The Invisible Line (50 page)

Bel's essays contained even more specific calls for racial equality and justice. When an “ebony-hued” woman spoke to Bel one day on the streets of Freeport, it was occasion for more drama. The very sight of the woman made Bel swell with indignation at the way blacks were held in “scorn, opprobrium, stigma, discrimination.” “I wanted to purge the black of its stigma,” she wrote. “I wanted us both to begin a new way of thinking—to ignore the past unjust placement of her inferiority. All that my soul felt of altruism shone through my eyes as I looked in hers.” Bel advertised her sympathy with blacks, but it was a sentiment that seemed to affirm her position as a white woman more than anything else. To feel for another only reinforced their difference. It was as if she wanted to connect with her past and her heritage but always had to stay in character. In New York, as in Washington and other points south, blacks lived apart from whites, were shut out of all but the most menial jobs, were brutalized by police, and were denied service at hotels and restaurants. After decades of living in a way that constantly foreclosed the issue of her race, she could only drift further away.
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When Bel's niece and her family drove to her house, she was in her eighties, a solitary woman who craved an audience. To see two other Isabels, two younger generations named for her—happy and beautiful—must have delighted her. They had gone out of their way to visit and did not have any particular place they had to be. Bel asked if they would like to stay the night.
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The little girl did not want to spend another minute in Aunt Bel's house, let alone sleep there. She had been walking around, looking for the source of the horrible smell that burned her throat and saturated her dress and hair. It did not take long to find. The stairway was scorched and charred, leading up to a second floor where no one seemed to go. There had been a big fire. She did not know how long ago, but the damage had never been fixed. The house was worse than haunted; it was blackened. It might suffocate them. It might fall on their heads.
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To the girl's relief, her parents declined Aunt Bel's invitation, and they drove back to New York as the sun set. While in the city, they went to a Horn & Hardart's Automat for dinner. Compared with the house in Freeport, it was hard to imagine a place so bright. Around them were all kinds of people, rich and poor, young and old, happy and despondent, but the Winwards did not have to talk to anyone. The restaurant was self-service, no waiters, and the hum of voices and report of silverware on plates and bowls insulated the family from other conversations. The girl marveled at the hundreds of little windows framed in gleaming chrome, each holding a dish—Salisbury steak, creamed spinach, a slice of pie—each catching a bit of light, a glimpse of the ceiling, a reflection of herself.
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After dinner the Winwards walked out into Times Square. The sidewalks on Broadway swarmed with people. Barkers announced the attractions at clubs and theaters. Pinball arcades rang and flashed. Overhead, billboards shined and bellowed, making up for time lost during wartime blackouts. At the Claridge's Hotel, a giant face blew five-foot-wide smoke rings next to a neon pack of cigarettes one story high. Headlines angled along the “news zipper” around the Times Building. Tourists stood dazzled by spectacular advertisements: a giant steaming cup of coffee and a cascading Pepsi bottle. Young Isabel Winward held her parents' hands. She never forgot what she saw—lightbulbs, hundreds of thousands of them. They turned night into day.
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BEFORE THEY LEFT NEW YORK, the Winwards made one more stop at a small Manhattan apartment where a divorced mother and her son, Ruth and Patrick Gates, lived. Patrick was a few years older than the Winwards' daughter, his first cousin. Model airplanes, the fighters and bombers that had leveled Germany and Japan, dangled from the ceiling of his room. Patrick's father was Isabel Winward's brother, Stephen Wall's youngest child. Born Roscoe Wall, he grew up as Russell Gates but died Patrick Murphy.
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Isabel had known her brother as Russell and told her daughter stories about him. He was handsome, slightly built with intense dark eyes, black hair in tight waves coming to a widow's peak. Isabel, Ethel, and Russell had gotten along well as children. “He could always get out of trouble with his parents because of his smile,” Isabel's daughter was told. “He'd give this grin, and it melted them right then and there.”
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Russell had died just shy of his fortieth birthday, a matter of months before the Winwards visited Ruth Gates and her son. Isabel told her daughter that it was pneumonia that killed Uncle Russell. She was not telling the truth.

Russell was three years old when his sister was kicked out of the Brookland School. He never knew a time when the family was not moving, changing neighborhoods and friends, shedding names and identities and pasts. While his older sisters looked for solid ground, going to school and finding jobs and getting married, Russell relished the drift. In 1923, when he was seventeen, he and a friend stole a truck, packed it with camping equipment, and drove to North Carolina. The boys spent months on the road before they were arrested in Durham for beating up a black man. After serving jail time in North Carolina, they were escorted back to the District to face charges for the theft.
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Russell's first arrests were not his last. When he was twenty-two, he fled the scene of a car crash. At the time he was under indictment for passing bad checks. The police already knew him under the aliases Steven Russell Gates, Stephen Russell, and C. E. Murphy. Three years later, in 1931, when a woman was murdered in her home after a struggle, the police rounded up Russell as one of the usual suspects. It was a sign that he was graduating from low-level grifts to more violent crimes.
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Meanwhile Russell met and married women. He learned how to fix cars and opened a garage in downtown Baltimore. But he remained unmoored. He wed Ruth in 1930, but when his father died four years later, Russell played no role in the probate—he was too busy hiding from process servers in the divorce dispute.
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By 1937 Russell Gates had become Patrick Murphy. One night he met a young waitress at a coffee shop named Charlotte Doster. Slight and darkhaired, she had moved from South Carolina to the District. A week later they were married. Still drifting, he spent the next five years moving north, south, east, and west, from Miami to New Orleans to Washington, D.C., to Knoxville, and back. In 1938 he was convicted in Miami of having sex with a minor. Within a few years his rap sheet included a series of rape and assault charges.
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Charlotte stayed with her husband the entire time. He gave her a list of aliases that he used when he was arrested: Russell or Stephen Russell Gates, F. S. Lee, and Roscoe Orin Wall. She never knew that the first alias was what he had been called as a child; the second, a play on his mother's maiden name, Slee; and the third, the name he had been born with. Between 1939 and 1943 Charlotte had three boys and a girl, the youngest named Thomas, but she never met any of her husband's family. Once, while she was taking care of the babies, he shouted to her that his sister Ethel was visiting. By the time Charlotte made it downstairs, just minutes later, Ethel was gone. Charlotte's family was convinced that the man they knew as Patrick Murphy would kill her one day. He was a small man, but he terrified them. They had him arrested for beating her, but she insisted that the police drop the charges. He always seemed to talk his way out of his other arrests, collecting suspended sentences like so much pocket change.
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Charlotte was spared her husband's most notorious act of violence. On April 19, 1942, while his wife was pregnant with their third child, he went on a double date with a sailor and two women who worked as attendants at St. Elizabeth's Hospital. After they spent some time at a club, one of the women had to leave to work the night shift. Murphy offered to give her a ride to the hospital, but instead of driving there, he headed out into Maryland. She told him to turn around, so he stopped the car and tried to have sex with her. When she resisted, he choked her. She fled the car but stumbled. He followed. People at a house nearby heard her screaming. They found her weeping, bloody, filthy, neck bruised, cheek scratched. She had been raped.
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Two years passed between Patrick Murphy's arrest and his trial. During that time he was arrested for rape in Knoxville and was indicted for raping his secretary in Baltimore. Charlotte attended the trial in Prince George's County Circuit Court, as did Murphy's secretary. The proceedings lasted a day. Charlotte sat through testimony from the victim, the people who had found her, and the doctor who treated her. It took twenty minutes for the jury to return a guilty verdict.
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The judge proceeded straight to sentencing. “You are the kind of man who has no regard for the chastity of women,” he told Murphy. “You violate them in the most despicable manner whenever you get the chance. While you feel that every woman is fair game, the Court must inform you that this is not the conception in this county or in this country generally.”

The defendant interrupted the judge and told him the victim had been lying. Take her into chambers, Murphy said, and get the “whole truth” from her. The judge cut him off. “There was no doubt in the mind of the [C]ourt that the young woman involved in this case told the truth,” he said. “It is difficult to conce [iv]e of a more brutal crime.” He sentenced Murphy to death. Charlotte started wailing and had to be restrained.
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The defendant's arrest record and his long list of aliases were proof to the prosecutors and the judge of an incorrigible criminal mind. No one ever linked the names to the Wall family's passing from black to white. Although Patrick Murphy could not escape the law, he succeeded in outrunning race. Thirty-five years after a District of Columbia court held that his sister was black, Murphy would await execution as a white prisoner.
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After a year of appeals and clemency hearings and psychiatric evaluations, Patrick Murphy was taken from his cell in the Maryland Penitentiary in downtown Baltimore. It was midnight, deepest summer, two weeks before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The heat did not penetrate the prison's thick stone walls. Murphy was escorted into a narrow room. He stood on a walkway with two guards, about twenty feet above the ground. The room below was almost bare, furnished with little besides the mechanism that extended a long length of rope to the ceiling and down again. The glare of floodlights softened and dimmed as the guards placed a hood over his head.
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FROM NEW YORK CITY, the Winwards continued north. They stopped in Rhode Island to visit Charles's family, and from there they headed to Cape Cod to see friends. Isabel and the girl stayed on the Cape, and Charles returned to the mill at Hudson, visiting them on weekends. Although he had the hands of an experienced wool-sorter, Charles tired of being apart from his family. He joined them on the Cape and found work as a landscape gardener, a contractor building homes, and finally as a skilled finish carpenter. In his spare time he did calligraphy for plaques and certificates for the police and the Masons; he always kept vials of India ink and gold leaf around the house. He created an elaborate, illuminated Mayflower Compact for a local historical society. With their daughter in school, Isabel went back to work. She was a bank teller, then a drugstore clerk. But the first job she took on the Cape was in the art room at the Colonial Candle Company. She painted by hand specialty candles for the tourist trade: Miles Standish and Priscilla Mullens, George and Martha Washington, people and legends that had made America.
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T
OWARD THE END OF his life, Hart Gibson sat down in his turreted castle on the outskirts of Lexington, Kentucky, and began composing a long essay entitled “The Race Problem.” Some forty years after watching George Fitzhugh and Wendell Phillips debate the slavery question in New Haven, Gibson promised a “Graphic Review of the American Negro's Condition as a Slave, a Freedman and Citizen.” Looking back, he admitted that slavery had been a poisonous force in the American Republic, and he expressed relief that the Civil War had destroyed the institution in a “sharp and summary” fashion. But Reconstruction had been a “tremendous leap in the dark,” he wrote, an unholy experiment with “African supremacy” ended only by “the courage, intelligence and sagacity of the Anglo-Saxon that have made it the heroic race of history.” With Jim Crow now the law of the land, Gibson felt compelled to consider “the final destiny” of blacks in the United States. Would the race “remain an unsightly excres[c]ence, disfiguring the fair proportions of our public and social life,” he asked, “or shall it under the subtle influence of that wonderful solvent, political freedom, become an integral, effective and beneficent force in the body-politic?”
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