John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

He helped carry the printing gear up into that house just a little while back and now it is burning away, and he has to wonder was anybody trapped inside or shot when they run out from it, such a low, spiteful thing to do when they already took their damn election, the faces on the couple hundred whites who stay to watch not twisted with meanness, but just looking happy and curious like it’s the 4th of July and next there’s going to be rockets. Johnson directs them to wet the outside of St. Luke’s and then do a quick knockdown of the fire on what’s left of the Love and Charity top floor.

“What’s the use setting it on fire,” says a disappointed white boy, stepping up close with two of his friends, “if you gonna let em come and put it out?”

Dorsey was born on the day of the Capitulation, when the rebels give up to the Union at Appomattox, and his mama says that’s why he’s bound to keep the peace. But nobody seems to be in the mood for that right now. There is a big crowd of them come out from the cotton press, maybe a hundred men, worried about their families or their homes or just so mad they want to fight back, all facing the double row of white men lined up across Nutt Street with rifles raised and ready to shoot, some with uniforms and some without, and a Gatling gun mounted on a wagon with a white man sweating at the trigger.

Dorsey stands in the middle with Mr. Rountree and Mr. Sprunt and old James Telfair.

“What we heard is they strung up Alex Manly and burned down the Love and Charity Hall and St. Luke’s Zion,” says James, who manages the floor for Mr. Sprunt and sometimes preaches at St. Stephen’s. “And now we hear they coming over to Brooklyn to shoot us up.”

“No truth to that at all,” says Mr. Rountree, whose hair looks like he hasn’t put a comb to it this morning. “You got to get these people back inside.”

“— that if any persons, to the number of ten or more, unlawfully, tumultuously and riotously assemble together to the disturbance of the public peace— ” Mr. Roger Moore shouts out, reading from a paper and marching back and forth in front of the line of riflemen, “— and being openly required or commanded by invested authority to disperse themselves —”

“Dammit, will you stop that?” snaps Mr. Sprunt.

Mr. Roger Moore is in some kind of made-up uniform, wearing a sword. “We got to make this legal,” he explains.

“There hasn’t been any disturbance here and there’s not going to be any,” says the press owner. Dorsey was cutting Mr. Sprunt in his shop in the Orton when a couple men run in and yelled “Your niggers are coming out!” and then run off again. He should have just stayed and let the white man deal with it, but they put his name on that Colored Committee, which maybe was an honor but felt more like a responsibility, and so here he is in the middle of it. He knows they at least won’t start shooting while the man who owns the cotton press and the Orton Hotel and a good deal of the rest of the city is right beside him, but the big mounted rapid-fire gun keeps swiveling to follow every time his nerves force him to move a little bit.

“If there’s nothing to it about a mob coming,” says Dorsey quietly, trying to be still, “I don’t see why the men can’t go and see for themselves.”

“The situation has got beyond that,” says Mr. Roger Moore. There are stripes and other shapes on the shoulder of his uniform but Dorsey doesn’t know what rank they add up to. “We can’t let a whole gang of these people out into the streets when they supposed to be working.”

“It’s the rumors, suh,” says James Telfair, who belonged to the de Rosset family when he was a young man and knows how to talk to white folks. “Rumors beset a man’s mind. But if you let a few out, two or three at a time, they can go look and come back with the real story.”

“That would be fine with me,” says Mr. Sprunt. “They won’t get any work done till this is settled, one way or the other.”

Mr. Rountree turns. “How bout that, Roger? Two or three can’t do us much mischief.”

“I’ll let these two go,” he says, pointing to Dorsey and Reverend Telfair. “And then I want the rest of them inside.” He flips the Riot Act paper over, holds it out.

“Write your names here, if you can write.”

Dorsey writes, and thinks how this is the second time in two days the white people got his name on a paper.

“You hurry your asses back here,” says the man behind the Gatling gun as they pass. “This deal won’t hold water long.”

Men and boys are posing for photos when Jubal leaves the fire. It’s only just smoldering now and he’s got Dan tied across the Creek on Fourth with a wagon full of coal left to deliver. He tries to stay on the far side of the street from the white men who are drifting back toward Brooklyn in small groups, rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders, talking excitedly. The ones that got jobs must be taking the day off, as they are none of them in any hurry. When he crosses Chestnut he sees Toomer hurrying up in his uniform.

The police gives him a look. “Where you been, get all sooty like that?”

“With the Phoenix boys at the Love and Charity fire. Where were you, man?”

“Bad business popping up all over town. Somebody got a plan,” says Toomer, “but they aint let me in on it.”

Jubal nudges Toomer’s stick as they walk. “You gone ’rest somebody?”

“Not if I can help it. I be happy I get out of this day alive.”

There are a couple dozen black men outside when they get to Fourth and Bladen, glaring diagonal across the trolley track at as many whites carrying rifles who have bunched up between Brunjes’ store and the St. Matthew’s church. Dan is tied up by the white men.

“Help me with this,” says Toomer, heading for the black men.

“I aint no police.”

“Yeah, but you was over at the Love and Charity. You can put them straight.”

The one they call Little Bit who you don’t want to mess with at craps is out front of the men with his chest puffed out.

“Look who comin,” he says. “Pet nigger in a blue suit.”

Toomer steps very close to Little Bit. Jubal doesn’t understand stepping that close to a man known to favor a knife. “What you think you gonna settle out here?” says Toomer. “All this shit blow over fast if you let it.”

“They lynched a man.”

Toomer turns to Jubal.

“You see anybody swinging?”

Jubal shakes his head. “Burned down Manly’s paper but he wasn’t there. Not that I seen anyway.”

“Then what they all doin over here now?”

“Most of em lives here,” says Toomer. “Now why don’t alla you just—”

Little Bit pushes Toomer back a little and there is a pop and then another and a couple of the men around him have pistols out and there is a volley from the rifles across the street and a half dozen men fall. Jubal squats down as more shots are fired and glass shatters and one white man is down in the dirt with Dan rearing and bucking to tear himself loose while other white men take cover behind the wagon, shooting, shooting at him, and then Dan is down and screaming, kicking and writhing and Toomer stands tall and disgusted in the middle yelling “Damn you! Damn the bunch of you!” and then more white men with rifles arrive and Jubal is running, running with the rest, first down Fourth and then right up Harnett but there are men in houses shooting at them there and they retreat, a few men turning to fire back at the houses and then toward the river but more shooting now, whites chasing and black men coming out of their houses shooting and on Third another man goes down, Sam Gregory, he thinks, but Jubal just jumps over the body as it sprawls and keeps running, cutting back with three other men toward the railroad tracks and maybe a bridge to hide under, the fire bells ringing again all over town and marching up from Nutt Street to their right comes what looks like the Wilmington Light Infantry and a hundred of the Vigilance Committee with a rapid-fire gun mounted on a wagon.