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, there’s a good bit of evidence against her. She had Mrs. Belote’s purse, with some money.”
She shook her head. “It’s a bad thing, Mr. Charlie,” she said. “Colored folks got to be able to work in people’s houses. You take Mrs. Wingate, living here all by herself. What she gone think?”
“I wouldn’t worry, Maebelle. The law will follow its course.”
“I seen all kinds of laws, Mr. Charlie. I seen laws come and I seen them go. Whatever gone happen, it best happen quick.”
Maebelle headed for the front of Mrs. Wingate’s house. The wind had shifted to the southwest and the sky had cleared. The air was beginning to warm. I came up to the porch and ate a biscuit. Maebelle had sprinkled a little brown sugar and black peppercorns on her ham when she fried it. I thought I could eat the whole basket. I found a handkerchief and wrapped a biscuit in it for later in the day. I tucked the cover cloth back in the basket and set it on the table in the kitchen.
The cabinet above the sink in the bathroom was open, and from the doorway I could see my reflection in the mirror. I did look thin. And wan. When warm weather came on, I would go down to the Roads more, get out in the sunlight. Smoke fewer cigarettes. Maybe by fall I would be ready to go back to school. But now I needed to go by the newspaper.
Mr. Hobgood tossed back a glass as I walked in and placed it on his desk pad. He looked terrible. The circles around his eyes were always dark and this morning they looked like bruises.
“People are stirred up, Mears,” he said. “They want blood.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good job reporting on the inquest.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“What was the name of that colored lawyer? The one the father went to on Wine Street?”
“George Washington Fields.”
“Fields, that’s right. Better see what you can find out from him. Make sure he’s representing the girl before the grand jury.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Mrs. Belote’s brother. Hobbs.” He rummaged around on his desk. “Where’s that infernal note? Oh, here. Lewter F. Hobbs. Hobbs-Newby Equipment Co., Inc. Norfolk. Supposedly he’s friends with Montague. They went to school together or some damn thing. See what you can find out there.”
“He’s friends with the Commonwealth’s attorney?”
“Yes, yes, Edgar Montague. No need to shout, Mears!” Mr. Hobgood pressed his hand to his forehead.
“No, sir.” I leaned forward. “Would you like some water, Mr. Hobgood?”
“No, Mears, I’m fine. Oh, be sure to check with Sheriff Curtis. Heard a Negro assaulted a white girl on Buckroe Beach.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you have a cigarette, Mears?”