Ragtime (16 page)

28

Actually the blast occurred two miles away at the borders of the city in its west end. The station house of the Emerald Isle Engine had exploded, firing the field across the street with burning timbers and lighting the sky over Westchester. Companies from every section of the city responded and from the adjoining communities of Pelham and Mount Vernon. Little could be done. Fortunately the clapboard structure on Firehouse Lane was no closer than a quarter-mile to the nearest residence. But two of the volunteers were in the hospital, one with burns so severe that he was not expected to live through the day. And at least five men were known to have been on duty at the time. It was the night of the week, Thursday, when the company gathered for its regular game of poker.

By the following dawn the field was scorched and the building was a pile of charred ruins. The entire area had been roped off and police detectives now began to go through the debris recovering bodies and deducing from the evidence what it was that had caused the disaster. It soon became apparent that homicide had been committed. Of the four bodies recovered two show that not the fire or the explosion but buckshot had been the cause of death. The matching horses were in harness and attached to the pumper and they lay where they had fallen halfway into the street. The alarm signal machine was recovered from the ruins showing that an alarm had been given from a box at the north end of town, yet there had been no other fire anywhere in the city that nigh. From this and several other bits of evidence, some secured with the help of a doctor of forensic medicine from the New York City Police Department, the following reconstruction was made: At approximately 10:30 P.M. six members of the engine company had been gathered in their quarters playing cards when the alarm rang. The cardplayers scrambled into their boots and helmets. The horses were trotted out of their stalls and hitched to the steam engine. The harness was a special snap-on variety developed for firehorses by the P. A. Setzer Company of Hickory, North Carolina. Like all firemen the Emerald Isle were proud of the speed with which they answered alarms. There was always a small fire going under the boiler so that the steam could be raised to full pressure by the time the apparatus arrived at the site. If the company were normally efficient on this evening not one minute would elapse before the doors were swung open and the driver, hollahing his horses, would have whipped them into the road. Someone was standing in the street directly in the engine’s path. He or they were armed with shotguns which were fired directly in the faces of the oncoming horses. Two of the horses went down immediately, the third reared, wounded in the neck so that its blood sprayed over the street like a fine rain. The driver of the rig was fatally shot, and fell forward to the ground. Of the three firemen aboard, two incurred fatal wounds and a third was crushed to death as the engine, pulled awry by the panicked horses, toppled over on its side. When the steam boiler went over, it made a terrible clang that was heard by residents in the neighborhood already startled by the boom of guns. The firebox was scattered and flaming coals ignited the clapboard firehouse. The blaze quickly grew and the heat of the burning building exploded the boiler and sent burning timbers flying across the road into the field. That was the moment Houdini lost the affection of his audience.

As it happened the family had retired early that night. They had been sleeping poorly. The brown baby cried for his mother and did not take to the mild of a wet nurse. Father heard the distant explosion and looking out of his bedroom window saw the light sky. His first thought was that his plant with its store of fireworks had blown. But the glow was brightest in a different direction. It wasn’t until the next morning that he learned what it was that had burned. The fire seemed to be the only topic of conversation throughout the city. At the lunch hour Father went to the site. Crowds were standing at the police barriers. He circled the ropes and came to the pond at the bottom of the field across the road from the demolished firehouse: in the pond, the sunken structure of the Model T appeared and disappeared as the water, raised to a small chop by the prevailing breeze, erased and then re-formed its wavering outlines. Father went home for the day although the twelve-noon whistle had only just blown. Mother could not look at him. She was seated with the baby on her lap. Her head was bet in a meditative attitude unconsciously suggestive of the dead Sarah. Father wondered at this moment if their lives might no longer be under their control.

At four in the afternoon the newsboy ran by and tossed the folded evening paper to the porch. The killer arsonist was believed to be an unidentified Negro male. From his hospital bed, the sole survivor of the attack had been able to describe him to the police. Apparently the Negro put out the fire burning the clothes of the injured man. And then, lest that be interpreted as an act of mercy, he had held his head by the hair and demanded to know where the Fire Chief was hiding. But it was Fire Chief Conklin’s good fortune not to be at the station house that evening. It was not known how the Negro knew Conklin or what he had against him.

The professional consensus was that there had to have been accomplices—this from the fact that a false alarm had been set to bring the volunteers out of the station. Nevertheless an editorial described the disaster as the work of a lone crazed killer. Citizens were called upon to lock their doors and maintain their vigilance, but to remain calm.

The family sat at the dinner table. Mother held the baby in her arms. Without realizing it she did not now expect ever to put the child down. She felt the touch of his tiny fingertips on her cheek. Upstairs in his room Grandfather groaned in pain. There was no dinner this evening, nobody wanted to eat. A cut-glass carafe of brandy was set in front of Father. He was drinking his third glass. He felt that something, some sort of small bone or piece of dust, was lodged in his throat and he had conceived of the brandy as the only thing that would fix it. He had taken from his bureau drawer his old army pistol from the Philippine campaign. It lay on the table. We are suffering a tragedy that should not have been ours, he said to his wife. What in God’s name possessed you on that day? The county has facilities for indigents. You took her in without sufficient thought. You victimized us all with your foolish female sentimentality. Mother regarded him. She could not remember any time in their long acquaintance when he had reproached her. She knew he would apologize; nevertheless tears filled her eyes and eventually ran down her face. Wisps of her hair had come undone and lay on her neck and over her ears. Father looked at her and she was beautiful in the way she had been as a girl. He did not realize the pleasure he felt in having made her cry.

Young Brother was sitting with his elbow on the arm of his chair and his head propped in his hand. His index finger was extended and pointed at his temple. He watched his brother-in-law. Are you going out to find him and shoot him? he said. I’m going to protect my home, Father said. This is his child here. If he makes the mistake of coming to my door I will deal with him. But why should he come here, Brother said in a goading tone of voice. We did not desecrate his car. Father looked at Mother. In the morning I will go to the police and have to tell them this murdering madman was a guest in my home. I will have to tell them we are keeping his bastard child. Younger Brother said I think Coalhouse Walker Jr. would want you to tell the police everything you know. You can tell them he’s the same Negro maniac whose car is lying at the bottom of Firehouse Pond. You can tell them he’s the fellow who visited their own headquarters to make a complaint against Will Conklin and his thugs. You can tell then he’s the same crazed black killer who sat by the bedside of someone who died in the hospital of her injuries. Father said I hope I misunderstand you. Would you defend this savage? Does he have anyone but himself to blame for Sarah’s death? Anything but his damnable nigger pride? Nothing under heaven can excuse the killing of men and the destruction of property in this manner! Brother stood so abruptly that his chair fell over. The baby started and began to cry. Brother was pale and trembling. I did not hear such a eulogy at Sarah’s funeral, he said. I did not hear you say then that death and the destruction of property was inexcusable.

But the fact was that Coalhouse Walker has already taken several steps to identify himself with the crime. It turned out that within an hour of the explosion he, or some other black man, left identical letters at the offices of the two local newspapers. The editors after conferring with the police chose not to print them. The letters were written in a clear firm hand and told of the events leading up to the attack on the firehouse. I want the infamous Fire Chief of the Volunteers turned over to my justice, the letter said. I want my automobile returned to me in its original condition. If these conditions are not met I will continue to kill firemen and burn firehouses until they are. I will destroy the entire city if need be. The newspaper editors and police officials believed it was in the interest of the public welfare not to print the letter. An isolated crazed killer was one problem. An insurrection was another. Squads of police quietly went through the Negro neighborhoods and asked questions about Coalhouse Walker Jr. At the same time police of neighboring towns with Negro populations did the same. To headquarters the word filtered back: Not one of our Negroes. Not one of ours.

In the morning Father took the North Avenue streetcar downtown. He strode to City Hall. He went in the door a widely respected businessman in the community. His career as an explorer had been well reported in the newspapers. The flag that flew from the cupola on top of the building had been his gift to the city.

III

29

Father had been born and raised in White Plains, New York. He was an only child. He remembered moments of light and warmth in the days of summer at Saratoga Springs. There were gardens there with paths of washed gravel. He would stroll with his mama down the large painted porches of the great hotels. On the same day every year they went home. She was a frail woman who dies when he was fourteen. Father attended Groton and then Harvard. He read German Philosophy. In the winter of his sophomore year his studies ended. His father had made a fortune in the Civil War and had since used his time losing it in unwise speculations. It was now entirely gone. The old man was the sort that thrived on adversity. His confidence rose with every loss. In bankruptcy he was beaming and triumphant. He died suddenly, all his expectations intact. His flamboyance had produced in his lonely son a personality that was cautious, sober, industrious and chronically unhappy. Coming into his majority, the orphan took the few dollars left to him and invested it in a small fireworks business owned by an Italian. Eventually he took it over, expanded its sales, bought out a flag manufacturing firm and became quite comfortable. He had also found time to secure an army commission in the Philippine campaigns. He was proud of his life but never forgot that before going into business he had been to Harvard. He had heard William James lecture on the principles of Modern Psychology. Exploration became his passion: he wanted to avoid what the great Dr. James had called the habit of inferiority to the full self.

Now every morning Father rose and tasted his mortal being. He wondered if his dislike for Coalhouse Walker, which had been instantaneous, was based not on the man’s color but on his being engaged in an act of courtship, a suspenseful enterprise that suggested the best of life was yet to come. Father noted the skin mottling on the back of his hand. He found himself occasionally asking people to repeat to him what they’d said. His bladder seemed always to demand emptying. Mother’s body did not arouse his lust, only his quiet appreciation. He admired her shape and softness but was no longer inflamed. He noted that she had grown heavier in the upper arms. Once accustomed to life together after his return from the Artic, they had slipped into an undemanding companionship in which he felt by-passed by life, like a spectator at an event. He found distasteful her promotion of the black girl’s marriage. And now that Sarah was dead he felt altogether invisible, Mother’s grief having directed her attention solely on Sarah’s boy.

He recognized that he took satisfaction in going to the police. It was not an entirely righteous feeling. Perhaps in compensation, he represented Coalhouse as a peaceful man driven mad by circumstances not of his own doing. This was exactly the argument Younger Brother made at home. Father confirmed the account of events in Coalhouse’s letter. He was a pianist, Father said, using the historical tense. He was always courteous and correct in his dealings. The police nodded gravely. They wanted to know if the Negro was likely to strike again. That is what the Police Chief said, strike again. Father said that once Coalhouse had set a course for himself he was nothing if not persevering. Largely upon this advice a defense was organized. Police guards were assigned to all the firehouses in the city. The main roads were placed under watch. In the headquarters a wall map was installed showing the deployment of forces. On the basis of Father’s information the New York City Police Department was persuaded to assign detectives to look for Coalhouse in Harlem.

Father had expected criticism from the police. This was not forthcoming. They regarded him as an expert on the character of the criminal. They encouraged him to spend as much time at headquarters as he could. They wanted him to be on hand for their deliberations. The walls of the rooms were painted light green to a line at waist level, dark green below. There were cuspidors in every corner. Father agreed to make himself as available as he could. This was his busiest time of the year. All the orders for rockets, sparklers, Roman candles, crackers, flares and bombs had to be shipped in time for the Fourth of July celebrations. He went back and forth between his office and the police. To his disgust he found himself at the station in the company of the Emerald Isle Chief, Will Conklin. Conklin smelled of whiskey and the experience of being a hunted man had turned his florid face the color of veal. He was by turn bombastic and craven. He offered counsel of the same level of wisdom that had triggered the crisis in the first place. He wanted to go to the black neighborhood and clean all the niggers out once and for all. The officers heard this with disinterest. They teased him about his fate. We may have to give you to the boogie man, Willie, they said. Just to get some peace around here. Conklin could take little of this. Are we not in this together? he said. God love you, you were cruel lads at St. Catherine’s and yet cruel now. Willie, the Police Chief said, we had to wait to hear from the black man himself that one of you shenanigans is what started this, you dumb Mick, telling us now we’re in this together.

But the Fire Chief’s character and mentality seemed appropriate to the place. There was a constant traffic through the glass doors of felons, lawyers, bondsmen, policemen and hapless relatives. Drunks were brought in by the collar and thieves with their hands cuffed. Voices were loud and language was vile. Conklin owned a coal and ice business and lived with a wife and several children in an apartment over his yard office. It dawned on Father that the man was spending so much time at the police station because he felt safe there. Of course he would not admit it. He boasted of the precautions he had taken at his yard. Not relying on the two posted policemen, he had enlisted all the survivors of the Emerald Isle to billet themselves at his place. They were armed. The nigger might as well attack West Point, he said.

Father felt demeaned by the man. Conklin spoke to him differently from the way he addressed the policemen. His diction improved. His assumption of social equality was galling. It’s a tragic thing, Captain, he would say. A tragic thing indeed. Once he actually put his hand on Father’s shoulder, a gesture of such alarming brotherhood that it felt like an electric shock.

Nevertheless Father found himself spending more and more time here. He found it difficult to go home. On the day of the mass funeral for the victims of the Emerald Isle fire, he went to hear the eulogies. Half the city turned out. A large brass cross swayed over the heads of the crowd. Will Conklin did not leave the police station. I’d be a perfect target for the rifle shot, he said. Questions about his behavior began to circulate through the city. Then the news that the killing of the Night of the Emerald Isle stemmed from a grievance was published in the New York City dailies, where reporters were not constrained by the interests of the local chamber of commerce. The
World
and the
Sun
printed the text of Coalhouse’s letter. Will Conklin became a despised person everywhere. He was hated as the stupid perpetrator of events leading to the death of men whom he ostensibly commanded. On the other hand, among certain elements he was scorned as someone who knew how to bait a Negro but not to put the fear of God onto him.

A man wearing a derby now sat in a car every day up the street from the house on Broadview Avenue. Father had not been officially told of this but he advised Mother that he had asked for a police guard, feeling it would be less wise to share with her his speculation that for all their gratitude at his coming forward the police weren’t entirely above keeping an eye on him. He wondered what suspicion they might be entertaining.

Exactly one week after Coalhouse’s attack on the Emerald Isle, at six in the morning, a White town car drove slowly up Railroad Place, a narrow cobblestone street in the West End. In the middle of the block was Municipal Fire Station No.2. As the car drew abreast of the building it stopped and the two policemen standing sleepily before the doors were astounded to see several black men disembark holding shotguns and rifles. One of the policemen had the presence of mind to drop to the ground. The other just stood open-mouthed as the raiders efficiently formed a line, like a firing squad, and upon signal fired their weapons in unison. The blast killed the standing policeman and shattered the windowpanes of the firehouse doors. One of the Negroes then ran up and tossed several small packages through the broken windows.

The man who had given the command to fire came up to the terrified survivor lying on the sidewalk. He placed a letter in his hand and said calmly This must be published in the newspaper. Then he joined the other Negroes, who had returned to the car. As it drove off two or perhaps three explosions, coming one on top of another, blew out the doors of the firehouse and instantly turned it into an inferno. The flames quickly engulfed an adjoining saloon and the establishment of a coffee distributor who also roasted his blends for customers off the street. The sacks of beans produced a yellow pall and left a fragrance of roasted coffee over the neighborhood for several weeks. Eventually four bodies were recovered, all of city firemen. An elderly woman, presumably dead of fright, was found in her rooms across the way. A Reo fire engine and an ambulance were destroyed.

And now the city was truly in panic. Children did not appear for school. Cries of outrage were directed against the city administration and against Willie Conklin. A delegation of firemen marched to City Hall and demanded to be sworn in as police deputies and given arms to defend themselves. The flustered Mayor sent a telegram to the Governor of New York appealing for help. The story of Coalhouse’s second attack made the front pages of every newspaper in the country. Reporters in droves came up from New York. The Chief of Police was condemned for allowing the black killer to do his murderous work again. The Chief made a statement to reporters gathered in his office. The man uses automobiles to get around, he said. He strikes and disappears, God knows where. For several years the Association of Police Chiefs of the State of New York has passed a resolution calling for the licensing of automobiles and automobilists. If that were the law today we could track the brute down. The Chief as he spoke emptied the drawers of his desk. He puffed a cigar. He walked out with the reporters. The next day a bill to license automobiles was introduced in the State Legislature.

Father employed two Negroes at his manufactory, one as a janitor, the other as an assembler of rocket tubes. Neither reported to work the day of the second disaster. In fact Negroes were to be seen nowhere in the city. They stayed home behind locked doors. That night police arrested on the street several white citizens carrying pistols and rifles. The Governor responded to the Mayor’s appeal by sending in two companies of militia from New York City. They arrived the next morning and immediately set up their tents on the baseball field behind the high school. Children gathered to watch. Special editions of the local papers were published and each carried prominently the text of Coalhouse’s second letter. This is what it said: One, that e white excrescence known as Willie Conklin be turned over to my justice. Two, that the Model T Ford with its custom pantasote top be returned in its original condition. Until these demands are satisfied, let the rules of war prevail. Coalhouse Walker Jr. President, Provisional American Government.

At this point everyone’s most urgent need was to know what Coalhouse Walker looked like. The newspapers competed fiercely. Newsmen stormed the offices of the Clef Club Orchestra in Harlem. There were no pictures to be had that included the face of the infamous pianist. Hearst’s
American
triumphantly went to press with a portrait of the composer Scott Joplin. Friends of Joplin threatened to sue, the composer being in the last stages of a terminal illness and unable to see to his own interests. Apologies were tendered. Finally a newspaper in St. Louis came up with a picture that was reprinted widely. Father recognized it to be accurate. It showed a somewhat younger Coalhouse sitting at an upright piano in white tie and tails. His hands were on the keyboard and he was smiling for the camera. Grouped around the piano were a banjo player, a cornetist, a trombonist, a violinist and a drummer bent over a snare drum. They were all in white tie. They were posed as if playing but were clearly not. A circle was drawn around Coalhouse’s head. This became the standard photo. The ironies of a smiling black man with a neat moustache, an altogether cheerful and forthright physiognomy, were too delicious for the caption writers to resist. Smile of a killer, they said. Or the President of the Provisional American Government in happier days.

Under the intense and widespread investigation by the press the family’s role in the entire affair could not be kept hidden. Reporters, first in ones and twos, later in larger groups, began to knock on the door, and then, being refused admittance, to camp outside under the Norwegian maples. They wanted to see the brown child, they wanted statements of any kind about Coalhouse and his visits to Sarah. They peeked through the windows of the parlor and came around to the kitchen door to try the lock. They wore straw boaters and carried pads in their pockets. They chewed tobacco and spit it on the ground and crushed cigarettes under their heels in the grass. Pictures of the house appeared in the New York papers. There were inaccurate accounts of Father’s explorations. The blinds were drawn and the boy was not allowed to go out. The house was stifling and in the night Grandfather moaned in his sleep.

Mother might have withstood all of this if a debate did not rise concerning the family sheltering of Coalhouse Walker’s son. S steady parade of cars came up the hill in the long evenings as sightseers craned their necks for a glimpse of a face in the window. An official of the Child Welfare Board in New York gave an opinion that the still-unchristened illegitimate child should be given over to one of the excellent asylums that existed for the care of orphans, waifs and children born out of wedlock. Mother kept the baby in her room. She would no longer take him downstairs. She enlisted her son to watch over him when she had to see to something. She did not take the time to put her hair up but let it hang to her shoulders all day. She was uncharacteristic in her bitterness toward Father. Why don’t you unlock your treasure chest, she said and get me some proper help. This was a reference to his financial conservatism which she had never before questioned. Always they had lived less well than he could afford. Father was stung by the remark but he went out and found a woman to do the cooking and another woman to be laundress and housemaid, both to live in. He hired the man who had been the part-time gardener and installed him in the rooms above the garage stable. Grandfather already had a registered nurse to tend him in the day. The house, under siege, now bustled like a wartime camp. The boy was constantly admonished to get out from under people’s feet. He watched his mother pace her room, her hands clasped in front of her, her unbound hair hanging down the sides of her face. She looked gaunt, and her chain, which had always inclined to roundness, seemed ungenerous, even pointed.

It was clear the crisis was driving the spirit from their lives. Father had always felt secretly that as a family they were touched by an extra light. He felt it going now. He felt stupid and plodding, available simply to have done to him what circumstances would do. Coalhouse ruled. Yet he had been to the Artic, to Africa, to the Philippines. He had traveled out west. Did that mean only that more and more of the world resisted his intelligence? He sat in his study. Everyone he thought about, even Grandfather, he saw in terms of his own failed concern. He had treated Grandfather with the arrogant courtesy one gives the senile even before the condition has set in. From Younger Brother he was completely estranged. Toward his wife he felt drastically slipped in her estimation, an explorer in body only, the spirit trapped in his own father’s prejudices. He was beginning to look like him, too, going dry and juiceless in everything, with a mad glint showing in the corner of his eye. Why did that have to be?