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CHAPTER VII
THE IRONY OF FATE
His political battle won, Norton turned his face homeward for a struggle in which victory would not come so easily. He had made up his mind that Cleo should not remain under his roof another day. How much she really knew or understood of the events of the night he could only guess. He was sure she had heard enough of the plans of his men to make a dangerous witness against him if she should see fit to betray the facts to his enemies.
Yet he was morally certain that he could trust her with this secret. What he could not and would not do was to imperil his own life and character by a daily intimate association with this willful, impudent, smiling young animal.
His one fear was the wish of his wife to keep her. In her illness she had developed a tyranny of love that brooked no interference with her whims. He had petted and spoiled her until it was well-nigh impossible to change the situation. The fear of her death was the sword that forever hung over his head.
He hoped that the girl was lying when she said his wife liked her. Yet it was not improbable. Her mind was still a child's. She could not think evil of any one. She loved the young and she loved grace and beauty wherever she saw it. She loved a beautiful cat, a beautiful dog, and always had taken pride in a handsome servant. It would be just like her to take a fancy to Cleo that no argument could shake. He dreaded to put the thing to an issue – but it had to be done. It was out of the question to tell her the real truth.
His heart sank within him as he entered his wife's room. Mammy had gone to bed suffering with a chill. The doctors had hinted that she was suffering from an incurable ailment and that her days were numbered. Her death might occur at any time.
Cleo was lying flat on a rug, the baby was sitting astride of her back, laughing his loudest at the funny contortions of her lithe figure. She would stop every now and then, turn her own laughing eyes on him and he would scream with joy.
The little mother was sitting on the floor like a child and laughing at the scene. In a flash he realized that Cleo had made herself, in the first few days she had been in his house, its dominant spirit.
He paused in the doorway sobered by the realization.
The supple young form on the floor slowly writhed on her back without disturbing the baby's sturdy hold, his little legs clasping her body tight. She drew his laughing face to her shoulder, smothering his laughter with kisses, and suddenly sprang to her feet, the baby astride her neck, and began galloping around the room.
"W'oa! January, w'oa, sir!" she cried, galloping slowly at first and then prancing like a playful horse.
Her cheeks were flushed, eyes sparkling and red hair flying in waves of fiery beauty over her exquisite shoulders, every change of attitude a new picture of graceful abandon, every movement of her body a throb of savage music from some strange seductive orchestra hidden in the deep woods!
Its notes slowly stole over the senses of the man with such alluring power, that in spite of his annoyance he began to smile.
The girl stopped, placed the child on the floor, ran to the corner of the room, dropped on all fours and started slowly toward him, her voice imitating the deep growl of a bear.
"Now the bears are going to get him! – Boo-oo-oo."
The baby screamed with delight. The graceful young she-bear capered around her victim from side to side, smelling his hands and jumping back, approaching and retreating, growling and pawing the floor, while with each movement the child shouted a new note of joy.
The man, watching, wondered if this marvelous creamy yellow animal could get into an ungraceful position.
The keen eyes of the young she-bear saw the boy had worn himself out with laughter and slowly approached her victim, tumbled his happy flushed little form over on the rug and devoured him with kisses.
"Don't, Cleo – that's enough now!" the little mother cried, through her tears of laughter.
"Yessum – yessum – I'm just eatin' him up now – I'm done – and he'll be asleep in two minutes."
She sprang to her feet, crushing the little form tenderly against her warm, young bosom, and walked past the man smiling into his face a look of triumph. The sombre eyes answered with a smile in spite of himself.
Could any man with red blood in his veins fight successfully a force like that? He heard the growl of the Beast within as he stood watching the scene. The sight of the frail little face of his invalid wife brought him up against the ugly fact with a sharp pain.
Yet the moment he tried to broach the subject of discharging Cleo, he hesitated, stammered and was silent. At last he braced himself with determination for the task. It was disagreeable, but it had to be done. The sooner the better.
"You like this girl, my dear?" he said softly.
"She's the most wonderful nurse I ever saw – the baby's simply crazy about her!"
"Yes, I see," he said soberly.
"It's a perfectly marvellous piece of luck that she came the day she did. Mammy was ready to drop. She's been like a fairy in the nursery from the moment she entered. The kiddy has done nothing but laugh and shriek with delight."
"And you like her personally?"
"I've just fallen in love with her! She's so strong and young and beautiful. She picks me up, laughing like a child, and carries me into the bathroom, carries me back and tucks me in bed as easily as she does the baby."
"I'm sorry, my dear," he interrupted with a firm, hard note in his voice.
"Sorry – for what?" the blue eyes opened with astonishment.
"Because I don't like her, and her presence here may be very dangerous just now – "
"Dangerous – what on earth can you mean?"
"To begin with that she's a negress – "
"So's mammy – so's the cook – the man – every servant we've ever had – or will have – "
"I'm not so sure of the last," the husband broke in with a frown.
"What's dangerous about the girl, I'd like to know?" his wife demanded.
"I said, to begin with, she's a negress. That's perhaps the least objectionable thing about her as a servant. But she has bad blood in her on her father's side. Old Peeler's as contemptible a scoundrel as I know in the county – "
"The girl don't like him – that's why she left home."
"Did she tell you that?" he asked quizzically.
"Yes, and I'm sorry for her. She wants a good home among decent white people and I'm not going to give her up. I don't care what you say."
The husband ignored the finality of this decision and went on with his argument as though she had not spoken.
"Old Peeler is not only a low white scoundrel who would marry this girl's mulatto mother if he dared, but he is trying to break into politics as a negro champion. He denies it, but he is a henchman of the Governor. I'm in a fight with this man to the death. There's not room for us both in the state – "
"And you think this laughing child cares anything about the Governor or his dirty politics? Such a thing has never entered her head."
"I'm not sure of that."
"You're crazy, Dan."
"But I'm not so crazy, my dear, that I can't see that this girl's presence in our house is dangerous. She already knows too much about my affairs – enough, in fact, to endanger my life if she should turn traitor."
"But she won't tell, I tell you – she's loyal – I'd trust her with my life, or yours, or the baby's, without hesitation. She proved her loyalty to me and to you last night."
"Yes, and that's just why she's so dangerous." He spoke slowly, as if talking to himself. "You can't understand, dear, I am entering now the last phase of a desperate struggle with the little Scalawag who sits in the Governor's chair for the mastery of this state and its life. The next two weeks and this election will decide whether white civilization shall live or a permanent negroid mongrel government, after the pattern of Haiti and San Domingo, shall be established. If we submit, we are not worth saving. We ought to die and our civilization with us! We are not going to submit, we are not going to die, we are going to win. I want you to help me now by getting rid of this girl."
"I won't give her up. There's no sense in it. A man who fought four years in the war is not afraid of a laughing girl who loves his baby and his wife! I can't risk a green, incompetent girl in the nursery now. I can't think of breaking in a new one. I like Cleo. She's a breath of fresh air when she comes into my room; she's clean and neat; she sings beautifully; her voice is soft and low and deep; I love her touch when she dresses me; the baby worships her – is all this nothing to you?"
"Is my work nothing to you?" he answered soberly.
"Bah! It's a joke! Your work has nothing to do with this girl. She knows nothing, cares nothing for politics – it's absurd!"
"My dear, you must listen to me now – "
"I won't listen. I'll have my way about my servants. It's none of your business. Look after your politics and let the nursery alone!"
"Please be reasonable, my love. I assure you I'm in dead earnest. The danger is a real one, or I wouldn't ask this of you – please – "
"No – no – no – no!" she fairly shrieked.
His voice was very quiet when he spoke at last:
"I'm sorry to cross you in this, but the girl must leave to-night."
The tones of his voice and the firm snap of his strong jaw left further argument out of the question and the little woman played her trump card.
She sprang to her feet, pale with rage, and gave way to a fit of hysteria. He attempted to soothe her, in grave alarm over the possible effects on her health of such a temper.
With a piercing scream she threw herself across the bed and he bent over her tenderly:
"Please, don't act this way!"
Her only answer was another scream, her little fists opening and closing like a bird's talons gripping the white counterpane in her trembling fingers.
The man stood in helpless misery and sickening fear, bent low and whispered:
"Please, please, darling – it's all right – she can stay. I won't say another word. Don't make yourself ill. Please don't!"
The sobbing ceased for a moment, and he added:
"I'll go into the nursery and send her here to put you to bed."
He turned to the door and met Cleo entering.
"Miss Jean called me?" she asked with a curious smile playing about her greenish eyes.
"Yes. She wishes you to put her to bed."
The girl threw him a look of triumphant tenderness and he knew that she had heard and understood.
CHAPTER VIII
A NEW WEAPON
From the moment the jail doors opened the Governor felt the chill of defeat. With his armed guard of fifty thousand "Loyal" white men he hoped to stem the rising tide of Anglo-Saxon fury. But the hope was faint. There was no assurance in its warmth. Every leader he had arrested without warrant and held without bail was now a firebrand in a powder magazine. Mass meetings, barbecues and parades were scheduled for every day by his enemies in every county.
The state was ablaze with wrath from the mountains to the sea. The orators of the white race spoke with tongues of flame.
The record of negro misrule under an African Legislature was told with brutal detail and maddening effects. The state treasury was empty, the school funds had been squandered, millions in bonds had been voted and stolen and the thieves had fled the state in terror.
All this the Governor knew from the first, but he also knew that an ignorant negro majority would ask no questions and believe no evil of their allies.
The adventurers from the North had done their work of alienating the races with a thoroughness that was nothing short of a miracle. The one man on earth who had always been his best friend, every negro now held his bitterest foe. He would consult his old master about any subject under the sun and take his advice against the world except in politics. He would come to the back door, beg him for a suit of clothes, take it with joyous thanks, put it on and march straight to the polls and vote against the hand that gave it.
He asked no questions as to his own ticket. It was all right if it was against the white man of the South. The few Scalawags who trained with negroes to get office didn't count.
The negro had always despised such trash. The Governor knew his solid black constituency would vote like sheep, exactly as they were told by their new teachers.
But the nightmare that disturbed him now, waking or dreaming, was the fear that this full negro vote could not be polled. The daring speeches by the enraged leaders of the white race were inflaming the minds of the people beyond the bounds of all reason. These leaders had sworn to carry the election and dared the Governor to show one of his scurvy guards near a polling place on the day they should cast their ballots.
The Ku Klux Klan openly defied all authority. Their men paraded the county roads nightly and ended their parades by lining their horsemen in cavalry formation, galloping through the towns and striking terror to every denizen of the crowded negro quarters.
In vain the Governor issued frantic appeals for the preservation of the sanctity of the ballot. His speeches in which he made this appeal were openly hissed.
The ballot was no longer a sacred thing. The time was in American history when it was the badge of citizen kingship. At this moment the best men in the state were disfranchised and hundreds of thousands of negroes, with the instincts of the savage and the intelligence of the child, had been given the ballot. Never in the history of civilization had the ballot fallen so low in any republic. The very atmosphere of a polling place was a stench in the nostrils of decent men.
The determination of the leaders of the Klan to clear the polls by force if need be was openly proclaimed before the day of election. The philosophy by which they justified this stand was simple, and unanswerable, for it was founded in the eternal verities. Men are not made free by writing a constitution on a piece of paper. Freedom is inside. A ballot is only a symbol. That symbol stands for physical force directed by the highest intelligence. The ballot, therefore, is force – physical force. Back of every ballot is a bayonet and the red blood of the man who holds it. Therefore, a minority submits to the verdict of a majority at the polls. If there is not an intelligent, powerful fighting unit back of the scrap of paper that falls into a box, there's nothing there and that man's ballot has no more meaning than if it had been deposited by a trained pig or a dog.
On the day of this fated election the little Scalawag Governor sat in the Capitol, the picture of nervous despair. Since sunrise his office had been flooded with messages from every quarter of the state begging too late for troops. Everywhere his henchmen were in a panic. From every quarter the stories were the same.
Hundreds of determined, silent white men had crowded the polls, taken their own time to vote and refused to give an inch of room to the long line of panic-stricken negroes who looked on helplessly. At five o'clock in the afternoon less than a hundred blacks had voted in the entire township in which the Capital was located.
Norton was a candidate for the Legislature on the white ticket, and the Governor had bent every effort to bring about his defeat. The candidate against him was a young negro who had been a slave of his father, and now called himself Andy Norton. Andy had been a house-servant, was exactly the major's age and they had been playmates before the war. He was endowed with a stentorian voice and a passion for oratory. He had acquired a reputation for smartness, was good-natured, loud-mouthed, could tell a story, play the banjo and amuse a crowd. He had been Norton's body-servant the first year of the war.
The Governor relied on Andy to swing a resistless tide of negro votes for the ticket and sweep the county. Under ordinary conditions, he would have done it. But before the hurricane of fury that swept the white race on the day of the election, the voice of Andy was as one crying in the wilderness.
He had made three speeches to his crowd of helpless black voters who hadn't been able to vote. The Governor sent him an urgent message to mass his men and force their way to the ballot box.
The polling place was under a great oak that grew in the Square beside the Court House. A space had been roped off to guard the approach to the boxes. Since sunrise this space had been packed solid with a living wall of white men. Occasionally a well-known old negro of good character was allowed to pass through and vote and then the lines closed up in solid ranks.
One by one a new white man was allowed to take his place in this wall and gradually he was moved up to the tables on which the boxes rested, voted, and slowly, like the movement of a glacier, the line crowded on in its endless circle.
The outer part of this wall of defense which the white race had erected around the polling place was held throughout the day by the same men – twenty or thirty big, stolid, dogged countrymen, who said nothing, but every now and then winked at each other.
When Andy received the Governor's message he decided to distinguish himself. It was late in the day, but not too late perhaps to win by a successful assault. He picked out twenty of his strongest buck negroes, moved them quietly to a good position near the polls, formed them into a flying wedge, and, leading the assault in person with a loud good-natured laugh, he hurled them against the outer line of whites.
To Andy's surprise the double line opened and yielded to his onset. He had forced a dozen negroes into the ranks when to his surprise the white walls suddenly closed on the blacks and held them as in a steel trap.
And then, quick as a flash, something happened. It was a month before the negroes found out exactly what it was. They didn't see it, they couldn't hear it, but they knew it happened. They felt it.
And the silent swiftness with which it happened was appalling. Every negro who had penetrated the white wall suddenly leaped into the air with a yell of terror. The white line opened quickly and to a man the negro wedge broke and ran for life, each black hand clasped in agony on the same spot.
Andy's voice rang full and clear above his men's:
"Goddermighty, what's dat!"
"Dey shot us, man!" screamed a negro.
The thing was simple, almost childlike in its silliness, but it was tremendously effective. The white guard in the outer line had each been armed with a little piece of shining steel three inches long, fixed in a handle – a plain shoemaker's pegging awl. At a given signal they had wheeled and thrust these awls into the thick flesh of every negro's thigh.
The attack was so sudden, so unexpected, and the pain so sharp, so terrible, for the moment every negro's soul was possessed with a single idea, how to save his particular skin and do it quickest. All esprit de corps was gone. It was each for himself and the devil take the hindmost! Some of them never stopped running until they cleared Buffalo creek, three miles out of town.
Andy's ambitions were given a violent turn in a new direction. Before the polls closed at sundown he appeared at the office of the Eagle and Phoenix with a broad grin on his face and asked to see the major.
He entered the editor's room bowing and scraping, his white teeth gleaming.
Norton laughed and quietly said:
"Well, Andy?"
"Yassah, major, I des drap roun' ter kinder facilitate ye, sah, on de 'lection, sah."
"It does look like the tide is turning, Andy."
"Yassah, hit sho' is turnin', but hit's gotter be a purty quick tide dat kin turn afore I does, sah."
"Yes?"
"Yassah! And I drap in, major, ter 'splain ter you dat I'se gwine ter gently draw outen politics, yassah. I makes up my min' ter hitch up wid de white folks agin. Brought up by de Nortons, sah, I'se always bin a gemman, an' I can't afford to smut my hands wid de crowd dat I been 'sociating wid. I'se glad you winnin' dis 'lection, sah, an' I'se glad you gwine ter de Legislature – anyhow de office gwine ter stay in de Norton fambly – an' I'se satisfied, sah. I know you gwine ter treat us far an' squar – "
"If I'm elected I'll try to represent all the people, Andy," the major said gravely.
"If you'se 'lected?" Andy laughed. "Lawd, man, you'se dar right now! I kin des see you settin' in one dem big chairs! I knowed it quick as I feel dat thing pop fro my backbone des now! Yassah, I done resigned, an' I thought, major, maybe you get a job 'bout de office or 'bout de house fer er young likely nigger 'bout my size?"
The editor smiled:
"Nothing just now, Andy, but possibly I can find a place for you in a few days."
"Thankee, sah. I'll hold off den till you wants me. I'll des pick up er few odd jobs till you say de word – you won't fergit me?"
"No. I'll remember."
"An', major, ef you kin des advance me 'bout er dollar on my wages now, I kin cheer myself up ter-night wid er good dinner. Dese here loafers done bust me. I hain't got er nickel lef!"
The major laughed heartily and "advanced" his rival for Legislative honors a dollar.
Andy bowed to the floor:
"Any time you'se ready, major, des lemme know, sah. You'll fin' me a handy man 'bout de house, sah."
"All right, Andy, I may need you soon."
"Yassah, de sooner de better, sah," he paused in the door. "Dey gotter get up soon in de mornin', sah, ter get erhead er us Nortons – yassah, dat dey is – "
A message, the first news of the election, cut Andy's gabble short. It spelled Victory! One after another they came from every direction – north, south, east and west – each bringing the same magic word – victory! victory! A state redeemed from negroid corruption! A great state once more in the hands of the children of the men who created it!
It had only been necessary to use force to hold the polls from hordes of ignorant negroes in the densest of the black counties. The white majorities would be unprecedented. The enthusiasm had reached the pitch of mania in these counties. They would all break records.
A few daring men in the black centres of population, where negro rule was at its worst, had guarded the polls under his direction armed with the simple device of a shoemaker's awl, and in every case where it had been used the resulting terror had cleared the place of every negro. In not a single case where this novel weapon had been suddenly and mysteriously thrust into a black skin was there an attempt to return to the polls. A long-suffering people, driven at last to desperation, had met force with force and wrested a commonwealth from the clutches of the vandals who were looting and disgracing it.
Now he would call the little Scalawag to the bar of justice.
