Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [82]
Even if there was at this point a public demand for a strategy of negotiation, which there was not—not even the press suggested it—no one could have had any idea of how to get in touch with the killer. Coalhouse had not announced how much time he granted them till the next attack. Indeed, there was an opinion delivered by an alienist hired by the New York World that the second of the letters, signed Coalhouse Walker, President, Provisional American Government, was much advanced beyond the first in its signals of mental deterioration, and that to deal with someone in the throes of a progressive delusionary madness as if he were open to reason would be a tragic mistake.
However, it was left to the plain citizenry of New Rochelle to come up with the most practical idea for dealing with the problem. From every neighborhood and every class the cry arose for Willie Conklin to leave town. Some irate citizens even communicated with Conklin himself. He brought into police headquarters several unsigned letters delivered to his mailbox, all suggesting that if he did not pack up and leave New Rochelle they, the writers, would do Coalhouse Walker’s job for him. Like all of Conklin’s moves, sharing his correspondence with the authorities was a mistake. It did not generate their sympathy, as he had hoped, but simply made up their minds to sponsor the idea. From the beginning Conklin had been unable to understand how anyone who was white could feel for him less than the most profound admiration. The more unpopular he became the more piteous his bewilderment. The miserable fellow understood nothing and saw the public outcry for his exile not in its larger strategy, as a means of defusing the situation, nor even in the small, as a means perhaps of saving his own life. He felt martyred by what he called the nigger lovers, even though these now seemed to constitute virtually the entire population of the city. He drank himself into a state of torpor and became dumbly complaisant as his wife and associates made arrangements for their departure.
Thus, with no one completely in command of the situation, with municipal authorities, police, state militia and citizenry all nervous and unsure in their continuing vulnerability to the black guerrilla, two things were caused to happen more or less by public consensus that were roughly analogous to a recognition of his demands: the Model T Ford had been raised, possibly foretelling some kind of negotiation, and he could read, if he was in range of the New Rochelle papers, both of which gave the largest headlines in their history to the intelligence, that the Conklin family had gone into hiding in New York City. No concessions had been made and the streets bristled with military and paramilitary deployments. But the situation was altered. Let him now burn down the entire metropolis of New York, one editorial said. Or accept the principle that any man who takes the law into his own hands places himself against a civilized and resolute people and defames the very justice he seeks to enforce.
In contrast to all of this the family’s departure was private and unreported. Father contracted with the Railway Express to transport their baggage—a matching pair of wicker trunks he had bought for the occasion, each with several drawers and compartments and a commodious closet for hanging clothes, a brass-studded footlocker and several suitcases and hat-boxes—and they rode out of New Rochelle on a train that came through at the crack of dawn. Later that morning in New York they made connections with an Atlantic City train in Pennsylvania Station. This was the station designed by the firm of Stanford White and Charles McKim. Its stone colonnade façades, modeled on the Roman baths at Caracalla, spanned 31st to 33rd Street, and 7th to 8th Avenue. Porters helped with Grandfather’s wheelchair. Mother was wearing a white ensemble. The laundress held Sarah’s child. The station on the inside was so vast that although it was filled