John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“We will require a written response as to your acceptance of these demands,” says Waddell without acknowledging him. “It shall be delivered to me personally at my residence by half past seven tomorrow morning. This meeting is adjourned.”

With that the white men remain seated, staring at the colored committee they have invented, insulted, and now dismissed. Tom Miller is the first to comprehend, standing without a word and walking quickly for the door. Dr. Lunceford takes a final glance at the faces across the table and finds no hint of bluff or reservation, only the florid glow of righteousness.

“I’d had my.44,” says Tom Miller when Dr. Lunceford catches up to him on Dock Street, “I’d have blown his cotton head off.”

Dorsey has never actually sat in David Jacobs’s shop before. He’s looked through the window in passing, David or one of his boys snipping over the white men who come in, a three-chair tunnel of a room. It is packed to the walls now as most of the men from what they’re calling the Committee and some others who have caught wind of this new threat have all crowded in. Dr. Lunceford stands in front of the middle chair and tries to pull them together.

“The mayor is useless,” he says. “Once the hope of Federal troops was gone he crawled under a rock to hide. Which means it’s up to us.”

“They got the guns, they got the power.”

“They’ve asked for a reply.” The Doctor seems almost calm. “We should give them one. We reject their declaration and all of its provisions. If they can achieve the same ends through legal means, let them try. There’s no reason we should take a part in our own disen—”

“There’s a couple hundred reasons still wandering around town,” says David Jacobs. “They’re just aching for an excuse to let fly at us.”

“I’m not talking about a physical confrontation. I believe it is important, for the record, to—”

“Who’s gonna write that record?” Tom Miller holds the lease on Dorsey’s Dock Street shop, owns the pool room he used to hang in before he married Jessie. “Anything don’t look good for them they just change it.”

“If there’s nothing to be gained by defiant language,” says Mr. Henderson, “I suggest we just distance ourselves from Alex Manly and appeal to the cooler heads among them. If those Red Shirts had their way—”

“Those Red Shirts don’t do a damn thing the big folks don’t put em to.” Miller is by the door, angry, holding up a fist studded with rings. “And no matter what we say in any letter it’s already been decided whether they be let loose or not. But lemme tell you, they come huntin niggers where I’m at, they gonna find one who bites back .”

Dorsey finds himself stepping up on one of the chairs by the back wall to be seen. “They think we got some say about how other colored folks act,” he says. “But the ones they worried about, all that wild Brooklyn crowd, them shack people live down south of town, they don’t go to no church service. And they sure as hell don’t care what we got to tell em—”

“Just like how we had nothing to do with what Alex Manly wrote in his paper.”

“That boy was here,” says Tom Miller, “I’d put my boot to his near-white behind.”

“So what will our response be?” asks Dr. Lunceford.

“You seen that gun they got,” says John Goines, who was Manly’s printer at the Record before it shut down. “Seen what it can do. You want to be responsible for that machine being turned loose on our people?”

“The responsibility rests on the head of the man who pulls the trigger,” says the Doctor.

“Yeah, and the man who gets caught in front of it,” adds David Jacobs, who is also the city coroner, “won’t have no head left.”

Jubal spends the long night down with his animals. Old Dan is still poorly, shedding the worms, and Nubia is flighty from the white people all day. They’ve been quieter and more sober than for the marching, but so many of them about, crowded around the polling places, laughing and waggling their rifles and looking their looks at you. Jubal take her out for her little trot, Nubia a horse you can’t leave in a stable all day, no matter what, and she got a sense for it, contention in the air make her shy just like a shotgun blast, and now her skin is still quivering on her back in sudden ripples, her ears switching this way and that listening for it to start for real. Jubal listening just as hard.

“Best thing for it,” he says softly as he moves around her stall, “is they drink some more and fall out from it, wake up happy they won this round. Things go back to normal.”

Dan is farting as he dozes, not a mule to worry about people business. There is hauling to do tomorrow and Jubal wants people back in their homes and forgotten about the election. He uses his time now, too jangled up to fall asleep, to put the tiny stable in order, hanging tack and polishing leather, talking soft to his nervous riding horse.

“Maybe this Sunday we head out to the beach,” he tells her. “Let you go on them mudflats. You like that, I know.”

It is a quiet night, a long night, and dawn is peeking in through the cracks between the planks before Nubia’s head finally drops low and her ears relax. Jubal eases the bar up silently and steps out onto Love Alley.

Across the way, sitting in the sand with his back against a slat-and-wire chicken coop, is old Caleb who used to drink with his father, who was a slave on the indigo plantations and then rolled turp barrels on the loading dock till the liquor made him useless, which he’s been as long as Jubal can remember, Caleb who never in his life give a damn about anything you couldn’t pour down your throat. There is no telling what shade the old man is under the crust on him, with yellow eyes and yellow nails thick as horse teeth on his toes.

“They done stole it back,” he says, looking in Jubal’s direction, the way he does, but not really at him. “Everthing we won in the War, everthing we built up, they done took it back.” He shakes his head, lets his turtle eyelids drop shut, tears making channels in the grime on his cheeks. “Aint that some shit?”

And then there are roosters crowing.

When Milsap turns onto Market Street a thousand armed white men are marching toward him. At least a thousand — they fill the wide thoroughfare from side to side all the way from Sixth to the Armory two blocks down. The flood must have come like this through the streets of Johnstown, he thinks as he waits for it to sweep him along, no chanting or haranguing in the ranks, only an inexorable force of nature unleashed to run its course. He knows where they are headed.

Colonel Waddell is in the van, the old gentleman riding ahead with a Winchester held up like a standard, grim as fate. Many of the town’s leading men hurry to keep beside him on foot, armed or not, determined to be noted by the swelling throng behind them. Mr. Clawson is up on the sidewalk staying parallel, with Walter Parsley and Hardy Fennell trailing after, Clawson scribbling in his notebook as he walks. Milsap falls into step — where else in the wide world should he be? — and feels the power of a thousand bodies with one deadly purpose in their consciousness as the mass surges hard right down Seventh Street, picking up speed, more men and boys pushing into the torrent from the side streets as they cross Dock and Orange and Ann and Nun, small brown faces goggle-eyed at the windows of the Williston School till they are pulled away by their teachers and then Waddell raises his rifle over his head and the righteous horde washes out around him facing a two-story clapboard house just south of the colored Methodist church, modest in façade and seemingly empty. The Love and Charity Hall.