XXXIII
There was a stir in the sultry July air of the metropolis of inland America. During the World War thousands of blacks had been imported to fill the depleted ranks of white men in the reeking stockyards, the sweltering foundries, the clamourous shops. With their families they had swarmed into the homes of the abandoned Red Light district to the number of 125,000 and were even crowding, here and there, beyond their boundaries into the sacred precincts of the whites.
White working men, banded into labor unions, had frowned upon their coming, but the industrial and political barons had willed it. These latter had given them work at almost white men’s pay, welded them into a political unit and permitted them to elect black representatives to sit among the city fathers. They had been lulled into the illusion that here, at last, they were free from the howling mob, the stake and torch, the hatred of the South.
They no longer bowed their heads as they walked along the streets. They could almost look a white man in the eye. They sat beside the whites on the street cars and in the “L’s,” talked to them, ate beside them at some restaurants and even, in certain dance halls, danced with their daughters. A few had intermarried.
The whites were growing restless. A spirit was blowing through them and uniting them. White workmen were becoming frightened and then enraged at the black intruders, who competed with them for food. Clerks who sat in the “L’s” turned their nostrils away from the Negroes beside them. Men of a hundred occupations, creeds and politics, who had been individuals since the war, suddenly found themselves once more aunit—a unit because of their common color. The Negroes felt the unity of their blackness.
Freeman smelled the coming storm, like a thousand other men, and prophesied about it freely.
“It’s Sunday,” he said one afternoon as they sat in the lobby of Robert’s hotel. “Well, perhaps I don’t blame you much for not wanting to visit some of the black and tan dance halls. I realize how you Southerners must feel about it. But you haven’t anything to do today anyway, and you must see the district. You can’t imagine what it’s like until you see it for yourself.”
“I’ll go,” Robert consented reluctantly, “but it rather goes against me to see a nigger walking with a white woman, and—”
“Well, after we get public opinion organized you won’t see a white girl walking with a coon!”
It was hot and sultry. It would have been hot even for Corinth and one noticed waves of air rising from the pavement. They rode to Twenty-Second street by elevated.
“There it starts,” said Freeman, pointing through the window as they drew near the station. “See all those dirty, brick tenements? And a few years ago there were only a few thousand in the whole city. What’s going on there? It looks like a mob.”
They reached the street and found it deserted save for dusky heads in the windows.
“Every one must have gone over there,” said Freeman. “Let’s see what’s doing. They look excited.”
“I’m not interested in any nigger meetings,” replied Robert. “There’s the lake. It’s hot as the deuce. Let’s walk down there.”
They had walked perhaps a block and a half east when Freeman suddenly turned. Robert had also heard the sound.
“Gee, they’re coming!”
Robert turned. Perhaps fifty blacks, men and boys, brandishing clubs and rocks, started at a dog trot up the street, whooping and yelling.
“They’ve got us cut off from the station. Hamilton, come on!”
“Why should we? They can’t be after us.”
Through an open window a mulatto, thrust her head.
“Hey, you white men,” she called. “They’s trouble andyou betta all beat it while de beating’s good. I know you just come, so you ain’t done nothing.”
“What’s the matter?”
Other heads appeared in windows, all talking and shouting at once. A black child had been drowned by a white man and the blacks were retaliating.
“Follow me!” yelled Freeman. “Around the corner to the car line.” They set off and as they did so, the blacks in their rear set up a cry and broke into a run. A stone whistled through the air and hit the sidewalk two feet ahead.
As they turned the corner a Negro darted out of a door with a yell, a stick in his hand. Hamilton, for the first time in months, felt the old pain in his chest. A few more steps and Freeman was drawing away. Robert suddenly whirled around and struck out with all his force. It was his only chance. The Negro stopped and ducked. The blow shot over his head, but Robert’s shoulder crashed into his chin and both fell. Robert felt the Negro wriggling beneath him, even before he opened his eyes, and attempted to regain his feet. He heard the shouts of the mob. He tried to rise. The black man clutched at his coat. Robert yanked it away and kicked himself loose and went staggering backward. Some one was clutching him by the arm. The cries of the mob grew louder.
“Automobile, c’mon!” It was Freeman pulling him forward and shouting hoarsely. They ran into the road and the speeding car suddenly slid to a halt trembling, its brakes set.
“Don’t stop! They’re after us!” They scrambled over the side into the back seat.
The car jumped ahead and went roaring down the road. A volley of stones shot through the air and shattered the wind-shield. The mob yelled.... Robert looked around. The mob was running toward the lake. They were out of the black belt, and the driver slackened his pace.
“What’s up?”
They told him.
“Every one of ’em ought to be lynched!”
The man at his side swore loudly.
“We ought to go back and burn the entire district.”
Robert was panting.
“Now you Northerners’ll know what we’ve got to put up with!”
“You’re right,” they swore.
In his room, Robert flung his coat across a chair and threw himself upon the bed, exhausted. His chest was heaving, he was wet with perspiration. Race riots in Chicago. God! In Corinth they would burn the colored population! He wondered whatwouldhappen here.
The door suddenly flew open.
“H’lo, Ham. What the devil! Are you sick?” It was McCall.
“No,” he panted, “tired. Doing some sprinting.” He untwisted himself and rose shakily. “But where have you been? Gee, it’s great to see you again.”
“You must have got a bump,” remarked McCall, as they shook hands. “Oh, I’ve just got back from a trip. I’ve been getting some stuff on the Trick Track Tribe. Trying to connect some atrocities with the Tribe. But what have you been doing, anyway? Playing football?”
Robert laughed.
“Almost.”
He narrated his experiences in the black belt. McCall whistled.
“When I was over in the office a little while ago, they told me something about it. So you were in it? Do you know how it started?”
“Only what a mulatto woman said, and she probably was lying.”
“No, that was straight. They have a line at the Twenty-Sixth street beach. The blacks bathe on one side and the whites on the other. No law about it, but it’s just a rule that both respect. Got a match?” He pulled out his cigarette case. “Well, a little pickaninny crossed the line and climbed on a raft. A white man threw a stone at him, struck the kid and knocked him in the water. He drowned.He probably didn’t mean to do it. There was a white patrolman in the district and when he took his time about investigating and making an arrest, the blacks started organizing. They had a few run-ins, but I thought that the thing had probably died down.”
“No, about fifty of them were running toward the lake when I saw them.”
“I suppose there’ll be trouble, then. Of course, only one white man is to blame and he ought to be punished. But the blacks feel the mass hatred against them. That rope keeping them to one side of the beach is a symbol of it. The throwing of the stone, another. Last week the race riots in Washington. This week in Chicago. You’d think that such a thing was impossible after the war.”
“Oh, well, you’ll always have a color line.”
“Oh, you’ll always have differentcolors, but I mean that race prejudice, that unreasoning mass hatred. Levin was right about the reaction following the war. Take the Trick Track Tribe. The things I’ve found out about them. The mayor of a little town in Kansas tarred and feathered, for instance, simply because he said he was opposed to the Tribe.”
“But look at all the niggers in Chicago, wouldn’t the Tribe—?”
“No! A thousand times no! You think if you had the mob organized to hate the Negro that everything would be all right.”
“We’re not telling anyone to hate the nigger. I mean the Tribe isn’t. The Tribe wants to put the nigger in his place. And he isn’t in his place in Chicago.”
“Bunk! If you have a Tribe here, you will only crystallize all the class hatred.”
“But it’s here.”
“Sure it’s here. But it’s the duty of intelligent men and women to break it.”
“So you’d have equal social rights for the nigger, as the nigger writers are advocating, would you? You’d have them marry and—”
“Don’t talk like a damn fool,” interrupted McCall. “Social equality is nothing that can be regulated. It is up to the individual. But you can insure social and economic justice, at least in a measure, and you can at least try to keep racial hatred from flaring up. Don’t you see what the Tribe is doing? It is simply magnifying all the narrow prejudices and hatreds. No man of intelligence could be reasoned into joining it because of its demands. He joins because his prejudices are aroused.”
“Why can’t he? Americanism. Pure womanhood—”
“Don’t talk like an ass. These terms don’t mean a blamed thing. Everybody is for Americanism, those niggers who chased you down the street as much as any one. Every one is for pure womanhood, except a few degenerates whom your prisons take care of. White supremacy is simply the Tribe’s way of saying black hatred. That’s what the Tribe standsfor—hatred, hate of the black, of the Jew and of the Catholic, hate of the laborunion—it wants to abolishneedlessstrikes, with a Tribesman, I suppose, to decide which are needless. And then there are states’ rights and prohibition. If you appealed to a man’s reason, you couldn’t get any members, because those planks automatically cut off every one who is a Catholic, a Jew, a Negro, an alien, a Republican, a radical, a believer in organized labor, a liberal or an intellectual. And their insinuations aboutWilson—Democrats. Now, then, who’s left? What’s this junk?”
He stooped to pick up one of the folders of the Trick Track Tribe, which had fallen out of Robert’s pocket. It was headed “Knights of Columbus Oath, Fourth Degree.”
“What is this?”
As he read, McCall’s eyes blazed and the arteries of his neck swelled. Robert bit his lips. The time had come. He could no longer dissemble. It was a question of his friendship withMcCall—McCall his buddy of thetrenches—or loyalty to the Tribe. McCall’s voice was raised in anger: “What’s this blasphemy!”
He read:
“‘When opportunity presents, I shall make and wage relentlesswar, open and secretly, against all heretics, Protestants and Masons, as I am directed to do, to extirpate them from the face of the whole earth; and that I will spare neither age, sex nor condition and that I will hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle and burn alive these infamous heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women and crash their infants’ heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race.
“‘That when the same cannot be done openly, I will secretly use the poisonous cup, the strangulation cord, the steel of the poniard, or the leaden bullet ... as I at any time may be directed so to do by any agent of the Pope or superior of the Brotherhood of the Holy Father of the Society of Jesus.’”
There was more ofit—about denouncing allegiance to Protestant countries and about voting for and employing only Catholics.
McCall’s angry eyes took in the pile of booklets and cards on the dresser. With one stride he crossed the room and began tearing them into bits. Then his contorted, red face grew pale, his lips quivered.
“Hamilton,you—you—” his voice choked. Robert held his breath. “You contemptible spy. From Corinth! I might have known!And—and—” He stood there for a moment, speechless, his hands clenched, his body trembling. He stepped forward and then suddenly turned to the door.
“Mac! Bill!” Robert found his voice. “Let me explain!”
“Explain? Hell!”
McCall reached the door and, without turning to look around, opened it.
“Bill!”
The door slammed. McCall was gone. The torn leaflets on the floor and the window curtains blew upward and fell again. Robert took a step toward the door and stopped. Bill was gone. In the mirror of his dresser Robert saw how white he was.