John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Look at this,” he says. “Can you believe this?”

When the inside of the house is in ruins they come back to the man with the list.

“He shows his face,” the man says to Jessie, “tell him he got to report to City Hall, give himself up.”

“But he hasn’t done anything.”

“He got his name on this list,” says the man. “That’s enough.”

As they leave the man who is angry at the piano gets two others to help him. She has barely touched it. The keys give up a moan as the men bang through the doorway.

“That’s mine,” she says and feels the first tears rolling down her face. “He gave it to me.”

Harry has somehow located the only cabman left working on the streets of Wilmington, a poor little hare-lip negro with a spotted dobbin who has seen better days.

“Oh my Lor’ ,” says the cabbie as they are blocked and redirected and once even chased by the marauding white men, jerking his reins this way and that till they are thoroughly lost. Harry was at the wheel shop when the shooting began, cataloguing the inventory, and was struck with the sudden knowledge that it was his duty to join his father at home. He has seen the Judge’s signature on some sort of proclamation this morning, pasted crookedly on the display window of his shop, and it has troubled him deeply.

“A sense of impending shame,” Niles used to say, but always with his mischievous grin, his touch of irony. There were names far more prominent than their father’s on the ridiculous document, but he had an impulse to mount one of his speedier models and pedal to the old man’s side. As if he could.

A cripple running a bicycle shop, he thinks. An apt metaphor for the situation in this city. This city, he promises himself, that I am leaving.

“Oh my Lor’ ,” says the cabbie beside him, pulling up on the reins.

Men are butchering a piano in the middle of the street. Polished wood cracks sharply under the backside of an ax head, pieces of the beautiful machine yanked free and hurled about. The men, white men, look up from their furious work but say nothing, make no threatening move.

“Don’t worry,” says Harry to the rigid cabman. “You’re with me .”

He has his cane in hand, but is not suggesting he will use it in defense. It is their contract, the one race serving the other, that protects them, that has even elicited a smile or two from the rampant Caucasians they have encountered. The man in the red shirt, the one with the ax, is smiling at them now.

“You can pass by here, Mister,” he says to Harry, then winks. “I see you got yourself a tame one.”

Harry elbows the poor hare-lip, who chucks his ancient nag forward. It is a tense, jittery passage, the cab wheels bumping over the scattered ivory keys, black and white.

It is one thing to bear witness as the disgraced ones sign themselves out, but another to compromise his office by swearing this new crowd in.

“You haven’t been elected,” says the Judge. “Not a one of you.”

Mayor Silas and the white aldermen and Melton the police chief have just been sent off with their tails between their legs, having signed the paper and said the words to relinquish their positions, and here is Waddell shoving this new slate under his nose for confirmation.

“But you agree, Judge,” says Hugh MacRae, who is listed as one of the new aldermen, “that we need somebody in charge to deal with this riot we got outside.”

“It appears to be running pretty much how you planned it,” says the Judge. They can jockey for position all they want, but nobody is going to ride on his back.

“We need this board in place,” says Waddell, who has windbagged himself into the mayor’s spot on the list. “We need our new chief of police to get active weeding the troublemakers out of town and we need at least a couple hundred special constables sworn in to restore the peace.”

“Now that you’ve burned down everything you wanted.”

The old man stiffens. “Mob violence is the most terrible occurrence. I dispersed those men myself, with words of conciliation.”

“I can hear them out there spreading fellowship.” The alarm bells have been ringing since before noon, the gunfire constant and not so far to the north of City Hall.

Allen Taylor is pacing behind him. “You going to do this for us or not?”

There was no subterfuge in the Secession. He remembers the euphoria of those first days, how free they all felt, free of compromise and secret agendas, their defiance proud and open. But this, despite the legal filigree and the old Colonel’s stirring peroration about saving the city from an African uprising, is nothing but clubhouse politics under the cover of wholesale slaughter.

“No, I will not,” he says.

“Dammit.” Taylor looks to the other men, the self-declared saviors of Wilmington, already occupying the old board’s seats. “Somebody go dig up a Justice of the Peace,” he snaps, “that got more sense than scruples.”

The men seem almost awed, standing on the carpet in the Doctor’s house. Alma shows them in and then Mrs. Lunceford comes down to tell them no, he is not home, and yes, if they must they may search the house. Alma wants to take a fire poker to the one that sits in the Doctor’s favorite chair without being invited and sticks his dirty boots up on the hassock, but Mrs. L is as gracious as if they were guests.

“My husband is a physician,” she says, using the fancy word. “I suggest you go look for him where the victims of this outrage,” and here she drills the one sprawled in the Doctor’s chair with a look that would melt lard at forty paces, “are being treated.”

Mrs. L doesn’t blink as they get up and shuffle out, a few grumbling, the others looking like boys just been whipped by the deacon. She turns to Alma.

“Would you’d help me pack a few things?” she says. “I suppose we need to be prepared for the worst.”

It feels like the alarm bells are in his head. They should shut them down — everybody knows to watch out by now and it’s only adding to the panic. Jubal ducks behind a light pole as a riderless, crazy-spotted Appaloosa comes barreling down the street, big eye swimming around in terror, lathered beyond what is healthy. Horse like that will run till those bells stop or it falls down dead.

He finds Uncle Wicklow at the stable, calming Tobey and Socks and Strider with wet blankets over their heads to dull the sound.

“They killed Dan,” Jubal says as he steps in, glad to be out of sight of the street. “And they done their best to kill me too.”

Wick is running the curry-comb down Strider’s shivering flanks with long, easy movements. “They done step past the line,” he says with a look in his eye his nephew has never seen before.

“Aint nothin we can do about it.”

Wick snorts in disagreement and comes out of the stall, carrying his hunting rifle with him. “They after you?”

Jubal shrugs. “Some that know who I am got a look at me when it come to gunfire. Right now they just huntin black hides, don’t care who it is, but I expect they been takin names.”

Wick pulls the bridle and steps in with Tobey. “Best thing for you is ride out of here tonight and don’t look back.”

“Leave Wilmington?”

“This city dead for us now. Won’t never be the same.”

Jubal is not so sure it won’t settle down, that tomorrow or the next day he can’t be back hauling coal and ice and whatever else they want, but he gets the saddle and throws it over Tobey’s back.

“I got near one hundred dollars in a tin box under them grain sacks,” Wick says, nodding to the corner. “Take all the paper money — it won’t weigh you down.”

There is shooting only a block away and Strider whinnies and shifts about, then lets loose with his pizzle and the barn starts to reek. Smells like fear, sharp and nasty.