The man in the brown suit sits coiled and tight beside Miss Loretta, growling, if that is how one would describe the noise, even more loudly now. She leans out into the aisle and casts a glance backward to see where there might be someone to intercede if he proves dangerous.
“But with power,” the Suffragist continues, “comes responsibility. A responsibility that is sadly lacking in our present administration in regards to their unholy alliance with a—” and here she looks around the hall again, as if searching for the parties she is about to malign, and though finding none, lowers her voice with the delicacy appropriate to public criticism, “—a less morally developed segment of our citizenry.”
It can’t be.
Miss Loretta feels her cheeks begin to burn. This is wrong, this is not where it is supposed to lead. She had not believed Daddy when he told her, had refused to read the article in the newspaper, replying that as she had never heard him refer to its editors as anything but liars and scoundrels, why would she believe a slander they printed about Mrs. Felton, whose views they so airily disparage whenever given the opportunity?
“See for yourself,” he grumbled, “but don’t blame me for being the messenger.”
Daddy is a man with no idols. Even Mr. Lincoln, whose words and deeds he admired on the whole, was “still a politician” and therefore the object of some contempt. Even Socrates, endlessly quoted during her childhood and ever since, is not beyond reproach. “A Greek,” Daddy will say cryptically, leaving the nature of that particular shortcoming to her imagination.
“For the want of political gain,” the great lady goes on, indignation creeping into her voice, “these white men have initiated the negro into the mysteries of the ballot box, confounding him with tall stories and outright bribery in exchange for his vote!”
The Suffragist says vote with disgust, a dirty thing in her mouth. The man in the brown suit has begun to rock slightly to and fro in his seat, the movement somewhat indecent, his burning eyes fixed on the speaker. There have been reports, a new one practically every day, that indicate a rash, no, an epidemic of black men inflicting the “nameless crime” upon innocent white women. Six of them — or is it nine, or fourteen? Some of the stories end with the tree and the rope, others with only the howl of outraged Southern Manhood. Daddy, of course, with his contempt for the Fourth Estate, especially as it is manifested in North Carolina, remains unconvinced.
“Can it then surprise us that once allowed to break our election laws with impunity, these creatures assume they may engage in theft, rapine, and murder without fear of retribution?”
Grumbles among the audience members, male voices for the most part. The Suffragist begins to increase her volume, laying a foundation for her crescendo, lowering her register, now that she knows she has the men with her, from a soft coloratura to a hearty tenore spinto.
“As long as your politicians take the colored man into their embrace on election day and make him think that he is a man and a brother, so long will lynching prevail — for familiarity breeds contempt.”
She is brilliant, as usual, in her use of the language. “Your” politicians, leaving the unenfranchised women innocent of the outrage, the twist in logic that makes misplaced benevolence the handmaiden of murder. Daddy was president of the Forensic Society in his Princeton days and has drilled Miss Loretta in the uses and abuses of rhetoric. She feels tears beginning to form. The man beside her presses his hands, curled into fists, against his thighs as he rocks and growls, his knuckles white.
“And if it needs lynching to protect women’s dearest possession from these ravening human brutes—” a tiny caesura, the intake of breath before the final chord, “—then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary!”
The little man springs to his feet, smashing his hands together in approval, joined by half the audience, the women applauding as fervently if not as athletically as the men. It is what they have come for, the air in the room with a different charge than she’s ever felt before, a raw and terrible energy. Miss Loretta rises and walks quickly up the aisle toward the rear of the hall, a tight smile on her face, the tears coming now.
She recognizes the man standing at the very back. He is not applauding but writing on a pad, a frown fixed on his handsome face. Their eyes meet for an instant and he nods, though they have never been formally introduced. It is Alex Manly, the editor of the Wilmington Daily Record, who is engaged to her dear little Carrie.
Miss Loretta may be the only person in the hall who knows he is not white.
“The manhood of the South,” she hears the Suffragist continue as the applause dies down, the words echoing, distant and hollow now as she hurries across the lobby, “must put a sheltering arm around innocence and virtue. The black fiend who lays his unholy and lustful hands on white women must surely die!”
An ancient negro waits, leaning against his hackney carriage at the bottom of the steps.
“M’am,” he says, tipping his battered cap, and offers his hand to help her up.
Miss Loretta experiences a twinge of — what? Discomfort? Fear? — as she takes it, and is immediately furious with herself.
“Thank you,” she says when she is settled. “Eighth and Market, please.”
The old man tips his cap again and climbs up into the driver’s seat.
“Listenin to Mrs. Felton,” he says as he urges the horse into motion.
“Yes. She’s — she’s quite an orator.”
“Womens at the ballot box,” he says, shaking his head at the wonder of the idea. “That be a new day.”
VOLUNTEERS
In Denver they don’t make him undress.
The meeting is in the bigger bar downstairs at the Windsor, the one with the silver dollars inlaid every few feet in the floor and walls. Masterson perched on a stool pulled away from the bar counter as the pencil artist sits and stands and squats to draw his face from different vantage points, Niles Manigault obligingly skittering out of the eyeline whenever it changes, the fat man blocking most all the daylight from the open doorway.
“He knows the deal?” asks Masterson, flicking his eyes briefly at Hod.
“He fought Choynski,” says Niles. “Held his own.”
“The three great virtues of a prizefighter,” says Masterson, lifting his chin a bit to catch the light angling in from Larimer Street, “are Talent, Heart, and Obedience. In my book the last of these is the greatest.”
“He’s a sharp lad,” says Niles. “Once the deal, whatever it is, has been agreed upon—”
“Twelve rounds,” says the fat man, slowly circling Hod, poking his bicep once with his cane. “Reddy needs time to sell beer, and if the Kid and Mongone are fighting straight—”
“For eight rounds they’re fighting so that both stay on their feet,” interrupts Masterson, “and then they can knock each other’s brains out.”
“You’ve placed some wagers.”
“Move, Otto,” says Masterson, holding his pose and wiggling a finger sideways. “You’re throwing a shadow.”
The fat man snorts in annoyance but moves to the side a few feet. He wears a bright checked suit and a red vest. “If you’d just have a photograph taken like a normal man—”
“It lacks the human dimension,” says Masterson. His face is fleshier than Hod has imagined, his eyes sharper. In their boyhood games he always insisted on being Masterson, his brother Zeb left with a choice of badmen to represent. “It lacks the soul. These likenesses, which will appear in — what’s this one to be called?”