Ella Maud Read online

  When the seedlings were all cut and cured, Cropsey let it be known around town that sowing had come. Gangs of free workers—mostly blacks—gathered at dawn in front of the farm. Ollie would peep out at them from behind the parlor curtains. In the warm season, they would lie on the riverbank with shirts open, taking the breeze. On cooler days, they would gather in little knots, sharing cigarettes and tossing dice. Some leaned on shovels they brought themselves: the best, long-handled picks and spades, because many landowners, Cropsey included, provided short-handled ones.

  When a large enough gang of twenty or thirty men had gathered, Cropsey went out wearing his sun hat and riding boots. To Ollie’s eyes, her father took on a different character as he inspected the applicants. As he dismissed the ones who had been laggard or insufficiently pliant in the past, he seemed to swagger. He shut his ears to all the sad stories of the rejected men, who begged for another chance because they needed the work. When they wouldn’t leave the premises, he clapped his hand on a club he kept at his side.

  The rest of the men were put to work in the fields digging furrows, twelve inches deep and—all told—miles in length. The job took all day and into the next, hard sweaty work that forced them to strip down to bare skin even on chilly days. To keep them productive, the Cropsey boys were sent out with buckets of water. At noon, they brought a luncheon of bread and cheese and whichever fruit was in season, which the workers had to eat standing in the dirt. Though it would have been easier to have his daughters distribute these, Cropsey never let them out of the house with so many shirtless men of low means on the property. For the time being, this made Ollie and Nell and Lettie and the other girls into prisoners.

  Sometimes, as the sun began its long descent to evening, the Negro gangs drifted into song. They did it softly at first, as if seeking the landowner’s permission. If he didn’t object, more and more of the workers would join in, and the songs would get louder, until Ollie could hear them from any room in the house. They were not spritely tunes, but they were never purely sad. Instead, they seemed born more of loneliness. As she sat and listened, Ollie would think “Now here’s a thing”—a Brooklyn girl like herself transported to the doorstep of the South, as plainsongs of endurance sifted through the walls. They made her blue even when she couldn’t hear the words, and not always because of the men who sang them. Ollie, after all, had a flair for self-pity, and for some obscure reason it made her cry to think of how her life had changed.

  One morning during the summer sowing the family was gathered around the breakfast table.

  “Has anyone seen Nell today?” asked Mary Cropsey. “May? Lettie?”

  “Shouldn’t you ask Ollie that?” Douglas suggested.

  Ollie appeared, bearing a pitcher of cream. Of Nell’s whereabouts, she frowned: “She wasn’t in bed when I got up.”

  “You have no idea where she might be?”

  Ollie shrugged.

  The mystery was solved inside the hour. There was a lot of whistling coming from the workers in the fields. When Mary Cropsey went to the window to see why, she saw Nell out among them. She was striding through the furrows, not looking at the men as they stared and stumbled to get out of her way. She was dressed in her crimson riding dress, with a black picture hat the width of a barrelhead, hair full of curls on her shoulders and a basket of flowers on her arm. Her face was still, with a faint smile brushing her lips. She ignored the whooping and hollering from the white men — the blacks would never dare such a thing — but the commotion befitted her, as if she were some blood-daubed pagan priestess of the open fields.

  Her mother met her on the side porch. She concealed her fury until Nell presented her with the basket.

  “The wildflowers near the racetrack are so pretty…” she began.

  Mary Cropsey slapped Nell across the left cheek. The blow was so hard it knocked her hat off her head. Shocked, Nell covered her cheek with her hand.

  “How dare you!” said Mary.

  The workmen averted their eyes—as did the other Cropsey children in the windows.

  “You know what we told you,” continued her mother. “What do you think your father would say if he found out?”

  Nell’s eyes were wet. Then they hardened like the marble eyes of some ancient statue.

  “You’ll regret that!” she said, and ran into the house.

  Mary Cropsey stood for a moment longer, keeping her back to the others. When she turned to come inside, Ollie saw there were tears in her eyes too.

  Nell’s spilled basket of flowers and hat lay on the porch for the rest of the day. When the workmen left in the evening, and she was permitted to go out, Ollie retrieved them.

  Nell didn’t leave her room that day, not even for meals. Before bed, Ollie returned her hat to her.

  “So why did you do it?”

  “Because the flowers were blooming.”

  “Nell—”

  “Why has no one done it sooner? Is it fair that we are stuck in this stifling place, just because strangers are around?”

  “You know the rules.”

  “Yes, you are one for the rules, aren’t you?”

  “That is unkind,” said Ollie.

  To their mother’s question—what would their father do if he found out—they soon learned the answer. William Cropsey had been away all day, buying lumber at Kramer’s for a new fence. When he got back in the evening, the children watched for the explosion, but it never came. Instead, Cropsey ate his dinner silently, and didn’t inquire about Nell’s absence from the table. Whether to avoid another dramatic scene, or because Mary’s rebuke was enough, he pretended it was all beneath his notice.

  By the next morning all was back to normal, albeit with Nell’s face still bruised on the left side. Ollie didn’t want to see her sister suffer merely because of her high-spiritedness. But she could not help feeling that her sister had been treated differently again.

  After the digging of the furrows it was time to set the seedlings. The potato sections were brought out tenderly, like heirlooms. They were pushed into the bottom of the furrows, about a foot apart and an inch or two down, and then covered with manure. Cropsey hired carts full of the stuff, because the family’s animals could never produce enough. By this phase of the planting a rank odor filled the house—more so when pig manure was used. During the summer and fall plantings, on those humid days when there was no breeze from the river, the stench was staggering. The Cropsey girls developed a solution: they put a drop of perfume in a handkerchief, and tied it around their noses. Passersby who caught a glimpse of them through the windows might have thought the Cropsey residence was a plague house, with masked nurses and an odor not quite of death, but bad enough.

  Into these occasions Jim Wilcox would genially waft. With his cologned face and aura of sweet tobacco smoke, he seemed to come from a place where manure was a thing of the past. He brought sweets, and news of ships at the port lately arrived from islands of spice. The children would rush through their chores just to come and sit with him. In time, even Mary Cropsey smiled when she heard Jim’s particular rapping on the door. It was not thought odd that Lettie asked for a lock of his hair, to be woven into the family wreath.

  One of the things done in that time was for boys to serenade their sweethearts by moonlight. Jim made his debut one summer evening in ’99. Round midnight, Nell was drawn to her bedroom window by a sickly thin melody. Jim was below, sitting in a chair he must have carried down the street, playing the spoons against his knee. Behind him were two other men she didn’t recognize—one with a harmonica, the other sawing on a fiddle.

  After listening for a few seconds, Ollie rose up in bed.

  “What ARE they playing?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  The indeterminate tune meandered for a while until Jim stopped, and rounded on the fiddler.

  “Leo! Have you been drinking?”

  “Early and often,” came the smirking reply.

  Jim jumped up to give chase. Leo Owen
s dropped his fiddle, and Jim put his foot through it. He did so with such force that it stuck there, and he wore the busted instrument like a shoe as he stumbled across the yard, flinging curses. The neck of the violin tore a swath through her mother’s kitchen garden.

  Soon the only evidence of this concert was an upturned chair, some broken plants, and the fiddle bow Leo Owens had abandoned. Nell closed the curtain.

  “Well, it was sweet of him to try,” she said.

  “Yes, I suppose it was the best you could expect,” replied Ollie.

  They shared a more accomplished musical evening some weeks later, when Jim took Nell and Ollie to the Academy to see a show. It was the only Elizabeth City appearance of Hoover’s Amalgamated Genuine Ethiopians, a touring troupe of minstrels who boasted of being authentic blacks from the deepest South.

  Due to what was regarded as provocative Unionism, there hadn’t been many minstrel shows in North Carolina since the War. Elizabeth City, with so many transplanted Northerners, had never kept them out, and so had become a regular stop on the Baltimore to New Orleans circuit. To Ollie, such shows were already old-fashioned, being more associated with the times of her grandparents. Sophisticated girls from Brooklyn preferred legitimate theater, dances or, at worst, vaudeville. But as Hoover’s group boasted real blacks “straight from bosom of the old South”, it promised to be more interesting. So off they went.

  The hall was full when they arrived. The audience was almost entirely white, predominantly male, and seemed to hail mostly from the outlying quarters of the city. A smoky pall draped the room, half-concealing the stink of body odor. When the girls edged into their seats there were cat-calls, but no one dared meet Ollie’s eyes when she looked for their sources.

  Though drinking was forbidden in the auditorium, there was a lot of pointless laughing from spectators who had arrived drunk. Jim saved his fortification for the main event. With an air of accomplishment, he pulled a pewter flask from his waistband and showed it to the girls. Ollie quickly looked away. Nell shot him a reproving glare that wasn’t very sincere.

  The show began with a cakewalk, with all members of the company jumping, twisting and high-stepping to the sound of fiddles and tambourines. Ollie wouldn’t have thought it necessary, but most of the “genuine Ethiopians” were nevertheless in blackface. Only the host, a light-hued mulatto, was untouched by cork:

  “Ladies and gentlemen, gather ‘round as we regale you with the genuine sounds of a world sadly missed, an idyllic place, a glory to her people, betrayed by cruel war, lost in time…”

  “If ye got the time, dat iz!” injected the minstrel at the end of the line.

  There were songs, and moments when the performers could not contain their joy, and jumped up and danced. The host, who was dressed in an ill-fitting suit, puff tie and spats, tried and comedically failed to give the proceedings an air of class, to which some of the audience hooted “He’s a show horse, ain’t he?” and “Tell ‘em Senator!” A heavily inebriated gentleman rose from the audience and shouted “God hang you monkey-faced, purse-thievin’ dandy darkies!”. The crowd erupted in applause, and the other Ethiopians laughed and slapped their knees as if they were in on the joke.

  “I assure you, sir, I come from a distinguished family,” replied the dandy. “My brother climbs mountains. He climbed the Himalayas last year.” Then he pointed at one of the end-men, and asked “What mountains have your brother ever climbed?”

  “My brudder? Him-a-layin’ in bed every chance he get!”

  The first act was topped off with a rendition of the old favorite, Jump Jim Crow, by a singer in ill-fitting rags. He feigned a gimp as he danced—

  Come listen all ye girls and boys, I’m from Tucky-hoe

  I’m gonna sing a little song, my name’s Jim Crow.

  Weel about and turn about an do just so,

  Ebery time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow

  Oh, I’m a roarer on de fiddle, and down in old Virginny

  They say I play de skyentific like Massa Paganini…

  Wilcox made a display of enjoying himself. He laughed overloud, turning frequently to Ollie and Nell to make sure they were laughing too. Between guffaws he bent his head down to his knees to take nips from his flask. To Ollie, his conduct reflected weakness of character, as if he felt compelled to descend to the level of the rest of the audience. It bothered her so much, she found it hard to enjoy the music, which was—truth be told—better done than most all-white troupes. A Negro fiddler with face painted black as a railroad tie performed some of the best bowing she had ever heard.

  During the first break Nell got up to visit the powder room. When they were alone, Ollie turned to Jim:

  “Are you just going to sip on that, or finish it like a man?”

  He regarded her, surprised. Ollie met his gaze, not flinching.

  Jim was never afraid to take up a challenge from his co-workers and his peers at the saloon. So why would he shrink now, from a woman?

  He downed the rest of his whiskey in a dozen hearty gulps. Then he wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and stared back at her, triumphant.

  It didn’t take long for the extra liquor to show on him. As the three of them sat through the second act—which included a long, malaprop oration by the dandy on the absurdity of women’s suffrage—Jim suddenly had trouble keeping straight in his seat. His head lolled on his shoulders, and he slumped, and began to mutter under his breath.

  “James Wilcox, are you intoxicated?” asked Nell in a voice loud enough to be heard throughout the hall.

  Jim heaved a sheepish laugh. Someone from the audience chimed in, “Yeah Jim, ain’t ye drunk yet?”

  “Ollie, let’s go!” said Nell, red-faced and struggling to collect her things. As the ladies departed, the Ethiopians all rose to their feet, and the dandy doffed his cap.

  Later, on the porch at home, Nell fumed.

  “I’d never begrudge a man a drink or two. But to be falling-down drunk while escorting two women in public. It’s disrespectful!”

  Ollie kept silent, nodding her head but otherwise letting Nell’s pique run its course. If she felt at all guilty for goading Jim, it dwindled beside the fact that he was liable to be goaded in the first place. Yet she felt compelled to add, “I might have suggested he finish his bottle or get rid of it…”

  “To think he believes he’s with his low waterfront pals when he's out with me!” Nell went on, not hearing or not caring what Ollie said. “To think that’s the kind of conduct this family would approve…!”

  “I wonder what Ma and Pa will say about this.”

  At this thought, Nell fell silent. She sat in the glider. Her thoughts seemed to try her as she stared across the river.

  “I don’t think it would help to tell them,” she finally said.

  “I wouldn’t be much of an elder sister if I didn’t.”

  “No, I don’t think you should. Promise me.”

  “Nell—”

  “I said promise me!”

  “It’s only your happiness I have in mind,” said Ollie. “But don’t ask me to keep more secrets about him. From this day on.”

  “You won’t have to. You have my word.”

  She took Ollie’s hand, and they sat together looking at the river until someone put out the dining room light.

  VI.

  The Methodists are worth considering; they are nearer the soil. Their religious emotions can be transmuted into love and charity. They are not half bad; even though they will not take a drink, they really do not need it so much as some of their competitors for the seat next to the throne. If chance sets you down between a Methodist and a Baptist, you will move toward the Methodist to keep warm.

  --Clarence Darrow, How to Pick a Jury

  Jim had been game for any sort of entertainment for all the years of their acquaintance—until September of 1901. That was when the celebrity evangelist George R. Stuart came to town for a ten-day revival. Nell had read about him in the newspapers, and wanted Jim t
o escort her to his sermon at the Baptist Church on Sunday the 29th. But to her surprise, Jim turned her down flat.

  Stuart travelled far and wide on a campaign of temperance sermons that electrified and appalled the nation. Electrified, because he filled every house he spoke at, to the extent that hundreds of would-be attendees had to be turned away at the doors. His revivals were the despair of fire marshals, who had to countenance auditoriums packed shoulder-to-shoulder. In Dayton, Ohio, so many people came to hear him that he was obliged to deliver his sermon three times—once to the crowd in the sanctuary, again to those gathered in the basement, and a third time to the ones outside. In Portsmouth, two thousand people filled the largest hall in town, pressed so tightly that Stuart was unable to reach the stage. After the cry went up to “Lift him!”, he was raised on the shoulders of the people and invited to crawl to the pulpit over their very bodies.

  For all this anticipation, his crowds were never disappointed. Listeners, whether regular churchgoers or not, were reduced to states of reverent ecstasy by his words. Hundreds of hard-drinking men swore to Christ and Methodism after hearing just one of his sermons. It was not uncommon for business to plunge at the saloons in the towns he visited—at least for a whole day or two.

  Yet some were appalled by his popularity. Stuart, in fact, was no mere chapter-and-verse preacher. His fiery orations against Demon Alcohol were illustrated not only with examples from the Bible, but juicy stories ripped straight from the yellow press. Faithless wives, corrupt politicians, drunkard sons and husbands, thieves, whores, murderers and divorcees all figured in his parables. To certain old-school critics, Stuart’s ministry smacked more of titillation than righteousness.