She went back to the schoolhouse and sat stiffly at her makeshift desk in the empty classroom. From time to time, her hand strayed to adjust her turban. She had closed the school. It might be closed forever, so heavy was the cloud of fear shrouding the town.
“Niggers go home.”
She stared straight ahead with unseeing eyes at the ugly sod walls she once thought were beautiful. The door thudded open, shut, open, shut, with the irregular gusts of wind. Her heart was dead to the wind today. Numb, she didn’t notice when the noise ceased.
Jed Talbot walked through the door, then stopped dead still. “What in God’s name? What in the hell do you have on your head?”
She looked at him with sullen, heavy eyes. “You a black man. You don’t know what this is? You ain’t never seed this kind of wrapping before?”
He walked over to her chair and furiously yanked her to her feet, shoved his hand under the turban, and pulled it off while she tried to slap his hands away. “Don’t think like that, and don’t talk like that.”
Her shiny, black hair tumbled about her shoulders. She looked at him with tear-filled eyes. “But it is how we talk. And I’m going to start talking like our people talk and thinking like our people think. It’s what I should have been doing all along.”
“It’s not how you think,” Jed snapped. “Not how you talk, now is it?”
“Not yet, no, not yet. But it going to be,” she said grimly. “Now let go of me.”
He loosened his grip, then helplessly let his hands fall, turned abruptly, and walked over to the shelf in the corner. Striving to control his outrage, he examined the titles of the books there one by one, nodding with familiarity as he came across old friends.
Bethany Herbert was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen, black or white. The image of her ricocheting into the Browns’ dugout the first night he came was seared into his mind. The wild hair streaming behind the kerchief, her lively, lovely face, the shining brown eyes. For the last six weeks, he had become enthralled by her quick wit, her almost childlike inability to contain her enchantment with ideas. Her transformation from a woman crackling with compulsive energy to an ugly, sullen, gray-black toad infuriated him. A vein throbbed in his temple.
He shoved his hands into his back pockets and paced around the room while he marshaled his thoughts. Then he picked up a book and faced her.
“And what are you going to do about this?” he said. The air seemed to vibrate, matching his intensity. He walked over and stood directly in front of her as he waved the book. “The thoughts, these ideas, are already in your head, woman. It’s too late. You can’t go back. Don’t you understand that? We can’t go back. We can’t leave this state. And you, my dear lady, can’t go backwards in your mind. You can’t wipe out book-learning.”
Shocked by her sudden gush of tears, he reached for her, but she twisted away. “What are we going to do?” she whispered. “What in God’s name are we all going to do?”
“We’re going to fight,” he said. “Right here, right now, we’re going to fight. With every last breath. It’s the only thing we can do.”
“How? We’ve already gotten one good man killed. Why did you come here? Surely not just to berate me.”
“Bethany, I came here because I want to organize this township. The township and then the county, and I want this school to be the first legal school. Your school.”
“It can’t be done.”
“It can. And it will. Your students are getting top notch instruction. I want your work recognized. Validated. When your students complete their education, I want them to have a certificate of their progress. The kind white children get.”
“It can’t be done,” she said. “They would never, ever let us start the first school district.”
“It can be done,” he said. “It can, and it will.”
She was deathly silent for such a long time, he was afraid he had lost her. Then she spoke with exquisite slowness, as if pushing every word from her throat. A schoolmarm’s words, proper and measured.
“This evening then, sir, I shall call a meeting and let our people know school will resume Monday morning.”
She reached for the unbound turban, folded it neatly and laid it on her desk. Then she grasped her long, shiny hair and twisted it into a bun. She anchored it at her neck with one of the chicken feather quills she had carved out for use in the children’s writing lessons.
Her eyes never left his face. Never strayed from his luminous, gray eyes. Never drifted from his strong, fine jaw and his sculptured cheekbones.
“Now you get the hell out of here. Just get the hell out of my school.” Tears streamed down her cheeks.
Stunned, Jed Talbot started to speak, then touched his cap with a slight nod and edged out the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Teddy watched Jed Talbot walk toward the blacksmith shop. The lawyer wore a fawn-colored broadcloth suit with a gold brocade waistcoat. His shirt was sparkling white with a separate snowy collar, accented by a black bow tie. He carried a fawn-colored hat.
For an instant, Teddy was stunned by the fine figure of this man, his friend, looking like a Greek god. Looking like he had the authority of a king to order people to do this, or to do that.
Our lawyer, he thought gloomily. Don’t need a god-damned lawyer to lead us straight to hell. Won’t set right with the Rooks County commissioners to go in looking like a riverboat gambler.
Jim Black finished checking Gloriana’s shoes. The mare’s coat shone, and every inch of gear was polished to a cavalry shine.
Since the murder, there had been no stopping Jed. He had visited every single black family living in Nicodemus and gathered more than enough signatures to petition for a legal voting township.
Teddy had turned down the use of a fancier horse to make the twenty-mile ride to Stockton where they would present Jed’s petition. “I rides old Sherman. Always have. Reckon I always will,” he’d said stubbornly. “That old mule kind of got used to me.”
Being bullied into this trip against his better judgment was bad enough. Damned if he was going to let Jed Talbot or anyone else tell him what horse he had to ride. He, too, was wearing his suit, but it was so old and worn, just like him, that he couldn’t imagine anyone would accuse him of putting on airs.
“Ready?” Jed asked.
“I reckon.”
When they came to the end of the street, Dolly Redgrave came flying after them. “I’ve fixed you a little something to eat,” she said. “And I’ve sewed up a couple of dusters to put over you if it starts to rain.”
She wore a yellow dress sprinkled with little white flowers and had tied her hair up with yellow bows of the same material. She looked pretty in the morning sun with her weak-tea skin and her pale, hazel eyes.
“I thank you kindly,” Teddy said, knowing this offering was all for Jed’s benefit. The woman had been making eyes at the man since the moment he showed up, but you’d think Jed was some blind old mule and Dolly was ninety years old.
“Oh, you is welcome,” she gushed. “Just so completely welcome. It’s just some jerky and some chunks of cornbread.”
Jed reached for the package of food, which she had tied into a square of cotton. He fastened it to the roll of dusters behind his saddle. Then he touched his hat politely. “Much obliged.”
Teddy turned back to look at Dolly’s face as they rode off. A mean woman. Bone mean. He wished she was gone. But if they started running people out of town because they had a crazy streak, wouldn’t be hardly nobody left. Their lawyer included.
They rode three miles without talking at all. Teddy saw things now he wouldn’t have noticed a year ago. He heard sounds that had formerly escaped his sharp ears. In spring and summer there were more shades of green than he thought possible—from the pale under-skin of wild onions, to the emerald cast of the tall bluestem that was making inroads on the patches of scrappy buffalo grass.
Prairie dogs stood like sentinels bravely war
ning other families of approaching danger. He’d come to love their shrill panicked bark. Hawks dove like lightning toward tiny rabbits that strayed from their holes. Sometimes he was tempted to look up and see if one of the birds was big enough to carry off a tiny, old black man.
“Well, Teddy, we’re crossing the Rubicon,” Jed said.
“Don’t know what that means.”
“It means the die is cast.”
“Don’t know what that means, either. If you means we is making a big mistake, you got that right.”
Jed laughed. “Means there’s no turning back.”
“Right. Doing things you can’t take back or wiggle out of usually is a big mistake.”
“Well, it’s quite clear we can’t go back after we take this step. After dice are thrown you can’t undo the toss. Julius Caesar once crossed a river, the Rubicon, into enemy territory. Once crossed, he couldn’t turn back.”
“Them is fine words. Just right. That what we doing, all right. How’d it turn out for old Caesar?”
“It worked.”
Just then old Sherman brayed, and both men laughed.
When they were about a mile from Stockton, Teddy stopped abruptly. “Jed, you sure you is doing the right thing?”
“As sure as I’ve ever been of anything in my life. Don’t quit on me, Teddy. We have to fight.”
Jed swung off his horse and reached for the package of food. He broke off a piece of cornbread and handed the bundle to Teddy. Then he held Gloriana’s reins while she lowered her head to eat buffalo grass. “What we’re doing today is just the first step. Next, I’m going to petition for the first school district and then organize the county.”
When Teddy was tired, his stained face splotched and grayed to a mottled, dusty yellow, and today his skin looked like an old rattlesnake hide left to dry in the sun. “Right now, white folks around here is playing like killing that man was the cowboys’ doing,” he said slowly. “Things has settled down. They is acting like they don’t care if we is here or not. They is acting proud of us like we is they own personal house niggers. They saying if those poor starving bastards packing those riverbanks in Wyandotte had a little get up and go like us Nicodemus folks, they could be eating high on the hog. Bethany reads me some of them papers, and they is all the time bragging about our grit and stick-to-itiveness.”
“Well, we’ve all managed to stay alive out here, haven’t we?”
“Just barely. And then we had help.”
“You mean the aid Harrington and Tripp rounded up?”
“That and Indians. They helped us, too. We can’t say we did this all by ourselves.”
“A man was murdered, Teddy. That’s what I’m trying to say. There’s no turning back now.”
“In the first place,” Teddy said, “we didn’t stay here by choice. Hardly a one of us that wouldn’t have left last winter. Takes money to come here, money to stay, and money to leave.”
“But you are here. If I had my way, we’d have fought them in the South. Tooth and toenail.”
“You crazy, Jed.”
“Eventually, the North would see to it that our power in the South amounted to something. Not because they love us, but for their own safety. If we had stayed and fought it out.”
Teddy’s shoulders drooped. “Eventually won’t get it. We talking about men that are poor, naked, hungry. Wife, half dozen kids that hungry right now. Can’t wait for politicians to make things work eventually.”
Jed swung back into the saddle as Teddy awkwardly mounted his old mule. “A good man has been murdered. If we let this kind of tyranny get a foothold here, like it did in the South, we’re doomed.”
Teddy glanced at the town ahead. He carefully brushed some cornbread crumbs off his old coat and looked squarely at the full noonday sun. A pleasant breeze cooled his head when he removed his hat. Little grasshoppers skittered across the plants, disturbing swarms of ants.
“Jed, you ain’t been here long. I don’t know you like I know all these people who came here from Kentucky. There’s not much I can’t tell you about them. I can tell you most of the time what they are all going to say, what they’re going to do, and what each of them wants. That’s the big thing. Understanding what each of them wants. But I knows you well enough to know you a lot different from the rest of us. There’s things about white men you don’t know, can’t know, and wouldn’t believe if I told you.”
Jed did not speak. He flicked the reins against Gloriana’s neck. Before long, they were in tall grass, up to their mounts’ stomachs.
Teddy started mumbling while they rode, and Jed stopped up short to hear. “Can’t see that town of our’n any more, but it’s back there somewhere.” He waved toward the horizon. “Our houses,” Teddy said, his eyes full of misery as he watched Jed’s face. “Our buildings. The most our people have ever had in their whole natural born lives.”
Jed rode on, ignoring Teddy’s monologue.
“Hear our songs, mister lawyer man? All we can think about is the hereafter, because God knows, there’s never been a thing we could own or count on down here. May not be much. By most people’s thinking, all those little pitiful things are is a handful of dirt buildings, but to them it like the heavenly city paved with gold. Better think about that, mister lawyer. Better think real hard.”
“I’m going to help you keep it, not lose it.”
“Maybe. Maybe so. No one cares if we have this. Don’t make a good goddamn to white folks if a handful of niggers want to set up a few buildings on land nobody wants anyway in a state most people don’t like much after they get here. You’re fixing to change all that. If we petition for a township, people going to notice us plenty.”
“It must change!” Jed said. “Some of what you’re saying is true. That white folks leave us alone. That they don’t care as long as we don’t bother them. But that’s not good enough. I’m going to keep working until they look at us and don’t see color at all.”
Teddy stiffened.
“You know what bothers me most?” Jed asked. His handsome face was solemn above his snow-white collar. “If I can’t convince you, I’m afraid I can’t convince anyone. But you can turn around and go back. I’m not willing to drag you into anything you really don’t want to do.”
Teddy looked down at the ground, then back in the direction of Nicodemus, then toward the town of Stockton. He looked squarely at Jed, and his old jaw quivered for an instant.
“You’re the one who started this, Teddy. Why did you lure people out here in the first place?”
“I moved them away where things weren’t going to work no time never, to a place where things might work sometime, if we mind our own business.”
“Then why did you come with me today, if you don’t believe in what I’m trying to do?”
Teddy sat rigidly upright on Sherman, his dried tobacco leaf–face still as death. “Because you is too ignorant to let loose roaming around by yourself. I is afraid you going to get hurt.”
Jed’s lips quirked into a faint smile, and his heart broke at the old man’s bravery.
“Besides, you right about one thing. We can’t let it start here. Not here.”
Jed grinned.
“Now, mister lawyer feller. Let’s go cross that there Rubicon.”
They rode on into town.
“Well, it’s clear where we need to head,” Jed said. At the end of the street was a beautiful two-story, magnesium limestone courthouse.
“How much you reckon that set these folks back, Jed?”
“Five thousand dollars. Read that in their paper, when I was trying to figure out when their commissioners meet. That’s their jail off to the side. They used to have to take prisoners to Ellis County.”
“They gots real law, then.”
“Real law and about the same number of people we have, but Stockton has about a ten-year head start. They’ve got a creamery, two grist mills, whole bunch of businesses, and enough churches to save all of hell.” Jed looked up and do
wn the street and decided it was safe to leave Gloriana tied to the hitching rail out front.
Inside, they followed the sound of men arguing. Jed knocked lightly at the open door. The commissioners stared at the two men like they were apparitions.
“Gentlemen,” Jed said in his well-modulated bass voice, “allow me to introduce myself. I am Jedidiah Talbot, and this is my colleague, Mr. Theodore Sommers. We are from Nicodemus, Kansas, and we are here with a petition to organize a township.”
The details of the events of that day, told and retold by the three commissioners to whomever would listen, became legend.
“Swear to God, Mabel,” Commissioner Atkins said to his wife that evening, “as God is my witness, the lawyer’s paperwork was flawless. Perfect; letter perfect.”
“And then,” Commissioner Klein said to the intrepid editor of the Stockton News, “and then they invited us to dine with them at the Rooks County Hotel just like they had all the money on God’s earth, and of course we couldn’t refuse their kindly offer.”
When the astonishing move by the Nicodemus lawyer was duly reported in the paper—particularly all the details of the three commissioners dining in public with the two men who weren’t too terribly black—Jed and Teddy had established the right to enter any business, any store. By extension, it was understood that all the people of Nicodemus were to be treated with equal courtesy.
“The man was white enough to trust,” Commissioner Kerry swore to the dumbfounded whittlers in the mercantile store. “Not white enough to pass, but plenty white enough, and he could talk as good as you or me. All dressed up, too.”
“Jesus, Hiram, you’ve been hornswoggled plenty good. Everyone knows niggers can’t read or write, let alone study for law. Where did they get that many signatures? You must have been drinking. Bet the same person wrote them all.”
Hiram Kerry looked soberly at the oldest man in the store, knowing he wouldn’t believe in Christ on a crutch if he’d seen it with his own eyes. “Swear to God, Ike, those signatures were genuine. That’s the first thing we studied after they left.”
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