The ministers, by contrast, were eager to relieve him of his burdens. "Thank you, Deacon Younger," he said as he shook hands with them. "Thank you, Mr. Towler. Good to see you gentlemen-and you, too, of course, Mr. Bass; I don't mean to forget you-again. It's been four or five years since I last had the pleasure, has it not?"
"Fo' years, Mistuh Douglass," Deacon Daniel Younger answered. "It sho' enough is a pleasure to set eyes on you again, suh, I tell you truthfully." Like his colleagues, Younger was a man of education. He wrote well, as Douglas knew. His grammar and vocabulary were first rate. But he, like Towler and Bass, retained most of the intonations of slavery in his speech.
Douglass' own Negro accent was much less pronounced; as a boy, he'd learned white ways of speaking from his master's daughter. Over the years, he had seen many times how that made people both white and black take him more seriously. He found it useful and unfortunate at the same time.
"Come on to the carriage wid us," Washington Towler said. "We'll take you over to the Planter's Hotel on Fo'th Street. They know you're a-comin', and they will be ready fo' you." By that, he meant the hotel wouldn't make a fuss about having a Negro use one of its rooms for a few days. Douglass, of course, was not just any Negro, either, but as close to a famous Negro as the United States boasted.
The Reverend Henry Bass drove the buggy. He was younger than his two colleagues, both of whom were not far from Douglass' age. He said, "Don't know what all the excitement of the past few weeks will do to your crowds, Mistuh Douglass. What has yo' experience been in the other towns where you were?"
"It would be hard to state a general rule," Douglass answered. "Some people-by which I mean white people, of course-"
"Oh, of course," Bass said. He and the other two ministers rolled their eyes at the never-ending indignities of living on sufferance.
"Some people, I say," Douglass resumed, "take the threat of renewed war as a chance to punish the Confederate States, which works to our advantage. Others, though, continue to make the Negro the scapegoat for the dissolution of the Union, and because of that discount every word I say."
"You will see a deal o' dat last here, I am afraid." Deacon Daniel Younger's broad shoulders-the man was built like a barrel-moved up and down as he sighed. "During the war, there were plenty who fought"-he pronounced it fit, as did many, black and white, in the West and in the CSA-"to make Missouri a Confederate state. They have made up their minds to be part o' de Union now, but they are still not easy about it."
"I remember how Kentucky fell after Lincoln pulled troops easttoo little, too late-to try to halt Lee's army," Douglass said. "1 remember the talk about partitioning Missouri, too, on the order of what was done with Virginia and West Virginia. I thank God you were preserved entire for the United States."
"We praise Him every day," Washington Towler said. "Without His help, we should still be slaves ourselves." Henry Bass pulled up in front of the Planter's Hotel. Towler pointed to the entrance. "They bought and sold us, Mr. Douglass, right there, even in the days after the war, till emancipation finally became dc law of de land."
The Planter's Hotel had a Southern look to it even now. Its arches were of a style old-fashioned in the USA, incised into the fagade rather than raised in relief from it. Some of the men going in and out wore the white linen suiting common in the warm, muggy South, too, and spoke with drawls: traders up from New Orleans and Memphis, Douglass supposed. They stared at his companions and him as if a nightmare had come to life before their eyes-and so, Douglass hoped, one had.
He took his bags and went into the hotel. As he had on the steamboat, he carried them himself. Maybe the white porters assumed that, despite his clothes, he was a servant. Or maybe, and more likely, they just refused to lower themselves, as they saw it, by serving one of the Negroes who had served their kind for so many long, sorrowful years.
"I am Frederick Douglass," he said when he reached the front desk. "A room has been reserved in my name."
He waited for the clerk to shuffle through papers. The fellow lifted up his eyes now and again to stare at Douglass' dark countenance. What followed was as inevitable as night following day. "I'm sorry, s-" The clerk could not bring himself to say sir to a Negro. He started again: "I'm sorry, but I don't find that reservation."
"Young man," Douglass said coldly, "if you do not find it by the time I count ten, I promise you this hotel will be a stench in the nostrils of the entire United States by a week from Tuesday, when my next newspaper column goes out over the wires. Your superiors will not thank you for that. 1 commence: one, two, three…"
How the clerk stared! And how quickly the missing reservation appeared, as if by magic. Thoroughly cowed, the clerk even browbeat a white bellboy into taking Douglass' carpetbags from him and carrying them to the room. It was one of the smaller, darker rooms in the hotel, but Douglass had expected nothing better than that. Daniel Younger and his friends had probably been able to book no better.
After supper-which he ate at a table surrounded by empty ones-Henry Bass came by to take him to the Merchants' Exchange, where he would speak. St. Louis was a handsome city of gray limestone and a sandstone almost as red as brick, though soot dimmed its color on many buildings. The Merchants' Exchange proved to take up the whole block between Chestnut and Pine on Third Street. "We've got plenty of room for a good house, Mr. Douglass," Bass said. "President Tilden was nominated in the Grand Hall back in '76, he was."
But, when Douglass went into the hall, he was sadly disappointed. Plainly, every Negro in and around St. Louis who could afford a ticket was there. Somber-suited black men and their wives in fancy dresses filled to overflowing the seats allotted to them. Douglass had long prided himself, though, on his reputation for being able to speak to whites as well as blacks. Tonight, it failed him. The bright gaslights shone down on great empty rows of chairs, with here and there a clump of people.
He went ahead with his address; as a professional, he had no other choice. He sounded his familiar themes: tolerance, education, enlightenment, progress, the appropriateness of giving all their due for what they could do, not for the color of their skins. He drew rapturous applause from the Negroes in the hall, and got a polite hearing from the whites.
It could have been worse. He knew that. He'd started riots with his speeches now and again, sometimes meaning to, sometimes not. Tonight, he would have welcomed a riot in place of the near-indifference his white audience showed him. When U.S. whites had nothing else on their minds, they were sometimes willing to listen to tales of the Negro's plight and ways by which it might be alleviated. When they were distracted, they might as well have forgotten the USA still held any Negroes.
Once it was finally over, he stood down from the podium. To his surprise, one of the people who came up to speak with him was a gray-bearded white man, a former Army officer whom Douglass, after a bit, recognized from years gone by. "You must not take it to heart, sir," he said with touching sincerity. "Do remember, our present concern over the Confederate States is also, in its way, concern for your people."
Douglass smelled liquor on his breath. No wonder he is so sincere, the Negro thought. And no wonder he is a soldier no more, despite having won a couple of battles against the Rebels. By his rather worn suit, the fellow had made no great success of civilian life. Liquor again. But he had done his best to be kind on a dismal evening, and he did have a point of sorts. Exercising forbearance, Douglass said, "Thank you, General Grant."