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TO ROBERT J. HOUSTON AND
EVELYN YURCISIN HOUSTON
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Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. The Nashville Way 1
One. A Manner of Segregation: Lived Race Relations and Racial Etiquette 13
Two. The Triumph of Tokenism: Public School Desegregation 47
Three. The Shame and the Glory: The 1960 Sit-ins 82
Four. The Kingdom or Individual Desires?: Movement and Resistance during the 1960s 123
Five. Black Power/White Power: Militancy in Late 1960s Nashville 164
Six. Cruel Mockeries: Renewing a City 202
Epilogue. Achieving Justice 235
Notes 243
Bibliography 295
Index 311 CONTENTS
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has been with me for a long time and through a lot of changes. There are tons of people to thank, personally and professionally.
I gratefully acknowledge the financial support that underwrote major parts of the research and writing of this book. The McLaughlin Grant from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Florida, was absolutely critical in providing a summer of intensive research in Nashville. A Dissertation Writing Fellowship from the Louisville Institute was similarly significant in allowing concentrated energy and attention to completing the first draft. Smaller but valuable grants from the Southern Baptist Library and Archives, Emory University, and Georgia State University, plus the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson presidential libraries, permitted me to explore important research angles. The Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (cause) at Carnegie Mellon University generously supported my ongoing research agenda, as has Newcastle University. I also thank folks at Edinburgh, Sunderland, and Cambridge Universities for chances to present my work and talk through my findings. Similarly, I’m grateful to the staff and fellows at Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, sponsor of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Summer Institute on civil rights, for a month of intensive thinking and study. All created tremendous opportunities for me.
I would also like to acknowledge those in Nashville who were incredibly supportive. George Barrett welcomed me with dozens of stories and insights, and I thank him for his boundless generosity (and for the cigars). Don Doyle and Marjorie Spruill graciously opened their home during a summer of research, making an immense difference during my Nashville jaunt. Pete Kuryla and Bob Hutton were especially fantastic in welcoming me to the city, talking shop and hilarious nonsense in equally entertaining measure. And I am most appreciative of those who were agreeable to being interviewed or pointed me in new directions. Similarly, I cannot thank enough all the fantastic archivists who rolled up their sleeves and
helped a rookie researcher immerse myself in Nashville’s documentation. I particularly am grateful to Kathy Smith and Teresa Gray at Vanderbilt, Beth Howse at Fisk, Ken Fieth at the Nashville Metro Archives, Kathy Bennett and Sue Loper at the Nashville Public Library, and Chris Harter at Amistad Research Center. Beth Odle at the Nashville Public Library was particularly patient in helping me find the right photos for this book.
In direct and indirect ways, the driving interest in this book first stirred at Rhodes College. Tim Huebner saw something and worked indefatigably for my sake more than his, and I thank him for the belief. Russ Wigginton gave me a first peek at the civil rights movement; he and Doug Hatfield gave sage advice freely. Even before that, I carried a bit of Paul Hammock’s and Doreen Uhas-Sauer’s influence on me wherever I went, and still do—thank you for what you did. As a dissertation, this project was birthed at the History Department at the University of Florida, where I had the great fortune of working with great people and scholarteachers. Julian Pleasants is a good man and had my back in a number of ways. Roberta Peacock looked after me in many different ways. Bert Wyatt-Brown, Fitz Brundage, and Jack Davis were very good role models for me in various ways, and I thank them for their energy and support. And special thanks especially to mate and tireless mentor, Brian Ward.
I’m also grateful for all the uf gang: Jenny, Jace and Shannon, Craig and Amanda, Sonya and Barclay, Carmen, Bud and Theodora, Jason, Mike, Tim, Kristin, Randall, Kim, Bryan, Dave, and Chris—good times and fine people all the way around. Alan and Lynn were exceptional for their wisdom, caring, and hilarity, and triple thanks to Barclay for enduring all those damn e-mails. Professionally, I would also like to mention Wesley Hogan, Tony Badger, Ray Arsenault, Jane Dailey, Mike Foley, Bill Link, Ellie Shermer, Mike Ezra, Clive Webb, George Lewis and Liz Gritter for advice and good sense in varied capacities, as well as the good folks at the University of Georgia Press.
Working at the Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy was a tremendous first job. Thanks go to Joe Trotter, a fine man and consummate professional who taught me a lot. I’m also grateful to Tera Hunter, Johanna Fernandez, Edda Fields-Black, John Soluri, Nancy Aronson, Allen Hahn, and Jared Day for welcoming me to the school and the profession. Similar thanks go to Kevin, Russell, Lisa, and the rest of the graduate students for their cheerful energy, with special appreciation to Kate Chilton and Alex Bennett for able research assistance. Lisa Hazirjian and Derek Musgrove were especially splendid comrades/colleagues/friends and, in the case of “Gee, Derek,” a sorry excuse for a beer drinker but a very fine voicemail leaver.
x · ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Shifting across the pond to teach in England has landed me among a lot of amazing people. Hot-water bottles were just the start from Martin Dusinberre, but now that I’ve thanked him in print, I can stop checking my phone and he can stop killing me in squash. Saying thank you is simply inadequate for Joe Street, Martin F., Felix, Xavier, Asuka, Susan-Mary, Carolyn, Lorenzo, Matt, Monica, Alex, Sam, Claudia, Joan, Tim, Samiksha, Di, Kate, Mike, David, and Scott, but I hope they know that I mean it. Thanks also to the Friday footy crew for enduring my sad attempts at being a striker and for the ales afterward. Now that the book is done, I can safely exhort: “Long live Big W”!
On a more personal note: thanks to Melanie Sylvan, Heather Sebring, Andrew Vlahutin, Christine Leong, B.J. and Andrea Yurcisin, and Brandon and Trudy Barr for letting me crash on sofas during various research trips and always being there, in so many rich and amazing ways. Thanks for reminding me where I came from and where I could go. Much love to Nikolai and Ellen, who more than anyone can keep me balanced (and I’m sorry about the printer), and to Lori for the e-mails, laughter, and moral support. This book is dedicated to Robert J. Houston and Evelyn Yurcisin Houston, my parents. Both of them taught me about history in very different but hugely important ways. Their sustenance and love was manifested every day in a thousand large and small examples.
And finally: Michelle. It’s not just any person who on any given day can and will proofread my chapters, give me a yoga lesson, help me thrash out ideas over a pint, or bring me countless cups of coffee as I furiously pound away on a keyboard. That’s just a fraction of what she does. Yet, who she is, and what she has brought to my life, is even more luminous.
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The Nashville Way
These aberrations are kept going more by unwritten and un-writable laws than by the written law affecting the races: by an immense and elaborate code of etiquette that governs their daily relations; by an exquisite and intuitive tact on the part of both whites and Negroes; by adherence to a labyrinthine code of manners, taboos and conventions. There is therefore a sense of strain in the air, of a delicately poised equilibrium of forces held in leash. Here men toss uneasily at night, and awake fatigued in the morning. —David L. Cohn, “How the South Feels,” 1944
Among all the vivid examples of Jim Crow– style segregation in the South, some of the ugliest were the stark white and colored signs paired with shiny or shabby restrooms and water fountains. As powerful symbols of the racial divide, these markers were all the more chilling for being so casual. And yet, for someone strolling through downtown Nashville in the 1940s, those signs were not always there, forcing the visitor to chart a far more bewildering path. No white or colored designations adorned the restrooms in the state capitol, for example. Nor were there any in the post office, where both races waited in line together—although the watchful eye would note that black postal employees always worked in the back room under white supervision but never at the service window.
Walking through the city-county building downtown, however, yielded mixed messages. The upper floor did have segregated restrooms, but no one bothered to ensure that people obeyed the mandate. The first floor instead had what used to be a colored sign, painted over because of a lack of white facilities, alongside a water fountain used by both races. Similarly, in one railway station where some whites worked side by side with blacks, the restrooms were segregated but “similarly equipped” and a common water fountain served both races. At the customs house, the colored restroom for black employees was considered well-appointed despite being segregated—but the public restrooms and water fountains were used
by both races. For audiences at the city auditorium, the color line switched invisibly depending on the crowd: sometimes blacks were relegated to balconies, but other times both floors were divided, with the poorer of both races up in the cheaper seats. And while Nashville courtrooms did not have racially designated seating, “Negroes always discreetly leave a foot or more of space between themselves and whites.”
In myriad ways, an important aspect of race’s legacy in modern U.S. history is how space and place were preserved or rearranged by whites and African Americans in large and small dimensions. As both races went about their lives, the South’s social dynamics loomed conspicuously in even the most routine interracial interaction. In a Nashville courtroom, the quiet use of gaps between people seated on a bench had far deeper meaning as an expression of social distance. But, on a vaster scale, the molding of various spaces into black and white neighborhoods told equally important stories about how economic and political clout constructed laws and public policies that shaped and reflected the social dynamics of Nashville. This book is an account of how two races in one city, with a shared history yet divergent paths, utilized and fought over social and physical space in diverse ways. Within that story is a bigger tale about the urban South most immediately, U.S. history more generally, and particularly how racial legacies remain in the present. Even as the turbulent years of the modern civil-rights era altered laws and customs, the patterns of segregation, in reforming, retained resonance with the past.
It may seem surprising that Nashville’s story is at least somewhat analogous with other southern—and, indeed, U.S.—places given that Nashville boosters relentlessly conveyed a sense of the city’s uniqueness, often in cheery nicknames. For example, “The Rock City” derived from its perch atop graceful limestone cliffs with the Cumberland River meandering through the gentle hilly landscape of middle Tennessee below. “The Protestant Vatican” invokes Nashville’s religiosity, as the city to this day has numerous churches and headquarters several major denominational institutions. Similarly, “The Athens of the South” refers to the city’s seventeen colleges and universities, many of them religiously affiliated, and locals even built a full-scale replica of the Parthenon in homage to this appellation. “The Wall Street of the South” tips a hat to the banks and insurance companies responsible for Nashville’s prosperity. Taken together, these appellations epitomized Nashville’s religious, educated, and white-collar character. More recently, “Music City, U.S.A.” acknowledges Nashville’s heritage in fostering and capitalizing on the rich tradition of country music.
Because Nashville’s elite had such fervent pride in the city’s image, it was startling when someone tried to puncture these affectations. This happened in July 1945 when white Nashville educator J. E. Windrow addressed the Kiwanis Club
and lauded Nashville as “the ideal city” and the “queen city of culture,” with “all the ingredients of civilized society,” where “at last is found man at his best.” But Windrow immediately deflated these glowing plaudits with a lengthy list of Nashville’s problems: the smoke smothering the city skyline, the “civil lethargy” represented by voter apathy, the “staggering death rate” of tuberculosis victims, and assorted social ills such as high venereal disease rates, infestations of flea-ridden rats, inadequate garbage collection, juvenile delinquency, and poor housing, sanitation, and sewage. Disgusted with the inaction of Nashville’s professors and civic clubs in confronting such problems, Windrow chided those who “buried their heads in the sands of the magnolia-scented past.”
Windrow’s critique suggested that Nashville’s slogans give only superficial glimpses into the city’s character. Many stress instead that understanding Nashville requires grasping the city’s inherent paradoxes. One observer, traveling through Tennessee in 1962, noted that “It is difficult to believe one state can have such different ‘moods.’ ” Nashville personified this as the capital city in the middle of a state adjoining eight others. The city stood geographically at a crossroads roughly equidistant between border and Deep South, and likewise between the cool rugged mountains around Chattanooga and the flat scorching Delta surrounding Memphis. One historian and resident of the city used the same term in writing that Nashville is “as much a mood as it is a place,” as it commingled remnants of a self-professed “genteel Old South” and “reminders of a Confederate heritage” with the “bustle of a New South commercial town,” the bawdiness of a river city and the fundamentalist roots of a religious center, an urban lifestyle and the homespun country values of rural people tied to the land. As the city’s elites built the trappings of a major urban center (sophisticated political leadership, art galleries, a symphony, renowned institutions of higher education, reputable newspapers), rural migrants of both races from surrounding counties in Middle Tennessee, South Kentucky, and North Alabama flocked to Nashville, searching for more lucrative work or more fun in hardscrabble lives. Even Nashville’s fledgling country music scene grew from uncertain parenthood, mixing sharecropper’s blues migrating east from Memphis with Appalachian folk music filtering west. Never mind that Nashville’s best citizens sniffed haughtily at the unwashed crowds who littered outside fine churches before cramming into the pews of a hillbilly show called the Grand Ole Opry. The city housed all these paradoxes and more; anyone looking to comprehend Nashville’s history must hold these tensions in place—rural and urban, polished elites and gritty common folk, a backwardlooking past and a forward-looking gaze—to discern the city’s character. When Windrow spoke in 1945, he addressed changing political shifts in the city. But the internal contradictions he identified were especially apparent as Nash-
ville grappled with tumultuous racial issues during the post–World War II era. Here, too, another slogan, “The Nashville Way,” captured the self-professed style of Tennessee’s capital city, where pride, provincialism, and paternalism melded in powerful ways. Nashville’s boosters trumpeted amicable race relations as a city virtue and recourse to catch-phrase characterization was tempting. “In Nashville, we don’t have race relations, we have human relations!” Mayor Ben West crowed in the 1950s. “Nashville’s segregation,” remembered local white journalist David Halberstam, “was largely of a soft kind, administered, it sometimes seemed, not with the passion of angry racist officials, but more as a cultural leftover from the past.”
In the vernacular of the time, Nashville was a moderate city. Even those casually familiar with the dynamics of southern race relations will recognize this word and its synonyms civil, progressive, genteel, and respectable, all used widely throughout the South. Traditionally, these words were all different hues of the same color; they corresponded to an upper-class emphasis on manners, decorum, and a hypersensitive avoidance of civic unrest. Moderation meant a more or less genuine sympathy for black advancement undergirded by deeply felt assumptions of black inferiority and white superiority. This combination, taken for granted by white southerners in the mid-twentieth century, remained so deeply ingrained that it barely needed conscious consideration or even acknowledgment. As historian William Chafe puts it precisely, it was “a paternalism so unconscious it would never be called such by whites.” Moderation was used frequently to depict a racial stance that positioned itself between sweeping declarations of vicious racism and the sanctioning of racial equality, defining itself against extremism rather than for a particular racial philosophy. Thus the moderate philosophy had no internal cohesion in steering between two powerful poles of racial thinking: avoiding the vituperative racism of hard-core segregationists, but often equally skeptical about southern racial progressives. Essentially, moderates were segregationists—segregation was, after all, what they had been raised on, taught, and acculturated to, and the prospect of an integrated society confounded their imagination—but the style with which they professed their racial superiority differed from other whites.
For black southerners, who knew more about the agonies of segregation than whites ever could, moderation was empty and self-serving rhetoric, and black Nashvillians especially knew better than to accept local platitudes about race. Local observers dismissed the collective back-patting of white moderates as superficial, noting that “[Nashville’s white] citizens are constantly under the temptation to glory in the past when present problems seem too much for them.” They saw moderate discussions, even those under the auspices of interracial cooperation, as rarely yielding concrete or significant change. Instead, “the tendency is to talk over local problems so much that we think we talk them out of existence.” The
irony was that Nashville’s black community, despite segregated realities, were fundamental to the qualities that white Nashville took such pride in: the prominent African American colleges and universities in Nashville were part of the “Athens of the South,” black banks and businesses were a small but notable component of the “Wall Street of the South,” and black religious institutions part of the “Protestant Vatican.” These black institutions cultivated resultant values among African Americans in Nashville in much the same way that white Nashville did.
It is significant, then, that there was an identifiable black “Nashville Way” that looms prominently in civil rights movement history—as movement veteran John Lewis later recalled, “something happened in Nashville that did not happen any other place in America.” In 1960, as lunch-counter sit-ins swept the South, Nashvillians found their city home to a unique cohort of demonstrators, most from elsewhere but uniquely incubated in this environment. Perhaps more than any other cluster of civil rights activists, this Nashville-based group fused African American religious tradition with a number of different intellectual influences in absorbing the philosophy and meaning behind nonviolent direct action and adopting it as a way of life rather than as a mere tactic. Thus emboldened, these Nashvillians later played crucial roles in founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc), rescuing the 1961 Freedom Rides, and participating in virtually every major subsequent southern battle of the movement, including those in Jackson, Birmingham, and Selma. Although the absolute quality inherent in this conception of the movement’s possibilities frequently jarred with more pragmatically inclined civil rights veterans, the Nashvillians comprised, in many ways, both the literal and figurative soul of this phase of the black freedom struggle. The 1960 sit-ins began in other states, argues activist C. T. Vivian, “but the Movement began here in Nashville.”
Thus more paradoxes: the carefully mannered representative politeness of the white Nashville Way and the uniquely daring, radical, and transformative possibilities of the black Nashville Way both sprang from the same city. This book attempts to explore both Nashville Ways, their origins and trajectories, and the results when the two clashed. Both ways were styles of belief and action that shed light on southern urban racial dynamics during the civil rights era. All the self-clichés about white Nashville’s culture and pretensions of mannered graciousness, the self-image as a city that retained the finest aspects of the Old South’s “magnoliascented past” while adapting to the best elements of progress and change, signaled the unspoken belief that race relations could be managed, that the Southern Way of Life could adapt without sacrificing core elements. The laid-back political and business climate in white Nashville made for a functional approach to race relations that begrudgingly dealt with immediate conflicts while resisting structural,
functional, and comprehensive change. And, by claiming Nashville as a good city for black people, white Nashvillians were able to downplay and deemphasize civic issues that had profound racial implications for the city. Conversely, the unusual example of nonviolence in Nashville highlights longer trends within black Nashville, as African Americans sought refuge in the same virtues of civic pride and personal respectability while still challenging white Nashvillians to match moderate rhetoric with substantive action. That internal tensions within the black community, much like the white, dictated the course of racial activism was another critical part of the story. Thus some shared values smoothed over what was a deeper racial reality of constant contentiousness between and within the races. This tension between Nashville’s rhetoric and Nashville’s actions—and how integration did or did not occur across the city—is the core theme of this book.
The Nashville Way argues that both civil rights activism and white responses to battles over jobs and public accommodations sprang from the elaborate racial etiquette of the Jim Crow past and were updated according to new circumstances decades later. This etiquette simultaneously provided whites with self-justification for their racial beliefs while channeling black resistance. But a combination of legal and political maneuvers in the mid-1950s, responding to movement endeavors and accelerating throughout the 1960s, changed the rules. Whether by explicit design or benign indifference, this maneuvering remapped the spatial layout of the city so that race and class remained deeply encoded in the physical layout of the city. To be sure, this had happened consistently throughout the twentieth century as neighborhoods around the city changed racial demographics according to the demands of white businesses and politicians. It was not only a case of white flight to suburbs, although that happened in droves, but a combination of city policies that directly targeted black neighborhoods and institutions where movement activism had flourished. As the racial etiquette of the first half of the century was meant to preserve social hierarchies in the spaces where the races interacted, so did the second half of the century see whites dictating the same in terms of the city’s physical design to preclude that sort of interaction. Both were meant to reinforce black economic dependence on whites. Whites reshaped urban space as the blacks, however fitfully, began to break out of their “place”; despite the change in etiquette, the structural dimensions of segregation were reinforced in analogous ways.
These conflicts between rhetoric and action, racial law and racial custom, space and place, were just some of the tensions embedded in the Jim Crow racial order before this book begins. Nashville’s racial culture drew directly from the wider socioeconomic makeup of the city, but this was part of an ongoing reality that most urban U.S. locales during the twentieth century were struggling between traditional and progressive impulses more broadly in negotiating shifting economic
contexts. By 1945, Nashville was a major city regionally, although less so nationally, lagging behind Atlanta and Birmingham in attracting industry. Instead, the local economy depended on shipping and distribution businesses plus local banking and insurance companies that were regional powerhouses. Conservative mentalities governed white businessmen in these years, especially with a distinctive laggardly attitude toward interfering in political and social affairs, and racial matters in particular.
While white Nashville was happy to make its peace with the New South in economic terms, its conservatism aligned naturally with a cultural harkening back to the Old South. If Atlanta was “the city too busy to hate,” Nashville may well have termed itself “the city too well-bred to hate.” Like Atlanta’s motto, that was Nashville’s white lie, even though it spoke to a certain attitude that was historically rooted. But this lie not only obscured the hateful behavior of many in the city, it also soft-pedaled the reality that racism could be driven by attitudes other than mere hatred. Jim Crow had been designed to force African Americans to stage public deference to supposed white superiority. When that insufficiently cowed black resistance, segregation was shored up with repressive racial laws so as to normalize white supremacy publicly in daily life as an added insult to the economic subjugation and violent repression of African Americans. Indeed, at the time, segregation was considered a quite progressive measure that hoped to tame violent racial passions into an orderly disaggregating of racial privilege, particularly in cities where racial interaction was frequent.
But African Americans in Nashville did not stand for mere flattery. By World War II, even as segregation’s cultural hold powerfully controlled the white mind, there were some signs of erosion elsewhere. Nashville’s downtown and underworld were realms where racial interaction occurred in uncertain ways, often weakly or shamefully defended by whites or not at all. Connections between black and white Nashville existed in business and politics—never on an equal plane but, in those connecting places, the racial etiquette of the past held sway. As John W. Cell pointed out, “Jim Crow was a city slicker”—the etiquette was built to preserve distinctions in these realms of racial intersections. Segregated life in Nashville built diverse black populations that fought this etiquette as well as more tangible battles against segregation simultaneously in individual and collective ways. Even as African Americans shrewdly learned to play the game of racial etiquette according to different rules by trading off opportunities for individual survival, the game was still rigged to reaffirm the broader system of segregation and allow whites to luxuriate in their false sense of racial superiority.
This contradiction is captured as chapter 1 surveys the social and political dynamics of Nashville from the late 1930s into the mid-1950s, when racial etiquette
had a fluid yet formidable hold on Nashville. The chapter endeavors to capture the lived reality for both whites and blacks in one segregated society. It emphasizes both the racial etiquette that governed the behavior of both races, as well as the spatial layout of the city’s urban segregation patterns, in order to give a full picture of life under Jim Crow. Chapter 1 also introduces some personalities key to Nashville’s history to show how these figures represented networks of interracial progressives and white conservatives contesting each other over racial issues. All these elements form crucial context for understanding the racial fissures that subsequently develop.
As various versions of grassroots activism in Nashville blossomed into a fullscale movement, black Nashvillians fought segregated mentalities directly in the struggle over public education and public accommodations, along with scores of other battles for better employment opportunities, enhanced voting power, and access to social, political, and economic equality. Chapter 2 is an account of public school desegregation in Nashville during the mid- and late 1950s, the process of which yielded “The Nashville Plan,” a model for other southern communities. The chapter focuses particularly on how self-proclaimed white moderates struggled with, and ultimately largely succeeded in, dictating the terms and pace of school desegregation.
After white moderates controlled school desegregation, the local movement had its most triumphant achievement during the 1960 lunch-counter sit-ins explored in chapter 3. Here, diverse tactics and personalities harmonized in pursuit of a common goal by playing directly on the hypocrisies and distortions of Nashville’s racial etiquette and making Nashville a different model, now one that showcased the possibilities of disciplined nonviolent direct action. But equally importantly, the sit-ins forged a collectivity in black Nashville that would not be duplicated thereafter. Perhaps more importantly, beyond the stirring moral call of nonviolence and the militancy in seeing nonviolence as a way of life, the campaign united and directed the political and economic power of black Nashville—significant enough to be compelling—toward a single target.
This exceptional moment, and the following battles that continued throughout the 1960s, resulted in unrelenting and constant violent outbursts meant to thwart movement ambitions on a level that few accounts in Nashville then and now dared to acknowledge openly. Chapter 4 brings the themes of chapters 2 and 3 together in surveying ongoing civil rights struggles up to the mid-1960s as activists struggled to extend the lessons and possibilities of the lunch-counter sit-ins into other arenas. Subtle changes in white resistance, continued attempts to sustain the movement, and detailed patterns of how desegregation actually occurred show the mixed results of racial change in these years. The outbursts on some level were ac-
knowledgment that blacks were no longer following the script and that the racial etiquette of the past was fading. Slowly chipping away, the movement scored some victories in the downtown spaces where whites were vulnerable. Other realms such as employment or social clubs were far harder, as whites had little compelling reason to share social space or hierarchy with blacks. But with these developments came a reframing of rhetoric and values from whites besieged by black activism. Whether couched in the usual terms of “freedom of association” and “color blindness,” whites tried to use legal and social norms to mask the consistent violence on Nashville streets, to change the conversation to a more elevated tone, and to retain some control over a situation unsettled by African American activism.
Chapter 5 is based on a racial disturbance nominally triggered by Black Power advocate Stokely Carmichael’s visit to the city in April 1967, but also depicts how broader issues of class and generational differences pulled factions apart as the city continued desegregating unevenly and uneasily. As the 1960s continued, Black Power—which never had particularly vibrant and organized roots in Nashville despite its appeals—became an excuse for an era of racial politics where whites had new rationales for controlling and dominating black space while stigmatizing black standards. Along with these shifts in racial attitudes and rhetoric came applications of laws and public policies that not only defended against black activism but attacked it directly by targeting the places that had bred the activism. In the Black Power years, a new cohort of black student activists staged symbolic confrontations similar to those in 1960 but according to the new ethos of the era. This was, however, marginalized by the law and order compulsions of the white power structure and students dismissive of differing outlooks from Nashville’s black elite. Yet, even as the black elite dampened Black Power spirit in the city, they found themselves vulnerable to wholesale changes that targeted the black economic power directly. How this occurred is treated in chapter 6 as battles over the building of Interstate 40, the local Model Cities program, and the issue of busing all factored into a reshaping of the city that preserved legacies of a racial past.
By knitting these episodes into a fuller analysis, The Nashville Way straddles and tries to merge several different scholarly conversations among historians of the urban South and civil rights movement. Such an approach is meant to meld the various historiographies into something more than the sum of isolated yet important themes and use the Nashville Ways to embody how both racial attitudes and racial policies molded the history of this era. This book readily falls within the genre of civil rights community studies, which favor in-depth portraits of individual cities to yield a fine-grained look at how both black activism and white resistance functioned and responded to each other. Like all types of historical scholarship, community studies have inherent strengths and drawbacks. They help
provide a useful way to evaluate results—namely, the extent to which the movement spurred change. Focusing on one city also provides the chance to render the sheer range of issues and dynamics against which the movement struggled and to underscore the interplay between individual agency and broader forces. Above all else, this book was profoundly influenced and inspired by William Chafe’s classic Civilities and Civil Rights, which described the progressive mystique that governed white moderate attitudes in Greensboro, North Carolina—an attitude synonymous with Nashville’s moderation. My work extends Chafe’s formulations by exploring the class dimensions inherent in moderate civilities, by underscoring the constancy of violence that undergirded those civilities, and by linking those attitudes to wider-scale use of legal means to buttress segregation.
But, to fully render how the Nashville Ways operated, it was necessary to draw from other literatures. In particular, studies about the intricate etiquette that comprised elements of the Jim Crow– era South’s racial culture gave insights that applied to the civil rights era when that etiquette was directly under siege. Numerous scholars have underscored how, from its inception, Jim Crow segregation was part of a defensive maneuvering on the part of whites who tried multiple cruel ways to control race relations (and thus political and economic power) as they faced African Americans who refused to surrender to such machinations. The parameters that these scholars trace in sketching how racial etiquette was inculcated, taught, and defended with unrelenting and targeted violence by whites against diverse forms of resistance from African Americans are important to depicting how white and black Nashvillians interpreted their own world. But this book also connects to the post– Jim Crow South and the recent body of historical literature that joins suburban growth and urban changes with race to highlight how the Sunbelt politics of suburbanizing whites drove much of the political, economic, and social history of post–World War II America. Those developments are also Nashville’s. White supremacy was updated, moderated, and restrengthened across the South and indeed America, regardless of the “flavor” or “mood” of each place, precisely because of the persistence of movement activism. Place did matter, even as the universal pattern also held true.
Uniting these literatures is necessary to combine black and white realities into one narrative that can better highlight the fullest scope of segregation in U.S. life. My emphasis on southern racial etiquette is meant to depict how a racial culture was made, but, in doing so, I do not mean to downplay the reality that the segregated customs embedded in racial etiquette (however “soft,” as Halberstam ascribed to Nashville) were only the most superficial and visible components to a far more abusive system. Indeed, Jim Crow was fundamentally brutal, violent, and exploitative in shadowing every aspect of southern life. This book is meant to high-
light this enduring reality as the real legacy lurking underneath Nashville’s selfpromotional tendencies about matters of race.
Frequently people who lived through this era remark on how life was “totally segregated,” as they try to capture the staggering weight of an entire society where racial divisions were stark, unrelenting, and powerfully informed individual destinies. But, even as that view of Nashville or any other place being “totally segregated” highlights the enormity and scale of Jim Crow, the phrase also tends to downplay or minimize how segregated life functioned on an intricate day-to-day level. Racial etiquette dictated that the social realities of race, class, and gender dynamics in southern racial culture were ever-present in everyday life and underscored how people thought about, internalized, and made choices about race. And, as racial etiquette helped dictate social norms, an entire society was predicated on racial values that were falsehoods made terrifyingly real and, especially when reinforced with laws, molded into the fabric of everyday life.
Writing a narrative that encompasses the stories of blacks fighting this reality even as whites reconstructed these fictions is important, but only if we understand that these stories should encompass everything from daily encounters on a Nashville street to how the building of those streets happened in racially specific ways. This approach is necessary to appreciate how the South’s racial culture mattered to blacks and whites, how both were inured to and thus shaped by segregation in varied ways, and how that framed their beliefs and decisions about responding to immense social change. And yet, individual decisions come from available options, many of which are dictated by laws, political norms, and public policies that construct our world in seemingly invisible ways yet with profound consequences, even when created by individuals shaped by racial etiquette. Both factors are critical dimensions to understand how legacies of the racial past live in the present. In a sense, then, this book connects the cultural paradoxes of the white moderate South with the racial reorganization of urban space due to the insistent pressures from African American activism. The culture of segregation, borne from generations weaned on Jim Crow and acted out in daily racial etiquette that reinforced such attitudes, was replicated on a citywide scale as whites reacted defensively to black pressures, first over social distance in public accommodation (and other civil rights issues) and later over the physical remapping of the city itself.
When I began teaching history in graduate school, I found myself troubled by student essays exploring the civil rights movement with great sophistication but concluding that those days of discrimination were now banished to the past. In many ways, this book is meant to address that inference. By using Nashville and the respective Nashville Ways as microcosms of racial attitudes and racial arenas,
I hope to use both dramatic and prosaic events to capture the tensions between blacks and whites during this time and place, and explore how decades of local and national issues fraught with racial meaning filtered through black and white lenses differently to condition events and attitudes. The details in these pages are meant to preserve the richness of Nashville’s particulars while still speaking to the broader themes that animate the city’s racial history and carry the most resonance for historians and citizens. There are undoubtedly stories about race in Nashville that will still need to be told. Rather than being exhaustively comprehensive, my approach hopes to portray faithfully the perspectives of those people who lived this history while binding these individual stories into something more connected and meaningful. It is a difficult balance and one that I hope I have honored. What follows is tied to one specific locale, drawn from local events and personalities, but is also meant as much more. It is the story of a society wrestling with and yet willfully ignoring its racial reality. Most fundamentally, it is the story of how a racial status quo, after decades of upheaval, was both changed and yet preserved.
A Manner of Segregation
Lived Race Relations and Racial Etiquette
Someone standing by Nashville’s state capitol in the pre–World War II era could easily visualize at least some dimensions of the city’s segmentation. The building towered over downtown Nashville and the tall hills overlooking the rest of the city and the Cumberland River. Although the vista’s effect might be lessened somewhat by the city’s notoriously smoke-choked air, the rare clear day permitted a visitor looking due north to watch the Cumberland snaking up and away, bending to the west in an upside-down U shape that curved around North Nashville. This neighborhood was considered the very heart of African American life in the city. To the east, the river lazily meandered north to form another U shape that encompassed East Nashville, where working-class members of both races lived. It was rather harder to see the conspicuously white parts of the city, which lay farther to the south and west, although they naturally caught the eye by sitting on faraway hills. As with downtown, a sort of geographic segregation meant that most wealthier neighborhoods were centered on higher elevations, leaving residents on less valuable property to contend with the smoggy air. A similar pattern dictated that poor blacks usually lived along the river-bottom areas prone to flooding and along the many railroad tracks that crisscrossed Nashville. There were many ways in which the city was vividly divided in a meaningful manner.
Within downtown, however, where the races might meet in going about their daily lives, segregating was trickier. This was embodied by the uneven and indeed confusing combinations of white and colored signs (or the lack thereof). Racially divided space downtown had haphazard patterning. At the train station, even as tellers sold tickets to blacks and whites from the same window, each race had a separate waiting room. Blacks and whites shared telephone booths and bought reading material from the same newsstands, but African Americans had different barbers to trim hair and a separate bench train-side as they waited. At the bus station, however, a cheaper travel option for those of more modest means,
segregation was more strictly delineated, with the black waiting room tucked in a far corner of the building. Even by late 1955, after the order from the Interstate Commerce Commission to desegregate travel accommodations, the bus system had a reputation for being “most resistant.” Segregated toilets remained and the single lunch counter served blacks, but only at one end. By contrast, in the rail station there were no white and colored signs, but local African Americans still used the same restrooms and lunch counters as before. However, blacks traveling through Nashville as interstate passengers occasionally chose to use the general waiting area rather than retire to separate quarters, in accordance with the commission’s legal mandate.
Still other forms of transport lacked white and colored signs, and here unspoken codes of conduct prevailed. Taxicabs generally took black customers, but doing so was dependent on the cabbie’s personal preference—this wholly confused black visitors from other southern cities, where taxis catered to specific races. On streetcars, where segregation was “not as formal in action as it is in word,” a silent agreement had blacks fill seats from the rear and moving forward, with whites doing the same from the front and moving backward. Black Nashvillians had fought against this with boycotts and protests in the early 1900s when the practice was first instituted; later generations struggled with the custom. One Fisk student in the early 1940s described the “hot blood” that “flooded her face” when her date scolded her for sitting next to a white person on a bus. His reproach was revealing, as he warned her of potentially powerful repercussions from her breach of etiquette: shaming black men, even though they risked jail or worse if they tried to protect her, but also associating those men with “unmanliness” if they did not defend her. Still, the city, as elsewhere across the nation, witnessed a noticeable increase in streetcar and bus altercations during the 1940s.
The fact that silent understanding could govern racial interaction suggests that how Nashvillians moved through segregated space was as revealing as the marking of such spaces. Sometimes racial signs seemed to contradict racial realities. At other times, the very lack of signage was laden with historical meaning, as when the removed signs were vestiges of black political pressure or gestured to white convenience. And yet, this etiquette held sway over the places where the races intersected; those places were relative aberrations in a broader landscape where white and black neighborhoods remained distinct, with boundaries reinforced by both racial custom and public policy. This chapter explores both these dimensions of segregation simultaneously. The intricate details inherent in daily racial interaction show how whites and African Americans could use etiquette for their own benefit; the racial differences of urban sectors indicate how both law and custom converged to impact black and white lives on a broader scale. Each dimension em-
bedded the social dynamics of the city, both silently and tangibly, in the everyday lives of Nashvillians.
The curious dynamic of racial etiquette in the early and mid-twentieth century was particularly conspicuous downtown, which was wholly white-owned except for First Colored Baptist Church (later First Baptist Church, Capitol Hill), the place of worship for much of Nashville’s African American elite and a central site for civil rights activism. Yet downtown also represented the civic and economic center of Nashville, and that reality rested uneasily with Jim Crow legacies. This meant that commercial transactions, for example, had curious racial contradictions. White-owned banks in Nashville gladly kept black accounts—but would not provide loans. In the exclusive shops that sold the latest fashions to Nashville’s elite, there was never a colored sign above the dressing rooms mocking African Americans. Instead, a designated clerk, usually “polite and effusive,” would steer black clientele to “special seats in rear” and “special trying rooms.” The same Fisk student humiliated on the bus described one store where a white clerk “shifted about, miserably ill at ease” and “hung his head as if he were a school boy” in telling her that she would have to try shoes on in the back. Declining to do so, she found another store just a few blocks away where the clerk calmly invited her to sit wherever she chose as he went to find her size. In plainer five-and-ten-cent stores, however, where separate water fountains were more common, service for black customers often depended wholly on “the disposition of the sales clerk,” which in turn usually stemmed from the class status of the black patron.
Segregation had a similar patchwork feel in health and educational venues. Most hospitals in Nashville did not accept black patients. One exception, Hubbard Hospital, affiliated with black Meharry Medical College, was entirely African American. Nashville General Hospital was nearly fifty-fifty interracial, although beds for black patients were contained in an older building connected only by corridor to the newer wing for whites. Here orderlies and maids were black, but never the medical staff. Exclusive Vanderbilt University hospital had thirty-five beds for African American patients; black doctors, while not allowed to practice there, were “received courteously” when visiting. Similarly, public libraries were not open to blacks, but methods of transferring materials to black institutions were not unheard of, whereas “special instances” were made when a black person needed to access the state library, state supreme court library, and Vanderbilt University or Peabody College libraries.
The racial line hardened when it came to food. In the South, where cuisine had a pronounced cultural importance, segregation in eating places was seemingly absolute. No restaurants downtown served blacks. Nor did hotels sell meals or rent rooms to African Americans, although by the mid-1950s there was a curious ex-
ception: hotels permitted—“in fact welcome[d]”—the use of banquet facilities for interracial groups, even when the same hotels refused rooms to black patrons. “It seems a fine line of distinction,” wrote one local, “but it’s held to firmly here in Nashville.” Elsewhere, in the Krystal’s lunch counters and similar food joints, black customers could order take-out meals but were not permitted to eat inside. Food and money could trade hands, but the fellowship of a shared meal remained forbidden. One white reporter mused that “there is something sacramental about eating together. It is a social act and some of these people have simply been unwilling to make the hurdle that would be involved.” Neighborhood stores in black areas “are adjusted to Negroes and give them service they expect,” but in white neighborhoods the service might be “courteous but speedy” so as to more quickly usher black patrons out the door. The white southern psyche refused to accept blacks and whites eating together. Partaking in food together was an intimacy presuming equal status.
The cultural realm was equally puzzling. By the mid-1950s, Nashvillians up late at night could tune a radio dial to 1510 a.m., where wlac disk jockey “Hoss” Allen was spinning Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, and other black music on his nightly show. Allen was the latest in a succession of now-legendary djs at wlac, especially Gene Nobles and “John R” Richbourg. Nobles, in heeding the request of local black college students to play some R&B, had seen his show grow wildly popular, and Richbourg and Allen also played black music on their programs to great acclaim. The latter dj had a deep southern-flecked voice and sprinkled his speech with black street slang (“Look, it’s git-down time! The Hossman is here, so it’s time to hop, it’s time to jump!”) which led many listeners to assume the white boy from Gallatin, Tennessee, was African American. Allen later admitted that he was poorly versed in the double entendres of the vernacular despite hanging out in black music clubs; “git-down time” was actually the street expression for prostitutes beginning their evening shift. His patter was less authentic than it sounded. Nonetheless, wlac’s 50,000-watt signal beamed to twenty-eight states across the nation, so the three djs, each white but fanatical about black music, were beloved figures. While Dewey Phillips in Memphis, soon to discover and record Elvis Presley for the first time, remains a powerful representative of 1950s musical fusions, the wlac djs radiated an equally powerful influence throughout the eastern United States to an eager and diverse audience. Even Alan Freed, often nominally credited as the first popularizer of rock ’n’ roll, was a fan. “Freed used to call us from Cleveland every night and ask us what to play,” Hoss Allen later remembered.
The djs indicated a music scene that contained even more of Jim Crow’s contradictions. DeFord Bailey, the black harmonica player for the Grand Ole Opry, often
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The “vial of wrath” was empty My father looked at me—looked uglier than I had ever seen him look before. He held it over the glass, and inverted it. My work had been thoroughly accomplished, and hardly a drop of the fiery fluid answered the summons to appear. My father looked at me again. His lips were compressed, and his eyes snapped with anger.
“All gone—is it?” laughed the sheriff. “Well, no matter; I can get along without it.”
“We’ll take some at the bar,” said my father, as the bell rang to “slow” her
When the boat was fast to the wharf, they went to the bar and drank together. Somehow, it seemed to me that all my calculations were failing on that day; but still I hoped to accomplish something by the deed I had done. Mr. Mortimer went on shore, and my father returned to the engine-room. I hoped he would be satisfied with the dram he had taken, and that I should escape the consequences of his anger. The bell rang, and the boat started again.
“Wolf, did you empty that bottle?” asked my father, sternly.
“Yes, sir, I did,” I replied, gently, but firmly.
“What did you do that for?”
“I thought it was best not to have the liquor here,” I answered, with no little trepidation.
“Best!” exclaimed he. “Who made you a keeper over me?”
I did not dare to say anything. I held my peace, resolved to endure the storm in silence, lest some disrespectful word should escape my lips. My father was very angry, and I feared that, under the influence of the liquor, he would do violence to me; but he did not.
“Get away from here! Don’t let me see you around me any longer,” said he, at last, when he found that I was not disposed to explain my conduct, or to cast any reproaches upon him.
I went to the forward deck, and seated myself on the rail at the bow
CHAPTER VIII.
THE DUMMY ENGINE.
My father and I had always been on the best of terms. He was very considerate to me, and used to talk with me a great deal; indeed, he treated me in such a way that I had very little reason to think I was a boy. He discussed his plans with me, and often asked my advice, just as though I had been a man of mature judgment. He was angry with me now, almost for the first time in my remembrance; certainly he had never before been so highly exasperated with me. But I consoled myself with the reflection that he was partially intoxicated, and that, when the fumes of the whiskey had worked off, he would be as kind and gentle to me as ever.
Perhaps it was wrong for me to empty the bottle; but, as I can never know what would have happened if I had not done so, I am content with simply believing that I did it for the best. He was in charge of the engine. There were fifty precious lives on the boat. My father had the reputation of being a very steady and reliable man. If he had been a little noisy and turbulent at Ucayga, the shock of losing his money had wrought a sudden and wonderful change in his manner, so that few, if any, had noticed him. After the steamer started, I alone was aware of his condition; I alone knew of his resuming his cups; and I alone knew that, left to himself, he would soon be intoxicated, and incapable of managing the engine. I could not wish that I had not emptied the bottle, even while I suffered intensely under the consciousness of his displeasure.
While I was thinking of the wrath of my father, and of the consequences which might follow the loss of the money, the steamer approached Middleport, which was opposite Centreport, where we lived. My attention was immediately attracted by a singular-looking object on the canal boat at the wharf. My thoughts were partially diverted for a time from the painful circumstances of our family affairs, and I gazed with interest at the strange object. It looked like an immense omnibus, only it had a smoke-stack passing through the
roof at one end. I had never seen such a thing before, and I did not know what to make of it.
“Ah, the dummy has arrived,” said a Middleport passenger, who had come forward to look at the carriage.
“The what, sir?” I asked.
“The dummy.”
“What’s a dummy?” I inquired; for, with all my study of steamengines, I had never heard of one.
“It’s a railroad car with an engine in one end of it,” replied the gentleman; and by this time I could make out the form of the thing. “It is for the Lake Shore Railroad. I suppose you have heard that the students of the Toppleton Institute are building a railroad on the shore of the lake.”
“Yes, sir, I have heard of it.”
“This dummy was built to run on a horse railroad in Philadelphia; but though they call it a dummy, it made so much noise, and frightened so many horses, they could not use it in the streets. Major Toppleton saw it, and bought it cheap, for the students, in order to get a little ahead of the Wimpleton Institute, on the other side of the lake.”
As the boat approached the wharf, I examined the dummy very carefully. It was a railway carriage, similar to those used on street roads, having an engine in one end to propel it. It would be a rare plaything for the Toppletonians, and I envied them the possession of such a prize. I knew all about the Lake Shore Railroad, and many a pang of jealousy had it caused the Wimpletonians, on our side of the lake; for a stupendous rivalry existed between the two Institutes, which were separated from each other by only a mile of fresh water.
Lake Ucayga is about forty-five miles long. At the foot of it was the town of the same name, connected with the great centres of travel by railroad. At the head of the lake was the large town of Hitaca. The average width of the lake was three miles; but near the middle—or, to be more accurate, twenty miles from Ucayga, and twenty-five from Hitaca—a point of land jutted out on the west side, so as to leave a passage only a mile in width. On this peninsula was located the town of Middleport, and directly opposite was Centreport.
Below these towns the country was level, while above them it was hilly, and even mountainous near the head of the lake. Middleport and Centreport were of very modern origin, so far as their social and commercial importance was concerned, and their growth and history were somewhat remarkable. They are located on the verge of the hilly region, and the scenery around them, without being grand or sublime, is very beautiful.
Hardly twenty years before my story opens, two gentlemen had come up to the lake to spend a week in hunting and fishing. They were fast friends, and each of them had made an immense fortune in the China trade. The narrow part of the lake—generally called “The Narrows”—attracted their attention on account of its picturesque scenery. They were delighted with the spot, and the result was that, on retiring from business, they fixed their residences here.
One of these gentlemen was Colonel Wimpleton, and the other was Major Toppleton. They had won their military titles in the same regiment of militia in their early life, and had clung together like brothers for many years. They built their elegant mansions on the banks of the lake, facing each other, and formerly gayly-painted barges were continually plying between them. Certainly their houses looked like palaces of enchantment, so elegantly were the grounds laid out, and so picturesque were the surroundings. In front of each, on the lake, was a wall of dressed stone, from the quarries in the neighborhood. From these walls, the grounds, covered with the richest green in summer, sloped gradually up to the houses. They were adorned with smooth walks and avenues, shaded with a variety of trees. Indeed, I think nothing more lovely was ever seen or imagined.
Major Toppleton, on the Middleport side, built a flour mill; the village began to grow, and soon became a place of considerable commercial importance. At the same time, Centreport increased in population and wealth, though not so rapidly as its neighbor on the other side of the lake. Both the gentlemen had sons; and they were alive to the importance of giving them a good education. This consideration induced them to discuss the propriety of establishing an academy, and both agreed that such an institution was desirable, especially as there was not one of high standing within fifty miles of
the place. Then the difficult and delicate question of the location of the proposed academy came up for settlement. Each of them wanted it on his side of the lake; and on this rock the two friends, who had been almost brothers for forty years, split; and the warmth of their former friendship seemed to be the gauge of their present enmity.
The feud waxed fierce and bitter; and henceforth Middleport and Centreport, which had always been twin sisters, were savage foes. The major built a lofty edifice and called it the Toppleton Institute. The colonel, not to be thwarted or outdone, built another on a grander scale, and called it the Wimpleton Institute. Everything that could add to the efficiency and the popularity of the two institutions was liberally supplied; and, as competition is the life of trade, as well in literary as in commercial affairs, both thrived splendidly. All the principal cities and towns of the Union were represented among the students. The patron millionnaire of each, with his principal and teachers, labored and studied to devise some new schemes which would add to the popularity of his institution. Military drill, gymnastics, games, boating, English, French, and German systems were introduced, and dispensed with as fresher novelties were presented.
The rival academies numbered about a hundred students each, and neither seemed to obtain any permanent advantage over the other. “Like master like man;” and, as the major and the colonel quarrelled, the pupils could hardly help following their illustrious example; so that it was fortunate a mile of deep water lay between the two.
The rivalry of the millionnaires was not confined to the schools; it extended to the towns themselves. Colonel Wimpleton built a flour mill on the Centreport side, and fought boldly and cunningly for the commercial salvation of his side of the lake. If a bank, an insurance company, or a sawmill was established in Middleport, another immediately appeared in Centreport; and the converse of the proposition was equally true.
In the midst of this rivalry the Toppleton Institute was vivified by a new idea. The mania for building railroads which pervaded the Northern States invaded the quiet haunts of learning. Many of the students were the sons of prominent railroad men, and Major
Toppleton hit upon the magnificent scheme of giving the young gentlemen a railroad education. A company had been organized; certificates of stocks and bonds—of which the munificent patron of the institution was the largest holder—were issued. A president, directors, treasurer, and clerk were elected; superintendents, trackmasters, baggage-masters, conductors, brakemen, engineers, firemen, switch-tenders, and other officials were duly appointed. At first the railroad was to be an imaginary concern; but the wealthy patron was not content to have the business done on paper only. He purchased sleepers and rails, and the students had actually built five miles of road on the level border of the lake. The dummy engine had been bought, and had been sent by railroad to the head of the lake, and thence to Middleport by a canal boat.
This splendid project of the Toppletonians was viewed with consternation by the Wimpletonians. I was warmly interested in the scheme, and watched its progress with the deepest interest. The dummy was a miracle to me, and I regarded it with the most intense delight. All the Toppletonians, assisted by a few men, were on the shore, busy as bees in transferring the machine to the wharf. Planks had been laid down on which to roll it from the boat, and rigging manned by the students was attached to it, by which it was to be hauled on shore.
The steamer was to make a landing alongside the canal boat. I stood at the bow watching the operation of moving the dummy. They had rolled it two or three feet up the skids; but “too many cooks spoil the broth.” A rope broke, the machine slipped back, and, canting the boat by its impetus, the thing rolled off, with a tremendous splash, into the lake. The steamer backed just in season to avoid smashing it into a hopeless wreck.
If Centreport had been there it would have rejoiced exceedingly at this mishap.
THE ACCIDENT TO THE DUMMY.—Page 93.
CHAPTER IX.
TOPPLETONIANS AND WIMPLETONIANS.
Middleport had a terrible fall in the unfortunate slip of the dummy engine; and if any Wimpletonians, on the other side of the lake, witnessed the catastrophe, I am afraid they were ill-natured enough to “crow” over it; for to have seen the thing hissing up and down on the opposite shore would have been a sore trial to them. For the present, at least, it was safe on the bottom of the lake, though, as the water was only six or eight feet deep, the machine would doubtless be saved in the end.
Though I belonged to Centreport, and was a graduate of the Wimpleton Institute, I could not find it in my heart to rejoice at the disaster which had befallen the Toppletonians. I was too much interested in the dummy to cherish any ill-will towards the machine or its owners. I wanted to see it work, and I could not help envying the engineer who was to enjoy the superlative happiness of running it. Such a position would have suited me, and I was sorry the railroad idea had not originated on our side of the lake. I wondered what Colonel Wimpleton would bring forward to offset this novelty of his rival, not doubting that he would make a desperate effort to outdo the major.
The accident filled the Toppletonians with dismay. They had been yelling with excitement and delight while laboring at the skids and rigging; but now they were aghast and silent. The Ruoara backed away from the submerged machine, and made her landing at the end of the pier. The dummy rested upright upon the bottom of the lake, with its roof well out of the water. I hardly took my eyes off of it while we were at the wharf, and I only wished the task of putting it on the track of the Lake Shore Railroad had fallen on me; for I thought I saw a plan by which it could be easily accomplished.
While the steamer was waiting I stepped upon the wharf, and mingled with the crowd of dismayed Toppletonians, who were gazing at the apparent wreck of all their hopes. I was acquainted with a few
of them; but they regarded me with a feeling of jealousy and hatred which I am happy to state that I did not share with them.
“Our pipe is out,” said Tommy Toppleton, the only son of the major. “It’s too confounded bad! I meant to have a ride in that car by to-morrow.”
“It’s not so bad as it might be,” I ventured to remark.
“Who are you?” snapped Tommy, when he recognized me as a Centreporter.
“I belong on the other side, I know; but I was really sorry to see the thing go overboard,” I added, gently enough to disarm the wrath of the patron’s son.
“I think the Wimpleton fellows will feel good over this,” continued Tommy, who, if he had not been crestfallen at the misfortune of his clan, would have been impudent and overbearing to a plebeian like me.
“I suppose they will feel good; but if I were one of your fellows I would not let them enjoy it a great while. I would have it out of the water and get up steam before I slept upon it,” I answered.
“What would you do?” asked Tommy curiously.
“I would get it out of the water in double-quick time, and then put her through by daylight, even if it took me all night.”
“You are a brick, Wolf; and I am rather sorry you live on the other side of the lake,” laughed the scion of the Middleport house. “Do you think you could get her out of the water?”
“I know I could.”
“How would you do it?”
“I haven’t time to explain it now,” I replied, edging towards the steamer.
“I say, Wolf, people think you know all about an engine, and can run one as well as a man,” continued Tommy, following me to the boat.
“I ran a locomotive ten miles to-day.”
“Did you, though?”
“I did—all alone.”
“Our fellows don’t want a man for an engineer on the Lake Shore Railroad; some of them were talking about having you to run the dummy for us.”
“I am much obliged to them for thinking of me.”
“It’s too bad you live on the other side.”
I thought so too, as the bell of the Ruoara rang, and I stepped on board of her. To do anything for the enemy on the Middleport side would be to give mortal offence to Colonel Wimpleton, his hopeful son, and all the students of the Institute in Centreport; and it was quite out of the question for me to think of a position on the footboard of the dummy. I would have given anything to join the Toppletonians, against whom I had now no spite, and take part in the operations of the new railroad; and I regarded it as a very great misfortune that the rivalry between the two places prevented me from doing so.
The Ruoara left the wharf, and stood across the lake towards Centreport. As she receded from the shore, I saw Tommy talking to his father, and pointing to the boat, as though I were the subject of the conversation. I do not know what either of them said; but the young gentleman doubtless told the patron of the Toppletonians that I considered myself able to extricate the dummy from her present position. I was a very modest young man at the time of which I write; but years have enabled me, in some measure, to conquer the feeling, and I may now say that I had a splendid reputation as an engineer, for a boy. I do not know that I was regarded as exactly a prodigy, but even men of ability treated me with great kindness and consideration on account of my proficiency in matters relating to machinery. It seemed quite possible, therefore, that Major Toppleton did not regard my suggestion of a plan to extricate the dummy as a mere boyish boast.
Whether he did or did not, I was too much oppressed by my father’s misfortunes to think of the dummy after it was out of sight. I walked aft, passing through the gangway, where I could see my unfortunate parent. He looked stern and forbidding, and, when I paused at the door, he told me I need not stop there. I did not think he had been drinking again, and I felt sure that he would not long be angry. It made me very sad to think that he was offended with me; but, more than this, I dreaded lest he should fall back into his old habits, and become a drunkard.
As the steamer approached the Centreport landing, I was startled by three rousing cheers. On the lawn, which faced the river in front of the Wimpleton Institute, were assembled all the students. Two or three of them were looking through field glasses to the opposite shore. They had just discovered the nature of the disaster to the dummy, and they expressed their satisfaction in the cheers which I heard. It was mean and cowardly to rejoice in the misfortunes of others, even if they were enemies; but as their elders expressed themselves in this manner, nothing better could be expected of them.
I went ashore when the boat was made fast. I noticed that several people looked sharply at me, and some of them appeared to make remarks about me, as I passed through the crowd up the wharf; but so completely had my thoughts been absorbed by the affairs of my father, that I had quite forgotten my altercation with Mr. Waddie Wimpleton, and I did not connect the sharp looks and the suppressed remarks bestowed upon me with that circumstance. I had the young gentleman’s revolver in my pocket; but I had ceased to feel its weight or to think of it. I walked up the wharf, and hastened to the cottage of my father.
“Why, Wolfert! What have you been doing?” exclaimed my mother, as I entered the kitchen, where she was at work.
“Nothing wrong, I hope, mother,” I replied; and I am sure my long face and sad demeanor were not without their effect upon her.
“They are telling awful stories about you, Wolfert,” she added.
“Who are?”
“Everybody. What have you been doing?”
“I haven’t done anything, mother.”
“Didn’t you take the powder from the tool-house at the quarry, and blow up that canal boat?” gasped she, horrified that I should be even accused of such wickedness.
“No, mother; I did not. Who says I did?”
“Everybody is saying so. We all know that the canal boat was blown up; and they say you ran away before the people came.”
I told my mother the whole truth in regard to the canal boat, and she believed me.
“Waddie Wimpleton says you did it, Wolfert,” added she.
“I did not do it, and did not know anything about it till the explosion took place.”
“They all say you must have done it. Waddie don’t deny that he had a hand in it; but he says you planned the whole thing, and he gave you his revolver for doing it.”
“There is not a word of truth in it, mother.”
“The quarrymen saw you and Waddie near the mill wharf, just before the explosion. It was not till they had told their story that Waddie acknowledged he had anything to do with it. He says it was done by pulling a string; and everybody believes that boy hadn’t gumption enough to blow up the canal boat without blowing himself up with it. They say the thing was well done, and therefore you must have done it.”
This was flattering to my pride, disagreeable as the consequences threatened to be. People believed I was guilty because I had the reputation of being skilful in mechanical contrivances! But I was not anxious to rob Waddie of any of his honors in this affair.
“I have not done anything wrong, mother; and I am willing to take the consequences, whatever they are. I wish this was the only thing we had to fear,” I said, dreading the effect upon her of the intelligence I had to communicate in regard to my father.
“Why, what else have we to fear?” asked she, with an expression of alarm. “Where is your father?”
“He has gone up to Hitaca in the steamer.”
“What has he gone up there for?”
“He is in charge of the engine of the Ruoara.”
“Where is Christy Holgate?”
“He has robbed a man of his money, and run away.”
“Christy?”
“Yes, mother; and that isn’t the worst of it, either.”
“Why, what do you mean, Wolfert?”
“Father was the man whom he robbed.”
“Why, Wolfert!” ejaculated my mother, as pale as death.
“It is just as I say, mother; and it isn’t the worst of it, either.”
“Oh, dear! What else has happened?” she demanded, in a hoarse whisper.
“Father has taken to drinking again,” I replied; and, no longer able to restrain my emotions, I burst into tears.
“Merciful Heaven! That is worse than all the rest!” exclaimed she, covering her face with her apron, and weeping bitterly with me.
CHAPTER X.
COLONEL WIMPLETON AND SON.
My mother wept as she thought of the past, and dreaded the future. It would have been comparatively easy to endure the loss of the twenty-four hundred dollars; but it was intolerable to think of the misery of again being a drunkard’s wife. All else was as nothing to her beside this awful prospect. My father had struggled with his besetting and his besotting sin for five years, and with hardly an exception had always been the conqueror. During this period he had prospered in his worldly affairs, and till this day of disaster the future seemed to be secure to him.
My mother told me I had done right in emptying the bottle, and assured me that my father would not long cherish his anger. She knew not what to do in order to turn the tide which had set against us. If the sheriff succeeded in arresting Christy, and securing the money he had stolen, the effect upon my father would be good. If the money was lost, we feared that father would be lost with it.
While we were talking about the sad prospect before us, an imperative knock was heard at the front door—a summons so loud and stately that we could hardly fail to identify the person even before we saw his face. My mother wiped away her bitter tears, and hastened to the door.
“Has your son come home?” demanded Colonel Wimpleton, in his abrupt and offensive manner, when he spoke to his social inferiors, as he regarded them.
“Yes, sir, he has,” replied my mother, with fear and trembling before the magnate of Centreport.
Without further ceremony, or any ceremony,—for he had used none,—he stalked into the kitchen where I sat. He was followed by his hopeful scion, who looked quite as magnificent as his stately father.
“So you have come home, you young villain!” said the colonel, fixing a savage gaze upon me.
“I have come home; but I am not a villain, sir,” I replied, with what dignity I could command.
“Don’t contradict me. I say you are a villain.”
“Your saying so don’t make it so,” I answered, desperately; for I was goaded almost to despair by the misfortunes of the day; and though at any other time I should have been as meek as a nursing dove, I felt like defending myself from the charges he was about to make.
“Don’t be impudent to me, young man,” scowled he. “You know me, and you know what I am.”
“I know what you are,” I added, significantly; and I was astonished at my own boldness.
He looked at me savagely, apparently trying to determine what construction to put upon my remark. Waddie stood at his side, quite self-possessed, considering the wicked deed he had done. His presence reminded me of the revolver I had in my pocket, and I took it out and presented it to him.
“Here is your revolver, Waddie. I did not intend to keep it, when I took it,” said I.
“I don’t want it. It is yours now,” replied he, declining to take the weapon. “I gave it to you for the job you did for me, and I am not going to back out now.”
“Take it, Waddie,” interposed his father. “Such a trade is not legal or binding.”
“I’m not going to take it,” replied the hopeful, stoutly. “It was a fair trade, and it would not be honorable for me to back out.”
“Give it to me, then,” added the colonel.
I gave it to him, and he put it in his pocket, in spite of the protest of Waddie.
“Now, Wolf, I want you to tell me the truth,” continued Colonel Wimpleton.
“I will do so, sir.”
“You persuaded my boy to blow up that canal boat?”
“No, sir. I did not.”
“I didn’t say he persuaded me to do it, father,” interrupted the son.
“You wouldn’t have done such a thing as that unless somebody put you up to it, Waddie,” protested the fond father, who had been
obliged to make the same statement fifty times before, and remained obstinately incredulous in regard to his son’s capacity to do mischief up to the present time.
“Yes, I would, father; and I am only sorry the skipper of the canal boat was not on board when she went up. Didn’t I say he insulted me? Didn’t I tell you he shook me, kicked me, cuffed me, and then chucked me on the wharf, as though I had been a dead cat? When a man insults me, he has to pay for it,” said Waddie, shaking his head to emphasize his strong declarations.
“Yes; and I shall have to pay for it too,” muttered the colonel, who felt very much as the man did who had to pay his wife’s fine after he had prosecuted her for an assault upon himself.
“No matter for that; I am revenged,” added Waddie, coolly. “I only said that Wolf showed me how to do it, and pulled the string when all was ready.”
“That’s enough,” replied the father.
I understood the magnate of Centreport well enough to comprehend his position. He was quite willing to pay a couple of thousand dollars for the destruction of the canal boat; but he was very loath to have the Centreporters believe, what was literally the truth, that Waddie Wimpleton was the worst and most evil-disposed boy in the whole town. While he did not attempt to discipline and control his vicious heir, he was exceedingly jealous of the youth’s reputation. He wished to have me confess that I had had a finger in this pie of mischief. My character stood high in town, for I had tried to behave like a gentleman on all occasions. If I shared the blame with the colonel’s hopeful, he was willing to pay all costs and damages. I really believe, if I could have assumed the entire odium of the wicked deed, the magnate would have been willing to pay for the boat, and give me a thousand dollars besides. In fact, I knew of one instance in which a boy of bad habits had been indirectly paid for taking upon his own shoulders the blame that belonged upon Waddie’s.
“I had nothing at all to do with blowing up the canal boat, Colonel Wimpleton,” I replied. “I knew nothing about it till the explosion took place.”
“You deny it—do you?” demanded the magnate, sharply.
“I do, sir; I had nothing to do with it.”
“How dare you lie to me? As Waddie was concerned in the affair, I don’t mind paying for the boat, and I suppose that will be the end of the scrape; but I know my boy wouldn’t do such a thing without some help.”
“I didn’t help him,” I protested, warmly.
“Didn’t you pull the string?” demanded Waddie, with the most unblushing effrontery.
“No, I did not.”
“Didn’t you have hold of the string when the boat went up?” persisted the young villain.
“I did, but”—
“There, father, he owns up to all I ask him to confess,” interposed Waddie.
“I own up to nothing,” I replied, indignantly. “I say, again, I had nothing to do with the explosion, and knew nothing about it till the boat blew up.”
“What do you mean, you young rascal?” stormed the colonel. “One moment you say you had hold of the string, and the next that you knew nothing about it.”
“If you wish me to explain the matter, I will do so; if not, I won’t,” I added, disgusted with the evident intention of the magnate to convict me, whether guilty or not.
“Will you confess that you had a hand in the mischief?”
“No, I will not.”
“But, you young rascal”—
“I am not a rascal, Colonel Wimpleton. If either of us is a rascal, you are the one, not I,” I continued, goaded to desperation by his injustice.
“What!” gasped the great man, confounded at my boldness.
“I say just what I mean. Waddie knows, as well as I do, that I had nothing to do with blowing up the canal boat, and if he was a decent fellow he would say so.”
“Don’t be rash, Wolfert,” interposed my mother, alarmed at my temerity.
“I am not afraid of them, mother.”
“Do you mean to say I’m not a decent fellow?” howled Waddie.
