by John Jakes
“Bellman,” the clerk said, snapping his fingers. He looked outraged.
Patricia said, “Fremont, don’t play with your knackwurst.” Fremont Junior speared it with his fork and flung it on the floor. Patricia smacked his knuckles.
Her husband said to George: “How many of the Mains from South Carolina will be joining us?”
George put down his stein of Centennial Bock Bier and shook his head.
“Only Orry’s widow, I regret to say. Orry’s niece Marie-Louise is having her second child in August. Her doctor advised her not to travel. As for her father, Orry’s brother—” he drew a breath, his face grave. “After a good deal of thought, and despite the slight to his wife, who’s a lovely person, I declined to send an invitation to Cooper. He made it clear long ago that he was a Main in name only. Like Ashton. I never had any intention of trying to locate her.”
Judge Cork Bledsoe, three years retired from the state circuit, kept a small farm near the seacoast, ten miles south of Charleston. On a hot July morning, seven men riding single file turned into his lane to pay a call. They were not Klansmen; nothing concealed their faces. The only garments they wore in common were heavy red flannel shirts.
No one knew exactly why red had been adopted by loyal Democrats for their mounted rifle clubs; the custom had gotten started a few months ago, up around Aiken and Edgefield and Hamburg, along the Savannah River, where resistance to Republicans and blacks was perhaps the most savage in the state.
Cooper rode third in line. He’d tied a large white kerchief around his scrawny neck to sop up sweat, but it didn’t help much. From his saddle scabbard jutted the polished stock of the very latest Winchester big-bore, Model 1876—the “Centennial.” It fired a 350-grain bullet heavy enough to stop a stampeding buffalo. Lately Cooper had acquired a taste for firearms, something he’d never had before.
Judith objected to her husband’s keeping such a weapon at Tradd Street. She also disliked his new friends, and their activities. It made no difference to him; he no longer cared what she thought. They shared the same house but he displayed little affection toward her; their communication was minimal.
He considered the work of this group and similar ones throughout the state to be crucial. Only a government of dedicated white men could redeem South Carolina and put the social order right.
A dowdy woman with gray hair and bowed shoulders watched the horsemen ride into the dooryard and arrange themselves in a semicircle in front of the house. The woman had been pruning some of her roses; there were dozens of them, pink, dusty red, peach, fuming the air with their sweetness.
The spokesman for the callers, the lawyer Favor Herrington, touched the brim of his planter’s hat. “Good day, Leota.”
“Good day, Favor.” She acknowledged three others by name; Cooper was one. She didn’t miss the rifle or shotgun each man carried on his saddle.
Herrington plucked his sticky shirt away from his chest. “Scorcher, isn’t it? I wonder if I might have a word with the Judge? Tell him some of his friends from the Calhoun Saber Club are here.”
Leota Bledsoe hurried into the house. Moments later, shirt cuffs rolled up and his hot-looking black wool vest hanging open, the judge shuffled out in his carpet slippers. He was a slight man with mild brown eyes. He had shares in several of the larger phosphate processing plants near the city.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of a visit by such a distinguished group from the political opposition?” he said with a certain sarcasm.
Herrington chuckled. “You know we’re Democrats, Judge, but I hope you recognize that we’re Straightouts, and not damn Co-operationists who want to crawl in bed with the damn Republicans.”
“With those red shirts I could hardly make a mistake,” the Judge said heavily. All that spring there had been a fierce struggle between those who wanted to keep the Democratic Party pure and those who wanted to strengthen it by means of a coalition with some of the less obnoxious Republicans, such as Governor D. H. Chamberlain. Cooper and Straightouts like him were now resorting to some unusual methods to strengthen the party. Red-shirt rifle clubs. Visits such as this one. Public meetings; even some useful, if bloody, rioting. The last day or two, he’d heard, darkies and white men from both sides of the river had been knocking heads up in Hamburg.
“We want to discuss the nominating convention in Columbia next month,” Herrington said.
That irritated the Judge. “Blast it, boys, don’t you waste my time. Everyone knows I’ve voted Republican six yean running.”
“Yes, Judge, we know,” Cooper said. “Perhaps that was in the best interests of your business.” Casually, he laid a hand on the stock of the Centennial Winchester. “We don’t believe that it’s in the best interests of the state.”
“See here, I’m not going to discuss my politics with a bunch of bullies who ride around selling their opinions with rifles.”
“These rifles are for defense only,” another of the Red Shirts said.
“Defense!” The Judge snorted. “You use those guns to frighten honest black men who only want the franchise, which is their Constitutional right. I know what this is, it’s the Mississippi scheme. It cleaned all the Republicans and nigras out of state office over there last year, and now you’re trying the same plan here. Well, I’m not interested.”
He turned and shuffled back toward his front door.
“Judge, just a minute.” Favor Herrington no longer sounded cordial. In the rose-scented shadows, the Judge blinked at the armed riders.
“I don’t deny what you say,” Herrington continued. “Yes, we are encouraging the niggers either to change their vote or to stay away from the polls in November. We are going to turn the Republican majority in this state into a Democratic one. We’re going to nominate a Straightout ticket next month, starting with General Hampton at the top, and we’re going to redeem South Carolina from the carpetbaggers and mongrel legislators who are dragging her to shame and ruin. Now”—he swabbed his shiny face with a blue bandanna—“to make that plan work, we must also convert erring Republicans to Democrats once again.”
“Bulldoze them, that’s what you mean,” the Judge snapped. “At gunpoint.”
“No, sir, Judge, nothing like that. We ask only that you do what’s right for the state. We ask it politely and respectfully.”
“Balderdash,” the old man said.
Herrington raised his voice. “All your Republican brethren are doing it, Judge. It’s a simple thing. Just change over. Cross Jordan.”
“Cross Jordan, is that what you call it? I’d sooner cross the Styx into hell.”
A couple of the Calhoun Saber Club members started to draw their rifles. In the house, the Judge’s wife called a muffled warning. The dooryard grew very still in the heat. One of the horses dropped reeking dung. Herrington cued Cooper with a sideways glance.
Cooper tried to sound reasonable. “We are in earnest, Judge Bledsoe. You mustn’t take us lightly. You have a family to think about, many grandchildren. Wouldn’t you prefer respectability to ostracism? If not for yourself, then for them?”
“Up in Charleston,” Herrington added, “there are a lot of hooligans roaming the streets. Sometimes decent folk aren’t safe. Especially girls of a tender age. You have two such granddaughters in Charleston, don’t you, sir?”
“By God, sir, are you threatening me?” the Judge cried.
“No, sir,” Cooper said with a sober expression. “All we want is your pledge to cross Jordan. To support Governor Hampton when we nominate him in Columbia. To tell others of your decision.”
“You boys go to hell, and take your rifles with you,” Judge Cork Bledsoe said. “This isn’t Mississippi.”
“I’m sorry that’s your decision,” Favor Herrington said with cold fury. “Come on, fellows.”
They rode one by one from the sweet-smelling dooryard. Judge Bledsoe stayed on the porch, glaring, until the last rider disappeared up the Charleston pike.
Herrington dropped b
ack to walk his horse beside Cooper’s. “You know the next name on the list.”
“I know. I’m not going to have anything to do with it. He’s my son-in-law.”
“We don’t expect you to take part, Cooper. You’re excused from dealing with Mr. German. But we’re going to call on him.”
Cooper wiped his sweaty mouth with his long fingers. Softly, he said, “Do what you must.”
Two nights later, unknown persons fired three rounds through the window of Bledsoe’s house. At church the following Sunday, old friends in the congregation refused to speak to the Judge or his wife. On Tuesday, as their fifteen-year-old granddaughter and her governess strolled home on King Street at dusk, two young white men dashed from an alley, snatched the girl’s reticule, and threatened her with knives. One slashed the sleeve of her dress before they ran off. At the end of the week Judge Cork Bledsoe announced his intention to cross Jordan.
___________
1776
THREE MILLIONS OF COLONISTS ON A STRIP BY THE SEA
1876
FORTY MILLIONS OF FREEMEN
RULING FROM OCEAN TO OCEAN
City of Philadelphia
Centennial poster
___________
“We won’t be needing the suite,” Virgilia said. “We have a reservation elsewhere.”
The clerk at the Continental, the same one who had registered Madeline and Jane, was dubious. “Whatever you say, Mrs. Brown. I hope you’re certain of your accommodations. I know of nothing to be had, not even hall space, in any of the good hotels.”
“We’ll be fine,” Virgilia said. She left the noisy lobby and got into the hack waiting at the curb. Elegantly dressed in an overcoat with velvet lapels and pearl-gray gloves, Scipio regarded his wife with mild displeasure.
“Why did you do that?”
She kissed his cheek. “Because it isn’t worth the fight, darling. I want to stay where we won’t be treated rudely and stared at constantly. We’ll have enough of it when we’re with the family.” She noted his frown and squeezed his hand. “Please. You know I’ll always go to the barricades if it’s important. This isn’t important. Let’s enjoy ourselves.”
“Where do you want to go now?” the driver called down. He didn’t hide his unhappiness about carrying a black man and a white woman, however much he made from it.
“To the Negro district,” Virgilia replied. The driver made a face and drove away.
“Bison?”
“Bunk, by God!” Charles whooped and dashed forward to his friend just coming down the marble stairs. People in the lobby stared at the lanky man in frontier costume bear-hugging the proper little fellow in a business suit. Questions and answers tumbled one over another.
“You brought Brett and the youngsters?”
“Yes. They’re upstairs. Where’s your wife? I’m eager to meet her.”
“Conferring with the head porter about train schedules. She wants to go to New York to see an old friend.”
They went to the saloon bar. Each studied the other, noting many changes. And although they spoke with enthusiasm and warmth, each felt a little shy of the other; it had been a long time since their postwar reunion at Mont Royal.
Children seemed a bridge over the years. “I’m hoping for an Academy appointment for my oldest son if my brother Stanley can stay in Congress three more terms. Isn’t your boy about the same age as G. W.? They could start together, just the way we did.”
Soberly, Charles said, “I’m not sure I want Gus to be a soldier.”
“He wouldn’t have to stay in forever. And it’s always been the finest education offered in America.”
Charles’s eyes seemed to drift away, past the layered smoke and the gaslights, past the noisy regulars and the visitors at the long oak bar, to some distant time, some distant place beside a river in the Indian Territory.
“I’m still not sure,” he said.
Willa found America’s Ace of Players in a dirty Mulberry Street rooming house that was almost a tenement. She knocked twice, got no answer, opened the door, and saw him seated in a rocker, staring out a grimy rain-washed window. The view was a wall. He didn’t turn when she closed the door. He must be going deaf.
The sight of the small room crowded with old trunks, piles of wardrobe items, and clipping books broke her heart. Above the door he’d hung a horseshoe. The chrysanthemum in his lapel was wilted and brown. A black cat in his lap arched and hissed at her. That made him turn.
“Willa, my child. I’d no idea you’d be here today.” Her telegram had stated both the exact date and the probable hour of her arrival. “Please, come in.”
When he stood, she noticed his swollen, misshapen knuckles. The contrast between his wrinkled skin and ludicrous dyed hair was sad. She hugged him lovingly. “How are you, Sam?”
“Never better. Never better! For a man sixty years old, I am fit as a young bachelor.” She knew he was seventy-five. “Come sit down and let me share my exciting news. Any day now, I have it on good authority, none other than Mr. Joe Jefferson is going to ask me to step in for two weeks and play Rip Van Winkle while he enjoys a seaside holiday. The part is around here somewhere. I’ve been studying.”
Under the rocker, next to a glass of water and a bowl of cold oats, he found an old side, from which he blew dust. Willa swallowed, congratulated him, and visited with him for the next two hours. He was dozing in the chair when she stole out. One of Trump’s crippled hands rested motionless on the head of his purring cat.
Before she left the building, she located the woman who owned it and paid her fifty dollars, twice the amount she mailed from Texas every month, secretly, for Sam Trump’s board and room.
On Monday, they all set out to visit the exhibition. George provided a carriage for each group, two for Billy and Brett’s family, and the vehicles took them swiftly and elegantly past crowded horsecars and Pennsylvania short-line trains to the carriage park on the grounds.
They saw exhibits of Pratt and Whitney’s metalworking tools, Western Electric’s railway signal devices, Ebenezer Butterick’s paper dress patterns, Gorham silver, Haviland and Doulton stoneware, LaFrance fire engines, Seth Thomas clocks, McKesson and Robbins medicinal roots and barks, Pfizer chemicals, Steinway and Chickering and Knabe and Fenway pianos. They saw locomotives, underwater cable equipment, tall glass cylinders containing dirt from various counties in Iowa, giant bottles of Rhine River wine on pedestals, portable boilers, wallpaper printing presses, glass blowers, Gatling guns, Mr. Graham Bell’s curious talking device called the “telephone” (George thought it impractical and silly), huge polished reflectors from the Light House Board, fifteen-inch ears of corn and seven-foot stalks of wheat, bentwood furniture, sculptures in butter, Swedish ornamental iron, Russian furs, Japanese lacquered screens, Army, Navy, and Marine uniforms of the last seventy-five years, the innovative new European school for young children called the “Kindergarten,” thriving orange, palm, and lemon trees in Horticultural Hall, Tiffany’s twenty-seven-diamond necklace worth more than eighty thousand dollars in gold, exhibit cases containing crackers, stuffed birds, blank books, mineral samples, carriage wheels, bolts and nuts, corsets and false teeth, a seventeen-foot-high crystal fountain hung with cut glass prisms and gas-lit for added brilliance, a plaster sculpture of George Washington, legless, perched on a life-size eagle (Madeline covered her mouth and rolled her eyes), and five thousand models of inventions from the Patent Office.
They drank soda water from stands on the avenue and coffee at the Brazilian Coffee House. Stanley liked the French food at Aux Trois Frères Provençaux because it was so expensive. Brett liked the new way all the furniture was exhibited in realistic arrangements called “room settings.” Virgilia liked the Women’s Pavilion, and especially the newspaper office in the center, where women at desks wrote articles and other women set type and still others printed a newspaper called the New Century for Women; she took two copies. The young boys liked Old Abe, the pet bald eagle of a Wisconsin Ci
vil War regiment; Abe was a veteran of more than thirty battles, and for long periods he sat so still on his perch he looked stuffed, but once, after a lengthy wait, he spread his great wings and turned his. fierce eye on the boys, who were thrilled. George liked the round four-inch bronze medal with a female figure holding a laurel wreath which Hazard’s had received for its ornamental iron; the Centennial judges awarded twelve thousand such medals for outstanding exhibits. Madeline liked the Mississippi state cabin because it was decorated with Spanish moss. Billy liked the 4-4-0 Baldwin locomotive Jupiter from the Santa Cruz Railroad and the mammoth grapevine shipped all the way from California and erected on a great overhead trellis; visitors strolled beneath the living vine. Charles didn’t like the display of Indian tipis, pipes, pots, costumes, and other artifacts assembled by the Smithsonian Institution, but he said nothing about his feelings, merely passed quickly through the exhibit with a grave expression. George frequently said things like, “It’s the beginning of a new age,” or, “And the skeptics say we have nothing worth showing to foreign powers,” but everyone was so interested in what they saw, they didn’t comment or even hear him most of the time.
Brett’s daughters Maude and Luci could hardly be pried away from the Nevins’s tiny Constance Anne. Everyone kept mixing up G. W. Hazard and George Hazard Nevin, whom his parents called G. H. Willa, who always spoiled Gus, bought him too much popcorn and he got a bellyache and had to rest an hour at a comfort station. Fremont Junior got lost for ten minutes near the Otis Brothers steam elevator exhibit in Machinery Hall. Brett’s youngest girl, Melody, just three and a half, pulled tulips from a bed outside Horticultural Hall before her mother stopped her and spanked her. A couple of oafish white men accosted Virgilia and Scipio, and he started swinging. Centennial Guards swooped in and broke up the clumsy flight. They gave the mixed couple no sympathy. Stanley and Laban, though still in Philadelphia, were nowhere to be seen. Nearly every exhibit that Billy passed inspired some comment about California. Everything was better there, more healthful there, more modern there. To Virgilia, her brother sounded like an abolitionist whose new cause was mammon. Scipio quietly suggested she curb her criticism for the sake of family harmony. George offered his arm to Madeline and with great interest listened to her describe the new house and Mont Royal. He promised everyone that there would be spectacular fireworks the next evening, the fourth.
