Ragtime: A Novel

  The next evening the household experienced the oddness of a visit by Coalhouse Walker that was not on a Sunday. He sat in the parlor with his arms folded and told the story in detail. There was no aggrieved tone in his voice, he recited calmly and objectively, as if he were describing something that had happened to someone else. Mother said Mr. Walker, I am ashamed that this community is represented in your mind by that bunch of toughs. Father said The company has a bad reputation. They are an exception, the other volunteer engines being in all ways upright and responsible. Younger Brother sat on the piano stool with his legs crossed. He leaned forward, totally engaged by the problem. Where is the car now? he said. And what about those two boys? They are witnesses for you. But the pianist had spent the afternoon tracking down the boys only to find their parents refusing to have them involved in the matter. I’m a stranger to the Negroes here, he said matter-of-factly. They have to live here and they want no trouble. As for the car I have not looked at it again. And I won’t until it is returned to me as it was when I drove away from this house yesterday evening.

  Standing in the hallway just out of sight during this interview was Sarah. She held her baby on her hip and she listened. She perceived as no one in the family could the enormity of the misfortune. She heard Father say to Coalhouse that if he intended to pursue his claim he should engage a lawyer. There was such a thing as the power of subpoena for witnesses. Are there any colored lawyers here? Coalhouse asked. I don’t know of one, Father said. But any lawyer who loves justice will do, I should think. He paused. I will underwrite the expense, he said in a gruff voice. Coalhouse stood. I thank you but that won’t be necessary. He put an envelope on the side table. In it was fifty dollars in cash. This, Mother learned afterward, had come out of the money he was saving toward the wedding.

  The next day Mother’s Younger Brother took it upon himself to go to the site of the incident and see the car. After work he rode his bicycle to Firehouse Lane. The Model T had been thoroughly vandalized, whether by the volunteers or others it was impossible to determine. It sat with its front end in the tall weeds at the edge of the pond. The wheels were sunk in the mud. The headlamps and the windshield were shattered. The rear tires were flattened, the tufted upholstery had been gutted and the custom pantasote top was slashed to ribbons.

  24

  Younger Brother stood at the pond. Since his evening with Emma Goldman he had been in considerable difficulty. People at work were surprised by his animation. He fixed his attention on anything that could sustain it. He produced small talk that verged on hysteria. He sat at his drawing table and turned out designs in endless modifications for rifles and grenades. He measured the small squares and made his computations and watched the point of his pencil as it impressed the paper. When there was no other recourse he would begin to sing, just to hear the sound. Thus with continuous concentration and the expenditure of enormous amounts of energy he tried to keep himself from slipping into the vast distances of his unhappiness. It was all around him. It was a darkness as impudently close as his brow. It choked him by its closeness. And what was most terrifying was its treachery. He would wake up in the morning and see the sun coming in the window, and sit up in his bed and think it was gone, and then find it there after all, behind his ears or in his heart.

  He decided he was on the verge of a nervous collapse. He prescribed for himself a regimen of cold baths and physical exertion. He bought a Columbia bicycle and rode it to work. At night, before bed, he would do calisthenics until he was exhausted.

  On the floor below, Mother and Father felt the house shake. They realized he was jumping up and down. They were used to his eccentricities. He had never confided in them or shared his hopes or feelings and so they saw no marked change in his behavior. Mother did ask him to join them in the parlor after dinner when he had no plans for the evening. He tried this. He heard them address him, heard himself answer. He saw them in their suffocating parlor with its chaise and its mounted heads and fringed lampshades and he felt he couldn’t breathe. He despised them. He thought they were complacent, ordinary and inconsiderate. One evening Father read to everyone the editorial in the local newspaper. Father liked to read aloud when he found something particularly instructive or well-written. The title of the editorial was THE SPRING PEEPER. So that diminutive visitor to our ponds and fields has come to call once again, Father read. In truth he is no less ugly than his older brothers Frog and Toad. But we welcome the gallant little fellow and laud his beauty. For is he not in advance of Robin and even hardy Crocus in his proclamation of the Spring? The young man rushed from the room convinced he was strangling to death.

  There is no question then that Younger Brother was fortunate to conceive a loyalty to the colored man. Standing at the pond he heard the lapping of the water against the front fenders of the Model T. He noted that the hood was unlatched, and lifting and folding it back, saw that the wires had been torn from the engine. The sun was now setting and it threw a reflection of blue sky on the dark water of the pond. There ran through him a small current of rage, perhaps one one-hundredth, he knew, of what Coalhouse Walker must have felt, and it was salutary.

  Here, given subsequent events, it is important to mention what little is known about Coalhouse Walker Jr. Apparently he was a native of St. Louis, Missouri. As a young man he had known and admired Scott Joplin and other St. Louis musicians and had paid for his piano studies with money he earned as a stevedore. There is no information about his parentage. At one point a woman in St. Louis claimed to be his divorced wife but that was never proved. There were never located any of his school records in St. Louis and it still is not known how he acquired his vocabulary and his manner of speaking. Perhaps by an act of will.

  It was widely reported when he was achieving his notoriety that Coalhouse Walker had never exhausted the peaceful and legal means of redress before taking the law into his own hands. This is not entirely true. He went to see three different attorneys recommended by Father. In all cases they refused to represent him. He was advised to recover his automobile before it was totally wrecked and to forget the matter. To all three he insisted that he didn’t want to forget the matter but to bring suit against the Fire Chief and men of the Emerald Isle Engine.

  Father himself telephoned one of these attorneys, a man who had represented his firm in several business matters. Is there not a case there, he asked. When he goes for his hearing, the lawyer said to Father, you can go with him. You don’t need me for this. When a property owner in this city walks into court with a Negro, a charge like this is usually dismissed. But he is not interested in the charge, Father said. He wants to sue. At that point Father realized the attorney was involved in a conversation with someone in his office. Glad to be of help, the attorney said, and rang off.

  It is known also that Coalhouse Walker consulted a black attorney in Harlem. He had learned that the Emerald Isle Chief, whose name was Will Conklin, was a stepbrother of the Judge of the City Court and a nephew of a County Alderman in White Plains. The Harlem attorney advised him there were ways to divert the case to other jurisdictions but these were expensive and time-consuming. And the outcome was not at all predictable. You have the money for that? the lawyer said. I am soon to be married, Coalhouse Walker said. That is an expensive proposition, the lawyer said. Surely your responsibilities to your intended are more important than the need to redress a slight on the part of white folks. Then Walker apparently made a remark not entirely courteous to the black lawyer. The counselor stood up behind his desk and told him to leave. I have charity cases you know nothing of, he shouted. I want justice for our people so bad I can taste it. But if you think I would go to Westchester County to plead on a colored man’s behalf that someone deposited a bucket of slops in his car, you are very much mistaken.

  It is known too that Coalhouse made a preliminary attempt to see the matter through as his own counsel. He had filed a complaint but did not know how to go about getting a place on the court calendar or what steps h
ad to be taken to assure that it was correct in form in order to be heard. He appeared at City Hall for an interview with the Office of the County Clerk. It was suggested that he return another day when there was less pressing business in the office. But he persisted and was then told that his complaint was not on file and that several weeks would be required to trace it. Come back then, the clerk told him. Instead he went to the police station where he had originally filed and wrote out a second complaint. The policemen on duty regarded him with amazement. An older officer took him aside and confided to him that he was probably filing in vain since the volunteer fire companies were not municipal employees and therefore did not come under the jurisdiction of the city. The contemptuousness of this logic did not escape Coalhouse but he chose not to argue with it. He signed his complaint and left and heard laughter behind him as he walked out the door.

  All of this happened over a period of two to three weeks. Later, when the name Coalhouse Walker came to symbolize murder and arson, these earlier attempts to find redress no longer mattered. Even at this date we can’t condone the mayhem done in his cause but it is important to know the truth insofar as that is possible. Conversation at the family’s dinner table was now obsessive on the subject of this strange proud black man’s attempts to have his property restored. It seemed like such a foolish thing to have happened. It seemed to be his fault, somehow, because he was Negro and it was the kind of problem that would only adhere to a Negro. His monumental negritude sat in front of them like a centerpiece on the table. While Sarah served, Father told her that her fiancé would have done better after all to drive away his car when he could and forget the matter. Younger Brother bristled. You speak like a man who has never been tested in his principles, he said. Father was so outraged by this remark that he could find no words. Mother said, gently, that no one would be helped by the voicing of intemperate feelings. A peculiar kind of unseasonably warm breeze blew the window curtain in the Egyptian dining room. It had that breath of menace which makes the beginning of the spring so unsettling. Sarah dropped a serving tray of filet of sole. She retreated to the kitchen and held her baby. Sobbing she told Younger Brother, who followed her there, that the preceding Sunday Coalhouse had said he could not marry until he had been satisfied by the return of the Model T in exactly the same condition as when the firehorses had been driven across his path.

  25

  Nobody knew Sarah’s last name or thought to ask. Where had she been born, and where had she lived, this impoverished uneducated black girl with such absolute conviction of the way human beings ought to conduct their lives? In the few weeks of her happiness, between that time she accepted Coalhouse’s proposal and the first fears that her marriage would never happen, she had been transformed to the point of having a new, a different face. Grief and anger had been a kind of physical pathology masking her true looks. Mother was awed by her beauty. She laughed and spoke in a mellifluous voice. They worked together on her wedding dress and her movements were altogether graceful and lithe. She had an excellent figure and she gazed at herself in the mirror with pride. She laughed in joy of her own being. Her happiness flowed in the milk of her breasts and her baby grew quickly. He was pulling himself to his feet and the carriage was no longer safe for him. He stayed with her in her room. She picked him up and danced with him. She was a girl of perhaps eighteen or nineteen years, now satisfied that the circumstances of life gave reason to live. She was, Mother realized, the kind of moral being who understood nothing but goodness. She had no guile and could act only in total and helpless response to what she felt. If she loved she acted in love, if she was betrayed she was destroyed. These were the shining and dangerous facts of the life of an innocent. The boy was attracted to her more and more, and to her baby. He played gently with the child and there was solemn recognition between them. The mother sang. She sewed her wedding costume and tried it on and removed it. Underneath she wore a shift which rose to her hips as she pulled the white dress over her head. She saw the boy’s honest and attentive regard of her limbs and she smiled. To Younger Brother she offered the unspoken complicity of two members of the same generation. Her husband to be was an older man and Younger Brother was set apart by age from the others in his family. And that was why he followed her into the kitchen and she confided to him the news of Coalhouse’s vow not to marry until he had his car back.

  What will he do? Younger Brother said. I don’t know, Sarah said. But she had perhaps detected the violence underlying all principle.

  The following Sunday, Coalhouse Walker did not appear for his visit. Sarah returned to her room. It was now clear to Father that the situation was deteriorating. He said it was ridiculous to allow a motorcar to take over everyone’s life as it now had. He decided to go the next day and talk to the Emerald Isle contingent, especially to Chief Conklin. What will you do, Mother said. I will make them see they are dealing with a property owner of this city, Father said. If that doesn’t work I will quite simply bribe them to repair the car and return it to my door. I will pay them money. I will buy them off. Mr. Walker would not like that, Mother said. Nevertheless, said Father, that’s what I’m going to do. We will worry about explanations later. They are the town dregs and will respect money.

  But before the plan could be undertaken Sarah decided on a course of action of her own. As it happened, this particular season was the spring of an election year: a candidate on the national Republican ticket, Mr. Taft’s Vice-President, James Sherman, was to be in New Rochelle that evening to speak at a Republican party dinner to be held at the Tidewaters Hotel. She had remembered overhearing Father discuss his reasons for not attending the event. Knowing little of government, nor appreciating the degree of national unimportance of her Coalhouse’s trials, Sarah conceived the idea of petitioning the United States on his behalf. It was the second of the frightened and desperate acts provoked from her innocence. She waited in the evening until her child was safely asleep, and wrapping a shawl about her head, left the house without telling any member of the family and ran down the hill to North Avenue. She was shoeless. She ran swiftly as a child. She was prepared to run all the way to the hotel but instead found a streetcar coming along, its interior lights flickering, the driver tolling its bell angrily as she dashed across the tracks just in front of it. She paid the fare and rode downtown.

  An evening wind came up and in the dark sky great heavy clouds massed for a rainstorm. She stood in front of the hotel among a small crowd of people awaiting the arrival of the great man. Car after car drove up and gave forth this dignitary or that. A few windswept drops of rain spattered the sidewalk. A carpet had been laid from the curb to the hotel doors. Not only the local police in their white evening gloves but a platoon of militia were on hand, keeping the entrance cleared and pushing the crowd back from the street in anticipation of the arrival of the Vice-President’s car. The militia were in constant attendance, as well as plainclothesmen of the Secret Service which had been commissioned to protect presidents and vice-presidents by Theodore Roosevelt after the assassination of President McKinley. As a matter of fact Roosevelt had come out of retirement this season to run against his old friend Taft. Wilson was the Democratic candidate, Debs the Socialist, and the four campaigns whipped back and forth across the country, blowing up hopes on the land like the winds that ruffled the great plains. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, just a week or so before, Roosevelt had arrived to make a speech. Leaving the railroad station and walking to a car he had been kept separate from a welcoming crowd. One man stepped out of the crowd and aimed a pistol at point-blank range. Shots rang out. A bullet tore through the spectacle case in Roosevelt’s breast pocket, ripped a hole in the fifty folded pages of his speech and lodged in his rib. He was stunned. The assassin was wrestled to the ground. There were shouts. Roosevelt examined his wound and was satisfied it was not serious. He went on to make his speech before he allowed doctors to treat him. But the acrid smoke of the act still lingered in the public mind. Anyone commissioned to guard
a personage could not help thinking of the shooting of Teddy Roosevelt. New York City’s mayor, William J. Gaynor, had been bloodied by an assassin’s bullets not too long before. Guns were going off everywhere.

  When the Vice-President’s car, a Panhard, rolled up to the curb and the man himself stepped out, a cheer went up. Sunny Jim Sherman was a New York State politician with many friends in Westchester. He was a round balding man and in such ill health that he would not survive the campaign. Sarah broke through the line and ran toward him calling, in her confusion, President! President! Her arm was extended and her black hand reached toward him. He shrank from the contact. Perhaps in the dark windy evening of impending storm it seemed to Sherman’s guards that Sarah’s black hand was a weapon. A militiaman stepped forward and, with the deadly officiousness of armed men who protect the famous, brought the butt of his Springfield against Sarah’s chest as hard as he could. She fell. A Secret Service man jumped on top of her. The Vice-President disappeared into the hotel. In the confusion and shouting that followed, Sarah was put in a police wagon and driven away.

  Sarah was held at the police station overnight. She was coughing blood and in the early-morning hours it occurred to the sergeant in charge that perhaps she ought to be looked at by a doctor. She had puzzled them all, answering no questions, looking at them with eyes of fear and pain, and had one of them not recalled hearing her cry President! President! they were prepared to regard her as a deaf-mute. What were you doing, they asked her. What did you think you were doing? She was transferred to the hospital in the morning. It was a gray overcast day, the Vice-President was gone, the festivities were over, the street sweepers pushed their brooms in front of the hotel, and the charge against Sarah was reduced from attempted assassination to disturbing the peace. She lay in the hospital. Her sternum and several ribs were fractured. At home, on Broadview Avenue, Mother heard the baby cry and cry, and finally she went upstairs to see what was the matter. Some hours passed before the family’s alarms were connected by a police officer to the colored girl who had been put in the hospital. Father coming from his business and Mother from the house, they found Sarah in a bed on the public ward. She was sleeping, her forehead was dry and hot and a bubble of blood on the corner of her mouth inflated and deflated with each breath. By the next day Sarah had developed a pneumonia. They pieced together the story from the few things she said. She paid little attention to them and kept asking for Coalhouse. They arranged to have her placed in a private room. Not knowing where Coalhouse lived they put in a call to the Manhattan Casino and reached the manager of the Clef Club Orchestra. In this way Coalhouse was located and a few hours later he was sitting by Sarah’s bedside.