pinchback’s Toggery Shop on Seventh near T Street.
Father purchased much of his clothing there.
Savannah passed it whenever she went to Uncle Madison’s or to just have a walk about U Street.
Mrs. Pinchback gave music lessons in their home—had been her and Yolande’s piano teacher.
