The Boy Orator Read online

  Warren Stargell was tense and grim. “Saw a young Negro put to death couple of years ago, over by Stillwater,” he said. Raindrops slopped off the rim of his hat. “Some fellows tied him to a tree and lit his clothes with a torch.”

  “Why?” Harry asked, watching children run to the edge of the road to stare mutely at their wagon.

  “Don’t rightly know. Seems to me they didn’t think they needed a reason. A bunch of us tried to stop them but the sheriff and his deputies held us back. Some folks, Harry …” He shook his head.

  The town’s railroad depot, gutted by fire, had nearly collapsed in a blanket of ashes. Harry learned, later, that a mob had burned it to protest segregated railway cars. Midland Valley refused to rebuild it. Trains didn’t stop here now.

  He read the tattered, hand-lettered signs on faded oak walls: Ford’s Cotton Gin, Stout Ham’s Hardware Store, Rockwell Grist Mill, Hobart Sanders’s Soda Pop Factory. On Main Street, men in dusty overalls and women in thin cotton skirts, shielding their heads with newspapers, stopped and stared at the white folks’ blustery parade. Only the bank building, in a tall brownstone, looked to be in decent repair.

  Warren Stargell parked the wagon in front of the bank’s glass doors. He and Chester and Frank O’Hare went to check on lodgings for the night. Harry saw Kate O’Hare hug her daughter and smile at passing women in the street. A pair of small children, a boy and a girl, approached him. They patted the flanks of the horses and stared up at him in the wagon’s spring seat. Harry felt awkward under their blunt and restless scrutiny.

  “Who’re you?” the little boy asked. He was soaked.

  “Name’s Harry.” Be proud, he thought. You’ve come to help.

  “Why are you here?”

  “To give you good news.” He smiled at the kids. “Your mama and your daddy, if they’ll join us, well … they won’t be mistreated anymore.”

  The girl laughed loudly. “My daddy? You seen my daddy?”

  “No, I—”

  “I ain’t never seen my daddy.”

  “I’m sorry,” Harry said.

  “What do you know about it, Harry?” She spat on the ground. “‘Sorry’ count for nothing.”

  The men returned from up the street, disgruntled, conferring among themselves. Harry leaped from the seat and followed Kate O’Hare to where they stood, shaking their heads. “What’s the matter?” she said, hooding her eyes in the rain.

  “They don’t want us,” her husband told her. “They’re afraid we’ll start trouble.”

  Kate O’Hare brushed a wet red lock from her eyes. “We’re here to support them. Did you tell them that?”

  “Support?”

  They all turned to see a tall dark man in a gray suit and blue string tie. He held a small umbrella. “Excuse me, but you see this bank building here?” he said to the group. “Only place in town owned by a white man. Only place in town making any money. Can you guess what he said, the bank president, when he moved his vaults in here and took a lien on every business in sight? ‘I’m here to support you.’” The man shook his head. “No thanks, folks. We got all the support we can stand. Good day to you.” He turned to leave.

  Frank O’Hare ran in front of him, introduced himself, and held out his hand. The man shook it warily. “We’re not on the side of the bankers. Not at all. We’re with you.”

  “I know who you’re with,” the man said. “Les, over at the hotel, told me what you said. You’re with the Reds. Wellsir, we don’t need any Red talk around here, stirring folks up, making ‘em more miserable than they already are.”

  “May I ask your name, sir?”

  “Bobby Springs, Deputy Mayor.”

  “Mr. Springs, we’re here to offer hope.”

  He chuckled. “And you know what coloreds hope for, do you?”

  “I think I do. A good living, a nice home for your wife and kids—”

  Bobby Springs bowed slightly and said he was sure they meant well, but the last thing the town needed was to be linked with a bunch of Reds. “More than most folks, we got to keep our noses clean, if you know what I mean,” he said.

  Kate O’Hare told him there was strength in numbers. “The state legislature’s liable to pass that Grandfather Clause next month. If you’ll join us, Mr. Springs, maybe we can head it off.”

  “‘Maybe’ sound like trouble to me, Miss. I heard ‘maybe’ one too many times.” He bowed again, politely, then walked away.

  Warren Stargell and Frank O’Hare debated whether or not to set up the speakers’ stand, anyway, despite the Deputy Mayor. “He didn’t exactly order us out of town,” Warren Stargell said.

  A stern-faced woman walked quickly past them, gesturing with her fingers at the children who’d talked to Harry. They grinned at him, giggled, then followed her into a nearby dry goods store. Harry looked around. The streets were crowded when they’d first got to town. Now no one was about. He saw a gingham curtain flutter in a window, a newspaper scrap tumble in a gust of dust. It wrapped around a hitching post on the corner.

  Warren Stargell reached for a bucket to water the horses. Harry heard a click somewhere above and behind his left shoulder. He cocked his head. A deafening crack—a rifle shot, he realized seconds later—splintered a wheel-spoke in front of him. Everyone dove for cover, splashing in puddles of water. Kate O’Hare’s daughter kicked and squealed. After a minute, Harry peered around the legs of the horses but saw no one. No more shots. Finally J. T. Cumbie said, “I think that was our order to leave.” He glared at Kate O’Hare. “Never should have come here in the first place.”

  They piled into their wagons and cars and bolted down the street. They weren’t far out of town when Frank O’Hare told Warren Stargell to stop. “Let’s just set up shop in this field for a couple of days,” he said. “Word of mouth’ll get around. Anyone in Taft who’s interested’ll find us.”

  And they did. By the second day, a throng of over two hundred women and men with their children had covered the soggy ground with blankets and picnic lunches. They listened to the speeches (J. T. Cumbie promised to “liberate” them from their “enduring bonds”), read aloud to each other from the Appeal. They laughed and sang rowdy spirituals, lined up for brief rides in Chester’s balloon.

  Late in the day, as Harry was leaving the platform after his speech, he ran into Bobby Springs in his gray suit and tie. “Very impressive, Mr. Shaughnessy. Passionate. Polished.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Harry pulled Bob Cochran’s yellow kerchief out of his pocket and wiped the sweat off his face. “I didn’t think we’d see you here,” he said.

  “I was curious,” Bobby Springs admitted.

  “You know, Frank was telling you the truth. We really are on your side.”

  “‘With friends like that’…”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I just hope y’all know what you’re doing, son, that’s all.”

  “You wait. When Gene Debs becomes President, it’ll be the birth of a whole new nation.”

  Bobby Springs laughed.

  “Are you the one who shot at us?” Harry asked.

  The man frowned. Harry described the incident in the street the other day. Bobby Springs looked stricken, and only partly recovered when Harry assured him no one had been hurt.

  “Thank Jesus. I’m terribly sorry such an outrage occurred in my town. Damn fools know better than to take potshots at white folks—”

  “We didn’t call the law.”

  Bobby Springs nodded. “You’re carrying a powerful message—a threatening message, even to some of us who’d like to believe it.”

  “I know,” Harry said.

  “Good luck to you, son.” He tipped his hat.

  Harry rolled himself a cigarette; Warren Stargell had given him a pouch of tobacco. He watched Chester check the stakes in the ground around the balloon. Last night’s rain had softened the turf. Now a new light drizzle had begun. Chester looked worried. He reknotted the ropes, turned and smiled at a group of kids. Ju
st then, as Harry looked on, a stake tore from the ground; the rope snapped forward and snaked around Chester’s right leg. He whirled to see what had happened, tugged at the rope. His sudden motion freed the other stakes, and the balloon began to rise, dragging Chester through a rugged thatch of grass. He worked his fingers into the earth; clumps of mud crumbled in his hands. The rope jerked him into the air.

  Harry dropped his cigarette and ran, waving his arms. The balloon had drifted too high. He leaped, but Chester’s hand was just out of reach. “Harry! Harry!” he called, upside down. He clawed at the rope. It was soggy and thick, and clung, tightly wrapped, to his leg. Sally came running from her tent. The crowd gasped.

  Chester flopped in the air, working the rope. He was a good thirty feet high by now. The rain picked up; a powerful gust snagged the balloon and carried it eastward away from the field. “Oh my God!” Sally yelled. “Someone—please—!” She sank to her knees in the grass.

  Your wings, Harry thought. Unfold them, man.

  Chester loosened the rope, unwrapped the coil, and tried to straighten up. He lost his grip and fell head first into a tiny stand of maples. Sally screamed.

  “First time I ever watched a man die,” Harry wrote his father later. “I hope it’s the last. The next day, after Sally left with Chester’s body in the wagon, the rest of us came on to Oklahoma City, to wrap up our circuit. We’re a sad bunch, Dad. We’ve drawn some good crowds this month, but we’ve been shunned plenty, too. We haven’t lost our optimism, but there certainly isn’t a red tide waiting to engulf the capital.”

  That drizzly afternoon in the maple grove near Taft, as the men untangled Chester’s body from the trees, Harry, shaken, cold to the core of his ribs, held Sally. Chester’s arms bobbed recklessly, like a scarecrow in a windstorm. Sally trembled, wouldn’t watch. Whispering, Harry told her Chester had simply run on ahead of them. He’d be waiting for them all on that glorious day when they learned, for a fact, that Heaven was painted red.

  THE HUCKINS HOTEL, ON Broadway Street in downtown Oklahoma City, was the temporary home of the new state capital. It was a squatty rectangular building; from a distance it looked to Harry like a toolbox, each of its shaded balconies a hollowed-out space for storing washers and screws. Next to it, another hotel, the Skirvin, was under construction. Steel cranes reached into the sky, their crossbeams like tic-tac-toe games scratched across the clouds.

  Electric lamps graced every corner: the future was here. Horse-carts, streetcars. A man sold hot dogs and cold fried potatoes from a card table on a sidewalk in front of the tall gray Pioneer Telephone Building (Harry had never seen a telephone but he’d heard about them); a flower-seller paced the steps of a massive Baptist temple. Harry smelled leather and sweat, perfume and hot rubber tires, asphalt, toasted bread, burning oil. Sparrows sang, engines wheezed, coins rattled in pockets, men whistled and women laughed, more easily than his mother ever had. Greens, blues, and reds looked sharper than ever before, splashed across the city’s fancy metal signs, or expensive tinted glass in a few of the downtown shops. He could barely catch his breath.

  He watched the legislators button their dark cotton suits in front of the Huckins, nod and gesture and slap each other’s backs, then disappear into the lobby.

  Kate and Frank O’Hare led their friends to the St. Nicholas Hotel on Eighth Street; the owners knew them and offered discounted rooms for a couple of nights. Harry had lunch with Warren Stargell and Fred Warren in Gus’s Fish and Steak House in the ground floor of the building—a hot roast beef sandwich with pickles and a spicy kind of mustard he’d never tasted. Then he climbed the stairs to his room and, despite impatient horns shaking his streetside window, fell into a dreamless sleep. He hadn’t been in a real bed in over three weeks.

  Warren Stargell woke him around seven-thirty that night, told him to wash up and change. Everyone was going to dinner. The lights had come on in the city. Harry stood at the window looking down at the nearby buildings, the yellow strips of curtains, the giant words in ads for shoes and shirts and bottled Coca-Cola, the button like headlights rolling down glistening gray streets. He whispered to himself the word “illumination” and knew what it meant for the very-first time.

  The group walked five blocks to the Evermonde Café, a small place that Frank O’Hare recommended. It was on the first floor of a large brick building trimmed with a thin wooden sign: “Carver Kiro-practic College and Infirmary.” Several buggies blocked the curb.

  “What’s … kiropractic?” Harry asked.

  “Chiropractic medicine. That’s where they twist your spine into crazy knots,” J. T. Cumbie said. “Capitalist racket, like everything else in this town.”

  The cafe’s proprietor, a big brown-haired woman named Rose, hugged the O’Hares as they walked in the door. “Don’t think you’re gonna eat here for free,” she told them. “I don’t share my food, I sell it!”

  Frank O’Hare smiled. “You’re forgiven, just for tonight.”

  Harry didn’t think he’d be hungry after the sandwich he’d eaten at lunch but he inhaled a bowl of chicken soup and a flank steak, medium rare, with peas and potatoes. He decided he liked city life—as long as the league was paying.

  After dinner, walking off their meals, they passed pawnshops, furniture stores, manufacturers, and business schools, each window a glimpse of strange, different lives Harry had never imagined. All these possibilities! In Oklahoma!

  He noticed a Catholic church he’d return to in the morning. He’d promised his mother he wouldn’t forget his prayers.

  On the way back to the hotel, he saw a pair of cops give them all a serious once-over before moving on down the street. The policemen wore tall, rounded helmets and knee-length coats like the British bobbies he’d seen in books. Their polished black shoes reflected the lights of the street. One of them touched the bill of his helmet with his billy club, greeting Harry as he passed. Harry shivered. “I’m a Red,” he almost told the man, just to see what he’d do. Just to see the real city.

  HE’D AGREED TO MEET Kate O’Hare and the others in front of the Huckins Hotel at ten A.M. First he ran to the church.

  The sanctuary was deserted, small and dark, brightened only by a series of candles near the altar. A large wooden cross hung in the nave, next to a painting of Mary looking pensive and sad. Harry saw a grimy alcove cut into one of the walls, big enough for a life-sized statue of a woman or a man. A statue had been there; he saw its outline in the wall, a blank where dust and soot had failed to collect: a robed figure with its right hand raised. Probably Christ. Where was He now?

  Gears ground in the street outside. A newspaper boy screamed about scandals, robberies, bloody murder: “Authorities baffled! Latest details!”

  Like every other laborer in this unforgiving city, Harry figured, Christ had probably packed His lunch and caught the streetcar to work.

  He said a prayer for Chester’s soul, and asked for the Holy Mother’s help as he and his friends spread the truth. Lately God had sent them more trials than triumphs. It didn’t seem fair to Harry. Oscar Ameringer, Patrick Nagle, Gene Debs—they all said God was on the movement’s side. If so, His support was awfully subtle. “Faith,” Harry exhorted himself. “Don’t lose faith.”

  By the time he reached the Huckins, just after ten, Kate O’Hare was already wagging her finger at the passersby on the walks, and the legislators who hurried past her into the hotel. She wore a long linen dress, flaming red, with a cream-colored sash around her waist, and a white cotton bodice. Her lustrous hair was tucked into a yellow straw hat. Harry fell in love with her again, as he did each day. “Woman labor!” he heard her shout at a pair of dour congressmen. “Gentlemen, when will the laws on your books match the facts? Why, in your very own city, just a few blocks from here, women weave the nation’s clothing. The matron at her loom has long been the theme for the painter’s brush and the poet’s songs. But today she no longer inspires picture or rhyme unless it’s the verse of misery and the portrait of human s
uffering!”

  The politicians shook their heads and looked away. Streetcars clanged and people called to one another. Some of them stared at Kate O’Hare, but refused to stop and listen, apparently frightened of being implicated in something strange, troublesome, dangerous, or illegal. J. T. Cumbie strolled along the street curb, restless, grim about the meager response, but Kate O’Hare kept talking. Harry looked around, expecting to spot, any minute now, a cop on the beat, and was shocked to see Jesus. So this is where He’d gone! He was barefooted and He wore a pair of tattered overalls. His long hair and beard were matted and moist and filmed with chalky dust. “Got a quarter, brother?” He said to Warren Stargell. Then Harry noticed the fellow wasn’t alone. Three other thin men, toothless and pocked with sores, moved through the line of Socialists, begging change. “Share the wealth, sister?” said the man who looked like Jesus, thrusting his open palm toward Kate O’Hare.

  “The shame of it,” she answered softly. “That a man can starve within a few steps of the state capitol. Tell me, if I give you money, will you buy yourself a meal or will it go for a bottle?”

  He grinned. His weathered expression was both cocky and shy. His clothes smelled of urine and cigarettes.

  “Socialism can cure your craving for drink, friend.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Here it comes,” he said. “The sermon.”

  “No no. I don’t agree with the churches that drink is a question of morals or sin,” said Kate O’Hare. “Churches are built for the glory of God and not for the uses of man.”

  Harry felt himself blush.

  “Drunkenness is a disease,” she said. “I’ve seen miners afflicted with rheumatism and printers with consumption. Drunkenness, too, finds its proper culture in excess—of idleness or work, excessive cold or heat, too much speed or deadly monotony. Am I telling your story?”

  Tears glistened in the young man’s eyes. He stared, astonished, at Kate O’Hare.

  “Here, friend. Take my hand. I won’t judge you. Intemperance is the fruit of capitalism. I’m not concerned with material prosperity. It’s the prosperity of the human spirit I cherish. Sit with me, relax, let me share with you—”