Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

They settled on a fee, and Mr. Rome promised to carry a message to Celia if Delvin could come up with the two dollars.

“I don’t see how you can make any money at all,” Frank said. “Mail a letter for two cents.”

Mr. Rome agreed. He was an agreeable man.

“Back in Tulsa they could have used you,” Frank said.

The little man shuddered. “You talking about that lamentable time, aren’t you?”

“I can call myself doing that,” Frank said. “I just come through there is why I do, day before yesterday. Tulsa’s where I’s born and raised. And it brought it back to my mind.”

“Were you there during the massacre?” Delvin asked. Everybody’d heard about that. He wanted something to eat, but he had nothing beyond Frank’s shared potato. Just then Mr. R pulled a squished ham and mustard sandwich out of his coat pocket, tore it in three pieces and handed two off to his fellow passengers. They sat quietly for a minute or two chewing. Somebody down on the other end was whistling “Barbry Allen,” the sound clear and fresh over the clack of the wheels.

“Yeah,” Frank said, “exactly.” As if they had been conversing all the time — words moving about, arranging, preserving, stacking in his mind. “Riot the white folks called it, but massacree it was.”

They all knew the story, even Delvin, who had heard it from the professor. Three hundred negroes killed, eight hundred wounded, all because a white girl had gotten upset when a black boy tripped and grabbed her arm for support.

“Yessir, I know all about it,” Frank said. “That boy, Dickie Do Rowland, was one of my cousins. He wadn’t nothing but a shoeshine boy in that office building downtown. The white woman — she was just a seventeen-year-old girl — operated the elevator. When old Dickie Do — he was nineteen but you would have thought he was still just a child — when he took a break from his shoeshine stand to use the restroom upstairs he tripped coming into the elevator and grabbed this girl — her name was Sarah something—”

“Page,” the little man said, “it was Sarah Page.”

“That’s it. And the one who really caused it, this white clerk in a close-by clothing store, this dumb jeff, heard her scream — I guess she was just a nervous person, scared of colored people — and rushed to her and saw Dickie leaving the building— running , the man said, as who wouldn’t if a white woman started screaming — and he come on this girl and said she was all shook up — about being assaulted, when it was just a case of a poor chuckleheaded boy grabbing to hold on. That’s how it started. The police come and took him the next day, little Dickie Do. He was sitting at home eating his breakfast and talking to this little puppy dog he used to have, little black and white spotted feist that could do tricks — he talked to that dog like it was a human being — and they came up on the porch and hollered for him to come out, Dickie Do, and talk to em. He knew right off what it was. He maybe could have turned tail, but he didn’t, even though my auntie said he’d been up worrying hisself, about what she didn’t know, for half the night. She had to get up and make him a milkroot punch to get him off to sleep. But they took him down to the courthouse and put him in jail. Somehow the word on the affair got in the paper—”

“The negro paper,” the little man said, “won’t it?”

“Yes, it was, the African Tribune . They’d got the word that the white mens was coming to lynch him. That’s when it started. My uncle and a bunch of other mens put on they uniforms—

“This was right after the Great War, wasn’t it?” Delvin said.

“Yes, it was,” Frank said, “pretty near. And a whole bunch of em put on they army uniforms and got they guns and marched down to the courthouse to protect Dickie Do.”

He reached between his spread knees and patted the dusty floor with both hands. “Well, the white boys heard about this and they grabbed they guns and they marched down to the courthouse. There was a standoff, getting nowhere, and after a while some of the colored boys went home after the sheriff told them he would protect Dickie. Everybody was scared because just the month before these white boys had lynched a little jew man because they didn’t like something he was doing. They didn’t like nothing they wont doing theyselves.”

Frank sifted a little corn dust from one hand to the other. “Well, it rocked back and forth with some folkses leaving and more coming and the sheriff and his boys up on the roof and hiding in the office behind tipped-over desks and such at the top of the courthouse stairs and outside the white boys pumping themselves up and the colored boys scared — everybody scared about to pop — and then the city police and the National Guard showed up and they went over to the quarter and began rounding up our boys and taking them over here to the fairgrounds where they had fences to stick em behind. All the while the white boys down at the courthouse kept trying to make our boys leave, but they had already left and come back once and won’t leaving again. It was night by now. And then they started shooting at each other and that was it.”

He leaned back against the pale wooden bulkhead and then he sunk his head and looked at the floor. He stayed that way for a long minute. The train hooted at a crossing, long singlethroated dying wail. Lights far off at some settlement or other. Then he raised his head and looked at his listeners.

“I was down in a ditch behind the Lazarus department store talking to my friend Hoster about getting on to the courthouse when came a wave of colored men running the other way through the alley and out into the lot where the ditch was. I got down in a big old pipe that stuck out of the ditch and I watched those men, colored men, come leaping over that ditch like they was horses galloping, just leaping. Some of them stopped to fire their rifles back the way they’d come. And then a little later here come the white boys. They was crouching and running. Ducking down and kneeling down to fire they rifles. It was dark enough. . flames shot out of the end of their guns. One white man stopped in the ditch right in front of me and he knelt down and fired. It was a double-barreled shotgun with rust on it. He had white hair and he was pink like a albino and he fired that gun two times. Sweat was pouring off his face. I could see it in the moonlight. After him I scrooched farther back in the pipe.”

Frank looked at Delvin. There was sweat on his face.

“Things died down,” he said, “but they didn’t die out. You could hear the gunshots over in Greenwood—”

“The quarter?” Delvin said.

“That’s right. You could hear the whomp whomp of the shotguns and the kee-rack! of the rifles, but they died down some and I was about to think the trouble was over. But it was just getting started. I’d fallen asleep in the pipe, but the whistle of an early morning train waked me up. The day was coming up clear with a few clouds, looked like big white soft pillows stacked up in the west. I crawled out of the pipe. In the ditch were three or four bodies of white men. They were dead, all but one of em, sprawled out in the bottom where they was a little rusty stream and up the side where two of em looked like they’d been trying to crawl out. There was a colored man dead too, but I didn’t know him. He was lying on his back with one fist balled up under his chin like he was about to strike a blow. I picked up a pistol I found and climbed out of the ditch. There was a white man lying over next to a sticker bush crying. I didn’t know him either and I didn’t stop for him.”

Delvin started to ask about the lynching party, but Mr. Rome shushed him. It was Frank’s time to speak.