The Invisible Line (37 page)

November darkened into December. Newspapers across the country printed daily updates on his condition, describing him as hovering between life and death. His doctors gave up any hope for his recovery and could only comment on the “amount of vitality he possesses, which has kept him up this long.” Will Johnston and Gilbert Hall came up from New Orleans to say good-bye. A Catholic priest gave Gibson last rites. On December 15, in the low afternoon sun, Richie, Preston, Leita Kent, and Sarah sat by Randall's side. He spoke with them quietly, then closed his eyes. For a silent minute they thought he was sleeping. Then they began to cry.
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O
.S.B. WALL SPENT HIS nights among the District's best people, at classical recitals and summer cruises down the Potomac, weddings with hundreds of guests, progressive euchre games that broke near midnight for sumptuous suppers, formal gatherings to honor distinguished visitors, and meetings of any number of political and charitable clubs. Wall shared pleasantries and confidences with Harvard graduates, doctors, educators, and former members of Congress. Over waltzes and oratorios, the trill of laughter, and the syncopated report of silver on china, it was possible to forget that these men had been blackballed from the Harvard Club and District Medical Society, forced to work in segregated school systems, drummed out of Congress, and hounded from their homes by murderous mobs.
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In Wall's nighttime world, he was a distinguished gentleman with a “most paying law practice,” “one of the most industrious and intelligent lawyers of the district.” To his friends, he was Captain Wall, a leader of the race. His status was cemented by his close relationship with John Mercer Langston, who had served until 1885 as the government's minister to Haiti, became the first president of the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute for colored men and women, and then in 1888 was elected to represent Virginia in Congress. Wall's status was undiminished by the fact that white Democrats had stolen the election, or that Langston had been contesting the results going on eighteen months.
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At public orations by Douglass and Langston before “large and brilliant audience[s],” Wall sat confidently on the dais alongside other Race Men like Blanche Bruce, Charles Purvis, Richard Greener, and the young Harvard graduate Robert Terrell. In 1885, when the crusading black newspaper editor T. Thomas Fortune sought an opinion on how colored Washington was weathering the Democrats' ascent to the White House, he asked Wall. After many blacks denounced Frederick Douglass's 1884 marriage to Helen Pitts, a white woman, Wall emerged as one of Douglass's most articulate defenders. “I think it is carrying out practically the theory and principles advocated by Mr. Douglass for the past thirty years with reference to the equality of the race,” Wall said. “Mr. Douglass is a distinguished man, and he is now in the full strength of his intellectual vigor, and therefore it should be regarded as a deliberate and mature choice. Marriage is a question to be determined alone by the high contracting parties, and I can see no reason why Mr. Douglass and Miss Pitts should be made an exception. I see no reason why the public should be exercised over this matter more than any other marriage.”
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Wall had long mingled comfortably with whites. Even as most were shutting blacks out of their lives, some remained sympathetic to the cause of equality and still showed their support openly and proudly. Wall might see a white ex-senator or a retired Supreme Court justice at an event. He might even imagine that the promise—the openness—of the days after the war had not withered on the vine.
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At their “charming house” on Howard Hill, O.S.B. and Amanda Wall held “most elaborate” evening parties for eminences such as Douglass and his wife, former Mississippi congressman John R. Lynch, and former South Carolina congressman Joseph H. Rainey. Firm believers in equality for all, priding themselves on views that were “radical and correct,” the Walls even hosted Susan B. Anthony at the house for a night of music and “bright and animated conversation.” By candle and firelight, Captain Wall delighted guests with stories of his “hairbreath escapes when he was conveying slaves to freedom by the Underground Railroad thirty-five years ago.” “But it moves one to tears,” wrote one visitor, “to hear him tell how that, upon one occasion when he with others rescued a boy at Wellington, Ohio, ... he, Mr Charles Langston, brother of our Minister to Hayti, and his other comrades were cast into the Cleveland jail.”
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When a young lawyer named Reuben S. Smith dined with the Walls, he thought that “a more ideal and happy family could hardly be found.” With his “amiable” wife, “stalwart sons,” and “beautiful and accomplished” daughters—the youngest, Laura Gertrude, was prepping at Oberlin—Wall was the picture of a “devoted father.” The impression was shared by Henry Wall, a white first cousin on O.S.B.'s father's side who had come to Washington to work for the Democratic senator from Tennessee Isham Harris, a former Confederate officer and aggressive opponent of Negro equality. For nearly a century the story “about that time Uncle Henry Wall ate with those colored Walls in Washington” would be repeated among the white side of the family down south. Henry had found his cousins “cultivated and charming and when they asked him to stay for dinner, he accepted and enjoyed the entire evening,” wrote one descendant in 1969. “As this part of the story was told and retold[,] the only person who received any censure here was Uncle Henry for his straightforward acknowledgement that he enjoyed himself. For that, they never forgave him.”
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THE RESPECT AND DISTINCTION, the intellectual exchanges and elevated pursuits of Wall's night hours, faded in the sunlight. After evening revelries Wall awoke to a less rarified existence. He had borrowed heavily on his charming house and had no certain way to pay his ballooning debt. He spent his days at the police court among the District's petty thugs and thieves, the abjectly poor and morally lost, hustling and scraping for clients who could barely afford to pay his five-dollar fees.
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At the police court, he argued before Judge William B. Snell, a Maine Yankee whose appointment to the bench in 1871 had terminated Wall's position as a police magistrate. Although Wall once described Snell as being evenhanded in his treatment of colored lawyers, the judge did not hesitate to put Wall in his place. While defending an accused harness thief, Wall tried to impeach the credibility of witnesses by asking them if they had ever served time in the penitentiary. Judge Snell declared in open court that Wall's cross-examination was “a disgrace to the profession.” “If a man would ask me that question,” Snell said, “I would knock him down.” When Wall tried to introduce hearsay in a larceny trial, the judge responded with what seemed like a personal insult to someone who had regularly testified on Capitol Hill. “No sir. No hearsay evidence here,” Snell said. “I am not a Congressional committee, and I despise the methods of those committees and the kind of witnesses that testify before them.”
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Judge Snell's lack of regard for Wall carried over to the prosecutors. When Wall defended a man who had been accused of carrying concealed weapons, the district attorney told Wall's client that he should get his money back and named the client to the court as someone who had a “dishonest lawyer.” Wall stood before the judge. “The client was a client of mine,” Wall said. “My children and my friends, their wishes and sentiments are at stake. I am nearly sixty years old, have held eleven commissions and have never dishonored one of them. I never had a charge against me except once in Cleveland for rescuing a slave.”
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The white press took every opportunity to portray Wall as a buffoon or worse, better dressed perhaps than the “piratic-looking young negroes” he defended on charges ranging from vagrancy to stealing a sixteen-cent harmonica, but no more worthy of respect, let alone equality. The papers regularly reported Wall's doings in court as comic relief. When Wall pleaded for mercy for an admitted thief on the grounds that “my client is an imbecile,” the defendant interrupted to ask “in a business-like manner how long he would get on [a guilty] plea.” “I guess he is a pretty bright imbecile,” joked the judge. In October 1885 the dailies titillated readers with news that O.S.B. Wall had been caught by Amanda in flagrante with the wife of a “white policeman” whom Wall had previously recommended for appointment to the force. The Walls and the policeman and his wife vehemently denied the story, and two months later an investigative report to the District commissioners by a police major stated that “nothing occurred to warrant the scene described in the newspapers at the time.” Wall blamed unnamed “enemies” for circulating the story.
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Perhaps most galling of all, Wall suffered the disrespect of younger black lawyers. Over the course of the 1880s, whites in Washington isolated their colored neighbors. The tens of thousands of blacks living in alleys behind tidy white residential blocks were erased from the civic consciousness except as criminals and carriers of communicable disease. Blacks with money were increasingly consigned to segregated enclaves on the District's fringes. The local government, no longer elected, shut blacks out of the city jobs that had sustained the community through the 1860s and 1870s. The election of Grover Cleveland in 1884—the first Democratic president since the Civil War—caused widespread fear that the federal government would stop hiring blacks too. The District had more black lawyers than anywhere else in the country, but there were not enough paying clients to support them. The colored aristocracy often hired white lawyers, a logical extension of their elitism and color snobbery, or perhaps a sign of surrender to the pervasive unfairness blacks faced in and out of the courtroom. Wall himself retained a white lawyer—his old friend, the abolitionist, Radical Republican, and former police chief A. C. Richards—to handle his estate. Black lawyers were left fighting for the scraps in police court. When defendants were led from the basement holding cells into the courtroom, they were set upon by hungry lawyers “as a rat by a congregation of cats.”
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Some lawyers tried to poach Wall's clients. Others insulted the old man to his face. Occasionally Wall was able to remain good-humored. When a judge urged Wall and another lawyer to settle their differences outside, Wall responded, “It'll be pistols and coffee for two.” But the daily struggle was grinding him down.
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The erosion of race pride and solidarity that Wall witnessed in the gritty chambers of the police court was a symptom of a larger sense of hopelessness that pervaded black America. In an 1885 speech that Wall attended, Frederick Douglass observed that the “sullen discontent and deadly hate” of white Southerners after the war had become a governing principle. From the moment federal troops abandoned the South in 1877, Democrats had had carte blanche to “encourage violence and crime, elevate to office the men whose hands are reddest with innocent blood; force the Negroes out of Southern politics by the shotgun and the bulldozer's whip; cheat them out of the elective franchise; suppress the Republican vote; kill off their white Republican leaders and keep the South solid.” Countless thousands of Negroes in the South lived in conditions approximating slavery, shackled by sharecropping contracts, arrested on trumped-up charges, and sold as convict labor. Every few days a Negro was lynched: burned, shot, castrated, hacked to pieces.
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Whites in the District and points north had scant consciousness of the terror and bloodletting, let alone sympathy for civil rights. Most Americans thought blacks were stupid, lewd, immoral, predisposed to crime, unfit for full citizenship—deserving of everything they suffered. Unless they were kept entirely separate from whites, unless whites took every effort to preserve absolute purity of their blood, Western civilization would fall. Given the horrors of Southern life—and the passive approval of the rest of the country—Douglass wondered aloud if blacks would be driven to revolution, “imitat[ing] the example of other oppressed classes and invok[ing] some terrible explosive power as a means of bringing [their] oppressors to their senses, and making them respect the claims of justice.”
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Instead the violence turned inward, and no one—not even those in Wall's elite social circle—was spared. The collapse of civil rights cast adrift young colored aristocrats like Wall's children, educated in the 1870s among whites and raised to expect equality. Just after sunset on March 4, 1884, John Mercer Langston's twenty-year-old son, Frank, found himself caught up in a crowd watching two men—black and white—brawl just a few blocks from home. On his way to a lecture at the high-toned Bethel Literary and Historical Association, dressed in a steel-colored suit, light overcoat, and derby hat, Frank was the picture of a colored aristocrat. But in the heat of the moment, he pulled out a pistol and fired two shots, killing one bystander instantly and wounding another in the neck.
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John Mercer Langston was away on government business in Haiti and Caroline was “prostrated with grief” at news of the killing, so O.S.B. Wall took responsibility for his sister's family. Rather than trusting the legal system to treat Frank fairly, Wall gave his nephew a horse and buggy and a hundred dollars, enabling him to escape to cousins in Memphis. When an “anguished” Langston arrived home from Haiti in May, Frank returned to town and surrendered. Wall helped put together a team of distinguished white lawyers who eventually won an acquittal. Just three years later, however, Frank killed a man who called him a “damned liar,” this time in Petersburg, Virginia. Again Wall assisted in finding “excellent” lawyers to represent his nephew and attended the trial. But with a less forgiving jury, Frank wound up serving nearly five years in the penitentiary.
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