The New Inheritors

by Kent Wascom

  And when he saw himself in shop windows or in the great, gleaming walls of barbershops, he was amazed not at the change but the lack of it. He expected to see someone else.

  He wondered what his boyhood self would think of the man he’d suddenly become. When he was seven years old Rule’s family left the country around Terrebonne in the receding southern tip of the state for the city of New Orleans, where his father went to work at a slaughterhouse and his mother as a cleaner. To the child Rule the city was a wild wonder, and he couldn’t understand why his parents went about always with their eyes averted from the buildings and machines. They lived with his aunts and an uncle, a swarm of cousins, in a tenement building on Saratoga Street, and six days a week Rule went to work as a hand at a lumberyard near the river in cleated boots too big for his feet. Heading to or from work and in the hours between he ran with the aforementioned cousins and other children, drawn always to the doings of the neighborhood men. Not those late of the countryside like their own fathers, but city men. Objects of awe (if they carried themselves well) or derision or shame (if they did not), but always fascination. Men in suits and bowler hats, watchchains at their hips, and women who wore bright, tight dresses, women whose hair was ironed and whose arms were rolled with fat. Men who did not squabble but were good with a joke and might, winking, tell a dirty one in passing to the boys who lingered at the periphery of their conversations. And maybe because Rule was a more dutiful son than most and would do little that might disappoint the father who’d used most of his strength to get them out of the countryside and to the city and the rest on the killfloor of Union Slaughterhouse, he was drawn less and less to the men who gambled and joked and dazzled but to one who possessed few of their seeming virtues and fewer still of their vices. Here was a man who held no streetcorner court, who gambled and drank socially, who kept his assignations with women private and yet wore the sharpest suits, got of a Poydras Street Jew who would later testify to his character when that man became notorious. Here was a man who read: generally works on politics and the literature of the Pan-Africanist movement and in particular the International Mission Society, which had formed a cooperative movement to buy its members tickets to a new life in Africa, and whose pamphlets he distributed each month. Later it would be discovered that the Society was backed by a white Alabaman Klansman, but by the time of his death, the man, whose name was Robert Charles, had paid some $200 toward his own exodus.

  A neighborhood eccentric, Robert Charles, appearing at your door with his bundle of the Voice of Missions, whose learning and earnestness might have made him an object of sport were it not for the fact that he was known (as neighbors would later attest) as a man not to be trifled with. He did contract work, scouting labor, and he stayed in a little room in an alley off Fourth Street, between Rampart and the tenement where Rule and his family lived. Close enough that Rule could stop by on his way home from work and, if Robert Charles was home and willing, sit with the man and listen to him read, then as time went on be made to read himself. Robert Charles’s manicured finger moving patiently under the words. A gentleness that never failed to stun Rule after a day of being hollered at and the whup of falling lumber; Robert Charles’s measured voice filling the room. But there was that other side to Robert Charles, no less fascinating, the side that loved firearms.

  He’d left Copiah County, Mississippi, knowing how to hunt, but there was another way of handling a gun, which Robert Charles learned at the age of twenty-one when he went to join his brother Hank in Vicksburg, where he worked digging holes and laying pipe for the coming miracle of running water (which would never reach his parents’ home). Their shovels turned up trenches and fortifications, unexploded shells and black boles of cannon and human bones cut to their marrow. The place was filled with feral dogs that skulked as offal thieves and child-maulers, and men who were not much better. Everyone was armed, and soon Robert Charles was no exception.

  When the digging was done Robert Charles was the owner of a side-ejecting Samuel Colt’s in .44 caliber and he chose to remain in the grave-ringed town, taking work as a section hand on the L.N.O.&T. railroad. With his paycheck he was able to make rent, buy his meals and drinks, and even, now and then, newspapers, books, pen and ink and paper—purchases that felt more illicit than the guns, which he also continued to acquire.

  He had to. After two years in Vicksburg he knew more men who’d been shot than hadn’t. Men he worked alongside or drank with at the saloons on Levee Street, where each night at midnight the music and the laughter and the singing had to cease for one hour by order of the law so that white passengers on red-eye trains would not be disturbed by black voices, black existence. The people in the barrooms would fall silent, women’s laughter dried up, and men who were loud as thunder would go stony.

  He could still see them, he told Rule. Men who had been or would be shot by cousins or by wives; by storekeepers out of suspicion and by themselves out of despair; by strangers as was one man called Dick Deadeye when a white stoker from a stopped train caught Dick watching him piss out behind the watertower early one morning (shooting Dick through the eye and giving him his nickname); and more than a few by Constable John Stanley of the Vicksburg police. One of those peacekeepers who, we must remember, have more to fear from us—potential havocs that we are with our mysterious and ever-shifting hands, bodies crackling with the potential to impede the lawman’s much desired return home—than we from them with their weapons and legal infallibility. On Levee Street and the surrounding neighborhoods John Stanley was known mostly as a man who rarely resorted to words when the means of violence were at hand, and, if you asked certain people, for keeping a black mistress. A rumor bloodily confirmed one August night when this mistress shot John Stanley through the side during an argument, at which point John Stanley put a bullet in her head and four more into her brother, who’d heard the first shot and come from next door. Add to these an L.N.O.&T. porter who had the misfortune of being on the street when John Stanley came roaring out. In the coming days and to the shock of many Constable John Stanley was indicted by a grand jury. The jurors, it must be said, were more concerned with Stanley’s miscegenation than the murder of two unarmed black men and one armed black woman, but still the people of Levee Street hoped for, and more importantly collected money to bribe the presiding judge into rendering, a conviction.

  But when the hat was passed Robert Charles didn’t give a dime. He saved his money, and when John Stanley was found not guilty and set free, Robert Charles owned another gun.

  Why put your money toward a justice that won’t come, he’d said to Rule, when you can have justice, or at least the hope of it, there with you. In your hand.

  Rule remembered him among the men on the streetcorner, saying Never. And now he wondered what Robert Charles, who before his own death in July of 1900 would become infamous, would’ve thought of the man Rule had become.

  Rule hurrying in from the summer rain. Three months before the influenza would come south, four months from the end of the war. He kicked off his boots and sat at the end of his bed and cast about for whiskey. On the floor, just past the lip of the door, lay a postcard.

  That night he’d broken the leg of a ship’s mate while the driver held a gun to the head of its captain. A foolish man who’d balked when he found out about the guns being laid in the hold of his ship. Given his first and only warning.

  —Now’s not the time to be a patriot, the driver said.

  The mate on the floor of the wheelhouse, screaming.

  Rule in his room, later, holding the postcard. It had come from home, written by his cousin but in the voice of his whole family, thanking him for the things he’d sent. Telling him to visit. For a while he thought of the cane fields and sunlight on the water in the rice paddies. Then he was thinking of the oldest daughter of the Haitians, and that maybe she’d been the one to slip this mail under his door. That she’d thought of him.

  A week later he robbed two consuls of a Central Ameri
can nation as they exited a whorehouse. Took their valises, which he brought to the man who would bring them to Woolsack, and their billfolds, which he gave to a child he saw who seemed particularly ragged. The child was white, as had been the men he’d robbed, and bore no gratitude in his face. Rule walked on, and the next morning read in the Picayune about what he’d done, only in the article he was some random negro, a part of the mass of faceless criminals distinguished only by skincolor. In this way he was able to, at a moment’s notice, slip from full view into a maligned undercurrent of blackness. Helpful as this was in certain situations, it spelled a larger doom. It made life horrifically random. You were all equally suspicious, and so equally dangerous and thus deserving of whatever came.

  What came to Robert Charles, in late July of 1900, when he was thirty-five and Rule was still a little boy who’d only catch terrifying glimpses of the events of that day, hidden by his father in the windowless interior of their apartment while the gunfire and the crowds raged outside, was infamy. It began as these things do, with a pair of young black men, waiting. Robert Charles and a friend waiting for their dates, who hadn’t shown by midnight. Waiting at the corner of two mythologies, the intersection of Dryades and Washington streets; one named for the goddesses of trees, admonishers of senseless destruction of woodland, and the other for the American god whose divinity was first glimpsed when he forthrightly admitted to cutting one down. Like many in New Orleans at that time, the neighborhood where they waited was mixed, blacks living alongside whites with circumspection if not amity, and one of these neighbors, seeing from his window two strange negroes waiting on the steps of a house down the block, told his wife to lock the door behind him and went out looking for a patrolman, found two.

  The space of a minute in a policeman’s presence is a maddeningly condensed trial; you are arraigned by all American history on charges of being born. And in that span, when one patrolman drew his pistol and the other his club, Robert Charles rose. A gun in his hand. Before the next minute was out, Robert Charles had blown the knee off one patrolman and sent the other running, which he himself did, leaving his bewildered friend behind.

  The police found Robert Charles at his room off Fourth Street, or rather he found them, stepped out into the alley shoulder slung with bags containing spare rounds and a little instrument he’d ordered through an ad in Scientific American, a tool that reloaded shells spent by the Winchester repeating rifle he held now at his shoulder, the rifle he aimed then and fired, killing the precinct captain who’d come to claim him. Killed two more in the street as he fought his way to a tenement building, where he barricaded himself in an upper room and rained hell for two days on the riotous white crowd that massed below. Body after body in the buckhorn sight of his rifle. He picked them off carefully, one round a minute, as crowds of outraged citizens grew, thousands spilling from the foot of the statue of Robert E. Lee at what was once Tivoli Circle, which they circled like pilgrims at Kaaba.

  Robert Charles kept firing, and Rule Chandler, not yet ten, heard it all. Heard the police break down the doors of the adjacent building, smelled the smoke of the fire they set. Then all was confusion and the corpse of Robert Charles was hauled into the street where, amid the usual mutilations, the child of a dead patrolman was brought forth to stamp on Robert Charles’s face.

  When the killing was done, in the city of New Orleans and throughout the country, people sent up great peals of support for the police and tried to place the blame for Robert Charles. They blamed the man who sold him the gun; they blamed the Devil; they blamed black nationalists; they blamed the black family as an institution; they blamed newspapers for their coverage of lynchings; they blamed drugs and drink; they blamed his nature. Some even claimed he was incensed over the killing of some negro in Atlanta.

  It was, Rule thought, like blaming a flashflood on a random raindrop.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  October 1918. More Americans would die that month than in any other, before or since. The influenza swift as the bolts of their doors, which must be shut on order of the city council.

  At this time, and against his better judgement and the darkening course of his life, Rule Chandler fell deeply in love with Augustine, the oldest daughter of his landlord. It started back when he held the postcard and went on through the following months as he made more frequent appearances at the dinnertable, listening to her, trying to watch her without being noticed, as did the other unmarried boarders and not a few of the married ones. When she was not helping her mother in the house, Augustine worked part time at the counter of a store down the street, until the stores closed for the ’flu. Like her mother, she moved with the sense that everything she did was somehow beneath her, and for months looked at Rule as if he notched well lower than herself.

  Until she didn’t. And it might have been the quarantine or the threat of imminent death (which does strange things to hearts), but whatever the reason one night in November, just before the signing of the armistice, she appeared in his bedroom doorway, asking to be let in.

  Her family, so the story went, had once been great. Her father, a small pensive man, light-skinned and spectacled, a jeweler now by trade, had been an official in the Haitian government during the seven years of seven presidents. Days before he was taken away by the officers of the fourth president, he’d used what remained of his wealth to ship his wife and daughter out of the country. Then this small, gentle man was sent to the island of Gonâve, where he spent almost a year heading out each day at dawn shackled by the ankle to another prisoner to work in the limestone quarries, until one evening on the march back from their work he and his companion made an escape. A few days later he appeared at a village on the northwest coast of the island and there convinced a fisherman to ferry him across the windward pass to Cuba, but not before having a blacksmith remove from his ankle the shackle which, the story went, was still attached to what remained of his companion, a foot and swollen shin. You would never know by looking at him—this little, balding man with his fine hands—that he was capable of such a thing, but you might catch a glimpse in the eye of his daughter. A glint as sharp as the smirk that swept up the corner of her mouth when she finished telling Rule the story.

  —Are you shocked? she said.

  She was sitting on the edge of his unmade bed, legs crossed. Still wearing makeup even though she hadn’t left the house for weeks.

  —Nope.

  —Really? she said, her eyes losing themselves somewhere past him.

  —Well, maybe a little, he said.

  His thumb pressing her hooked mouth.

  —But I wouldn’t be so shocked if you’d said it had been you.

  The glint so sharp and bright now it cut him in two. He wanted to live there forever in that gleam, like in the bow of the moon.

  He loved this look and tried to get it out of her as often as he could; those days of being trapped, when he had nowhere to go and nothing in the world but her; he loved her faint freckles and how she said ris instead of rice; loved how she talked about where she’d lived with her family outside Port-au-Prince in a neighborhood of mostly German millionaires. She’d been eight years old when she and her mother left, but she kept her country among the glossy recollections the rich have of their childhoods. Her words, for a while at least, keeping his mind from darker places, from what he’d seen and what he went on seeing. What he’d done, and what he’d be asked to do.

  Three

  Until quite recently Kemper Woolsack had taken for granted the fact that her parents’ chests would rise and fall, their lungs fill with air, their hearts go on beating even after she had banished them from her own. Regardless of the distance she put between herself and her parents, she took comfort in this certainty, much in the same way that a person locked away from the sun and the moon must believe that those bodies still exist in their former places, doing what they’ve always done, because to allow yourself to think otherwise means you’ve come into another world.

  Now at the
age of twenty-five Kemper had been there, when Isaac couldn’t, for the deaths of his mother and father, she from a cancer of the breast and he a few months later from what could only be called grief, unguarded people whose warmth and kindness she had come to love but also mistrust, never understanding how they could give so much of themselves so freely, and perhaps it was this mistrust Isaac’s brother and sister-in-law sensed when they sent her away from their father’s memorial service. Their eyes on her as if to say, Go watch your own parents die. Go have your own grief.

  And now she would.

  Mid-December. A shroud of cold thrown over the city filled with returned troops and men selling bonds for a war that had been over for weeks, death now in the form of the ’flu sweeping through the cities and towns. White masks in the streets. Word of deaths by the thousand elsewhere. One afternoon Rule woke to shouting in the street below and hurried down with the pistol in his belt. The Haitians and some of their boarders were on the sidewalk, necks craned, looking at the sky where little sheets of paper fell in drifts. Then he saw them: airships, silver-bellied and tapered like fish, drifting high above the city. He looked up, jaw slack, all wonder and horror, the polarities of that age. The war was over, he’d gone out with Auga in their masks to celebrate the day, but here they were, still selling it. He snatched a sheet from the air and read its message—that a German bombing would be just like this if you did not BUY WAR BONDS.