John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

Milsap has only seen it once, when he was a boy in South Carolina. By the time he and his friends got there the beating and burning was well over and somebody had strung a cord through the calves like it was a slaughtered deer and three of the Knights were hoisting it by rope over the branch of a sycamore tree. The top part was more charred than the legs, but as it swung, poked by gleeful older boys with long sticks, it was evident that it had been a man. Mr. Hudson, the town’s only photographer, had been summoned to set up his apparatus and there was repeated posing with the trophy, Milsap and his friends sneaking in just before the cord was pulled to be included among the huntsmen. He had not, at that point in his life, seen himself in a photograph. He remembers them all being queasy with excitement, remembers the bitter smell and the strange rush of saliva in his mouth, this confluence of blood and gathered neighbors always in the past leading to fresh cracklins and pickled souse.

“You know who it is?” Milsap asked one of the older boys wielding a stick and the boy laughed and poked the hanging carcass again to make it spin and said “Say hello to Albert Lee.”

But Albert Lee was a man he knew, a man who sat on the dock at the feed store and had once given him a gator he had carved from a chunk of tupelo, and this thing with half a head left strung up by the sinews could not be him.

One of the Red Shirts steps forward to pound on the door and there is shouting from the men who have flowed around and behind the structure and then Milsap is borne in a rush, feet barely touching the ground, in through the door just smashed open with axes and wrenched hard, fighting to keep from falling under the stampede of men squeezing into the downstairs hall, chairs and benches hurled shattering before them, Milsap grabbing a belt and lifted at the head of the crush up the steep incline to the crowded press at the top of the stairs. It is all he can do to avoid being brained by wood or glass or metal as the furies attack Manly’s den and wreak upon his tools of outrage what they had hoped to inflict on his person.

They have been, as Milsap often surmised, still setting by hand here at the Record , and he cannot help but make a hasty inventory as the smaller pieces of equipment whiz past his head to smash against the walls, as stacks of papers are flung about to carpet the floor and sloshed with kerosene from the lamps snatched up from below and a man next to Milsap is beating on a folding table with a compositor’s stick, smashing down again and again screaming “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” while four burly men struggle to tear the bulky rotary press from its moorings and, failing that, allow others to rush in and have at it with ax and sledgehammer. Then fire, the flames whooshing across the floor and the angry wave that has scoured this room becomes a desperate scramble of men fighting to escape, men leaping down the stairwell rolling over those still struggling upward to claim a shard of glory. Milsap is shoved and then rides another man’s back to the ground floor, someone stepping on his neck, then lifted and pulled to safety, hundreds of voices roaring in exaltation as white men pour out the bottom of the house and black smoke pours from the top.

Milsap doesn’t remember having grabbed the chunk of metal till he feels it cutting into the palm of his tightened fist. It is a rectangle of brass with a raised shape on one face, only a shape to most but to Milsap unmistakably a capital N when reversed in a newspaper headline. He jams it in his pocket and hurries back from the sudden wave of heat roaring out from the building, flames licking out from the smashed front window above now, nearly stumbling over the guts of the defenestrated printing machine.

They could have stripped the office of the equipment, he thinks, and given it to someone who would have used it responsibly. He learned his trade on an old four-cylinder press just like the one now busted at his feet, which Mr. Clawson himself had bought cheap then sold on credit to the Manly brothers. A pity to butcher the horses, he thinks, when the coachman is to blame.

The heat has driven them all to the west side of Seventh and the fire bells are sounding their alarm when Davey finds him in the throng. Tiny points of orange are reflected in the printer’s devil’s eyes.

“Manly wunt in there,” shouts the boy over the clanging of the bells and the cheers of their companions. “That bird done flew the coop.”

Milsap nods. His neck hurts where it was tromped on. “Then we’ve all got something to thank him for,” he says.

The alarm bells are clanging and then it’s their new hose wagon come rattling down Fourth behind those two big iron grays. Jubal ties Dan off to a light pole and runs alongside till Elijah Gause can pull him up to the siderail.

“What we got?”

“Seventh and Church,” shouts Elijah, pointing ahead to the left where the smoke is billowing up.

It is a mixed neighborhood and it might be three other companies there first. Jubal used to drive for these boys, the Phoenix Hose, before they went on the city payroll at the beginning of the year. Back then it was every company for itself and a race to be first at the scene for a crack at the insurance money. Uncle Wick told him once how he and Mance Crofut killed a bear years ago, how it reared up big as a hillside and threw their dogs through the air and took a couple pounds of lead shot and a smack on the head with a railroad spike before the light finally went out in its eyes. There are no bears left around here, though, and maybe a fire is the biggest thing left worth fighting, where at the end you feel like you done something important and come out alive.

They whip around the corner, wheels sliding in the dirt, and Jubal calls forward to Elijah. “You know what’s burning?”

“Not yet,” Elijah shouts back. “But I got a feeling it’s more than a fire.” And then Johnson has to pull back the reins as they come into the white people.

There is a shifting sea of them all around the fire at the Love and Charity Hall, men and boys, lots of them waving guns around. White men catch up the horses and surround the wagon, looking ugly, though Bud Savage is grinning as he struts up to hand them the word.

“False alarm, boys,” he says. “Chief says we gone let this one go to the ground.”

None of the other city companies have come. Heavy wood is shifting and cracking inside the building now, glowing embers floating down all around them, but not one of the Phoenix boys budges from the rig. Jubal can feel crackling heat from the blaze ahead and the acid glare of the white men closing in.

“You mean to let this church burn too?” asks Johnson, nodding to the St. Luke’s Zion. “Cause that’s what’s gonna happen next.”

An old gray-haired white man walks his horse over.

“What’s the problem here?” he says.

“Boy claims the church gonna burn,” says Bud.

The old man looks at the church and then back at the Hall, frowning. “Our work here is done,” he says. “Let them through.”

It takes a minute for the others to catch wind that they’ve been vouched for, every few yards another knot of white men throwing up their guns to challenge, but finally Elijah’s brother Frank jumps off and hooks them up to the hydrant as Jubal runs the hose out to within twenty yards of the fire with the other pipemen, his face feeling like it is blistering, and then Frank yanks the valve. The hose jolts stiff on his shoulder and then, despite themselves, the crowd of white men cheer as the first gout of water spurts skyward and smacks down on the St. Luke’s roof. Hot sweat boils off Jubal’s face, stinging his eyes as he wrestles the line with the others, water pressure pretty feeble here and thinking they could use one of the steam engines to pump while he hears the old white man’s voice, singing above the noise of the fire bells and the now roaring flames and suddenly the greater part of the white men start to move back north up Seventh, many of them ducking under the hose as they go. Something cracks under his feet and when he glances down he sees it’s a sign that’s been torn off the front of the house and hacked with axes, a sign you can still tell said THE RECORD PUBLISHING COMPANY.