The minister began to read from the newspaper, his voice raised to make himself heard. The black singers attempted with their melodies to overcome his words, but his speech came forth from the speakers at the side of the platform.
“The victims whose bodies were removed from the ruins early this morning were identified as Heather and Floral Albright, elderly sisters who were long time residents of River Sunday.”
He stopped reading and looked over his followers. Then he repeated the reading word for word as though the words of the faded newspaper story were as important as the poetry of a Biblical psalm.
“The victims whose bodies were removed from the ruins early this morning were identified as Heather and Floral Albright, elderly sisters who were long time residents of River Sunday.”
Members of Blue’s audience nodded their heads in approval, waving their hands and casting stares back at the black people standing behind them and separated only by the mound and the playing children.
Blue said, “Some of you listen to the Devil and feel compassion for the evil doer up there in that hospital. Do not do the Devil’s work. Remember what the Bible says that God gave us light to see our way in the dark, that we should go to the light and away from the dark.
“Amen,” said his crowd.
A movement among the crowd of people of color across the lawn made the Blue followers turn their heads. Pastor Allingham had stood up and was speaking without a microphone. Harry strained to hear him.
“We don’t seek to start a war here today. Too many of our friends are standing across from us and making like we are enemies. That is far from the truth. I ask only that all of you people here today, white and black alike, think of justice and what we all want. If Walker is innocent, let it be so. If he is guilty, let it be so. Let us not take the law into our own hands and try to be judge and jury ourselves. If we are Christians, we owe it to ourselves to act like Christians.”
He was met with boos and catcalls from the Blue contingent.
“This crowd is too stirred up to think reasonably. They’d hang Walker if they could get their hands on him, I’m afraid, and the Pastor’s people would get hurt trying to stop it, too.”
Annie nudged Harry and whispered, “I don’t want to miss anything, but I’ve got to get the paper finished for the races tomorrow. I’ll get back as soon as I can.” He nodded and remained staring at the reverend.
Blue cried out, the force of his voice strong from the microphone speakers, his words seemingly in defiance of Pastor Allingham.
“You remember those poor white women who had no sin and who the Devil gave only fire to burn away their holiness. The agent of the devil’s work is in that hospital. I say, let him burn too.”
The crowd began moving in unison, saying “Amen” and rocking back and forth. Children, attracted from the mound by the dancing, came over and were lifted to the shoulders of fathers so they could see the Reverend. As he talked, the tiny lights on Blue’s crucifix flickered on and off to accent his words. Even Mel got into the act, signaling his drummer to accentuate with drum beats the mentions of the word, Devil.
Reverend Blue leaned forward from his pulpit, pitching his voice lower to draw his crowd forward, to make them listen harder.
He said, “I heard the friends of Walker Douglas talking about setting his boat up on a pedestal of honor. The wreck came from the mud. Let it return to the mud. I hear it has been stolen away in the night. I say, this is the work of the Lord.”
“Amen,” his group responded.
Across from them, the black chorus sang out over and over, while the Pastor remained silent in the midst of his flock.
we shall overcome
The Reverend looked up at the sky and said, “Burn it, I say, to cleanse the Devil from this place of sin.”
With that comment, many of his audience began yelling and, as they shouted, rolling on the ground. Screams of “Burn the boat,” and “An eye for an eye,” echoed in the form of a chant among the parishioners. Mel stepped up his drumbeats and launched into another round of the old Confederate marching song.
The despot’s heel is on thy shore
The Reverend clapped his hands in time, rocking and stared grimly at his people.
Harry, in turn, was transfixed, pausing once again on the steps into the hospital. He turned to watched the two crowds, wondering what all this emotion would lead to, wondering if Walker was going to be safe in his hospital room, only two floors and a thin brick wall away.
Chapter 20
Friday August 6, 1 pm
Harry got back to the room and took up his spot by the window. He watched as Walker shifted on his hospital bed. Charleston reached over and adjusted the back so that he was more comfortable.
The television was showing a national news station but the sound had been turned off. At a desk Harry could see his old boss sitting with other commentators, their faces anxious. Harry could see the video clips that were playing over and over again, showing crowds in downtown River Sunday, panning in on tourists who were knocked down with their hands protecting their faces, angry men and women waving signs with blood red letters, and between the people, Captain Stiles and the rest of the town officers trying to hold back both white and black protesters. He had seen it before in other countries, the same screams of injustice, the same threats of violence, and the same impatience. He knew that a fire or fires would start up soon because fires were the weapons of mobs, the weapons of easy convenience, and fires did as much damage and attracted as much attention as all the bombs that could be exploded.
Walker said, “Thank you, Mister Charleston. One thing I had with me on my travels away from here was the award plaque that I got the night before the town fire. It was a little plastic certificate for my being a good mechanic. I had it with me for years until one night in the dark, I foolishly dropped it in the water out in the swamp. Try as I could, I wasn’t able to locate it in the water. I got to say that some of my hope was lost when that happened.”
His weathered face softened in pleasure as he talked. “That night, twenty-four hours before my life changed forever, all along the River Sunday harbor at each stretch of open beach were brightly colored and highly polished racing boats, stored up on trailers to keep their hulls dry. Boats of different sizes, classes of engine and hull size, were intermingled. A paradise for a man like me. Small outboards were being worked on beside the larger unlimited class boats. The drivers and the mechanics, some of them were out there on the beach all night, talking among the occasional run up roar of an engine, working with each other, sharing stories.
“Inside the Chesapeake Hotel was the dinner and dance for the racers and invited guests. At each table the more important sponsors had their racing teams and the driver’s wives and families feted with plates of blue crab boiled to perfection. Beer was plentiful. All the major sponsors were there including the Johnson and Evinrude teams and the Mercury drivers. Japanese teams were around too, mostly observing. A television crew was taking interviews at the back of the room where chairs were set up for the driver and the reporter under many lights.
“We made up a table of the racing crowd from River Sunday. Other black men were there, of course, and some from out west were race drivers. However, I was the only one from the area around River Sunday. At our table was Homer who was my sponsor and, I thought, my best friend, and Cheeks, his assistant, a very young man in those days, maybe two or three years out of River Sunday High School, Mrs. Kirby, Homer’s wife, and me. Around me were some of the kid drivers Homer and I knew like Jimmy and Jesse and Fat Mike who were younger drivers just coming along. The only one I didn’t get along with too well was Missus. Kirby but she didn’t like anybody. She made sure that all of us paid her for the tickets to that table and in advance. She sat on the other side and didn’t once look at me.
“Missus Kirby was running the race administration. She went up to the mike and spoke up advising the drivers and their teams all the mistakes they had made si
nce coming to River Sunday.
“‘Maybe twenty trailers I spotted parked empty up on Strand Street,’ she said. ‘Now you all know we don’t allow that and let me tell you River Sunday has a great sheriff who has strong arms. Rise up, Wilson, and let the folks see you.’
“Sheriff Wilson, he was the white sheriff then, long before this man here,” he moved his head towards Good, “Wilson stood up then, he was my friend too, at least before the fire. He had a job to do too, keeping order in this town. My people maybe don’t say it, but a lot of blacks folks needed to go to jail now and then, just like the white people. He did his job and folks in Mulberry said he was fair.”
“Missus Kirby went on with her arrangements, ‘You all can see that we’ll take them trailers from you and you’ll have to pay to get them back. We got three country commissioners too, You all stand up, Mister Everett Tolchester, Mister Senator Thomas Fair, and Mister Henry Terment. These folks if they have to go down there and help the sheriff and the town police, then you can be sure you’ll be paying to see the trailers again.’
“She said she was concerned that a civil rights group had been marching in the town and had started up some arguments and phone calls from the residents, porch sitters as she called them. ‘I want to say that we have good security on the mooring areas near the harbor and we don’t expect any trouble. You best understand that this sort of thing has been going on in many of the towns on the Bay and we have our share of it too. Outside people, that’s all it is.’
“Senator Fair stood up to talk when she finished, kind of a welcome talk, his manner far more jovial. He praised the racing teams and the press, telling them to have a great party and race. He kinda broke the ice and people started having a good time.
“I had heard before the dinner that a special award from the National Motorboat Association was being given for the first time tonight. Homer had been on the local award committee, had put in the names, and he sat through the dinner with a big smug look on his face every time he looked in my direction. I knew something was up but I didn’t know what it was and he wouldn’t tell me.
“Just when the dessert was being served, the speaker, the regional head of the United National Motorboat Association, stood up. He was a balding heavy set man in lightweight suit and tie with the name tag of the association on his lapel, and had been a championship driver during the years right after World War Two. Other men went up front, board members of the association. Some of these men were from the big oil companies, Sonoco, and Esso, and some were the racing directors for important engine companies who supported the races across the nation. They stood in a line behind the speaker.
“‘Tonight,’ the speaker started, began his talk, ‘will be the first award of this plaque in the east and we’re happy it goes to the Chesapeake where so much of the early motorboat racing took place.’
“He looked right at me, a big grin on his face, and said, ‘We’d like to invite Walker John Douglas to come to the front of the room.’
“Well, you can imagine I was pretty surprised. Of course now I knew this was what Homer Kirby had been planning with the others all along. He’d sure kept the secret though because I got weak in the knees and nearly fell off my chair.
“When I got to the front I looked around the room and saw most everyone in River Sunday who had anything to do with racing boats. Of course my momma wasn’t there because she hadn’t been let in that the award was going to be presented to me, Homer figuring and rightly, that she would have immediately told me and ruined the surprise.
“‘Walker, we got this award for you to honor your mechanical expertise on racing boats,’ the director said and reached out to give me a plaque.
“‘In other words, you can change a sparkplug,’ yelled Jimmy from the audience.
“I shook his hand and looked at the frame, my lips moving as I read my name to myself. He stepped back from the mike and motioned for me to speak.
“I said, ‘Thanks to all of you for helping me get this.’ I looked at my table. Cheeks and Missus Kirby weren’t smiling but they never did smile much at me anyway.”
The old man looked over at the sheriff who was busy with his note taking. “You know that’s true, too, Sheriff.” Sheriff Good never looked up.
Walker continued. “Homer was beaming and I think he would have given me a big hug right there in front of everyone. Of course most of the mechanics were kidding around and standing up to toast me with their beer cans. A couple of them were so drunk they fell right back down.”
Walker chuckled to himself. “After the dinner a drivers meeting was held in a room on the second floor of the courthouse. See, I had to be approved in order to race the next day. I had been driving for years but always in testing someone else’s boat. Black Duck was my boat, my own boat, and I wanted to race her for the first time in this regatta and that was what caused the problem. When I raced with my own boat, some of the drivers were complaining about a black man racing against whites.
“It wasn’t the national association and its officials who were complaining. Homer said that they were on my side. Some of their members, though, drivers who’d come from states south of Maryland, or even towns south of River Sunday, had misgivings about me entering races. The national had to tread softly because this River Sunday regatta was a big race and they wanted to keep it peaceful, especially with the warning they had just received from Missus Kirby about civil rights troubles in town.
“I had friends there, people who supported me for the race. Homer had encouraged me from the beginning to race and to build my own boat. I remember one time in his shop when a couple of strangers were standing around looking at the engines and they suggested to me that maybe a special class would have to be set up if I was going to race in River Sunday, a special class for black drivers. Homer hauled back in that way he had and told them that I could beat anyone in the room and if they didn’t like it they could take their work elsewhere. He was there as the prime sponsor for my application.
“I had got to know some of the drivers and mechanics from the other teams. They’d be in town and need a part or a shop to work in and we had a relationship over the years. That’s the way it is with motor racing. We’re all members of one big family. Most of us just cared about how well a man could build a boat or how well he could race in the turns and the straight-aways. I wanted to be treated like any other driver and judged on my performance not on whether I was a man of color.
“Jimmy was one of those mechanics, a young guy just starting out. I thought a lot about him when I was out there in the swamp. Jimmy didn’t care if you were red with two heads and came from Mars. He’d come to town and visit my shop. We spent a lot of time together working on the old Hacker racer that I had been restoring, the one that belonged to Mahoney.”
“It’s still there in your boat shop,” interrupted Harry.
The old man winked. “I know. I been in there a few times over the years to look after it.”
He went on. “The panel was made up of five persons, four men and one woman, all former race drivers who ran this examination of new drivers for the United National Powerboat Association. The speaker, the fellow who had given me the award downstairs, was one of them. These persons had been sent to River Sunday to go over any last minute preparations for this sanctioned race. They could have certain parts of the race course changed or certain drivers or machines disqualified. Even if I was qualified by votes at this meeting, it was normal that a new driver would still have to race behind the more experienced drivers until some race experience got in his record.
“‘I’ve driven against all the panelists,’ Homer whispered to me. ‘They are all right. They will be fair.’”
“‘We’re here tonight,’ a white-haired man who was the leader of the group began, ‘to go over final details for the race next Saturday. The first order of business is to vote on the qualifications of the boat Black Duck and its owner Walker John Douglas. I’d like to have any discussion begun now.
’”
“My friends Jesse, Fat Mike, and Jimmy sat in the front row of drivers and Jesse spoke first, “I never thought that our Association was known for being democratic,’ he said. ‘Matter of fact it isn’t. It’s fair though. I know I’ve just started racing but around the country, I’ve raced against black-skinned members, yellow -skinned members, you name it. We got no bias in this organization and I don’t want to see any start just because we happen to be racing here in River Sunday where race problems might exist. Our organization’s a place for winners and if you aren’t a winner, then you don’t get in. Here’s a man who’s a winner. Seems to me that’s the only criterion we got to have for Walker. That he’s a winner.’
“Homer got up then and said, ‘We thought we’d come over tonight and remind you folks about Walker. He’s a small town man, just like most of us. He’s also the best carburetor man in this part of Maryland and tells me how to set mine all the time. So, I know you can’t turn him down because of his qualifications as a racing man. That means if you don’t accept him as a driver, it’s because of the color of his skin. If you do that, I’ll resign here tonight because that’s not the way this association ought to pick its members.’”
“The white haired man looked at some papers in his hands. ‘We have two decisions to make here tonight. First we have to rule on Walker’s eligibility to race as a driver. Second we have decide whether his boat Black Duck qualifies to run in a race.
‘First we want to know if the driver is skilled enough to drive and not hurt others. On that score we know Walker can handle a boat. Everyone on this panel has seen his running test drives for many years prior to race heats. We all say he can drive. So in the opinion of this panel, he’s hereby qualified.’
“A few people clapped. The speaker glared at them. ‘Let’s not have any more of that.’
Powerboat Racer (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 3) Page 26
