The mob party ran the eight blocks from Bancroft to Second Street and waited for the cops to bring out the one who did it. Karel was with them, one of the three hundred whose throats burned from running. They packed like grain around the house. They climbed trees and to roofs. That was when they saw him for the first time. They had a face, a name. Will Brown.
The mob, that first one, tried to lynch Will Brown right then, once the cops led him into the open. Some boys in the mob party snatched the keys from the police Model T and wouldn’t give them back. The phone lines were cut. There was a standoff on the porch. Three police and Will Brown; the three hundred of the party. The party wanted the one who did it. They shouted, “Lynch him!” Karel saw the police and Will Brown on the Loebeck porch. He got as close as he could to see Will Brown. The one black man in a field of white. His dark, spongy hair, his shirt torn from folks pulling. Warning shots were fired from both sides. Stones thrown. Nooses tossed over tree limbs. The party jabbed at Will Brown with long clubs. “Let us have him! A judge won’t punish him! We will!” Almost three hundred people were in that mob and they wanted Will Brown. Somebody tossed a lariat around his neck, a lucky shot, and started to tug away, nearly yanked Will Brown off the porch by his throat before a cop was able to slip the loop off. It went on like that for an hour before more police showed up, every reserve in the city. They got Will Brown out of there. They fought through the party and got him in the back of a commandeered truck and sped recklessly away to the county courthouse downtown. The mob party chased after the car and threw more stones, but the police got Will Brown away. Somehow they got him out of South Omaha and into a jail downtown.
Some in the mob party tore off after the police, but most of them stayed to tell tales about what just happened and what would. The little Loebeck sister peeked her face out the door and asked everyone to leave. Most didn’t. A mob party like this went on for a while. Most of them were blotto or near it. There were oaths to swear, promises to make about what they’d do later.
Karel found a spot in a tree and listened to what went on. A few ballplayers were loud about what had happened at the Interrace Game some months before and how things only got worse after that. “We should have made an example of that cheating Fowler when we had the chance.” A scuffle broke out between some ballplayers, ones who weren’t even on the field when Fowler pulled the razor. Karel had been on the field. These guys argued over how they should have got that Will Brown but they’d botched it. The attacks on the front porch weren’t organized, no wonder they didn’t work. But what to do about it? There was only one thing. The courthouse. They had to get him. They talked and scuffled. They cracked new bottles and drank more, so after a while they wanted to drink more than anything. Near the front porch, maybe down the block, men unzipping to piss on the ground.
Karel went back to the dorming house. He’d stopped drinking.
It was much the same in the streets along the way. The mob party out on a drunk, the speakeasies overflowing. Saloons weren’t too secret during the Ak-Sar-Ben anyway. Some who’d chased after the police filtered back to where they lived on the Southside. They’d been too slow to catch up before the one who did it was locked safe in a jail cell. That Will Brown had slipped away. But they’d get him.
Some word was going around how Milt Hoffman set it up to have a friend of his darken his skin with soot then rush them in the park and do those things to Agnes Loebeck—but why would that happen? Was Milt mad at his girl? Why would Milt do that?—and now the underlying interests were just playing this Will Brown for a patsy. Karel had heard enough about those men Jake had worked for that he knew Dennison wouldn’t be at all opposed to what was going on, since it made the new mayor look bad. Tom Dennison, Billy Nesselhous, they wouldn’t care if a lynch mob roamed. Even if a riot broke out it would suit them.
Not everyone agreed that Milt set it up to have his girl raped. Some thought Agnes was in on the sham too, that she’d been paid off to finger a black, or that she was a prostitute, and maybe she’d wanted those things to happen to her.
Karel heard these rumors. People debated in the street.
And Will Brown could have done it. There was always that possibility. Will Brown could have raped Agnes just like she said, just like Milt said. It was easiest to believe this. Who wanted to accuse a girl of lying about a thing like that? And who was saying those things about Milt anyway? Who’d believe a guy set it up to have his girl raped?
Will Brown did it. That’s what most believed, what Karel thought he believed. That’s what made sense.
At the dorming house there were organizers from the machine talking to boys. Just inside the door, by the manager’s office. Joe Meinhof was with them. Lining up the boys, handing out some coin. Half now, half later. Karel slipped upstairs before Joe saw him. He wasn’t looking for a job. Months and months had passed since Karel cared a bit about making money, not since Anna went away. What Karel cared about now was sleep. He’d been running around day and night and figured he’d do the same tomorrow. The mob party wasn’t going to give up that easily. They all said so. They’d do anything to get that Will Brown.
Everyone had a theory about who he was. No one knew for sure. He’s someone the boys wondered about a lot in the years after 1919, after what they did that September. Will Brown. What was he thinking when the cops handed him over? Could he hear what that mob promised to do to him?
Consider that Will Brown lived in Gibson. It wasn’t easy for a black man there. Not far from Rourke Park and right next to Riverview Park. He was forty years old. Pockmarked with a small mustache. He came from Cairo, Illinois. Some said Will Brown got a girl pregnant and a judge in Cairo was going to order them married. That was how he ended up in Omaha, running out on that girl. Men like him moved around so much it was hard to say what made them go from one place to the next. Most of them in Omaha worked in stockyards, a lot of them scabs who took the jobs of doughboys.