he paused, people in the crowd hooted and whistled.
“Just hang that nigger!” a man close to me shouted. I walked on till I was closer. Chas saw me and nodded. He turned back to the crowd and lifted his chin.
“The mayor has directed the court to move forward on this case as quickly as the laws of the Commonwealth allow,” he shouted. “You folks need to disperse.”
“We don’t need Commonwealth law!” a man yelled from beside the steps. “We need God’s law!”
A murmur rose through the crowd like a swell in rough weather. There was quiet, then an eruption of sound.
“Send the nigger girl out!”
“We’ll take care of her. Save the sheriff the trouble!”
The deputy raised his hands for quiet, but the shouting grew louder. The sleet fell harder, bouncing off the brick pavers. The crowd’s anger seemed to rise.
“Send her out!”
The jail door opened and Sheriff Curtis stepped through. He was wearing his Stetson with the brim pulled low and an oilcloth slicker that reached to his boots. One side of the slicker was tucked behind a holstered Owlshead pistol on his hip. Slung over a forearm was a double-barreled Remington with the bore broken open. The brass shell casings shone in the dull light. Officer Hope and Constable Hicks stepped out behind the sheriff. Each man was wearing a holstered Colt. The constable closed the door and stood in front of it with his hands hooked in his holster belt. The big man was about as wide as the door. The crowd fell silent.
The sheriff looked from face to face. “I see people out here I know voted for me,” he said. “And I appreciate it. You voted for me to uphold the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia and Elizabeth City County in your behalf. I aim to do that.” He gestured with his free arm. “These men standing here, they aim to do that.”
He snapped shut the bore of the shotgun. “This ten-gauge is loaded with double-ought. At this distance I reckon it’d pert near cut a man in two. Now I’m asking you people to disperse. I know you want justice served and that’s what we aim to do. But I’m damned if I’m gone stand out here in this cold and wet. Now do what Chas says, and get on home.”
“She’s just a nigger, sheriff!” a woman shouted.
“I understand that, ma’am, but under the law, she’s a citizen of Elizabeth City County, same as you. Now move on. A grand jury is set to hear this case on the first of April.”
“Well I never,” the woman muttered.
The crowd began to break up. Officer Hope adjusted the globes and lit the gaslights on the façade of the jail. Sheriff Curtis removed his Stetson and shook the sleet pellets from the brim. He put his hand on Chas’ shoulder.
“You did all right,” he said. The sheriff replaced his hat and looked at me. “My cousin did all right, didn’t he, Charlie?”
“Yes, sir, he did.”
Just beyond the glow of the gaslights a small group of white men stood, murmuring like birds on a roost in the shadows. The sheriff and deputies watched them for a while, until the men began—by ones and twos—to walk away. The officers went back inside the jail. A colored girl raced across the square, brandishing a long switch. The pack of colored boys, huddled by a cistern where they’d listened to the sheriff’s speech, sprang up laughing. They ran along the courthouse fence and scattered in the streets.
“I’m gone tell Momma where I found you!” the colored girl screamed, chasing after the smallest boy.
5.
Maebelle’s Biscuits
There were wrought-iron stairs up to the little porch I had overlooking Lincoln Street. On the porch I kept a three-legged stool where I sat to smoke. There was a cuspidor by the stool where I put my cigarette butts. Mrs. Wingate, the landlady, forbade smoking in her rooms, and flipping butts into her boxwoods would have been an even higher crime. Mrs. Wingate lived in a handsome brick house with white columns on the other side of a boxwood garden from my rooms in the carriage house.
Maebelle told me Mrs. Wingate’s late husband had been quite a cigar smoker. He was one of “them no-count rich folks in Richmond, think they all high-and-mighty,” she said.
Maebelle was Mrs. Wingate’s house maid and she came with the rooms. She was a tall woman with a big bosom and she was as strong as a man. Her face was youthful, but she was born before the war to the house servants of a family in Portsmouth. She remembered her father loading her mother and her sisters into a dinghy one night and rowing down the Elizabeth River across Hampton Roads. They landed at Point Comfort. She remembered the Federal troops’ brass buttons shining in the firelight at Fort Monroe. The troops told them they were safe because they were now Confederate “cummerbund.” I told her she meant “contraband.” Maebelle was bundling my laundry. She said no, she knew what she remembered, since she was the one remembering, and was I one of them uppity white folks from Richmond, too? We left it at that.
Maebelle told me when Mr. Wingate wasn’t smoking cigars, he was fishing. When he wasn’t fishing, he was duck hunting. He left behind two Chesapeake Bay retrievers when he died. Mrs. Wingate moved the retrievers inside the house from the back porch where her husband had kept them “because them dogs was a sight easier to clean up after and better company than Mr. Wingate ever was, him tramping round in muddy boots and smoking them cigars in every room of the house,” Maebelle said. The dogs were old and slept in their beds in the entrance hall most of the time, but they followed Mrs. Wingate to whichever room in the house she was occupying. When she left the house for errands or church, the dogs peered out the front windows of the sitting room until she returned.
From my porch in the evenings I liked to watch the sparks of the trolleys dance along the lines at the stop. The sparks threw crazy shadows from the figures of people walking. A man would come by and light the gas streetlight. The light pooled from the last step of the iron stairs across the sidewalk into the street. A screen door opened into the kitchen and when the weather was good I left the inner door open for the breeze. Behind the kitchen was a good-sized room with a bed and dresser and a couple of chairs, and beyond that was the toilet with a sink and claw-foot tub.
“Mr. Charlie, that smoking ain’t good for you and it stinks up your clothes, too,” Maebelle said. She was standing at the foot of the steps. She had a cherry basket in her hand. “Come on down here and get you something to eat,” she said.
I put the cigarette in the cuspidor and trotted down the steps. She held out the basket. “Ham biscuits,” she said. She pulled back the cloth, then tucked it down. “They still warm. You didn’t eat a thing this morning, did you?”
I shook my head.
“Bony’s you is, ain’t no girl ever gone look at you twice. Lord!” She stuck the basket handle in my hand.
“Thank you, Maebelle,” I said.
“You welcome, Mr. Charlie. I got to get over to the house. Mrs. Wingate wanting to clean her curtains,” she said. “Mr. Charlie?”
“Yes?”
“What you think gone happen with this Christian girl? Used to work with her momma over at the hotel, years back.”
“Well,
