Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [76]
Father employed two Negroes at his manufactory, one as a janitor, the other as an assembler of rocket tubes. Neither reported to work the day of the second disaster. In fact Negroes were to be seen nowhere in the city. They stayed home behind locked doors. That night police arrested on the street several white citizens carrying pistols and rifles. The Governor responded to the Mayor’s appeal by sending in two companies of militia from New York City. They arrived the next morning and immediately set up their tents on the baseball field behind the high school. Children gathered to watch. Special editions of the local papers were published and each carried prominently the text of Coalhouse’s second letter. This is what it said: One, that the white excrescence known as Willie Conklin be turned over to my justice. Two, that the Model T Ford with its custom pantasote top be returned in its original condition. Until these demands are satisfied, let the rules of war prevail. Coalhouse Walker Jr., President, Provisional American Government.
At this point everyone’s most urgent need was to know what Coalhouse Walker looked like. The newspapers competed fiercely. Newsmen stormed the offices of the Clef Club Orchestra in Harlem. There were no pictures to be had that included the face of the infamous pianist. Hearst’s American triumphantly went to press with a portrait of the composer Scott Joplin. Friends of Joplin threatened to sue, the composer being in the last stages of a terminal illness and unable to see to his own interests. Apologies were tendered. Finally a newspaper in St. Louis came up with a picture that was reprinted widely. Father recognized it to be accurate. It showed a somewhat younger Coalhouse sitting at an upright piano in white tie and tails. His hands were on the keyboard and he was smiling for the camera. Grouped around the piano were a banjo player, a cornetist, a trombonist, a violinist and a drummer bent over a snare drum. They were all in white tie. They were posed as if playing but were clearly not. A circle was drawn around Coalhouse’s head. This became the standard photo. The ironies of a smiling black man with a neat moustache, an altogether cheerful and forthright physiognomy, were too delicious for the caption writers to resist. Smile of a killer, they said. Or the President of the Provisional American Government in happier days.
Under the intense and widespread investigation by the press the family’s role in the entire affair could not be kept hidden. Reporters, first in ones and twos, later in larger groups, began to knock on the door, and then, being refused admittance, to camp outside under the Norwegian maples. They wanted to see the brown child, they wanted statements of any kind about Coalhouse and his visits to Sarah. They peeked through the windows of the parlor and came around to the kitchen door to try the lock. They wore straw boaters and carried pads in their pockets. They chewed tobacco and spit it on the ground and crushed cigarettes under their heels in the grass. Pictures of the house appeared in the New York papers. There were inaccurate accounts