Columbia is the story of Theodore Lomax, a nineteen-year-old Union solider in the American Civil War, who is as committed as any to the ideal of human freedom. After being assigned to the army of William Tecumseh Sherman, shortly after the general’s infamous March to the Sea, he willingly participates in the destruction of civilian property in Columbia, South Carolina, believing his acts are justified by Southern resistance to the Northern cause of emancipation. But when the destruction escalates into violence against the civilians themselves, he becomes disillusioned, and feels compelled to strike out in opposition to his own countrymen.
The novel is told from Lomax’s point of view, but there are ten other supporting characters, each with a story of his or her own. There was a time when I thought these stories, or these “Reflections in Broken Glass,” should alternate with the chapters in Columbia, presenting a richer but perhaps more tangled tapestry of the lives that painfully converge in the novel’s climactic scenes. But Columbia is clearly a more coherent narrative without them. Still, they were valuable to me as an author, and so I’ve decided to share them here.
“Powell,” centers on the character of Albert Powell, and describes his pre-war involvement with a small pro-slavery organization in his hometown of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
Albert Powell was a man who believed things happened for a reason. He hadn’t always felt that way. His entire youth and first few years of his young adulthood had seemed very much like one random event after the other. Like the chicken pox Powell nearly died from when he was eight, things seemed to come out of nowhere into his life, cause a great deal of pain and turmoil while they lingered, and then depart just as mysteriously as they arrived, leaving behind an inscrutable pattern of effects like the pockmarks that had permanently scarred his face. The awareness that events which appeared random while one was living through them could be connected into a clear pattern with the exercise of hindsight did not come to him until one dark night in the middle of his twentieth year.
It was shortly after the Reverend Thomas Hutchins came to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The church on Twelfth Street Powell attended had the autumn before lost its minister, a man of imposing bulk and reputation who had tragically postponed giving up the bottle for one year too many. The Reverend Hutchins had been chosen by the Council of Deacons in Boston to serve as the new shepherd of the Twelfth Street flock, which had evidently been left to wander aimlessly for the seven months between his predecessor’s death and his arrival.
Powell still remembered the excitement that foreshadowed Hutchins’s appearance in their community, especially among the young ladies of the congregation, who had heard through whatever currents carry such news that the Reverend possessed all three of the traits they held most desirable in a man -- he was young, good-looking, and unmarried. And sure enough, when he arrived in mid-March he was exactly as advertised. A tall young man with a boyish mop of thick black hair and a twinkle in his eye that made one suspect he hadn’t learned everything he knew in the seminary.
His first sermon to the Twelfth Street congregation was also something Powell would not soon forget.
“Lastly, on this Sunday morning,” the Reverend Hutchins had said, “I want to talk about the latest news from Washington, the awful decision the Supreme Court has made against a man named Dred Scott. Some of you may still be unfamiliar with that name, although it has been in all the papers and is a matter, I fear, of the greatest urgency. If there are some among you who do not know who Dred Scott is, then I praise God and His wisdom for establishing this church so I may have the chance to enlighten you. As children of God we must be ever vigilant against the works of Satan in our human society. Listen closely as I speak of what may be the fallen angel’s latest accomplishment.”
Powell had certainly heard the name Dred Scott before, he had even read it in some of the newspapers the Reverend Hutchins had mentioned, and he had immediately known from the Reverend’s short introduction that he and Hutchins had two clearly different views on the matter. Work of the Devil? To Powell’s way of thinking, the decision against Dred Scott amounted to nothing more than a declaration for the natural order of things.
Nonetheless, Powell had sat and listened to the Reverend’s entire diatribe, both his description of the facts as well as his -- and evidently God’s -- opinions on what those facts meant for the future of the country. Dred Scott was a slave who had been taken by his master to live for a period of time in the free state of Illinois. Upon their return to slave-holding Missouri, Scott began to sue for his freedom, arguing that once in Illinois, a state in which the institution of slavery had been outlawed, he had no longer been a slave, and his master no longer had any right to take him anywhere against his will. The lawsuit had been filed a number of years ago at the local level, but had recently, through a series of appeals and countersuits, reached the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court had just issued its final ruling in the matter, and that ruling was not favorable to Scott and his supporters.
Slaves and their descendants, the Court had said, were not citizens, and therefore had no rights the Constitution was obliged to defend. Scott had still been a slave during the time he had spent in Illinois, and although Illinois certainly had the right to outlaw slavery within its borders, it did not have the right to deprive visiting slaveholders of their property.
Or so said the Supreme Court of the United States of America. The good Reverend Hutchins clearly had a different point of view, and he was determined to share it with his new parishioners.
“The Court’s argument,” Hutchins had said that Sunday morning, “is ridiculous in the extreme. It is based on faulty reasoning and cannot be the work of honest men dedicated to the betterment of all mankind. If the State of Illinois does not have the right to free the slaves that slaveholders bring onto its soil, then it does not have the ability to outlaw slavery within its borders. In the wake of this decision, what is to stop other slave owners from bringing their slaves into Illinois and perpetuating their unrighteous bondage on the supposedly free soil of that fine state? What is to stop ten, a hundred, a thousand slave owners from bringing a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand slaves into Illinois and turning that free state into a place where the passions of Satan reign supreme? And if they can do this to Illinois, what’s to stop them from doing it to every other free state in the Union? Even possibly here in New Hampshire itself?”
Powell had not fully seen the logic of Hutchins’s argument, nor the likelihood of the events he seemed to foretell. First of all, as Hutchins’s predecessor had often posed to him, did a state have the right to take a man’s mules away from him, simply because he brought them into its territory? Of course he didn’t. A man’s slaves, like his mules, belonged to him, and no one had the right to unjustly deprive him of his property, not even a lunatic state government that passes an incomprehensible law mandating that mules be treated as free and equal citizens. Secondly, Powell had a hard time imagining an army of slave owners bringing legions of slaves up to the rocky soil of New Hampshire to help them eke some sort of living from the few select crops that could be raised between the cold, harsh winters. Powell knew those slaves were making a fortune for their owners, picking cotton and cutting tobacco in the long growing seasons that blanketed the South. Why would they willingly give all that up?
But Powell, like the rest of the congregation, did not interrupt the Reverend Hutchins’s sermon with any of these counter arguments. Powell knew there were plenty of his neighbors who certainly agreed with Hutchins’s perspective on this issue, just as he knew there were a few like him who did not. Listening to other church goers applaud Hutchins for his platitudes as the Reverend concluded his speech, Powell found himself sitting quietly in the back pew thinking of all the things he would say at that night’s meeting.
“Friends and neighbors,” Hutchins had concluded, “it doesn’t take an attorney, or a politician, or a Supreme Court justice to see the decision in the Dred Scott case in one swift movement has returned our struggling nation to its dark and vile beginning when slavery was the scourge that tainted the entire land. All the progress we have made since those evil and ignorant days has been cast aside with the stroke of Chief Justice Taney’s pen on the majority opinion. The Compromise of 1820, the one that requires the admission of one free state to the Union for every new slave state the forces of Satan are able organize, the one that has checked the champions of evil and maintained a critical balance of power in our national legislature, the one that has kept our nation from tearing itself in two over this painful and illicit issue -- this Compromise has been thrown on the trash heap by this awful and illogical decision. America has no more free states, and freedom is once again something reserved for the owners of other men. As it was in the beginning, we are once again a nation of slaves and slave owners, plying our trade in a place where the righteous light of God no longer reaches.”
There were quite a few parishioners who had stood in line to shake Reverend Hutchins’s hand that Sunday morning. Albert Powell had not been one of them.
“Goddamn abolitionists,” Powell said later, sitting in the basement of that same Twelfth Street church, eleven hours after Hutchins had completed his sermon. “I can’t believe they sent us a goddamn abolitionist. Reverend Harper must be turning over in his goddamn grave.”
“Turning over and spitting fire,” Powell’s friend Jack Sloan said. “To think that man came up here and said what he did to Harper’s congregation, from Harper’s own pulpit. It’s enough to make the old man turn over and spit fire.”
Sloan was nineteen like Powell, and the two of them worked together six days a week at Cookson Brothers Iron and Metal Works on the south side of town. They worked at Cookson’s just like their fathers had. Sloan’s father was retired now, no longer strong enough to work the bellows he had pumped for thirty years. Powell’s father had died when Powell was sixteen.
“Reverend Harper built this church, for Christ’s sake,” Powell said. “Built it with his own two hands. And when he kicked off they sent a son of a bitch like Hutchins to replace him. Can you believe that? A goddamn abolitionist?”
Powell looked up at the room’s other two occupants, a short and swarthy man in his late twenties named Robert Menendez, and a stout and unprepossessing man creeping up towards fifty named Manfred Kraft. Menendez was half Mexican, his father hailing from south of the border, but had been born here in Portsmouth and had lived here his whole life. He was between periods of habitual unemployment, managing so far not to have lost a part-time job at the neighborhood fire engine house. Kraft was the custodian at the Twelfth Street Church and had been since the Reverend Harper built the place.
“What do you think of all this, Bob?” Powell asked Menendez. “You were there this morning. You heard the shit Hutchins tried to pass off as a sermon.”
“Didn’t make no sense to me,” Menendez said. “Sure didn’t sound like no Word of God I ever heard before.”
“Word of God?” Powell cried, the ridicule in his voice laced with an anger he could not always control. “Seems pretty clear to me the Reverend Hutchins wouldn’t know the almighty Word of God if it came up and bit him on the goddamn ass.”
The four of them had been meeting in the basement of the Twelfth Street Church every Sunday night for going on three years now. There used to be five of them. When the Reverend Harper was still alive, he was always the fifth person in the room. In fact, the Reverend Harper had been the one who had brought them all together in the first place. Since his death, the four of them had religiously held their little organization together, both out of memory for the good Reverend and because it seemed like the right thing to do. It gave them a chance to get together and talk about the things they had an increasingly difficult time finding others to talk to about. Blackies, as they would call them, their proper place in American society, and the forces that seem bent on elevating them to equal status with the white man.
“Vell,” Kraft said suddenly, his deep and seldom-used voice thick with the accent of his native Germany, as it always was when he’d had a little too much to drink. Since Reverend Harper died, their meetings had also given them the opportunity to sample the homemade gin Kraft had secretly begun distilling in the church’s basement. “Vhat are you going to do about it?”
“What do you mean, Manny?” Powell said. “What am I going to do about it? What the hell can I do about it?”
“Start dee meeting,” was Kraft’s quiet and cryptic reply to Powell’s mostly rhetorical question.
Powell was still not sure how it had happened. It had been clear from the very beginning, from the first time the four of them had sat together in this cold and sometimes clammy cellar without the Reverend Harper there to guide them, clear that one of the four of them was going to have to take charge of the organization. It could not go on without a leader, it could not, in fact, be an organization without a leader, and it had to go on. None of them wanted to imagine the wrath Reverend Harper’s spirit would rain down on their heads if they allowed the organization he had created to die with him. And so a new leader had to be found from among the ranks of people who, like Powell, had been too busy following Harper’s strong and powerful lead to ever even think about replacing him.
Powell had thought Kraft was the most logical choice. He was the oldest, first of all, and for some reason that made sense to Powell’s way of thinking, that qualified him more than anything else. In addition to that, Kraft had been Reverend Harper’s right-hand man during all the years they had spent together at the Twelfth Street Church. The organization had really come into being when Harper had proposed the idea to Powell and his friend Jack Sloan, and had asked them to come to a meeting in the church’s basement one Sunday evening after supper. When Powell and Sloan had arrived, Harper and Kraft were already together. Menendez would come later, after the organization had been formed and Powell and Sloan had taken their oaths, but Kraft was already there. Powell had initially thought perhaps Kraft was there as another possible recruit to this new club, but it quickly became clear Harper needed to spend no time convincing Kraft it was a good idea. Kraft was already on board. As far as Powell knew, the organization could have even been his idea to begin with.
So Kraft had seemed like the logical choice to Powell, and he naturally assumed the others would feel the same way. But when the time came to discuss the issue, Powell was shocked to hear his own name put into nomination, by Kraft of all people, and two enthusiastic votes of support from the other two members.
“Me?” Powell had said. “You guys want me to lead this organization?”
“Ov coarse,” Kraft had said. “Reverend Harper vould have vanted it dat vay.”
And that’s how the then-eighteen-year-old Albert Powell had become the leader of Reverend Harper’s Sons of White America.
“Start the meeting?” Powell said. “What good will that do?”
“Just start dee meeting,” Kraft said darkly. “Ve can’t talk about dis right until you bring us to order.”
“Okay,” Powell said. “Fine. The meeting will now come to order. I recognize that all active members of the Sons of White America are present and accounted for.”
There were no challenges to his statement. According to their bylaws -- bylaws the Reverend Harper had himself written and compelled them all to commit to memory -- any member could challenge such a declaration, which would then require the organization’s secretary to call the roll and verify that in fact a quorum was present. The Sons of White America could take no official action without a quorum being present. Kraft was the secretary and had been since the organization had been founded.
After a reasonable period of time to allow for a challenge, Powell turned to Kraft. “Are there any pieces of old business?”
“Nein,” Kraft said calmly.
“Then the floor is open for new business,” Powell said.
Immediately, as if he had been waiting for his cue, Menendez put up his hand.
“I recognize Bob Menendez,” Powell said.
Reverend Harper had always said, ‘the chair’ recognizes Robert Menendez, or Albert Powell, or whoever, whenever one of them had something they wanted to discuss. It was something else from the bylaws he had written, something Powell didn’t fully understand called parliamentary procedure. For a time after Harper’s death, after Powell had been maneuvered into Harper’s leadership position, Kraft had tried to get him to adopt the same phraseology when recognizing a new speaker. But Powell had always felt that referring to himself in the third person, especially when it was just the four of them, was silly and pretentious. He wasn’t anything special. Somehow he had found himself the leader of this pro-slavery organization, but that didn’t make him any better than the other members. Until Reverend Harper died, after all, he had been just another member of the club. The only positive thing Powell could see about parliamentary procedure was that following it made him slow down and think, which helped keep his anger under control. But that was it. Referring to himself as ‘the chair’ and giving people permission to speak made him sound like royalty, and Albert Powell didn’t want any man to think he thought he was better than anyone else.
Well, any white man, at least.
“I want to talk about what you were saying before, Al,” Menendez said. “About the new Reverend and what he said this morning.”
“Go ahead,” Powell said.
“Well,” Menendez said. “It’s like you were saying. The man had no right to come into our congregation and preach the kind of stuff he did. In Reverend Harper’s church, no less. Talking about the rights of the blackies right there from the pulpit in Reverend Harper’s church. I’m surprised the old man’s soul didn’t rise up between the pews and strike that man Hutchins down. He had no goddamn right.”
“I don’t know, Bob,” Sloan said. “Seems to me like most of the congregation didn’t mind Hutchins’s preaching as much as we did. There was a pretty long line after service waiting to shake his hand.”
“That don’t mean nothing,” Menendez said. “Most of them folks were just being polite. New preacher and all. He gives the same kind of sermon next Sunday and the one after that, you just see how many sour on him. He’s got no right to talk about the blackies like they were the equals of white men in a House of God. In Reverend Harper’s House of God most of all.”
“I’m not disagreeing with you on that,” Sloan returned. “I’m just saying I don’t think the whole congregation is up in arms about this the way we are. Look, fellas, you’ve all heard me talk about this before. New Hampshire is a free state. Has been for a long time. That means most people here think slavery is wrong. That doesn’t make them right, but most people here feel that way. I’m just as pissed off about this as you are, but if you think most of the congregation is going to sour on Reverend Hutchins because of what he’s saying about negroes, I think you’ve got another thing coming.”
Uh oh, Powell thought. There it was again. Negroes.
“Goddammit, Jack,” Menendez nearly shouted. “How many times do we have to tell you not to call them negroes? They ain’t negroes. They are blackies.”
It drove Menendez crazy every time Sloan called them negroes. Truth be told, it irritated Powell, too. Negroes. That’s the word the abolitionists used all the time. Negroes. Powell hated it. Made it sound like they had the potential to become something they weren’t. Blackie was the term Powell preferred. A blackie wasn’t ever going to be anything else but a blackie, pure and simple, and that’s the way Powell liked it.
But as much as ‘negroes’ irritated Powell, it simply drove Menendez crazy. Menendez had even made a motion some months back, back when Harper was still alive, a motion Powell himself had seconded and which had passed by a vote of four to one, that the term ‘negroes’ could not be used during any official meeting of the Sons of White America. As Menendez had clarified, the term of preference was ‘blackies,’ and that was what they had agreed to use.
“Whatever,” Sloan said with a wave of his hand. “My point is, why do you think there are only four members in this organization?”
Powell often wondered the same thing. He knew there were four and not five of them because the Reverend Harper had died. But why were there four and not three? Specifically, why did Jack Sloan decide to become a member? Powell considered Sloan a friend, but sometimes when he listened to Sloan talk, he wondered if his head was screwed on right.
“You love the goddamn blackies, don’t you, Jack?” Menendez said icily. It was his usual retort when he felt Sloan had gotten the better of him.
Sloan replied with his own standby. “Well, at least my skin isn’t dark like one, Bob.”
Powell leapt out of his chair before Menendez did, knowing what was coming next.
“Don’t call me no goddamn blackie!” Menendez shouted as Powell grabbed him by the shoulders and applied the necessary pressure to keep him from strangling Sloan.
“I didn’t call you one, Bob,” Sloan said calmly, still sitting comfortably in his chair and taking a sip of his gin. “I just said you were dark like one.”
Sloan’s clarification did little to assuage Menendez’s anger. He fought harder than ever against Powell’s restraining grip, forcing Powell to lean most of his weight into the smaller man to keep him at bay.
“You dirty shitbird!” Menendez hollered. “I’m going to kill you this time!”
Shitbird. That was one of Menendez’s own little phrases that no one really knew what it meant or where it had come from. Although Powell had never tried to confirm it, he suspected it was something Menendez had picked up from his Mexican father, something truly awful in its native Spanish, but which didn’t carry the same punch when translated into English. There was one thing Powell did know about it, though. If Menendez was using it, he was really angry and ready to do violence. Menendez was one of those small men who thought the whole world looked down on him, and Menendez was ready to fight anyone the world threw at him just to show the world how wrong it was.
“Knock it off, you two.”
Kraft’s deep voice sliced through the tension in the room and almost immediately stopped Menendez’s struggles against the virtual headlock Powell had been maneuvering him into.
“Ve’re supposed to be talking about vhat to do about Hutchins. You two vant to fight? Vait until dee meeting is over.”
“Okay, Manny,” Menendez said, Powell releasing him so he could return to his seat. “But you better tell Jack to clear out of here long before I do tonight. If I see him out on the street, I’m going to beat his goddamn brains in.”
“I can wait for you if you’d like, Bob,” Sloan said. “I’d like to see you try.”
“Enough,” Kraft said before Menendez could reply, speaking in a voice no one in the room had the courage to challenge, not even Powell, the supposed leader of this organization.
Why the hell isn’t Kraft our leader? Powell quickly asked himself for what must have been the ten thousandth time. He doesn’t say much, but when he does we all listen to him. He’s the only one who ever has any ideas about things to do to fix the goddamn problems in this town -- ideas that make any sense at least. I don’t think the organization would have survived Harper’s death if it wasn’t for Manny constantly holding us together while keeping Jack and Bob from killing each other. The Sons of White America is much more his organization than it is mine. I mean, it’s Harper’s organization, probably always will be. And maybe that’s why now it seems more like Manny’s than mine.
“How are ve ever going to get anyting done mit you two at each oter’s troats all dee time?”
Kraft was right, Powell knew, perhaps more than Menendez and Sloan would ever know. They hadn’t really done all that much when Reverend Harper was alive, but since the Reverend’s death, it seemed like they hadn’t done anything at all. Just sitting down here in this stupid church basement drinking coffee and gin and trying to keep idiots like Menendez and Sloan from killing each other. And meanwhile the free blackies were moving into the goddamn neighborhood and getting jobs at the ironworks and standing right next to me on the line. We haven’t been able to do anything about that and suddenly this asshole Hutchins comes to town and starts preaching about the blackies and how they got a right to be free, right there in the same goddamn church Reverend Harper built and from the same goddamn pulpit Harper had used to stand up for what’s right. What are we going to do about that? What can we do? We can’t even stop bickering long enough to discuss it.
Menendez stood in front of his chair, his muscles still tensed after Sloan’s last crack, but held momentarily at bay by the power of Kraft’s voice.
“Manny’s right, you guys,” Powell said, forcing himself to calm down and trying to adopt an equally authoritative tone. “This is serious. The Deacons sent this guy Hutchins here for a reason. Do you think he’s going to let us use this basement for our meetings once he finds out what we talk about down here? We’ve got to figure out a way to get him out of here and get someone else more sympathetic to the cause.”
“Someone like Harper?” Menendez asked.
“Exactly, Bob,” Powell said. “Now sit down and let’s go back to discussing this rationally.”
Menendez cautiously took his seat again, keeping an eye on Sloan as he did so. But Sloan seemed to have forgotten about Menendez for the time being. He turned his attention now on Powell.
“You’re right, Al, this is serious,” Sloan said. “We all had it easy when Harper was alive. He watched over this church and the organization like they were one and the same. And he was able to do things, do things for us, things he could’ve never done if he wasn’t the Reverend of this church. With this guy Hutchins in his place, it’s like we’ve lost more than our organizational leader, we’ve lost our spiritual one as well.”
This guy Hutchins. Powell noted with pride the way Hutchins had already stopped being ‘Reverend Hutchins’ and started being ‘this guy Hutchins.’
“And our power, too,” Powell said. “Don’t forget about that. Think about all the organization accomplished while Reverend Harper was alive. Organizing that rally to keep those damn abolitionists from building their own church on Tenth Street. Bob, getting you another job every time you lost one. You guys think he would have been able to do any of that if he wasn’t a Reverend? People listen to a man like that.”
“Yeah,” Sloan said. “People sure do. And people were listening to Hutchins this morning the same way they used to listen to Harper. Listening to what he had to say and shaking his hand on the way out the door. Why, I saw old Betty Crawford standing in line with the rest of them, standing in line to shake that man’s hand, the same Betty Crawford who crosses the street every time she sees a negro coming towards her on the sidewalk.”
“We’ve got to get rid of him,” Powell said quickly, before Menendez could pounce on Sloan’s continued infraction of their rules. “Somehow, we’ve got to get rid of him.”
The four of them sat in silence for a while, each seeming to cogitate on the possible avenues they had for accomplishing such a goal. Powell looked into each of their eyes in turn while the silence deepened, looking for some small clue he could build on in order to find a way out of this mess. Both Sloan and Menendez seemed as frustrated as Powell was, but there was a look in Kraft’s eyes that seemed to suggest he had already divined the solution and was only waiting for someone to ask him his opinion.
They really knew very little about Kraft. He was a German immigrant, that much they knew, but what town had he come from in Germany and when had he made his move to America? Not one of them knew. His accent was thick, but he could make himself understood in English with the ease of someone who had been practicing for a long time. His accent got worse when he was drunk, they all knew that, but Powell alone knew his accent became almost incomprehensible when Kraft got angry, which he did even less often than he spoke. In the past three years, Powell had heard Kraft lose his temper only once. It was shortly before the Reverend Harper’s death and on the occasion of Menendez’s termination from his most previous place of employment. Powell had stopped by the church on his way home from work to return some pamphlets Harper had lent him about the inferiority of the slave. Harper and Kraft were discussing Menendez’s unemployment in Harper’s small office at the back of the church. The door was mostly closed and Powell had unconsciously held back his knock as he had listened to the following exchange between the two men.
“Manny,” Harper had said, “we have to do what we can for him. He’s a member of the organization.”
“Ach!” Kraft had said, sounding exactly like he had spat on the Reverend’s floor. “Er ist es gut für nuhting bum! Er nicht verstehe vhat Sie haben done für him. Wie zum Teufel vill ve ever accomplish anyting mit members wer nicht keep ein gottverdammt job?”
“Manny,” Harper had said patiently. “We must work with the tools the Lord gives us.”
Kraft’s response to that had been a loud and phlegmatic string of what Powell could only assume were the vilest of German curse words. Rather than interrupt such a scene, Powell had placed the pamphlets on a chair outside Harper’s office and had quietly left the building.
This memory passed vividly through Powell’s mind as he sat opposite Kraft and met his cold and steady eyes. He didn’t look like he was ready to fly off the handle, but the outburst Powell had secretly overheard had seemed so out of character for the large German man that Powell never felt he could really predict what Kraft was going to do next.
“I know,” Sloan said suddenly, his voice brightening. “Why don’t you write one of those letters?”
“Huh?” Powell said, exerting the necessary effort to pull himself away from Kraft’s gaze.
“Those letters, Al,” Sloan said. “The ones you write to the newspapers. Why don’t you write one to the church Deacons?”
Powell’s brain was not making the connection. He knew what letters Sloan was talking about. Reverend Harper had asked him early on to write one letter a week to one of the area’s newspapers, decrying the increasing rights being afforded to freed slaves and their steady infiltration of their white society. Although Powell never knew why Harper had first asked him to assume such a responsibility, Powell quickly discovered he didn’t mind doing it at all. In fact, he found he liked writing, something he got precious little opportunity to do at his job down at the ironworks. It helped him think about some of the things Harper used to tell them at their weekly meetings. Initially, he proudly signed his name to all the letters he wrote, but after a few months of little success in getting them published, Harper had encouraged Powell to invent a series of pseudonyms and sign a new one to each letter he sent. This made it even more fun. Powell liked making up the names, but more than that, he especially liked seeing the phony names in print. Most of his letters were not published, but a few of them were, maybe one or two every couple of months, and seeing those names in print made him feel like they were real, like they represented an ever-growing army of supporters who believed as he did, that the slave was nothing more than an animal, put here by God with all the other beasts to carry the white man’s burdens and plow his fields.
What any of that had to do with the church deacons and getting Hutchins removed, Powell just couldn’t see.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Powell asked.
“Why don’t you write one of those letters you’re always writing to the newspapers to the Council of Deacons down in Boston? Tell them what an awful spectacle Hutchins is making of himself and demand they remove him.”
Powell still had difficulty seeing where Sloan was going with this. “Jack,” he said. “What good is that going to do? A complaint from one lousy parishioner? They probably get fifty of those a week from all over New England.”
Sloan was shaking his head smugly. “Not one parishioner, Al. All of them.”
“Huh?”
“Well, you’re always signing phony names to those newspaper letters, aren’t you? So what if you write the letter to the Deacons and bring it to our meeting next Sunday. Old Manny here can bring down a copy of the church registry and we can all take turns signing names to it. The Council of Deacons might get fifty letters a week from lone parishioners with an axe to grind, but how often do you think they get a bona fide petition signed by every church member?”
“So moved,” Menendez said suddenly.
Sloan’s idea had finally sunk home for Powell and he was momentarily dazzled by both its brilliance and its audacity. “Is there a second?” he said eventually, remembering his function.
“Second,” Kraft said.
“Any more discussion?” Powell asked and, after an appropriate lull of silence, “All those in favor say aye.”
“Aye,” the four of them said in unison.
“All opposed say nay.”
Another short silence.
“The ayes have it. The motion passes.”
And as simple as that their course was set. The meeting was adjourned quickly thereafter and Powell went immediately home to begin working on the letter. It was already late, and the work bell would start ringing early the next morning, but now that the idea had possessed him, Powell knew he wouldn’t get a wink of sleep until he got some of his rambling thoughts down on paper.
Sitting at the wooden and wobbly table in the common room of the flat Powell shared with three other Cookson Brothers workers, Powell began scratching out his ideas with a pencil. He realized early on the truth wasn’t going to get them very far. The fact that Hutchins had a soft spot in his heart for slaves may have sent the Sons of White America over the edge, but as Sloan had so annoyingly reminded them, the majority of the congregation had in truth lined up to shake Hutchins’s hand after his sermon. If Powell told the Deacons the truth about why they wanted Hutchins removed, they were liable to come up from Boston and pin a medal on the Reverend’s black frock coat. No, the truth wouldn’t do at all.
So a lie. Powell figured that was best. They were going to forge more than a hundred signatures on the bottom of the letter, after all. What was one more little lie on top of all those big ones? But which lie? What could Powell say, of what could he accuse the Reverend Hutchins, accuse with the weight of a signed petition from every member of the Twelfth Street congregation, that would compel the Council of Deacons to remove the shepherd they had so mistakenly sent to this flock?
He sat only for a short time staring off into the dark and hazy space of the flat before it came to him, came to him almost like a bolt out of the blue, like a gift from the dear, departed soul of Reverend Harper. The letter would not come from the entire congregation. The letter would come from one lone parishioner, and be accompanied by another letter -- no, by an affidavit -- an affidavit signed by the whole congregation and attesting to its veracity. The lone letter writer would be none other than old Betty Crawford herself, the same Betty Crawford who had stood so hypocritically in line to shake Hutchins’s hand that morning, and old Betty Crawford was going to accuse the good Reverend Thomas Hutchins with deflowering her sixteen-year-old niece.
Like a man possessed, Powell took out a fresh piece of paper and began scratching away on it with his pencil. He had no idea what he was going to say and what words he was going to use, and yet his hand moved effortlessly across and down the page, the words seeming to shape themselves in a flowing and elliptical script that bore only a passing resemblance to Powell’s own hand. It was Reverend Harper’s spirit guiding him, Powell knew it was. Harper had reached out from beyond the grave to plant this diabolical idea in Powell’s mind, and it was Harper who stood by him now to make sure the deed was done right. As he wrote there was no room in Powell’s mind for the realization that his own dark and unfulfilled desire to deflower Crawford’s niece -- a buxom and burgeoning girl by the name of Amanda Bainbridge -- undoubtedly played a larger role in the idea’s generation than the aggrieved spirit of Reverend Harper.
He finished the letter that evening, writing it straight through from first word to last without a single strikeout or misturned phrase. Reading it quietly to himself -- he would have preferred to shout it out like an actor schooled to project to the back row of the theater, but didn’t dare risk waking his flatmates -- Powell decided not a single word needed to be changed or added. It was an inspired work of art, and now that the moment of passion had left him, Powell knew he could rewrite the letter a hundred more times and never produce its equal or better.
Signing Betty Crawford’s name to the bottom of the letter with a flourish, Powell took out another clean piece of paper and quickly wrote in a style much more his own.
“We, the congregation of the Twelfth Street Church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire,” he said quietly to himself as he wrote, “attest by our signatures below that every word of Ms. Elizabeth Crawford’s letter is true, and join in her demand that the Reverend Thomas Hutchins be removed from his post for the evil he has brought to our community.”
That was the sheet the Sons of White America would sign at their next meeting, not in their own names, but by covering it front and back with the names copied out of the church registry.
Powell slept very soundly that evening after carefully placing the letter and affidavit in his satchel and then sliding the satchel under his bed. He awoke at the appointed hour for work feeling refreshed and excited to face another day. Laboring at the ironworks was no picnic, to be sure, but something would be different for Powell that Monday and for the rest of the week, something which should have been obvious to him at the time but wasn’t, something which had the power to alleviate some of the drudgery and exhaustion typically associated with his ten-hour shifts. Unlike so many days and weeks since Reverend Harper had been taken from them, Powell now found himself living with something to look forward to. He felt like he had when Harper had led the Sons of White America, when their Sunday meetings had meant something, and they had all seemed strong enough to fight back against the tide of abolitionists infiltrating their society. Because this Sunday Powell and his organization were going to start fighting back again. The abolitionists had sent one of their agents to cross their very doorstep, and this Sunday the Sons of White America were going to throw him out and slam the door shut after him.
Each night that week, after his flatmates had gone to sleep, Powell would quietly remove the letter he had written from the satchel under his bed. By the light of a single bedside candle he would read the words that seemed with each passing day more and more unlikely to be his own. It really was as if someone else had written the letter, not so much the spirit of Reverend Harper, but more like old Betty Crawford herself. Powell thought about the letter each day as he worked away in the nail shed, clipping and shaping rough iron nails from a red hot bar. He could recite the words from memory, but even in his brain they echoed with the voice of Betty Crawford. Through inspiration, genius, witchcraft, or divine intervention, Powell knew he had created something unique, something he doubted he would ever be able to create again. It was something none of his letters to the newspapers in his own voice and their phony names had been. It was real. A complete and utter fabrication, but at the same time it was authentic, as if old Betty Crawford had sat enraged at her writing desk and penned it herself. And it was this authenticity that gave the letter its power. It was a lie, but it was a lie that would be believed because it was told in the most direct and honest way.
When the following Sunday morning arrived, Powell proudly arranged himself for service, slung the satchel with its miraculous document over his shoulder, and walked the few short blocks from his flat to the Twelfth Street Church. He tipped his hat along the way to any familiar face he saw, and a few faces that weren’t, feeling preternaturally pleased with himself. Today was the day. Not only would they begin their counter offensive today but, perhaps more importantly, he would share the treasure he had written seven days ago and had been keeping protectively to himself ever since.
Powell arrived at the church a few minutes before the service was scheduled to start. He didn’t like arriving too much in advance because there were always awkward encounters as other parishioners tried to make small talk with him. Powell was not good at small talk, thinking he actually had very little in common with the neighbors and strangers who also attended the church. In fact, it was because Powell was shy and self-conscious.
Powell scooted quickly through the crowd of people clustered around the church entrance and found his way into the back pew in the right-hand corner of the church. It was where he and Sloan always sat, and Sloan was there ahead of him, saving Powell a seat.
“Good morning, Al,” Sloan said to him as Powell lowered himself into the pew.
“Good morning,” Powell returned.
The organ player turned up the volume of his playing, indicating to all it was time to take their seats. Like well-behaved children, the gaggle of parishioners still huddled in the antechamber put a quick end to their conversations and began filing into the church down the center aisle.
“Did you finish it?” Sloan whispered. “Did you finish the letter?”
Sloan had asked Powell that question every day when they’d had lunch together at Cookson Brothers, and every day Powell had told Sloan he was still working on it. That had been six lies on six different days, but Powell had thought them necessary. He was immensely proud of the letter he had written, but he hadn’t wanted to share it with anyone too soon. It would have its debut at their meeting tonight and that’s the way Powell wanted it.
“Yeah,” Powell whispered back, knowing he couldn’t lie anymore and be believed. “I finished it.”
“Can I read it?” Sloan asked him as the organist began the processional hymn and the choir began to sing. In unison with the rest of the congregation, Powell and Sloan got to their feet.
“At the meeting tonight,” Powell said just before adding his soft voice to the song around him.
“Come on,” Sloan persisted, poking Powell in the ribs. “Let me take a look.”
Powell ignored him and kept on singing. Even at the meeting tonight he didn’t want any of them to read it individually off the page. He had decided a few nights ago he would read it aloud to them. He had even been practicing his delivery at night after his flatmates had gone to sleep, whispering instead of projecting the way he planned so as not to wake them, but struggling just the same to get the proper cadence and inflections down pat. In his mind he was speaking in Betty Crawford’s voice, and in his dreams he even sounded like her, the old spinster’s voice falling naturally from his lips to the delight and amazement of his friends.
Sloan eventually gave up when the Reverend Hutchins entered the church and joined in on the hymn with the rest of the congregation. Powell couldn’t help but smirk when he first saw the Reverend, briefly in profile and then in a prolonged study of the back of his head with its tousled array of thick black hair. Your days are numbered, asshole, Powell thought as his lips kept singing the hymn chosen for that Sunday. Just wait until the Deacons get Crawford’s letter. Just you wait. In his mind, the letter had already stopped being his and had become Betty Crawford’s.
As the hymn drew to its close and the Reverend Hutchins took his seat beside the pulpit, Powell caught sight of the author herself, standing in one of the front pews beside her sister, brother-in-law, and niece. The women were each wearing a yellow bonnet in the style of the day, which were designed not only to show their good taste and their fashion sense, but also cover their head and hair in the presence of the Deity. Powell had at one time or another seen all three of them outside the church walls without their bonnets on and knew they all shared cascading auburn hair, Betty’s and her sister’s beginning to turn over to gray, but Amanda’s still burning with the fire of youth and vitality. It was clearly a trait that ran in the Crawford family. That morning, the two sisters had pinned their locks up into tight little buns under their yellow bonnets, leaving only a few wispy strands to float down their necks and backs. But Amanda had taken no such precaution, allowing her reddish-gold tresses to spill down her back in swoops and swirls.
The service that followed was the standard fare, light and airy, but pockmarked by the telltale rituals and road signs that allowed the congregation to feel the comfort of knowing what was coming next and keep them coming back for more. Hutchins had provided them the same menu the week before, knowing he had to in order to keep them in the fold and to keep them from criticizing him too strongly in contrast to his predecessor. But as all ministers knew, and as had so shocked the Sons of White America, Hutchins’s sermons were his own, and standard fare or not, he had the week before used his sermon to give his new parishioners a taste of the kind of reverend he was.
This week was to be no exception.
“Friends and neighbors,” Hutchins said after rising to the pulpit and allowing the notes of the previous hymn to fade into silence. “Before this week’s sermon I want to express to you all my heartfelt thanks for the way I have been welcomed into your community. It is often a difficult task for a young man such as myself to come into a situation like this and try to make a difference in the lives of people who have been shepherded so well and so long by a man like the Reverend Charles Harper. It is clearly something impossible for me to accomplish in my first week or even my first year here. I pray that someday I will be able to earn some small measure of the trust you had in him. The love and kindness you have already shown tells me how extraordinary a man he must have been, and it saddens me that I was not able to know him the way you did.”
A murmur of approval floated quietly though the congregation at the close of these opening words. Powell, by contrast, sat in the back pew with his face twisted into a scowl. If he thought he was ever going to have the hold over them the Reverend Harper had, he had another thing coming.
“But even as I share your sadness over the passing of Reverend Harper,” Hutchins went on, “my heart has been filled with joy for the warm reception you have given me and for the kind words so many of you have offered on the subject of last week’s sermon, the first I have delivered to this blessed and enlightened congregation. I speak from experience when I say there are places in New England and even here in New Hampshire itself where my words and thoughts on the subject of slavery would not have been so well received. Some may think I took a foolish risk introducing such a subject in my very first sermon to a new and unfamiliar congregation, but I say there was no risk in it at all. I say it was the very Spirit of God that led me here among you, led me here to a place where the holy and righteous truth of equality can be received in the same sacred and fervent manner it is preached.”
Powell exchanged an uneasy glance with Sloan and then his eyes sought out the figure of Menendez, sitting in the front corner of the room, facing him in the choir section.
What the hell is this guy talking about? Menendez’s eyes seemed to ask Powell.
Don’t worry, Powell tried to send back to him. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of things at the meeting tonight.
“Those of you who I have visited this past week, here at the church or at my home down the block, you have all spoken passionately and with resolve regarding the crisis approaching our troubled nation. You understand the real issue in the debate. It’s not about States Rights or who is entitled to own what, but rather it is about the very freedom of mankind and what that freedom means for all of us. The tyranny of slave owners cannot be allowed to expand further than it has already spread, for as long as there are slaves among us, then we are all slaves, and freedom and liberty are but hollow promises written on scraps of paper. You understand that, but others do not. Others all across this great country and here in this very town and likely some here today in this otherwise brave and sheltered congregation still live in the delusion that freedom and liberty for some can co-exist in a society that denies them to others. How can any one of us think of himself as free when our very neighbor is bought and sold like livestock, chained and whipped like a beast?”
Powell was shocked. This is even worse than last Sunday. Last Sunday he tacked his blackie-loving bullshit onto the end of a standard sermon. But now he is launching into his abolitionist tirade from the very beginning. No biblical text, no Word of God, no lesson from the good book. Nothing but this whining and misguided plea to let the slaves go free.
“This guy Hutchins is really going off the deep end,” Sloan whispered confidentially to Powell, echoing Powell’s own thoughts.
“We’ll fix him,” Powell whispered back. “Once we send the letter, we’ll fix him good.”
Powell could feel his anger swelling within him, rising up from the core of his being and threatening to surge out into the world around him. Reminding himself of Crawford’s letter and the havoc it would bring to Hutchins’s life, he gingerly coaxed the frustration back down within him.
“And it is these horrors of slavery,” Hutchins continued, “the buying and selling of men like cattle, and the evil it creates in our midst, that I have chosen as the subject of this week’s sermon. I have preached them before and Lord knows I will preach them again, preach them until the eyes of my fellow man are opened and the light of holy God is brought back to this land He loves so well. But today that duty will fall to another, one whose words will chill you in a way mine cannot, and one whose voice speaks with such truth that not a repentant soul can fail to hear him. Born within the serpentine grip of slavery itself, this man has followed the blessings of God to find his way to freedom and to our congregation today. He will tell you both of the evils he has suffered and the hope he still has for the future. Friends and neighbors, please join me in welcoming the Parson Abraham Finch to our humble house of God.”
With the close of Hutchins’s words, Powell watched in stupefied horror as a hitherto unseen dark figure rose from the church’s front pew and made its way up the steps to Harper’s pulpit amidst a cacophony of applause. The figure was dressed in the vestments of a minister, but his face and hands were black as night and his hair, speckled with gray, covered the top of his head exactly as moss covered a tree stump. Arriving at the pulpit, Hutchins shook the man’s hand and then stepped down to give the newcomer full access to the congregation. Mounting the last step, he placed one black hand on either side of the wooden lectern, and gazed defiantly out across the sea of white faces staring up at him.
“No goddamn way,” Powell whispered softly to himself, paralyzed and incapable of any other action.
It was horrible. Infamous. Blasphemous. Outrageous. The words flooded through Powell’s mind as he found himself sitting there listening to a former slave preach to him from Reverend Harper’s pulpit.
He had been born in Mississippi. He had been taken from his mother as an infant and suckled at the breast of a stranger, so that his mother could return to the fields. He himself was sent to the fields at the age of six and forced to work sunup to sundown, picking cotton with a long eleven-foot sack dragging between his legs. By the age of ten his back was permanently stooped and to this day he could not stand completely erect. When he was twelve his father escaped the plantation but was caught after two days and dragged back to the slave house with his bound hands tied to the back of an oxcart. Once there, he was hanged by his wrists, given five hundred lashes, and left to die as an example to all the other slaves. His body was left dangling there for more than a month, the crows and other vermin feeding on it every day as Finch passed it on the way to and from the fields, until the bones themselves began falling to the ground. His mother was sold a short time later, sold to a larger plantation in Louisiana, and he would never see her again. He himself was sold at sixteen to a farmer in Alabama who had him trained as a blacksmith so he could shoe the horses and repair the carts and harnesses the farmer used to deliver feed to other farmers across the northern part of the state.
Powell listened as long as he could, his blood boiling within him until his black eyes turned red. As Finch told them about how his new master began renting him out to other farmers and merchants for blacksmith work, Powell knew he could stand no more and he either had to leave the church or explode. The other misguided members of the Twelfth Street congregation may be willing to sit and listen while Hutchins and his black accomplice hijacked their church, but Powell wasn’t going to have any part of it. Leaping up as if his pants were on fire, Powell clambered over Sloan and fled the church.
“Mother fucker!” Powell shouted as soon as the church door closed behind him, almost losing his footing and falling down the front steps as he delivered an angry kick to the church foundation. Regaining his posture he saw several pedestrians offering him horrified looks as they quickly shuffled by.
“What are you assholes looking at!?” Powell shouted at them, angry at them, angry at the world they lived in, ready to jump on them and rip their heads off if they said one thing to him.
Cursing them again and telling them to mind their own goddamn business, Powell turned purposely away from their stares, thrust his hands deep in his pockets, and began pacing back and forth on the church steps. He was burning with fury, outraged at what Hutchins had done. He wouldn’t stand for it, by God, he would not stand for it. But what about the other Sons of White America? He had stormed out of there in sickened horror, but what about the others?
Menendez would not come, Powell knew instantly. Sitting up there in the choir like he was, it would take all the courage in the world to stand up and march down that long center aisle to the exit, all eyes on him, courage Powell knew Menendez did not have. Kraft would also not come. Kraft never even listened to the services anymore, not since Reverend Harper died. He said there was so much to do before and after the service, so that during the service was the only time he had to cook and eat a quick breakfast in the church’s small kitchen. No one in the organization dared point it out to Kraft, but all knew he had never eaten breakfast during one of Reverend Harper’s sermons.
No, Powell could pace back and forth on the steps all day and not see Kraft or Menendez walk out the way he had. But Sloan. Sloan was a different story. Sloan had been sitting next to Powell in the very back pew of the church, and slipping out of the church from the back pew was something that took hardly any courage at all. The only people who saw you do it were the folks in the same back pew with you, and perhaps one or two people in the pew ahead -- if you made some noise, as Powell had, or their heads were turned just so -- and those up at the front facing the other direction. The choir, and the preacher in the pulpit itself. But that was the point, wasn’t it? You would want that preacher to see you leave. If Sloan was anything like Powell, he would want Finch to see him leave so Finch would know Sloan was not buying the story he had come to peddle.
Powell waited a full five minutes, starting with the firm conviction Sloan would send that message and ending with the equally firm conviction Sloan would not. Cursing his friend’s name, Powell walked down off the church’s front steps and went looking for something to fill his time until that evening’s meeting.
He did a lot of walking, went down to the billiard hall and shot a few games, got some lunch at a deli just opened on Ninth Street, but eventually found himself back at his flat reading his letter over and over again. It was good, probably the best thing he had ever written, but now Powell wanted to make it even better, wanted to make the crimes it accused Hutchins of even more heinous than just deflowering a sixteen-year-old girl. The audacity Hutchins had shown, bringing Finch into their church to preach at them from Reverend Harper’s own pulpit, warranted a much stronger response. What was it the Bible said? An eye for an eye? A tooth for a tooth? The punishment needed to fit the crime.
Powell did not destroy his original letter, the one penned in one miraculous sitting as if in Betty Crawford’s own hand. Quite the reverse, in fact, he tucked it safely away in his satchel with its equally phony affidavit, perhaps knowing even before he started he would not be successful in creating another that surpassed it.
Taking pencil to paper he spent the balance of that afternoon spewing the noxious and demented contents of his imagination into one phony letter to the Council of Deacons after the other. He started with the theme he had established in his masterpiece, fornication with the teenage Amanda Bainbridge, and built a tower of epistles ever escalating in their anger and hatred. In his first rewrite, Hutchins had not just deflowered Betty Crawford’s niece, he had raped her, beating her savagely in the process and leaving her battered and bloody on the steps of the church. Then, he raped and beat her, but also sodomized her atop the Twelfth Street altar. After that, he raped and sodomized her atop the altar, and when he was finished he cut her throat and let her bleed to death. In the next one, he raped and sodomized her atop the altar while wearing the skull of a jackal on his head, and when he killed her, he dismembered her body and offered the pieces up as a sacrifice to Satan. And so on, and so on, and so on.
His flatmates were in and out of the flat at various times that afternoon, but Powell barely noticed them; he was so consumed by his task at hand. One tried to ask him what he was doing, but Powell just waved him off with an angry gesture and told him to mind his own business. In his mind, Powell knew he was going to fix that asshole Hutchins, and fix him good, and that didn’t have time to shoot the breeze with any of his moronic flatmates.
In between one feverish letter and the next, Powell happened to glance at the clock and saw to his horror he was already late for his meeting. Stuffing all the new letters in the satchel with the old one, he flew out the door without a second thought for the supper he had just missed and ran the four blocks from his flat to the church. Going around back to the cellar entrance, he rapped six times on the door in the special cadence Reverend Harper had taught them all. In a few moments, the latch clicked and Kraft opened the door.
“Ve vere beginning to vonder iv you vere coming tonight,” Kraft said by way of greeting.
“Just lost track of the time,” Powell replied as he followed the custodian down the stairs and into their meeting room. He could hear the voices of Sloan and Menendez arguing with one another from the moment he left the street.
“I can’t believe you’re not angry about what Hutchins pulled today,” Menendez said. “Bringing that black bastard into our church to talk to us that way.”
“I am angry,” Sloan said. “I didn’t say I wasn’t angry. All I said is the same thing I said last week. It didn’t look to me like Hutchins pissed off anyone else in the congregation.”
“Al,” Menendez said as Powell and Kraft entered the room, “help me set this idiot straight. Old Jack here is saying there wasn’t anything wrong with Hutchins bringing in that blackie to preach to us.”
“Goddammit, Bob,” Sloan said as Powell and Kraft took their seats, Powell unslinging his satchel from off his shoulder and letting it rest in his lap. “That isn’t what I’m saying at all.”
“Well, what the hell are you saying, then?”
Sloan tried to calm himself with a slow and steady breath before responding, but Kraft jumped in before he could utter any words.
“Gott in Himmel, I am sick ov listening to you two argue. Al’s here now. Vhy don’t dee bot ov you drop it so he can start dee meeting?”
“Just a minute, Manny,” Sloan said. “I don’t think I like what Bob is accusing me of.”
“I said drop it,” Kraft said in his voice that meant the fun and games had ended. “Al, start dee meeting.”
Obediently, both Sloan and Menendez turned to look at Powell.
“Okay,” Powell said, clearing his throat. “The meeting will now come to order. I recognize that all active members of the Sons of White America are present and accounted for.”
Powell allowed the customary few seconds for someone to challenge his statement. When no one did, he addressed the organization’s secretary.
“Are there any items of old business?”
“Ja,” Kraft said. “Dere is dee matter of dee letter you vere going to rite to dee Council of Deacons.”
“Yes,” Powell said, as if it was something he hadn’t been thinking about all week and had just now been reminded of it. “I’ve been working on that,” he said, fumbling with the latch on the satchel, “and I think I have something that will serve our purposes.”
Propping the satchel up on his lap and holding its throat open with one hand, the fingers on Powell’s other hand began flipping through the different letters he had brought with him. His first instinct was to pull out and read them the last letter he had written, the one he had completed just before looking up at the clock and realizing he was late for the meeting, but as his eyes searched for it in his satchel, his mind began recalling all the sick and graven images he had built into it. In the heat of the moment and the solitude of his flat, this last letter, with its testimonials from the poor spinster Crawford about the sodomy, witchcraft, torture, and cannibalism practiced on her innocent sixteen-year-old niece, this last letter had seemed like the grand prize, the surefire bet to send Hutchins back to the abolitionist commune that had spawned him. But sitting here in the basement of the Twelfth Street Church with the angry and anxious Sons of White America staring at him and ready to sit in judgment over his efforts, Powell realized with something akin to shock that his latest masterpiece was not a masterpiece at all. It was, in fact, a ridiculous joke, something any sane person would see through in a minute. The muse that inspired him to create it was not the same as that which had produced the first and perfect attempt. The first had been cool and calculating, balancing the egregious with the believable, and speaking with a voice that would have emanated from any outraged aunt. The last was hot and passionate, trampling all sense of rationality and scurrying up the heights of titillation, speaking not like a horrified relation but more like a masturbating voyeur.
In the twinkling of an eye Powell decided to burn all the additional letters when he got home that evening, and produced instead the letter he had written seven nights ago.
“I wrote an affidavit to go with this,” he said as he held the letter up to read. “Something from the congregation attesting to the truth of these statements. That’s what we can sign the names to if you think this is good enough to send. I thought the letter itself would work better if it was written by one angry parishioner.”
Kraft, Sloan, and Menendez all stared at him blankly.
Powell cleared his throat and began to read his letter. “April 5, 1857. Portsmouth, New Hampshire. To, The New England Council of Deacons, Boston Massachusetts. Dear Sirs. It is with broken hope and righteous anger that I take my pen in my trembling hand to write you this painful missive. The man you have sent among us, Thomas Hutchins, sent to be our shepherd after the passing of our dear Reverend Charles Harper, has brought not God’s Word but Satan’s business to our community, and I and my family are the loyal and trusting victims of his subterfuge and deceit.”
Powell was quite proud of that opening paragraph, and as he read it he reminded himself of the wonders yet to come. He had read this letter enough times in the past week to have recited it now by heart, but having the paper in front of him allowed his lips to keep moving while his mind worked on other things. By the time he started the second paragraph he knew he had made the right decision in choosing this one over any he had written that afternoon. Those had been self-absorbed dalliances, all too consuming in their moments of passion, but none of them had the staying power of truth the way this one had.
His audience sat silently listening as Powell presented them with the first public reading of his letter. Powell kept his eyes down for most of the performance, only catching glimpses of the faces of his comrades in between sentences or during pregnant pauses. They seemed unreadable to him, stoic masks of contemplation and judgment. Beyond that they left Powell with the barest of impressions. Was that a smile he saw teasing the corners of Kraft’s mouth? Wrinkles of confusion on Menendez’s forehead? Lines of concern around Sloan’s eyes?
Powell allowed himself little time to dwell on these possibilities, devoting his energy instead to the completion of his wonderful letter. He was at the climax now, the part where the irrevocable accusation is made. He has violated my niece. He has betrayed the trust of my family and destroyed the life given to his keeping. He is a foul and unrepentant abuser of the innocent and uses the position you gave him only to heighten the pursuit of his unholy lust. As the words left his lips, Powell could hear Betty Crawford saying them in his mind, as clearly as if she had been sitting there among them, as if she had taken the oath and become the first Daughter of White America, as if she herself had joined their righteous crusade against the slave and those who would place him on equal footing with the white man.
After the accusation, all that remained were the demands and the close. Recall him. Defrock him. Excommunicate him. Send us someone in whom the light of God shone like a beacon, someone like their dear departed Reverend Harper, someone whose soul would weep at the damage this man Hutchins had caused.
“Yours forever in faith, Elizabeth Crawford.”
Powell put the letter down on his lap and looked up to fully meet the stares of the others for the first time since beginning to speak. The vague impressions he had gained were partially reinforced. Menendez seemed confused and Sloan looked concerned, but whatever smile he thought might have been growing on Kraft’s face was absent now, leaving behind a scowl that seemed both annoyed and intolerant.
“Well,” Powell said bravely. “What do you think?” He looked at Sloan, hoping he would speak first despite the way he had disappointed Powell earlier that day, but knowing even as he did so Sloan would not.
“I’m not sure I get it, Al,” Menendez said. “Are you trying to say that Hutchins fucked her?”
Powell turned to face Menendez, unable to keep the look of disbelief off his face. “Yes, Bob,” he said, probably with more condescension than he should have. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. What do you think ‘violated’ means?”
Menendez did not answer Powell’s question, which had been largely, but not completely, rhetorical. “Well, maybe you should say that then. You know, make it clear. Leave no doubt.”
“What are you saying?” Powell asked.
“In your letter,” Menendez said, the condescension now making an appearance in his voice. “Maybe you should come right out and say Hutchins fucked her. You want the Deacons to get the point, don’t you?”
Powell was at a loss for how to respond. Fortunately, Sloan decided to respond for him.
“Bob, we can’t say that. The letter is supposed to be coming from old Betty Crawford. Do you think she’s ever used that word in her life? And even if so, do you think she’d put it in a letter she wrote to the Council of Deacons? Yours forever in faith, you fucking shitbirds?”
“Well, I don’t think the letter is strong enough,” Menendez said defensively. “It should come right out and say what Hutchins did, not hide it behind a bunch of fancy words. Maybe it should come from one of us instead of Betty Crawford?”
“And how are we supposed to know what Hutchins has been doing with Crawford’s niece? She broke down in tears and confessed it to us?”
“I don’t know!” Menendez shouted. “It wasn’t my job to write the goddamn letter. But we might as well not bother with this one. No one is even going to know what it means.”
Sloan dismissed Menendez and turned to Powell. “Don’t listen to him, Al. The letter is perfect. It’s as if Betty Crawford had written it herself. But we can’t send it. It’s never going to work.”
Powell’s brain was still chewing on the concept of Betty Crawford using such language in her letter to the Council of Deacons. Is that what Menendez was suggesting? Was he nuts? Looking at Sloan for some kind of assistance, Powell realized his friend had just spoken to him.
“What?” Powell said.
“I said the letter won’t work. It’s great but it’s not going to do what we want it to. We should have talked more about this last week.”
“Why?” Menendez asked.
“Because maybe the reality of what we’re trying to do would have occurred to one of us and we could have saved Al the trouble.”
“As I recall,” Menendez said, “the letter was your idea.”
“I know it was my idea!” Sloan shouted at Menendez. “I’m not trying to blame anyone else. Okay. Suppose we send Al’s letter. What do you think the Deacons are going to do when they receive it? Stretch out a shepherd’s hook from Boston and yank Hutchins out of the pulpit? My God, look at this letter we just got! We’d better get that guy out of there right now!”
“If we really told them what Hutchins did they might,” Menendez said sarcastically.
“Don’t bet on it,” Sloan said. “The most they’d do is send one of the Deacons up here to check the story out. And they might not even do that. We all speculated last week on how many letters from outraged parishioners the Council must get.”
Powell’s brain was beginning to catch up with the conversation, and he was beginning to remember how frustrated he was getting with Sloan and Menendez bickering all the time. “That’s what the affidavit is for, Jack. It’s not just a letter from one person. It’s a testimonial signed by the whole congregation.”
“Okay,” Sloan said. “Great. So this one stands out. They send their Deacon up here and he goes and has a talk with Betty Crawford. What do you think Betty is going to tell him? There’s the end of our plan right there.”
“All the more reason to have the letter come from one of us,” Menendez said. “That way, the Deacon would come talk to us and not Betty Crawford, and we can back up the story.”
“With what?” Sloan asked. “The letter is a lie, same as anything we would tell him. How long do you think it would take him to figure that out? After us he could go talk to anyone else in the congregation, all of whom supposedly signed the affidavit, and what is he going to hear from them? None of them hate this guy Hutchins the way we do. They all seem to be welcoming him with open arms. Him and his negro preacher.”
“Blackie!” Menendez suddenly shouted at Sloan. “Blackie preacher! He’s a blackie, Jack. Blackie, blackie, blackie! Why can’t you say it?”
“Whatever,” Sloan said dismissively. “The point is--”
“No, goddammit!” Menendez interrupted. “I’m tired of all your points. We passed a goddamn resolution in this organization that we were going to call them blackies, and in all the meetings I’ve sat in listening to your lips flapping, I don’t think I’ve heard you call them that once. Not once!”
“Bob, that’s--”
“Not once!” Menendez shouted again. “Then this guy Hutchins comes to town and you seem to go out of your way to point out the rest of the congregation seems to like him just fine, and now you’re busy trying to talk us out of sending a letter that might get him removed, a letter that was your idea in the first place. Just what kind of game are you playing, Jack? I’m beginning to wonder how much you really want to see Hutchins gone. I’m beginning to wonder if you really belong in this organization or not.”
An uncomfortable silence settled in amongst the four of them as Menendez’s words came to a close. Menendez was a moron, Powell knew that, and he also knew Sloan was probably right about the letter not working the way they wanted it to, but at the same time there was a part of him that was happy to see Menendez pinning Sloan down like this. These last two weeks, Powell had been finding himself asking the same kinds of questions about his friend Jack Sloan.
“Are you finished?” Sloan asked Menendez spitefully.
“I don’t know,” Menendez said calmly, more calmly than Powell would have thought him capable of. “I guess that depends on what you say next. I don’t know about Manny and Al, but I’d like to hear you say how much you want to run Reverend Hutchins and his goddamn blackie preacher out of town. I want to hear you say it so I can judge whether or not you really mean it.”
Another uncomfortable silence followed during which Powell found himself trading stares with Kraft. The older man sat opposite Powell on his folding wooden chair, a half-full glass of gin in his hand. Their eyes met briefly, giving Powell no more insight into Kraft’s inner world than he had before, and then both shifted mechanically to Sloan.
“I want to see Reverend Hutchins and his blackie preacher run out of town,” Sloan said evenly. “I just don’t know how we can.”
“I do.”
The utterance had come unexpectedly from Kraft. Even Powell, who had just traded looks with him, had no idea a thought was forming in Kraft’s head and that he would soon be giving it voice. It was almost as if a fifth person had crept unseen into the room and startled them all with his speech.
Kraft looked at each of them in turn -- Sloan, Menendez, and then settled his gaze on Powell as he finished enunciating his idea. The thoughts came out in three crisp sentences with two-second pauses in between, as if his mind was still fleshing out the idea as he spoke.
“I tink ve should burn his gottdam haus down. In dee middle of dee night. Vhen dee son of a bitch is schleeping inside.”
A chill ran down Powell’s spine as the sentences came out of Kraft’s mouth, each with a finality that rivaled the one before it. The idea was horrifying, but at the same time Powell knew instantly it would work. Unlike his letter or any other demented plan they were likely to come up with, Kraft’s idea would undoubtedly work. The fire would either kill Hutchins, or scare him so badly he would turn tail back to the Council of Deacons. Either way they would be rid of him.
“Zo moved,” Kraft said tonelessly in the silent room, all the while keeping his eyes pinned evenly on Powell.
These last words from Kraft stunned Powell even more than his previous ones. In all the time Powell had been a member of the Sons of White America, the only other time he could remember Kraft making a motion was when the older man had put Powell’s name into nomination for leading the organization. He had seconded a lot of motions, and voted for most of them, but he very rarely suggested a course of action on his own. The novelty of the event so surprised Powell he almost forgot his role as chair.
“Is there a second?” Powell asked with a throat that needed clearing.
“Second,” Menendez said almost instantly.
Powell cleared his throat. “Is there any discussion?”
All eyes in the room turned to Jack Sloan. Instinctively, Powell supposed, they all knew if there was someone among them who would want to discuss this motion, to get a debate going on it to help illuminate both sides of the issue, it would be Sloan. For the rest of them, Kraft’s short and direct sentences contained all the information they would need to make a decision.
For a moment, Powell thought Sloan might actually do it, might actually compel a discussion on the merits of this motion. But after meeting the eyes of his three opponents -- because we would be his opponents, wouldn’t we, Powell thought, in this discussion we would all argue against him -- something seemed to deflate in Sloan. His shoulders slumped forward and his head bowed heavily.
“Call the question,” Sloan said, more to himself than to the chair.
“All those in favor say aye,” Powell said.
“Aye,” Kraft, Menendez, and Powell said in unison.
“All those opposed say nay.”
“Nay,” Sloan said, quietly, but definitely for the record.
“The ayes have it,” Powell said. “Motion passes.”
“Move to adjourn,” Kraft said quickly.
Two motions in one night, Powell thought. This is a historic occasion.
“Second,” Sloan said even before Powell could ask for one.
“All those in favor say aye.”
“Aye,” the four of them said together, acting in unison for the last time. Although nothing of the sort had even been proposed, Powell knew Sloan was finished, and no longer was considered a member of the organization.
“All those opposed say nay.”
Silence.
“We’re adjourned,” Powell said.
Sloan immediately got to his feet and without a word, without a backward glance, he left the room, marched up the stairs, and exited out into the street. Powell, Menendez, and Kraft remained solidly in their chairs and maintained a communal silence until they heard the door at the top of the stairs shut. Then, and only then, did they start to discuss how they would implement their plan.
It didn’t take them long. It was clear the idea had been bumping around in Kraft’s head for a while and he had already worked it out into something decidedly doable. As Kraft revealed and they discussed, Powell was more than a little surprised that, even without Sloan, the Sons of White America had both the personnel and the resources necessary to do the job. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been. After all, once you started to examine it from a mechanical point of view, it just wasn’t all that hard to burn down a house.
Figuring out a way to trap Hutchins inside, now that was the tricky part. But Kraft had a plan for that as well, a plan both simple and sublime. That was really just a mechanical exercise, too, once you instructed your mind to look at it that way, and as the three of them talked it through, Powell realized that was probably the hardest part of all, keeping your mind focused on the necessary mechanics of the act, and forgetting as much as you could that Hutchins was a man, a white man, a child of God, and that at the end of this little exercise, he was more than likely going to end up dead.
Kraft had already trained his mind that way. He had to have in order to think it through in as much detail as he had. Menendez had, too, either because he had been harboring the same ideas for a while -- which Powell doubted -- or because his mind was simple enough it could make those kinds of distinctions quickly and never trouble itself with their implications again -- which Powell thought much more likely. But Powell was different. He needed some time to see things clearly. It was a good idea, better than the letter Sloan had convinced him to write, and it would undoubtedly work, but still Powell felt this nagging sense that perhaps there was another way, something that would also work, also drive Hutchins out of town, but not bring them so close to taking his life.
At one point, when most of the plan had been set, Powell allowed this meek little voice from inside to express some of its concerns.
“Manny,” Powell said. “Maybe we shouldn’t trap him inside.”
“Vhat do you mean?” Kraft asked.
“Well,” Powell said. “Maybe burning down his house will be enough. Maybe that’ll be a strong enough message. Maybe that’ll get him to leave town.”
Kraft shook his head. “Nein,” he said. “Dis Hutchins is a real crusader. He’s out not only to save all dee slaves, but also dee souls of dee vhite folk who don’t tink like he does. He’s heard dee call, or at least he tinks he has, and noting vill stop him from doing vhat he sees as dee Lord’s vork except coming face-to-face mit his own mortality. Und even dat might not do dee trick iv he somehow lives to tell dee tale. No, Al, you let him run out ov dat burning haus and next Sonntag he’s going to have ten blackie preachers shouting at us and helping him build a new haus.”
It was just about the most Powell had ever heard Kraft say in one sitting, and Powell knew every word of it was true.
“Besides,” Kraft added, “avter ve trap him inside he still may not burn to death like dee abolitionist Arschloch he is. Ve von’t be able to barricade dee vindows and it’s only a two-story haus. Given dee choice between burning up and breaking mein legs in a vall, I know vhich one I vould choose.”
And that, finally, was enough for Powell. Hutchins may wind up dead, but they weren’t necessarily going to kill him. In the end Hutchins, like everyone, Powell supposed, would be given a choice, and it would be truly up to him if he lived or died.
They decided they would do it the upcoming Wednesday night and then parted ways. Powell had some trouble sleeping that night, but nothing too excessive. He woke up a few times, knowing he’d had some kind of disturbing dream but never able to remember much of it.
In the morning life seemed to return to normal and Powell went off to clock his shift at the ironworks with little of the doubt that had nagged him the night. Once he fell into his routine in the nail shed the concerns seemed to leave him completely and it was almost as if the discussion of the night before hadn’t happened.
But of course it had. He was directly reminded of it at the lunch hour when he went to meet Sloan at their usual place behind the tin shop and Sloan was not there. He could have been late, Powell supposed, realizing Sloan did not always reach their rendezvous point before he did and he typically waited a few minutes for Sloan about as often as Sloan waited a few minutes for him. But today Powell did not give Sloan even those few minutes, knowing Sloan would not come no matter how long he waited. Powell saw some men Sloan worked with in the tool shed and he asked one of them if Sloan had come to work today. He was not surprised when the man told him no, Sloan hadn’t shown that morning, no excuse given.
Powell ate his lunch in quiet solitude that day wondering how far from Portsmouth his friend Jack Sloan had already gotten and how much farther he intended to go.
At the end of the day Powell lingered a little bit longer at his workstation than the rest of the men in the shed. Like most employees paid by the hour, those men stopped what they were doing the moment the shift whistle blew and quickly made their way to the door and the lives they led when they were not working at Cookson Brothers. Some took a few moments to tidy their areas a little, but most did not. In as little as three minutes, Powell found himself alone in the shed, except for the shed foreman, who was busy counting his workers’s output for the day.
Powell knew the foreman wasn’t going to leave before he did -- such things just weren’t done -- so he screwed up some courage and began walking towards the exit. He honestly didn’t know how he was going to do what he needed to do with the foreman standing right there counting the little brown boxes the nails were packaged in at the end of the line, but he quietly told himself not to worry about it. He would do it if he could, but he wouldn’t force it. He didn’t have to. If he didn’t do it today, he still had the Tuesday and Wednesday shifts to get what he needed.
The foreman was an Irishman named Art Kilpatrick and he was busy tapping his pencil down each row of boxes, his lips moving as he counted silently to himself. As Powell closed the distance he could tell he wasn’t going to get his chance today. Kilpatrick was too focused on the boxes to allow Powell the opportunity to tuck one under his shirt and take it home with him.
“Goodnight, Art,” Powell said instead as he passed by the man on his way out the door.
“Oh, hey, Al,” Kilpatrick said, suddenly breaking away from the boxes. “Can you do me a favor?”
Powell stopped. “Sure,” he said.
Kilpatrick quickly counted out five boxes of nails and pushed them into Powell’s hands. “Here, take these and give them to Joe Philbrick in the machine shop on your way out. They’re going to start building that new storage shed tomorrow and are going to need them.”
Powell could not believe his luck. Here he had been so worried about how he was going to steal a box of nails without his boss seeing him, and now here was his boss placing five such boxes in his hands and telling him to make off with them. Powell knew he could have bought some from the company store if he had to -- God knew nails weren’t that expensive -- but based on what he was going to do with them, Powell would have preferred there be no record of him buying nails a few days before the Sons of White America implemented their plan.
But he couldn’t take a whole box, could he? Walking across the yard to the machine shop Powell realized Kilpatrick had counted the boxes before giving them to him. Why had he done that? Because he was a foreman, of course, and foremen were always counting things -- men in the shop, hours worked each day, nails produced each hour. There were quotas to meet and that’s what they paid foremen to do, count and make sure quotas were being met. Somewhere on Kilpatrick’s ever-present clipboard he had no doubt made a notation that five boxes from today’s output had been sent to Joe Philbrick in the machine shop. And why five? Why not four or six? Undoubtedly because Philbrick had requested five. At two hundred nails per box, five boxes were a thousand nails, and that’s evidently what Philbrick thought it would take to build the new storage shed. What would he say if Powell only gave him four? Philbrick might forget to check now, but he was sure to remember at some point, and then he would surely ask Kilpatrick for another box. What? Kilpatrick would say. I already gave you five. I sent them by Powell. And that’s when everything would start to unravel.
Powell ducked quickly behind a row of outhouses, usually one of the most popular places to linger when there was work to be done, but the area was absolutely deserted now that the shift whistle had blown. An idea had suddenly struck him, and he didn’t want anyone to see him execute what he hoped would save him from this confounding predicament. He had been planning all along to take a box of nails from what Kilpatrick had already counted, primarily because he thought it would be the quickest and easiest thing to do. But for what they had planned, he certainly didn’t need an entire box of nails. Two hundred nails were far more than he needed, so why should he risk stealing so many?
Well, how many nails did he really need? Powell spent a few moments trying to visualize the task he had been assigned, weighing as many of the variables as he could imagine. The more he thought about it, the more difficult the decision seemed to be. Four, he determined eventually. Four would be the absolute minimum it would take to do the job. So he would play it safe and take eight nails. There was no way anyone was going to miss eight out of a thousand nails when they were building that storage shed tomorrow. The Cookson Brothers ran a tight ship, but it wasn’t that tight. With all the hammering tomorrow, who on earth would be able to tell that the boxes supplied by Art Kilpatrick, foreman of the nail shed, contained only nine hundred ninety-two nails instead of the regulation one thousand?
Powell crouched down and set the boxes on the ground at his feet. Opening their cardboard lids carefully, he took two nails out of three of the boxes and one nail out of each of the remaining two. Closing their lids just as carefully he stacked them again into a pile. Rising with the boxes balanced in one hand and his contraband clutched in the other, Powell slipped the eight nails carefully into his pocket and strode confidently back into the yard.
Philbrick was talking to another foreman when Powell arrived at the machine shop, and he stopped only long enough to tell Powell to put the boxes on a table by the door before resuming his conversation. Powell gratefully complied and slipped out of the shop without another word.
The next two days were difficult ones for Powell. Now that he had secured the nails, stashing them in a pocket of his satchel beside the letters he had not yet gotten around to burning, there was little to occupy his mind except the anticipation of the deed to be done. Reverend Harper had always spoken to them about the power of their organization, about the power of organizations in general, about the things men could accomplish as part of a community no one man could accomplish on his own, and Powell knew this battle against Hutchins was certainly one of those things. He knew none of them, not even Kraft, would have the courage or the ability to do what they planned by himself. Harper had taught them it was only through the organization and the larger community of man that such things were possible, that such stands could be taken against the ever-progressing encroachment of anarchy.
It made Powell think and dream about what could be accomplished with a real organization, something more than just the three of them meeting in a church basement every Sunday night. They were trying to drive away one preacher and it was going to take all of their efforts to accomplish it. But what if their organization had more than three members? What if it had more than the five it had enjoyed at its peak? Reverend Harper had always been vigilant about meeting in secret and keeping the true purpose of their organization hidden from the bulk of his congregation. It takes time, he used to say, to open people’s eyes to the truth, and confronting them too abruptly with unfamiliar notions ultimately only pushed them farther away. But what if Menendez’s dream came true and the whole Twelfth Street congregation did join the Sons of White America? Would there be any need for phony letters to the Council of Deacons or witching hour arson to get rid of an offensive minister? No, from the moment Hutchins opened his mouth about Dred Scott on that first Sunday the boycott of services and letter-writing campaign would have begun, the whole congregation unified and dedicated to the same purpose. And what if it wasn’t the whole congregation but the whole city of Portsmouth that belonged, either to the Sons of White America or to similar organizations in their own neighborhoods and congregations? Would there be any need to protest or seek action from the Council of Deacons in Boston? No, if the whole town belonged there would be no need for that. They and their fellow townsfolk would rise up and run Hutchins out of town themselves, dumping him and his notions into the Piscataqua River and telling him never to come back. Who would stop them? And what if it wasn’t just the city of Portsmouth, but the entire state of New Hampshire that belonged? Then, Powell knew, self-righteous preachers from Boston would never even be sent, because if the state of New Hampshire was one big organization then New Hampshire would be a slave state, and those who preached about slave equality wouldn’t just be run off, but strung up and hung like the traitors they were.
Some folks said a war was coming, a war between the states, a war to decide once and for all if the slaves should go free or be kept forever in bondage. Powell didn’t know if such a war was really on his horizon or not, but if it was he felt he knew which side he would end up fighting on.
When the appointed hour came Powell crept silently out of his flat so as to not wake his flatmates and made his way through the dark and deserted streets to the Twelfth Street Church. Kraft had left the back door leading down to the basement unlocked just as he had said he would and Powell made his way cautiously down the stairs. In the room at the bottom, the room in which the Sons of White America had been meeting since the Revered Charles Harper had envisioned the organization and written its bylaws, Manfred Kraft was waiting for him. And Manfred Kraft was drunk.
That took Powell completely by surprise. Kraft had made no mention of it as part of the overall plan. In fact, Kraft had left Powell and Menendez with the firm impression that the business they would undertake was something that required the cool detachment of a professional to accomplish. But it was clear from his first few stumbling steps and his first few slurred words that Kraft had seriously tied one on. They had all regularly sampled Kraft’s homemade gin during their meetings since Harper had died, but no one had ever gotten as drunk as Kraft was now. Whereas Powell had waited out the hours since sunset lying awake in his bed contemplating all he would do, it seemed that Kraft had spent them slurping down his moonshine and trying to forget them.
“Du bist die Nägel mitbringen?” Kraft asked insistently, the smell of his alcohol strong on his breath.
“Huh?” Powell said, not understanding a word of Kraft’s native German.
Kraft shook his head as if to clear it. “Did you bring dee nails?” he said.
“Yes,” Powell said, a little taken aback by the spectacle Kraft had presented. “They’re here in my pocket.”
“Gut,” Kraft said, lapsing in and out of German in his inebriation. “Sehr gut. Die Nägel ve got around here are only gut für hängen crosses und scheisse on die valls. They von’t stand up to tonight’s verk.”
“Don’t worry,” Powell said, believing he followed the thrust of Kraft’s comment and fishing one of the nails from his pocket for Kraft to see. “These are eight-penny nails, the longest ones we make. When I drive them home, they’re not coming out again, no matter how hard he pushes.”
Kraft laughed, a high and hissing chuckle that seemed both out of place in his mouth and in their circumstances.
“Do you have the hammer?” Powell asked, hoping to put an end to Kraft’s mirth.
“Ja,” Kraft said, continuing to giggle under his breath. “Es ist hier mit meinen Jungen.”
Powell didn’t understand that comment but he looked in the direction Kraft had gestured and saw one of the cases Kraft kept his gin bottles in sitting on top of the chair Menendez usually sat in during their meetings. On top of the closed case was an old and paint-speckled hammer.
“Hier,” Kraft said to him, picking up the hammer and handing it to Powell. “Aufnehem Sie das. Werden Sie bereit?”
Powell put the nail back in his pocket with its seven brethren and accepted the hammer from Kraft. “Huh?” he said again.
Kraft gave him a severe look and took a deep breath before responding in the clearest English he was capable of. “Are you ready?”
Powell didn’t have to ask what was inside the gin case. Kraft had told him and Menendez the Sunday before, told him in enough detail that Powell could visualize them now as if the case had been made out of glass instead of rough cardboard. Inside the case, each nestled protectively in its corrugated sleeve, were twelve bottles of gin, each filled about three quarters of the way to the top and each sporting a gin-soaked rag instead of a cork, a rag that both dipped down into the liquid and hung loosely down the neck of the bottle.
“Yeah, Manny,” Powell said. “I’m ready.”
Kraft smiled at him, his face looking for one terrifying moment the way Powell’s father’s had when Powell had done something to make him especially proud.
“Okay,” Kraft said. “Gehen wir.”
Kraft carefully picked up his case of gin bottles, some of the glasses rattling against their neighbors as he shifted it into a comfortable carrying position, and then slowly began to make his way up the basement steps and into the night air. Powell, hammer in hand and nails in his pocket, silently followed him.
The house that now belonged to Reverend Hutchins had once belonged to Reverend Harper and sat squarely on the end of the block, due west from the Twelfth Street Church. As he walked the few short steps behind Kraft, Powell realized ‘belonged’ was certainly the wrong way to think about it. Occupied. The Reverends occupied the house. It belonged to the church, paid for with church funds for the purpose of providing a dwelling to their esteemed minister. Harper had occupied it, and now Hutchins did, but as one part of Powell’s brain noted how still and empty the streets of Portsmouth were at this awful hour, another part knew the church was going to have to buy the next Reverend a new home. They had come to burn this one down.
In the middle of the night.
While the son of a bitch was sleeping inside.
Kraft stopped them when they arrived at the correct doorstep. Putting his gin case down on the front stoop, he began fishing in his pocket with one fat hand and presently produced a single silver key.
“Hier,” Kraft said, pressing the key into Powell’s free hand. “Ich gehe around back. Ich geben Sie fünf minuten to get into position und den ich werfe ihnen. Vhen you hear die erste fenster break, beginne hammering. Verstehen Sie?”
Powell had a hard time deciphering Kraft’s half-English, half-German, all-slurred directions, but he didn’t need to. They had been through the plan a dozen times on Sunday and Powell knew what to do next. The key, of course, had been Harper’s, and Kraft had inherited it when the Reverend had left for the great beyond. No one had thought to change the lock when Hutchins moved in, and if they had, they more than likely would have asked Kraft to do it. The key, in fact, was actually just a little bit of insurance. It was a rare bird indeed who locked his doors in the safe and friendly city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
“Yeah,” Powell said. “I get it.”
“Gut,” Kraft said and gave Powell a wink. “Let’s teach dis scheisskopf a lesson.” And without another word Kraft bent over to carefully retrieve his gin case and tottered unsteadily off into the darkness, disappearing around a corner of the house.
Alone on the doorstep, Powell first looked around to see if anyone was observing him. The streets seemed as deserted as ever. Since leaving his flat thirty minutes ago, the only other person Powell had seen was Kraft. He next turned to the doorknob. Transferring the key to the same hand that held the hammer, Powell decided to see if the door was in fact locked. Cupping his free hand around the knob, he turned it slowly and silently until the latch disengaged from the jamb and the door pushed open a crack.
That’s right, Hutchins, Powell thought to himself. Why lock your door? What the hell do you have to fear? You’re just a peaceful shepherd of the Lord, ain’t you, and we’re all your obedient flock. Powell quickly swung the door open wide enough to allow him to enter the house and then he pulled the door shut behind him, controlling the movement and the release of the knob to accomplish the action in silence.
Hutchins’s foyer was darker than the stoop outside and Powell gave his eyes a few moments to adjust, dropping the key Kraft had given him in his pocket opposite from the nails. As he stood there waiting for shapes to appear out of the gloom he realized just how hard and fast his heart was beating. He was scared -- that feeling was familiar to him -- but there was also something less familiar twisted up with his fear, something that felt a lot like excitement, but had a sharper edge than any other kind of excitement he had felt before. Whether it was the cause of this new feeling or not, Powell didn’t know, but he did know he had reached the moment of no return. Kraft had given him five minutes -- fünf minuten -- and then he was going to start hurling his flaming missiles. Powell had a job to do before then -- get into position -- and another to do when it started -- start hammering -- and if he failed at either task this horrible plan was going to turn out a whole lot different than any one of them had thought.
When Powell’s eyes had adjusted enough to allow him to move through the darkened house without tripping over anything, he began moving stealthily towards the stairs. The house occupied by Reverend Hutchins was a small two-story with two bedrooms on the upper level. The larger of these rooms Hutchins used as his bedchamber, the smaller as a study where he probably wrote his sermons and conspired with his ex-slave preachers. Powell knew all this because Kraft had told him. Reverend Harper had used the rooms in the same fashion, and just as Kraft in his role as the Twelfth Street Church’s custodian had been asked to remove Harper’s personal effects from the home, he had been asked to move Hutchins’s personal effects in. The bed in which the two men slept, the desk on which they wrote, every piece of furniture, like the house, did not truly belong to either of them, but to the church, and Kraft had been the church’s agent since it was founded.
Placing a tentative foot on the first wooden step of the staircase, Powell slowly added his weight to it, more to see how much the stairs would creak than to actually begin his movement upward. As he suspected, as he had been warned, the step did creak a little, not too loudly but loud enough to be heard clearly in every corner of the house. If Hutchins was a sound sleeper, Powell should be able to make it to the top without waking him up. If he was a light sleeper -- or what if he’s not asleep at all, Al, have you thought about that, what if he’s a goddamn insomniac and he’s up writing next Sunday’s blasphemous sermon at Reverend Harper’s desk -- this creaky staircase might very well ruin their plan. Powell would just have to go slowly and cautiously, and as quietly as possible.
Mentally, Powell tried to float himself up the stairs, putting as little weight as possible into his footsteps and giving himself a moment or two after each rise to listen for any stirring at the top of the stairs. Each and every stair creaked under him, not a one whose nails had held firmly enough over the years to prevent it. To Powell’s ears the creaks were screams of warning and protest, doing their best to alert their new master to the approaching danger and, if unsuccessful at that, at least crying a testament to the Almighty against the retribution that now trod upon them. But with each new step and each pause in progress, Powell detected nothing but silence from the top of the stairs. Each time the ticking of the grandfather clock down in the parlor and once the screech of an alley cat out in the neighborhood, but always silence from the top of the stairs.
His heart beating faster than ever and sweat actively pouring down his face, Powell at last mounted the final step and found himself standing sideways in a short corridor extending both to his left and to his right. Hanging on the wall directly in front of his face, almost as if Hutchins had put it there to taunt him, Powell could discern the shape and contours of a wooden crucifix. The body of Christ, nailed to its tiny cross, seemed to serve as a kind of signpost to Powell, the Savior’s striped and bloody arms pointing in two different directions and offering Powell a kind of last choice.
Which way is it, Jesus? Powell thought to himself, although he already knew what path he was going to take. Show me where that son of a bitch is sleeping. We’re going to show him what happens to abolitionist preachers in this town, aren’t we?
Powell slowly turned to his right and began making his way down the short corridor to Hutchins’s bedroom door. Three steps would have gotten him there, but he stopped after only two, momentarily confounded and confused by what he saw before him. The door to Hutchins’s bedroom was standing open.
This shouldn’t have surprised him but it did. Hutchins lived here alone, there would be no need to shut the door, no need for privacy for anything he planned to do, least of all sleep in the bed the church had provided him. It was just that in Powell’s every thought about what he was going to do next, from the time Kraft had first described it to him to his near-constant visualizations of it, the bedroom door had always been closed. All Powell had to do was walk up to it, wait for the glass on the other side of the door to start breaking, and then nail the thing shut. Cold, impersonal, and autonomic. Something his senses and motor functions could accomplish without involving his higher brain capacity. But now the door stood open, and Powell realized he would need to take one additional action. He would have to shut the door, shut Hutchins in on the inferno his bedroom was about to become. And although the moral distinction between closing an open door and nailing a closed door shut may be too fuzzy for others to see, it was crystal clear to Albert Powell.
Powell actually stood in torn hesitation for a moment or two, the hammer still clutched in his right hand and the eight-penny nails still in his pocket. What should I do? his mind asked, not of itself, but of any other entity that could possibly render an opinion. It was not a decision Powell wanted to make on his own, not something he had mentally prepared himself to confront. And yet the answer was there, coming to his mind the same way the words to Betty Crawford’s letter had come, ringing with the same resonance of truth. Whether they were words Manfred Kraft had planted there, or echoes of Reverend Harper from beyond the grave, or cries from the nailed-up Christ on the wall behind him, or thoughts from the place deep within his own mind where hatred and passion were one, Powell did not know then and never would. But they welled up within Powell with an allure that was irresistible and a force that was unstoppable.
Do it. Shut the door. Shut the door and let that self-righteous asshole get roasted alive.
Back on autopilot, Powell stepped forward, the hallway creaking under his feet much as the stairs had done, and he took a half step into Hutchins’s bedroom in order to reach the doorknob and pull the door quietly closed. The light was a shade brighter in the room with the moonlight spilling in through the cracks in the curtains. The brass doorknob caught some of that light and sparkled dully as Powell closed his fingers around it. Turning his head to make sure he had not disturbed the room’s sleeping occupant, he noiselessly began to draw the door closed.
And stopped.
The Reverend’s bed was placed with its headboard in the center of the long wall into which the bedroom door entered. Hutchins slept on his side, his face visible to Powell as he leaned half in and half out of the room. Behind him on the bed, obscured mostly from Powell’s view by the height of Hutchins’s shoulder and the length of his body under the blanket, a second figure laid, a wild and dark tangle of hair spreading over the pillow.
A woman? That was Powell’s first thought when he saw the hair. Hutchins is sleeping with a woman? It was such a shock to his sensibilities he was unable to process any deeper thought than that.
Just as Powell released the doorknob and took a full step into the room in an attempt to verify his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him, one of Kraft’s flaming gin bottles came crashing into the window on the wall opposite the foot of the bed, shattering both itself and the glass of the window, and splashing liquid fire on the window’s curtains and down the wall below the window to the floor. The sound made both Powell and the woman sleeping beside Hutchins jump, and as she scrambled to a sitting position as if woken suddenly from a nightmare, Powell saw by the lurid light of burning alcohol and gingham the unmistakable auburn hair tumbling down around the full and naked breasts of Amanda Bainbridge.
For a few frozen moments their eyes locked on each other’s, Bainbridge’s revealing both her disorientation and some misunderstood sensation of recognition for the man standing in the door to Reverend Hutchins’s bedroom. Powell’s black eyes undoubtedly mirrored back his own disorientation, but also something no one had ever seen there before, something feverish and pulsing, as if his brain had begun processing information in totally new pathways, wiring together connections absent from the original blueprint for the human mind and forcing white hot flashes of thought and chemistry through them.
It’s true, Powell heard his own voice echoing in his head. I wrote it and it’s true.
A second cocktail came flying through the hole created by the first and burst its full contents on the floor at the very foot of the bed. With this explosion, Hutchins himself began sputtering back towards consciousness. With his movement, Bainbridge screamed, clutching a pillow to her naked chest and dropping down off her side of the bed. Momentarily paralyzed by what he had seen, her scream shocked Powell back into the reality of what was happening. Desperately fumbling for the doorknob he had released, Powell backed quickly out of the room and slammed the door shut.
The wood of the door muffled the screams somewhat and the first few confused questions from Hutchins.
“What? What’s wrong? What’s going on?”
Thrusting his left hand into his pants pocket, Powell hooked a nail with two fingers and a thumb and tried to pull it free. Its point snagged on the fabric of his trousers and held tight, refusing to come out into the open air. Overreacting, Powell pulled up on the nail with tremendous force and yanked it free, shredding the lining of his pocket in the process and scattering the other seven nails on the floor at his feet.
There was continued screaming from inside the room and Hutchins’s strong voice, fully awake now for the first time. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
Blindly Powell brought the nail up and positioned it on the door so that when driven it would angle in through the door and into the jamb. The hammer was already moving towards the spot the nail would be before Powell completed the movement. If the nail wasn’t pointing the right way, Powell would have no opportunity to check his swing. The hammer would strike the point instead of the head and likely skip over to his fingers. But the nail was pointing the right way, and with one solid thump Powell drove it halfway into the wood.
At that moment the doorknob turned and someone tried to open the door from the inside. Powell’s nail was stuck high above the knob, causing the bottom half of the door to pull back slightly and then snap shut again. Beneath Bainbridge’s cries, Powell heard Hutchins’s hand slip off the doorknob and him tumble backward onto the floor.
“Jesus Christ!” Hutchins hollered.
The crash of another gin bottle echoed from behind the door as Powell looked up to see that Hutchins’s attempt to open the door had pulled his half-driven nail partially out of its newly created hole. Mashing the hammer down on its head allowed it to regain lost ground and sink deeper into the wood. A third quick strike and the nail was set all the way, the head of the hammer making a crude indentation in the door as it drove the nail slantways.
Powell looked around frantically for another nail, knowing he had dropped them all onto the floor, but there was not enough light in the hallway for him to see them. Dropping down onto his knees Powell began searching for them by running the palm of his free hand in swift, broad arcs across the floor. Just as his fingers clutched one Hutchins tried opening the door again. As before, the bottom half of the door sort of rattled in its frame but the top, for the moment, held tight.
“What in Christ’s name is going on?” Hutchins screamed over the ongoing cries of his bedroom companion. “Open this door for God’s sake!”
Powell did not spare any time for a reply, nor did he comply with the Reverend’s order. Positioning the second nail below the knob a symmetrical distance from the first, Powell began rapping it with his hammer and forcing it into the wood.
Hutchins tried the door again, but this time it did not even shake. “What are you doing?” he cried. “Let us out of here! You have to let us out of here!”
Powell quickly spied the remaining nails by the glow now coming through the crack at the bottom of the door. Picking up a third one he placed it six or seven inches below the doorknob and began hammering it home. On his third strike another gin bottle exploded inside the room and Bainbridge’s screams intensified, as if the bottle had crashed on the wall above her head and rained broken glass and burning alcohol down on her auburn hair.
Maybe it had, Powell allowed his mind a moment to think, and with that thought, the first since his strange awakening when he had locked eyes with Amanda Bainbridge, dozens more came crowding into his consciousness. Among them, two were conspicuously absent. He did not wonder how many of his cocktails Kraft planned to throw into the second floor room. They had not discussed it, but Powell knew there had been twelve bottles in Kraft’s case and he had no doubt Kraft planned to use every last one of them. He also did not wonder what would happen if the fire brigade should arrive before Kraft was finished. This was something they had discussed. The noise, the fire, they had both reached the point where someone was undoubtedly running there now, shouting for them to ring the bell and come quick. Powell did not wonder because he knew what they would find when they got there. They would find Robert Menendez on solitary night duty, a fire bell with the rope cut down from it, and four horses that had been filled too full of onions and hard-boiled eggs to be in any condition to pull the fire truck.
Hutchins suddenly threw himself at the door and Powell saw it bend and buckle in its frame but not break open. The Reverend tried again after a few short moments and a third time after that, but it seemed he had expended the bulk of his frantic energy on his first failed attempt to break free. Each desperate thud seemed weaker than the last until all that Powell could hear under Bainbridge’s ongoing screams and the rising roar of the fire within was a few feeble scrapes of Hutchins’s fingers on the door.
“Who’s out there?” Hutchins’s voice suddenly demanded, its tenor equaling the severity he used when speaking from the pulpit. “Tell me who you are and why you’re doing this!”
Powell paused with the fourth nail in his fingers and the hammer hanging down at his side. He was on his knees, crouched down under the gaze of the crucified Christ behind him. His first impulse was to ignore Hutchins’s questions and keep hammering away, hammering until all eight of the nails he had stolen had been driven into place. The crash of another gin bottle confirmed Kraft was not giving up until his ammunition was spent. But something in the Reverend’s voice gave Powell pause, and made him think that some sort of response was warranted.
“I know you’re out there!” Hutchins cried, his voice cracking with strain and muffled both by the door and the flames. “Why are you doing this? Let us out of here, please!”
Powell stood up. “Betty Crawford sent us,” he said instinctively, without giving it a moment’s calculation. “We’re the Sons of White America, and we’ve come to make sure you burn in hell for what you’ve done.”
Without waiting for a reply, Albert Powell began driving home the fourth nail.
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“Powell” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
Image Source
https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/shermans-march
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