Ragtime (22 page)

39

Several calls to the Ford motorcar people had brought forth by eight in the morning a truck carrying all the interchangeable parts for a Model T. The Pantasote Company delivered a top. Aides of Morgan had agreed that he would be billed for everything. As the crowd watched from the corner, Fire Chief Conklin, under the direction of two mechanics, piece by piece dismantled the Ford and made a new Ford from the chassis up. A block and tackle was used to hoist the engine. Sweating, grunting, complaining and at times crying, Conklin did the work. New tires replaced old, new fenders, new radiator, magneto, new doors, running boards, windshield, headlamps and upholstered seats. By five in the afternoon, with the sun still blazing in the sky over New York, a shining black Model T Ford with a custom pantosote roof stood at the curb.

All day the followers of Coalhouse had come to him with appeals to change his mind. Their arguments became wilder and wilder. They said they were a nation. He was patient with them. It became apparent they wouldn’t know what to do without him. They recognized his decision as suicide. They were forlorn at their abandonment. By the late afternoon the Library was in gloom. The young men watched listlessly from the windows as the automobile in which Coalhouse had done his courting reappeared at the curb.

Coalhouse himself never once went to the window to look at it. He sat at Pierpont Morgan’s desk in the West Room and composed his will.

Younger Brother had withdrawn in silent bitterness. Father, who was now closeted in the Library as an official hostage, wanted to talk with him. He was thinking what he would have to tell Mother. Only when it grew dark and the hour of the departure was approaching could he bring himself to confront him. It might be the last privacy they would have.

The young man was in the lavatory behind the entrance hall. He was wiping the burnt cork from his face. He glanced at Father in the mirror. Father said I myself require nothing from you. But don’t you feel your sister deserves an explanation? If she thinks about me, Younger Brother said, she will have her explanation. I could not transmit it through you. You are a complacent man with no thought of history. You pay your employees poorly and are insensitive to their needs. I see, Father said. The fact that you think of yourself as a gentleman in all your dealings, Younger Brother said, is the simple self-delusion of all those who oppress humanity. You have lived under my roof and worked in my business, Father said. Your generosity, Younger Brother said, was what you felt you could afford. Besides, he added, I have repaid that debt, as you will discover. Younger Brother washed his face with soap and hot water. He used a vigorous motion, his head over the basin. He dried himself with a hand towel embroidered with the initials JPM. He threw the towel on the floor, put on his shirt, dug in his pockets for cuff links, buttons, placed his collar over the shirt, tied his tie, raised his suspenders. You have traveled everywhere and learned nothing, he said. You think it’s a crime to come into this building belonging to another man and to threaten his property. In fact this is the nest of a vulture. The den of a jackal. He put on his coat, ran his palms over his shaved head, placed his derby on his head and glanced at himself in the mirror. Goodbye, he said. You won’t see me again. You may tell my sister that she will always be in my thoughts. For a moment he gazed at the floor. He had to clear his throat. You may tell her I have always loved her and admired her.

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 pulled 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 to 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 door. 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 is 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.

IV

40

About 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 intersection 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 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. He 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. He 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 were 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. The 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 beddings 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 Chapultepec. 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 garrison. 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 the. Spindly mountain railroad trestles crumpled silently into deep gorge. 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 wit 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 a 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 later 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, faïence, 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 a girl, done up in gray velvet and lace. He undressed them and turned them in every direction.

Morgan remained in Europe until his agents advised him that his Nile steamer was waiting in Alexandria, outfitted and ready to sail. Before departing he attempted for the last time to persuade Henry Ford to come to Egypt. He composed a lengthy cable. The reply came back from Ford that he could not leave Michigan because he had entered into the most sensitive stage of negotiations with an inventor fellow who was able to power a motorcar’s engine with a green pill. Morgan ordered his bags packed. After giving instructions in the crating and shipping of his acquisitions, he set off. It was the autumn of the year. When he reached Alexandria he came up to his boat, a paddle steamer built of steel, and without more than a glance from the pier he went aboard and ordered the captain to cast off.

Morgan’s intention in Egypt was to journey down the Nile and choose a site for his pyramid. He stowed in the safe in his stateroom the plans for this structure secretly designed for him by the firm McKim and White. He expected that with modern construction techniques, the use of precut stones, steam shovels, cranes, and so forth, a serviceable pyramid could be put in less than three years. The prospect thrilled him as nothing ever had. There was to be a False King’s Chamber as well as a True King’s Chamber, an impregnable Treasure Room, a Grand Gallery, a Descending Corridor, an Ascending Corridor. There was to be a Causeway to the banks of the Nile.

His first stop was Giza. He wanted to feel in advance the eternal energies he would exemplify when he die and rose on the rays of the sun in order to be born again. When the boat docked it was nighttime, and he could see from the starboard deck the pyramid field silhouetted against a blue night sky of stars. He went down the ramp and was met by several men in the Arab burnoose. He was installed on the back of a camel and taken in this ancient way up to the north face, to the entrance of the Great Pyramid itself. Against all advice he was determined to spend the night inside. He hoped to learn if he could the disposition by Osiris of his ka, or soul, and his ba, or physical vitality. He followed his guides down the entrance corridor. The light of a torch threw great bounding shadows against the stone-block walls and ceiling. After many turns and twists, some difficult climbs up ramped passageways, and several occasions requiring that he crawl on all fours to squeeze through the aperture, he found himself in the heart of the pyramid. He paid his guides half of the agreed-upon price so that they would come back for him for the balance; and receiving their wishes for a good night’s rest he was left suddenly alone in the dark chamber, the only light a dim glimmer of a star or two from the top of a narrow air shaft.

Morgan would not sleep that night. This was the King’s Chamber, long since emptied of its furnishings. The earth was so damp that its chill permeated the wool blanket he had brought to sit upon.. He had his monogramed gold box of safety matches but refused as a matter of principle to light one. Nor did he drink from his brandy flask. He listened to the dark and stared at the dark and waited for whatever signs Osiris would deign to bring him. After some hours he dozed. He dreamed of an ancient life in which he squatted in the bazaars, a peddler exchanging good-natured curses with the dragomans. This dream so disturbed him that he awoke. He became aware of being crawled upon. He stood up. Places all over his body itched. He decided to light one match. In its small light he saw on his blanket the unmistakable pincered bedbug, in community. After the match went out he continued to stand. He then paced the chamber, holding his hand out before him so as not to bump into the stone wall. He paced from the west to the east, from the north to the south, though he didn’t know which was which. He decided one must in such circumstances make a distinction between false signs and true signs. The dream of the peddler in the bazaar was a false sign. The bedbugs were a false sign. A true sign would be the glorious sight of small red birds with human heads flying lazily in the chamber, lighting it with their own incandescence. These would be ba birds, which he had seen portrayed in Egyptian wall painting. But as the night wore on, the ba birds failed to materialize. Eventually he saw up through the long narrow air shaft that the stars had faded and the rhomboid of night sky had grown gray. He permitted himself a drink of brandy. His limbs were stiff, his back ached and he had caught a chill.

Morgan’s aides came along with the Arab guides and he was helped back to the outside world. Surprisingly, the morning was well-advanced. He was placed in his camel and slowly led down from the pyramid. The sky was bright blue and the rock of the pyramid field was pink. As he passed the Great Sphinx and looked back he saw men swarming all over her, like vermin. They were festooned in the claws and sat in the holes of the face, they perched on the shoulders and they waved from the heights of the headdress. Morgan started. The desecrators were wearing baseball suits. Photographers on the ground stood by their tripods with their heads poked under black cloth. What in God’s name is going on, Morgan said. His guides had stopped and were calling back and forth to other Arabs and camel drivers. There was great excitement. An aide of Morgan’s came back with the intelligence that this was the New York Giants baseball team that had won the pennant and was on a world exhibition tour. The pennant? Morgan said. The pennant? Running toward him was a squat ugly man in pin-striped knee pants and a ribbed undershirt. His hand was outstretched. An absurd beanie was on his head. A cigar butt was in his mouth. His cleated shoes rang on the ancient stones. The manager, Mr. McGraw, to pay his respects, Morgan’s aide said. Without a word the old man kicked at the sides of his camel and, knocking over his Arab guide, fled to his boat.