Ragtime (31 page)

The band met in the entrance hall. They were dressed now in their Coalhouse uniforms of suit and tie and derby. Coalhouse told them they should pull their brims down and turn up the collars of their jackets to avoid identification. Their means of safe conduct was the Model T. He explained how to set the spark and throttle and how to turn the crank. You will ring the telephone when you’re free, he said. Father said Am I not to go? Here is the hostage, Coalhouse said, indicating Younger Brother. One white face looks just like another. They all laughed. Coalhouse embraced each of them before the great brass doors. He embraced Younger Brother with the same fervor he accorded the others. He looked at his pocket watch. At this moment the floodlights in the street went out. He took his place
in the alcove at the back of the hall, straddling the white marble bench with his hands on the dynamite detonation box. There is slack in the plunger to a point halfway down, Younger Brother called to him. All right, Coalhouse said. Go on now. One of the young men unbolted the doors and with no further ceremony they filed out. Then the doors closed. Bolt them, please, Coalhouse commanded. Father did so. He put his ear to the doors. All he heard was his own heavy and frightened breathing. Then after what seemed a torturously long interval, in which almost all his hope for his own life flowed from him, he heard the sibilant cough and sputter of a Model T engine. A few moments later the gears were engaged and he heard the car drive off. There was a thump thump as it went over the planks laid over the crater. He ran to the back of the hall. They’re gone, he said to Coalhouse Walker Jr. The black man was staring at his hands poised on the plunger of the box. Father sat down on the floor with his back to the marble wall. He raised his knees and rested his head. They sat like that, neither of them moving. After a while Coalhouse asked Father to tell him about his son. He wanted to know about his walking, whether his appetite was good, whether he’d said any words yet, and every detail he could think of.

A
bout two hours later Coalhouse Walker Jr. came down the stairs of the Library with his arms raised and started to walk across 36th Street to the brownstone. This was according to the negotiated agreement. The street had been cleared of all observers. Facing him on the opposite sidewalk was a squad of New York’s Finest armed with carbines. Lined up from one sidewalk to the other were two troops of mounted police facing each other at a distance of thirty yards, the horses shoulder to shoulder, so that a kind of corridor was formed. Coalhouse was therefore not visible to anyone looking on from the intersections at Madison Avenue or, more remotely, Park Avenue. The generators on the corner made a fearsome roar. In the bright floodlit street the black man was said by the police to have made a dash for freedom. More probably he knew that all he must do in order to end his life was to turn his head abruptly or lower his hands or smile. Inside the Library, Father heard the coordinated volley of a firing squad. He screamed. He ran to the window. The body jerked about the street in a sequence of attitudes as if it were
trying to mop up its own blood. The policemen were firing at will. The horses snorted and shied.

Up in their Harlem hideout the Coalhouse band could reason what the outcome would be. They were all there but the man they had followed. The rooms seemed empty. Nothing mattered. They could barely bring themselves to talk. All but Younger Brother thought they would remain in New York. The Model T was hidden in an adjoining alley. They assumed it had been marked. Since Younger Brother wanted to leave town he was awarded the car. He drove that night to the waterfront at 125th Street and took the ferry to New Jersey. He drove south. Apparently he had some money although it is not known how or where he got it. He drove to Philadelphia. He drove to Baltimore. He drove deep into the country where Negroes stood up in the fields to watch him pass. His car left a trail of dust in the sky. He drove through small towns in Georgia where in the scant shade of the trees in the squares citizens spoke of hanging the Jew Leo Frank for what he had done to a fourteen-year-old Christian girl, Mary Phagan. They spit in the dirt. Younger Brother raced freight trains and clumped his car through the cool darkness of covered bridges. He used no maps. He slept in the fields. He drove from gasoline pump to gasoline pump. He collected in the back seat an assortment of tools, tire tubes, gascans, oilcans, clamps, wires and engine parts. He kept going. The trees became more scattered. Eventually they disappeared. There was rock and sagebrush. Beautiful sunsets lured him through valleys of hardened sun-cracked clay. When
the Ford broke down and he couldn’t fix it he was pulled by children sitting up on wagons drawn by mules.

In Taos, New Mexico, he came upon a community of bohemians who painted desert scenes and wore serapes. They were from Greenwich Village in New York. They were attracted by his exhaustion. He was passionately sullen, even when drinking. He replenished himself here for several days. He enjoyed a brief affair with an older woman.

By now Younger Brother’s thinning hair was just long enough to fall flat on his crown. He wore a blond beard. His fair skin peeled constantly and he squinted from the sun. He drove on into Texas. His clothes had worn away. He wore bib overalls and moccasins and an Indian blanket. At the border town of Presidio he sold the Ford to a storekeeper and, taking with him only the desert water bag that he had hung from the radiator cap, he waded across the Rio Grande to Ojinaga, Mexico. This was a town that had seen successive occupations of federal troops and insurgents. The adobe houses of Ojinaga lacked roofs. There were holes in the church walls made by field guns. The villagers lived behind the walls of their yards. The streets were white dust. Here were billeted some of the forces of Francisco Villa’s Division of the North. He attached himself to them and was accepted as a
compañero
.

When Villa did his march south to Torreón, two hundred miles along the destroyed tracks of the central railroad, Younger Brother was in the throng. They rode across the great Mexican desert of barrel cactus and
Spanish bayonet. They encamped at ranchos and in the coolness of the castellated abbeys smoked
macuche
wrapped in cornhusks. There was little food. Women with dark shawls carried water jars on their heads.

After the victory at Torreón, Younger Brother wore the cartridge belts crisscrossed over his chest. He was a
villista
but dreamed of going on and finding Zapata. The army rode on the tops of railroad freight cars. With the troops went their families. They lived on the tops of the trains with guns and bedding and baskets with their food. There were camp followers and babies at the breast. They rode through the desert with the cinders and smoke of the engine coming back to sting their eyes and burn their throats. They put up umbrellas against the sun.

There was a meeting in Mexico City of the insurgent chiefs from the various regions. It was another moment when the revolution had to be defined. After the despised tyrant Díaz had been overthrown a reformist, Madero, had taken power. Madero had fallen to a General Huerta, an Aztec. Now Huerta was gone and a moderate, Carranza, was trying to assume control. The capital seethed with proliferating factions, thieving bureaucrats and foreign businessmen and spies. Into this chaos rode Zapata’s peasant army of the south. The city was hushed by their arrival. Their reputation was so fierce that the urban Mexicans feared them. Younger Brother stood quietly with the
villistas
and watched them ride in. Then the Mexicans began to laugh. The fearsome warriors of the south could not speak properly. Many of them were children. Their
eyes went wide when they saw the palace of Chapultepee. They wore rags. They would not step on the sidewalks of the Paseo de la Reforma, a boulevard of mansions and trees and outdoor restaurants, but walked instead in the street, through the horse droppings. The electric streetcars of the city frightened them. They fired their rifles at fire engines. And the great Zapata himself, sitting for photographs in the palace, let Villa take the President’s chair.

The
campesinos
of the south did not like either Mexico City or the revolution of the moderates. When they left, Younger Brother went with them. He had never revealed his special knowledge to the officers of Villa. But to Emiliano Zapata he said I can make bombs and repair guns and rifles. I know how to blow things up. In the desert a demonstration was given. Younger Brother filled four dry gourds with the sand at his feet. He added pinches of a black powder. He rolled corn silk into fuses. He lit the fuses and methodically threw a gourd to each of the four points of the compass. The explosions made holes in the desert ten feet wide. Over the next year Younger Brother led guerrilla raids on oil fields, smelters and federal garrisons. He was respected by the
Zapatistas
but was thought also to be reckless. On one of his bombing forays his hearing was damaged. Eventually he grew deaf. He watched his explosions but could not hear them. Spindly mountain railroad trestles crumpled silently into deep gorges. Tin-roofed factories collapsed in the white dust. We are not sure of the exact circumstances of his death, but it appears to have come in a skirmish with government
troops near the Chinameca plantation in Morelos, the same place where several years later Zapata himself was to be gunned down in ambush.

By this time of course the President in the United States was Woodrow Wilson. He had been elected by the people for his qualities as a warrior. The people’s instinct escaped Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt accused Wilson of finding war abhorrent. He thought Wilson had the prim renunciatory mouth of someone who had eaten fish with bones in it. But the new President was giving the Marines practice by having them land at Vera Cruz. He was giving the army practice by sending it across the border to chase Pancho Villa. He wore rimless glasses and held moral views. When the Great War came he would wage it with the fury of the affronted. Neither Theodore Roosevelt’s son Quentin, who was to die in a dogfight over France, nor the old Bull Moose himself, who was to die in grief not long thereafter, would survive Wilson’s abhorrence of war.

The signs of the coming conflagration were everywhere. In Europe the Peace Palace was opened at The Hague and forty-two nations sent representatives to the ceremonies. A conference of socialists in Vienna resolved that the international working class would never again fight the battles of imperialist powers. The painters in Paris were doing portraits with two eyes on one side of the head. A Jewish professor in Zurich had published a paper proving that the universe was curved. None of this escaped Pierpont Morgan. He debarked at Cherbourg, the incident of the mad black man in his Library quite forgotten, and made his customary
way across the Continent, going from country to country in his private train and dining with bankers, premiers and kings. Of this latter group he noted a marked deterioration in spirit. If the royal families were not melancholic they were hysterical. They overturned wineglasses or stuttered or screamed at servants. He watched. The conviction came over him that they were obsolete. They were all related, from one country to the next. They had been marrying one another for so many centuries that they had bred into themselves just the qualities, ignorance and idiocy, they could least afford. At the funeral of Edward VII in London they had pushed and shoved and elbowed each other like children for places in the cortege.

Morgan went to Rome and took his usual floor at the Grand Hotel. Very quickly the butler’s silver plate filled with cards. For several weeks Morgan received counts and dukes and other aristocrats. They arrived with pieces that had been in their families for generations. Some of them were impoverished, others merely wished to convert their assets. But they all seemed to want to leave Europe as quickly as possible. Morgan sat in a straight chair with his hands folded upon the cane between his knees and viewed canvases, majolica, porcelain, faience, brasses, bas-reliefs and missals. He nodded or shook his head. Slowly the rooms filled with objects. He was offered a beautiful golden crucifix that pulled apart to become a stiletto. He nodded. Through the lobby of the hotel and out the doors and around the block stretched a line of aristocrats. They wore morning coats, top hats, spats. They held walking sticks.
They carried bundles wrapped in brown paper. Some of the more intemperate of them offered their wives or their children. Beautiful young women with pale skin and the most mournful of eyes. Delicate young men. One individual brought in twins, a boy and girl, done up in gray velvet and lace. He undressed them and turned them in every direction.