“You want truth? Go to church.” Clawson opened and slammed a file drawer, then hollered for a copyboy. “We all do things we don’t like. That’s how things get done.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ask your cousin. Meantime, write me a story I can use.”

Part II: The Compaign

P A R T   II

T H E   C A M P A I G N

Chapter Six

It was determined that this city and county should be redeemed.

George Rountree

C H A P T E R   S I X

Thursday, October 6

FOR A WHOLE MONTH, an uneasy surface calm prevailed. Whites and blacks went about their business warily, avoiding open confrontation.

It was as if the town had rushed headlong to the brink, stared into the chasm, and pulled back. Something irreparable had almost happened. Nobody had lynched a black man in Wilmington in fifteen years, yet now, on the verge of the twentieth century, it had almost come true. It scared them sober. For a short time, merchants were more civil, preachers less strident, agitators less agitated. At Walker Taylor’s urging, Mike Dowling left town to visit relatives across the river.

For a while, Clawson backed off. He ran Sam’s copy with only light editing—just a touch here and there to remind him who was boss. Sam tried hard to tell the truth about things nobody could argue with. The city was quiet, orderly, boring.

But then the incidents began. Small punctures in the social fabric, more and more frequent. Sam started to feel the seams of the town straining, pulling apart. He lay awake at night next to his unhappy wife and fancied he could hear the town stretched tight, tearing slowly, like sun-rotted tent poplin. It made him anxious. Would he be a reliable witness? Would he tell the story? Or would he run for cover, as he had in Cuba? He made up his mind to be braver.

A white laborer assaulted a black stevedore with a baseball bat, and a black policeman refused to arrest the attacker. “I’m not allowed to arrest whitefolks,” he explained to the Messenger—a contention that Mayor Silas Wright hotly denied.

After the heaviest rainstorm in September, a gang of Negroes pushed a white woman into a muddy ditch. When Sergeant Lockamy happened by, they claimed she had slipped and they were only trying to pull her out.

Persons unknown desecrated the African Methodist Episcopal cemetery, smashing some tombstones with a sledgehammer and chalking obscenities on others. The caretaker spotted two Red Shirts fleeing into the woods.

Somebody fired a single pistol shot through the window of a streetcar as it passed through Brooklyn. Luckily, though the car was crowded with white shopgirls, nobody was injured.