Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [147]
ROOSEVELT PUT ASIDE HIS foreign-policy troubles on the new White House tennis court. He played with intense concentration, quite unaware of the strangeness of his style. When serving, he grasped the racket stem halfway, forefinger pointing upward. His myopia kept him close to the net, but his reflexes were so quick that he nevertheless covered the court well, chasing the balls that got past him. After smashing a winning shot, he would rejoice with falsetto shrieks, and hop around on one foot, singing and laughing. Washington’s tour guides began driving their vehicles down West Executive Avenue, with megaphoned commentary: “To the left you will see the famous tennis court. On most any pleasant afternoon you may see the President there, reaching for a high ball.”
Roosevelt’s favorite opponents were Gifford Pinchot and James Garfield. Although they were younger and more lithe than he, he could manage three sets with either of them. Speck von Sternburg, his old partner from Civil Service Commission days, still played a decent game, and Henry Cabot Lodge returned serves from all positions consonant with senatorial dignity. But the season’s real surprise was Jules Jusserand. Looking not unlike a Mont Blanc chamois, with his pointy beard and neat, precise leaps, the little ambassador darted about the court as nimbly as he ranged the field of medieval literature. Roosevelt beamed at him with increasing favor, much to the envy of Count Cassini, who received no invitations.
ON 22 JUNE, the President received a letter from his first Southern appointee, Judge Thomas G. Jones of Alabama. He was pleased to read that Jones had, true to Booker T. Washington’s recommendation, condemned peonage as the modern equivalent of slavery, and sentenced several white racists to prison for holding black “employees” against their wills. Roosevelt sent a copy to Lyman Abbott (his most consistently reliable editorial supporter). “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “there is in the South a very large element … which hates and despises the Negro but is bent upon his continuing in the land.”
The “element” was larger than he thought, and not confined to the South. One hundred miles northeast of the White House that evening, quiet groups of white men began to collect around a penitentiary near Wilmington, Delaware. The building was a massive structure, representing the latest in prison engineering. Wilmington’s police chief, whose name was Black, had chosen it to shelter a Negro murder suspect, whose name was White. Black felt that White needed all the security he could get, because the murder victim—who had identified him before dying—was a white teenage girl.
White sat now deep within the penitentiary, in a steel cell in a steel gallery in a steel chamber, sheathed behind brick walls, each with its own steel door, then a thicker wall, with a bigger door of wood and steel, then a yard, then another brick wall, and the biggest door of all, beyond which the quiet groups were forming.
Daylight faded. Still more quiet men came from the city, and from the fields, until there were no spaces left between the groups waiting for dark. The communal mood was disciplined, almost professional. Marksmen checked their rifles; boilermakers armed themselves with freshly sharpened saws and cold-steel chisels; quarriers counted out sticks of dynamite; shipyard workers readied a huge launch ram.
At sunset, electric lights went on in the yard. The marksmen took aim. Quickly, methodically, every bulb was shot out. Inside, the warden took his wife and children upstairs and locked them in the women’s chamber. Chief Black and two deputies arrived, stood against the yard door, and pleaded that the law be allowed to take its course. A short man in a red sweater listened, smiling, then said, “Come on boys, get to one side, you’re bothering us.” Out of the darkness came the ram, and the big door split like balsa. The crowd, four thousand strong now, surged roaring into the yard.
Guards on the penitentiary