Edgar Doctorow - Ragtime

These remarks, which were widely disseminated, had in their suggestion of a conspiracy of radicals the worst possible effect on an already agitated townspeople. Militia patrolled the streets. There were several instances of abuse of Negroes who were seen out of their neighborhoods. There was rash of false alarms from fireboxes all over the city, each bringing out engines with police guards and a convoy of reporters in cars. Reporters were everywhere, and along with the troopers and the highly visible police in their wagons, produced in the community a painfully swollen sense of itself. The churches on Sunday morning had never known such crowds. The hospital emergency room reported a higher than usual number of household accident victims. People were burning themselves, cutting themselves, tripping on rugs and falling down flights of stairs. Several men were brought in with gun wounds inflicted in the cleaning and handling of old weapons.

Meanwhile the press seemed to be ahead of the authorities in dealing with the specifics of Coalhouse’s letters. Probably for the pictures it would make they agitated for several editions to raise the Model T from Firehouse Pond. This was finally done. A crane was move to the site and the automobile was brought up like a monstrous artifact, mud dripping from its tires, water and slime pouring out of its hood. It was swung over to the bank and deposited on the ground for everyone to see.

But now the authorities were embarrassed. The Ford stood as tangible proof of the black man’s grievance. Waterlogged and wrecked, it offended the sensibilities of anyone who respected machines and valued what they could do. After its picture was published people began to come and see it in such numbers that the police had to cordon off the area. Feeling that they had compromised themselves the Mayor and the Board of Aldermen issued a new series of condemnations of the colored madman and said that to negotiate with him in any way at all, to face him with less than an implacable demand that he surrender himself, would be to invite every renegade and radical and black man in the country to flout the law and spit upon the American flag.

Even if there was at this point a public demand for a strategy of negotiation, which there was not — not even the press suggested it — no one could had any idea of how to get in touch with the killer. Coalhouse had not announced how much time he granted them till the next attack. Indeed, there was an opinion delivered by an alienist hired by the New York World that the second of the letters, signed Coalhouse Walker, President, Provisional American Government , was much advanced beyond the first in its signals of mental deterioration, and that to deal with someone in the throes of a progressive delusionary madness as if he were open to reason would be a tragic mistake.

However, it was left to the plain citizenry of New Rochelle to come up with the most practical idea for dealing with the problem. From every neighborhood and every class the cry arose for Willie Conklin to leave town. Some irate citizens even communicated with Conklin himself. He brought into police headquarters several unsigned letters delivered to his mailbox, all suggesting that if he did not pack up and leave New Rochelle they, the writers, would do Coalhouse Walker’s job for him. Like all of Conklin’s moves, sharing his correspondence with the authorities was a mistake. I did not generate their sympathy, as he had hoped, but simply made up their minds to sponsor the idea. From the beginning Conklin had been unable to understand how anyone who was white could feel for him less that the most profound admiration. The more unpopular he became the more piteous his bewilderment. The miserable fellow understood nothing and saw the public outcry for his exile not in its larger strategy, as a means of defusing the situation, nor even in the small, as a means perhaps of saving his own life. He felt martyred by what he called the nigger lovers, even though these now seemed to constitute virtually the entire population of the city. He drank himself into a state of torpor and became dumbly complaisant as his wife and associated made arrangements for their departure.

Thus, with no one completely in command of the situation, with municipal authorities, police, state militia and citizenry all nervous and unsure in their continuing vulnerability to the black guerrilla, two things were caused to happen more or less by public consensus that were roughly analogous to a recognition of his demands: the Model T Ford had been raised, possibly foretelling some kind of negotiation, and he could read, if he was in range of the New Rochelle papers, both of which gave the largest headlines in their history to the intelligence, that the Conklin family had gone into hiding in New York City. No concessions had been made and the streets bristled with military and paramilitary deployments. But the situation was altered. Let him now burn down the entire metropolis of New York, one editorial said. Or accept the principle that any man who takes the law into his own hands places himself against a civilized and resolute people and defames the very justice he seeks to enforce.

In contrast to all of this the family’s departure was private and unreported. Father contracted with the Railway Express to transport their baggage — a matching pair of wicker trunks he had bought for the occasion, each with several drawers and compartments and a commodious closet for hanging clothes, a brass-studded footlocker and several suitcases and hatboxes — and they rode out of New Rochelle on a train that came through at the crack of dawn. Later that morning in New York they made connections with an Atlantic City train in Pennsylvania Station. This was the station designed by the firm of Stanford White and Charles McKim. Its stone colonnade façades, modeled on the Roman baths at Caracalla, spanned 31st to 33rd Streets, and 7th to 8th Avenue. Porters helped with Grandfather’s wheelchair. Mother was wearing a white ensemble. The laundress held Sarah’s child. The station on the inside was so vast that although it was filled with people their voices were no more than a murmur. The boy gazed at the roof, an exposition of corrugated green glass vaults and arches supported by steel ribs and needlelike steel columns. The light fell through this roof like a soft crystal dust. Descending to the concourse of trains he looked right and left and saw as far as he could see in either direction the encouched locomotives waiting in an impatience of steam and shouts and tolling bells to be released on their journeys.

And what of Younger Brother? His absence from home since his passionate defense of Coalhouse had caused no undue concern. They were used to his sullen temper. He appeared intermittently at the flag and fireworks plant. He drew his salary. He was not on hand for their departure and so Mother sealed a note and left it on the table in the front hall. The note was never claimed.

Some days after the attack on the firehouse Younger Brother had gone back to the Harlem funeral parlor from which Sarah had been buried. He was met at the door by the proprietor. I should very much like to speak with Mr. Coalhouse Walker, Younger Brother said. I shall wait every evening under the arcade of the Manhattan Casino until he is satisfied that it is safe to receive me. The mortician listened impassively and gave no sign that he knew what Younger Brother was talking about. Nevertheless, every evening thereafter the young man stood at the Casino enduring the stares of the black patrons and timing the intervals between trains of the Eighth Avenue El that periodically rumbled past the building. The weather was warm and through he ornate glass doors of the theatre, which were opened sometimes after the evening concert began, he could hear strains of the syncopated music of Jim Europe and the applause of the audience. Of course Coalhouse had quit his orchestra job and moved out of his rooms weeks before his attack on the firehouse. To the police who tried to trace him it was as if he had never existed.