A black man was guaranteed nearly two dollars a day in the yards. With some money to spend, a place to live, life would have been good enough for Will Brown. But he was getting old that summer. He felt bad in his back, his legs and arms. His neck would have always been twisted. Some days it wasn’t all that bad if he didn’t get work, if he could rest on a park bench and look at a newspaper. Otherwise it meant staying home.
He and another black man lived under the same roof with a white woman that year. Their place on Cedar Street wouldn’t have been much, in some backwater ward bisected by freight lines, a shack so close to the Missouri that Will Brown could sit on a tar paper roof with a bottle and watch the river swell in the late hours if he wanted to. He could have seen riverboats float downstream at night, electric lights shimmering on the water, heard cornet calls echoing off the cottonwoods on the Iowa side. There wasn’t much legitimate fun a black man could have down in South Omaha besides going to a lunchroom for beans and coffee. Sitting on a roof and listening to a jazz band play a riverboat was a jubilation most nights. If he felt sick and sore, it would be. People on those boats wore white suits and dresses and bathed in electric light. They drank illegal booze and danced to hot music. Everybody else had to sit down in the muck to listen. If they lived down in the muck they’d hear by and by, like Will Brown would have.
He was in his cell on the fifth floor all night Friday. He was there all day Saturday. Never once did he confess. Never once did he say anything but that he was innocent of raping that girl. He had to know it was over. He’d already had a noose around his neck. If you’d been accused of rape and had to rely on the police to protect you, then you’d know it was over. They had him rushing away in the back of a truck, people trying to get him, bottles breaking, the uproar at the courthouse. God in heaven. They claimed he didn’t say but six words the whole time all this happened. It wasn’t me that did it. They put him in front of that girl Agnes and that’s all he could say. He nearly got carried off by a lynch mob, had to be saved by the police. Will Brown would have known what kind of trouble he was in. He’d have known there wasn’t much he could do about it. Men in a fix like that almost never said something to defend themselves. They knew what was coming.
A few blocks away the Ak-Sar-Ben carnival carried on. The prisoners could hear a calliope from the midway, the dying murmurs of faraway laughter, from an open window at the end of their row. There were traveling shows in theaters, musical revues, strong men, and novelty acts. Folks ate candied apples and hot dogs. The parade and coronation ball were still to come. Not a single room was vacant downtown; there was record attendance all week. The arcade was bustling busy all night Friday and all night Saturday, tens of thousands of visitors downtown to see what kind of action they could find in the city.
Will Brown was in his cell Sunday morning. It was quiet. The carnival wouldn’t open until noon. City and county offices were closed. The only commotion inside the courthouse came when breakfast was carted around and the drunks from the night before were let out of the tanks.
No more than fifty people in the whole city would have known him the day before he was arrested. The day after, up in a county jail cell, Will Brown’s name was on the lips of everybody in Omaha after what that girl said he did to her.
A guard showed Will Brown first thing that morning, the three Saturday editions draped over an arm like shaving towels as he rapped the bars with his cudgel. “You read?” the guard asked. “I guess you recognize your own name at least.”
It would have been different for Will Brown to see his picture in a paper. He was known. What did he think about that? Maybe he convinced himself that someone good could save him. He knew whether he did what that girl said he did or not—him being one of the holy few who would ever know the truth—but he’d hoped to be saved even if he was guilty, even if he did do things to the girl. Seeing his name in the dailies, maybe he believed it for a while, that something could save him.
Jake and Evie stayed in Saturday. They didn’t know what to do. They read the papers. Jake wished he knew what Tom Dennison had going. Things had moved on without him while he lived in Lincoln those fourteen months. They would move on now despite his being back.
He went to the Eigler house on Sunday. There was lunch at noon. Hamburger steaks and beet salad. They sat on the front porch after and listened to the noise coming from the mills, the clanging bells of streetcars, the shearing of a hot wind kicking up dust. Maria and Jake and Theresa and Silke and Miihlstein—Karel hadn’t been seen for weeks. It was a thing they’d done a thousand times before, watching the day wind down, watching the families across the way on their porches watch back, seeing groups of friends walk Clandish in twos or threes, debating some point of gossip or philosophy that was important to them and perhaps no one else in the world. Jake never quite knew what folks said as they walked by, murmuring from crooked mouths, shoulders touching as they swayed. They’re going to get that boy.
It was hot and humid for the time of year. It would probably rain, the air was so thick, maybe overnight. The clouds were low and hazy. They blended together and formed continent-like masses, gray, amorphous, never-ending. Jake hoped it would rain. Just sitting on the porch made him sweat. He felt drops roll down his back and tried not to move at all. Silke and Theresa sat sunning on the porch steps. “I like your beard,” Theresa said. One of them had to say something. When he arrived, they’d all stared at Jake and his wiry red beard.
“Yeah?” He played along. “I like it too. It gives me an excuse to scratch.”
The girls beamed as he dug into his jaw with his fingernails, their faces pink and glazed in the sun, in their heavy dresses, the only kind they had. Sleeves rolled, skirts to the knee. The girls were content like this, as if on a beach in Atlantic City, modeling bathing suits in a Harold Lloyd picture. Theresa swept hair off her forehead and tilted her chin skyward. Silke leaned back on her hands to stick her chest out. Jake couldn’t help laughing, looking at them.
He asked Silke how many boys were chasing her. She shook her head and blushed, then cleaned the thick lenses of her glasses with the fabric of her dress to avoid looking at Jake. He blushed too, seeing how uncomfortable he made her.
“There’s boys who talk to her plenty.” Theresa ratted her out. “The boys who live down where they keep the streetcars at night. Italians, around there. Poppa wouldn’t like them. They’re sweaty and grow stupid mustaches.”
“They’re gross,” Silke claimed.
“Who’s gross? Those grimy boys who work in machine shops?” Jake had spent enough time in Little Sicily to know what Theresa meant. “They unbutton their shirts when they see you two coming, yeah?”
He saw it clearly. Both girls would have babies of their own before they knew what. It pleased him to think of something so usual.
Maria asked if Jake had been to see Evie yet. Evie had come to visit the Eigler house a few times since he left. Requested his forwarding address. Maria asked if Evie ever wrote. “No,” he said. “I never heard from her.”