The Scribe (10 page)

“Underwood,” he muttered, “goddamn you.”

A
NSE SETTLED HIMSELF
into the leather seat and looked around balefully as the train began to pick up steam. His was
the only white face in the car and, worse, this man Underwood was staring right at him on account of it. Forty years of living in the mountains and Anse had seen nary a black face in that time, save for his rare visits down to this capital city. Had also seen the famous sign at the Forsyth County line in north Georgia that read
NIGGER DON
'
T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU HERE
. Talk had circulated about putting up a similar signpost at Ringgold's corporate limits but Canby would have nothing of it, elections be damned. Now Anse felt the distance of every mile that separated him from home. And he was surrounded.

A hand settled on his shoulder and he jumped.

“First time in the big city?”

Anse looked up and saw that the voice, and the hand, belonged to a white man outfitted in the uniform of the Western & Atlantic. He also wore a conductor's cap.

“Naw,” Anse said.

“Could have fooled me. You're in the colored car, Hiram. Move on up to the next one. I think you'll be more comfortable.” He dismissed him with a shooing gesture and began taking up tickets from the black passengers. Anse made his way to the front of the car, turning his wide hips sideways to navigate the narrow aisle, and slid open the vestibule door to the rushing air outside. He balked at opening the door to the car ahead, although he could see it was filled with white people, the ladies seated and men standing with hands slung in the leather straps that hung from the brass rails above. Instead he stood on the steel platform and breathed in the whistling air. So many smells in it: coal smoke, wood smoke, creosote, people, every kind of food. God knows what else.

When the train pulled into the Oglethorpe Park station he was the first one off, climbing down the car's welded steps to the decking of the depot. When Underwood came down from the colored car Anse fell in a few yards behind him, hands in his pockets, trying his best to look like a man strolling through the exposition for the third or fourth time.

But it took an effort not to gawk. He followed the rail passengers making their way to the I.C.E. entrance and his gaze went up to its gate, which seemed to loom five or six stories high in wrought iron, with
INTERNATIONAL COTTON EXPOSITION
welded right into its arching metal. Next to it a fountain spewed water nearly as high. The fairgoers, white and black, formed a single line, there being too many of them, he guessed, to be segregated here. As he walked under the arch, he followed the lead of those in front of him and dropped a quarter into an iron box at the turnstiles. The usher smiled at him. The man wore a uniform of blue, buff, and green with brass buttons, all of it trimmed in gold braid. Dressed for the circus, Anse thought as the turnstile trundled behind him.

Whatever notion of pandemonium Anse still had from the Sunday school days of his youth was here confirmed. Pandemonium sped up, no less. He walked down a boulevard lined with stalls of vendors selling everything but livestock. A weird cacophony of music and noise, of pianos and organs playing in their stalls and the cries of vendors hawking wares—tobacconists, haberdashers, sellers of painted china, antique bronzes, iron novelties, jewelry and art. He paused for a second at a booth that had been set up to sell concertinas. The man in the booth
a Chinaman, he guessed, with a long, braided ponytail hanging down his back, the hair as black and shiny as a crow's wing. He stood behind his display table playing one of the concertinas, the little accordion breathing melodies in and out in his small hands.

And apparently there was more yet to be built. Carpenters and bricklayers were working everywhere, trying to finish the construction that seemed to be running far behind schedule. Anse saw aproned and sawdusted men harangued by foremen who exhorted them with cries for haste. On the hillside west of the park he saw that a city of tents had sprung up, overlooking the racetrack that marked the park's boundary. He wondered how many of them housed these tradesmen.

Ahead of him Underwood had nearly reached the main building, a giant structure, cross-shaped, with windows high in each wall of it, flags from every state in the Union snapping on poles set at the edges of the building's roof. He saw from its signage that it was the model cotton factory and he hurried, lest he lose the black man in the crowd pouring in.

Inside was quiet. Though the factory was outfitted with all manner of outsized cotton gins, presses, looms, and sewing machines, all were silent, inert. A man atop a ladder, balance uncertain as though he had just climbed it, cleared his throat and spoke.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the man the newspapers call a steam engine in breeches, the exposition's director general, Hannibal Kimball, ladies and gents.”

The speaker climbed down and another man, with a sizable mustache and hair swept to one side of his head, took his place. A robust round of applause greeted him.

“Thank you, ladies. Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “I thank you all for joining us and welcome you to another day of Atlanta's exposition. We have gathered exhibitors from New England to the Middle West and from six foreign countries, eleven hundred exhibits in all. I believe you will see that it is a new kind of South we herald—one of energy and industry. It can't all be seen in a day. Perhaps you'll stay and spend a night at the new Southern Hotel here on the grounds. Or at the Kimball House downtown.”

He nodded and smiled at the scattered laughter.

“I say a new kind of South, ladies and gentlemen, because the old one is dead. The old system is completely overturned. Sherman, in his rather flammable way, did us a kind of favor. As Henry Grady likes to say, the war also freed the slave
holder
—of the obligation of hungry mouths to feed. We were too much dependent on slavery, and too much dependent on growing cotton without milling or weaving it. For too long we have shipped our staple to the north to be processed. We are now bringing the mill to the cotton. Atlanta will lead the charge from the fields to the factory.

“Folks, I'm glad you're here. We're witnessing a birth, you see. The birth of the New South. Here and now.”

“
Attends!
Attends!
” someone cried from the back of the crowd. Anse followed the turning of heads and saw that a tall man had climbed up the side of a loom, where he clung with one hand and waved a handkerchief from the other. “One week, Monsieur Kimball, one week since opening day we have waited for the booths for the industrial pavilion!”

Kimball smiled. “My friend, the lumber that is to go into
that exhibit is not sawn yet. But I told you ten days, and we will make it.”

The man wiped at his brow with his handkerchief. “But the money!” he said.

As if to answer in kind, Kimball pulled his own handkerchief from his breast pocket and waved it. All the cotton machinery sprang to life instantly and simultaneously, it seemed, gins and combs raking back and forth, sewing machines chattering into motion. The man on the loom sprang down from it just as the loom's arm swung into the place his hand had been a moment before. Still smiling, Kimball tucked the handkerchief back into his pocket, climbed down the ladder, and began shaking hands.

Underwood was moving again, scanning the crowd as he made his way through the factory. Anse dropped back a bit. After fifteen minutes of walking through the place like a patrolman on a beat, Underwood had made it to the factory's north door. He seemed to be looking at the black faces in the place most intently.

Just outside the factory he looked back in Anse's direction and Anse turned away and stepped a few yards to a steaming tin cart from which a black boy was selling boiled peanuts. Once the money had changed hands, Anse turned back with his soggy paper sack in hand and saw Underwood enter a wood-framed building designated as the Arts & Industrial Pavilion, though “
PAVILION
” was yet unfinished, a painter on a scaffold brushing the last letters into place.

He found him inside, in yet another line. This building housed the truly heavy equipment, machinery for lumber and
manufacturing that ran so deafeningly loud that the floor vibrated beneath his feet. Hemp ropes had been strung in front of the exhibits to queue the fairgoers before each machine at the closest safe distance. He took his place between the ropes. While he waited, he picked peanuts from the bag, splitting the shells with a thumbnail and dropping them to the plank floor.

The machine ahead of him was turning a length of pine log before feeding it into a circular saw that screamed like a fury each time it bit into the wood. It was steam-powered and he could see from his place in line that it was operated by a man raising and lowering an iron lever at intervals. With each raising of the lever came a great pneumatic hissing of steam and with each lowering a softer exhalation. In between, the log jumped and danced in the carriage thunderously, bark chipping and flying. He could see Underwood now directly in front of the machine, holding up the line. Underwood's eyes moved from the machine itself to the little sign that had been erected in front of it to explain its function, this one being far too loud for the operator to talk over. He lingered on the sign itself the longest. His face bore a strange expression of curiosity and distaste, as though he suspected that the little plaque might spring into motion as well. After a long minute the white man behind him in line said something to him and he looked up, moved on.

Anse inched forward with the others. He could see now that the lever powered two metal cylinders: one that pushed the log over and the other out of which sprang a hooked metal arm that pulled it back. At each turn the carriage carried the log forward, into the saw, where the blade sheared off side boards.
After four turns and shuttles the log was rendered into a perfectly square length of pine, fit for a column or to be cut down smaller into boards for framing lumber. Anse had spent hours cutting each log to build his own house; here, one was planed in a minute. He had never in his life seen so many machines as he had this morning, and this one perhaps the granddaddy of them all. By the time he got to the prime place in the queue another huge log had been dropped onto the carriage and he was able to watch the process all the way through.

He looked down at the sign that had so interested Underwood. It was a metal plaque, finely cast from steel and glazed over with a glossy coat of black enamel.
STEAM NIGGER
, it read, and in smaller letters beneath, W
M
. H. H
ILL
& C
O
., K
ALAMAZOO
, M
ICH
.

“Be damned,” Anse said. When he looked up to locate Underwood again he could not find him. The black man in the sage suit and hat had disappeared in the mass of men and women, melted back into the crowd of his fellow Atlantans.

T
HE YOUNG LIBRARIAN
had been sheepish about Canby's inquiry as to the Y.M.L.A.'s pro-slavery holdings. “Most of those books have been cleared out. Our subscribers lost interest in the topic some years ago,” he had said, carefully logging in the Fitzhugh books Canby had set on his desk. “I was surprised to find Chief Thompson had any interest in the slavery argument at all.”

“Thompson? Vernon checked out these books?”

“His boy did, sir. On his orders, I'm sure.”

Canby nodded. “And these Fitzhugh titles are all you have left? No others by McDuffie? James Henry Hammond?”

The young man set
Cannibals All!
aside with both of his slender hands and looked up at Canby, blushing. “You might check with Robert Billingsley, sir. The holdings at his house alone are nearly double the volumes we have here.”

And so Canby found himself on the front porch of the grand Billingsley manor on Saint Paul Avenue. While he waited for the bell to be answered he gazed down the street at Lemuel P. Grant's mansion and at the park named for Grant across the street from it, where the trees were just beginning to turn with autumn. The Billingsley place was even newer and grander than Grant's, a two-story edifice of red Georgia brick and white-painted columns and shutters, four chimneys jutting above the roof at each of the house's corners. When Billingsley had moved into the city he had done so in earnest, one of the few of the old planter class who managed not only to weather the war but also to build from its ashes an empire. And his house was said to be wired throughout for the electric lights Billingsley's Dixie Light hoped to bring to the city grid. Billingsley's was the kind of story Henry Grady evangelized, every chance his editorials gave him. Canby imagined that could Grady afford it, he would be erecting his own place next door.

The black face that peered out from behind the great cypress door was already bobbing and nodding before Canby spoke a greeting. Clad in white tails, the butler led Canby back to “the libry” down a dim hallway lined with a thick carpet runner. The black man pushed open the door to Billingsley's study. Billingsley was at his desk, dozing, head down on an open book
splayed across the desk's surface. The butler cleared his throat and Billingsley sat up and shut the book on which his face had been resting. He fitted a pair of wire spectacles on his face and regarded Canby for a moment, then smiled.

“Detective Canby,” he said, rising, “please come in.” He nodded toward one of the wingback chairs that faced the desk, while the butler, unbidden, moved to a sideboard and poured two drinks from a crystal decanter.

“I'm sorry to have disturbed your constitutional.”

“Constitutional? Mister Canby, my friend, keeping regular hours is the hope of a bygone time for one my age. One takes a constitutional whenever one can.” He waved a hand, lassitude in the gesture, at the butler, who set the drinks before them and moved about the room pulling lamp chains. Each pull was followed by a barely audible hiss as the electric bulbs in them caught the current, and the room was filled with a light of such steady whiteness that Canby could not help but marvel.