Speeding cars rushed into the crowds with young men on sideboards, to find where the action was. Cars with Sicilians, Lithuanians, Greeks, Serbs, Germans. Once word of the riot spread, anyone who wanted to take a swing at a cop made a beeline to the courthouse. A gang hijacked a streetcar and wore out the bell as they plowed into the mess. Musky husbands rushed from houses with whatever hammer or club or bat they could lay hands on and then hopped a taxi to get there fast. Jalopies swung recklessly around the blocks. They swerved and skidded to miss bystanders and each other. Karel heard motors hammer at full throttle a block away, spreading echoes between the high-rises of downtown, while trucks hopped hot over the pavement to load up with furniture or produce or women’s garments, whatever could be looted. Crammed full inside, passengers on the footboards, taxis slumped cockeyed and labored up hills, running for free. “The fare is already paid for. As long as all this goes on, it’s paid for!”
People shouted out any news they heard. Smutty details of the rape. Conjecture about Will Brown’s body in relation to the girl’s. They made him out to be huge, a towering man with mountainous shoulders, arms like a gorilla, legs like a mule. Karel had seen Will Brown when they had him cornered on the Loebeck porch, but he couldn’t recall if what people said was true. Karel shook as he remembered Will Brown. A voice came to him through the drunk of the mob. The voice of a stranger god. They talked about Agnes Loebeck as if she were a little girl, pious and pure, like she only ever wore long, white Sunday dresses; like she picked berries in a pristine field; like she’d never even heard of anything resembling a dick before. They made jokes about black sex, about slicing off Will Brown’s organ and stuffing it in his mouth. About shooting it off with shotgun spray at close range. About sledgehammering his balls and feeding them to a hog. They talked about that woman Will Brown lived with down in Gibson, Virginia Jones, and what kind of woman she was, shacking up with two black men. What did anyone expect to happen when things like that went on in a city?
Towheaded Will Francis rode a white horse. Its hooves struck streetcar rails, whose glint showed down the block. Somehow he’d acquired a white Arabian, an erect, regal horse, muscled and ghostly beautiful. A rope hung from the pommel of his saddle. “We want the Negro and we’re going to get him,” Will Francis shouted. He rode back and forth to excite the others. “I got the rope! Get us the Negro, men, and us boys will do the rest!”
The man next to Jake collapsed. He dropped like he was nothing. People fired warning shots—both police and hotheads in the mob. Some fired until they ran out of bullets, then yelled until more were found. A bullet fell from the sky and dug into the top of the man’s head. Jake was next to him when he dropped, a body crumpled into his legs. Jake tried to help the man to his feet, but it was no use. His hat fell off, and they saw what happened. A woman poked her finger out the top of the hat to show where the bullet went through.
They circled in to look, the body facedown, a man in a blue suit, neither old nor young. There was hardly any blood. He’d been standing watching and a stray bullet came down on his skull. “He was next to me,” the woman holding the hat said. “Then, kaput.” This made sense. Nobody questioned it. A truck came along, they laid the body in the back. The truck drove off with the body.
Raiders stormed the courthouse again, and a few made it up the stairs this time. They found Chief Eberstein and made him address the mob from a window. Eberstein urged them to let the law take its course. Nobody listened, nobody could hear.
Jake had been at the back of the crowd, but now he was surrounded, with nowhere to go, just people everywhere, talking and jeering and telling each other what they thought should happen. Jake couldn’t find the boy. It was impossible. Who knew where Karel could be in this mess? Karel could be one of the raiders, could be inside the courthouse swinging a brick at a cop. Jake had to push and shove just to hold his ground, just to watch as a ladder was raised up the side of the courthouse. A few of the mob climbed in a second-floor window, none of them Karel. They didn’t last long before the police forced them down.
You’re not judge and jury, a sergeant rushed out to tell the mob. He was grabbed and punched in the mouth. They took his nightstick and beat him. Sheriff Clark tried to talk some sense into the mob—all those government men and their logic—and he was greeted by a girl who slung a skipping stone upside his head.
Jake saw Karel. The boy had bore out a circle for himself. Nobody wanted near him—hopping on his toes, swinging his arms—but people watched. Jake pushed through to see. Black-haired Karel had muscles in his neck and had grown a voice, and Jake wondered if it was really him. “Karel!” Jake shouted. The boy stopped to look around; it was him, hair stuck to his face, his shirt nearly torn from his body, how he swayed in a drunken swagger. “What are you doing?” Jake shouted. Karel looked at Jake but didn’t answer. What on earth could he say?
Not far from them the mob bombarded the courthouse. Jake couldn’t hear for all the glass breaking. Police sprayed fire hoses from a third-floor window—that was how it escalated—and the mob threw rocks in return. Nearly every window was gone through with a rock or stone or brick, shards hanging from the casements. Any police who tried to stop the mob were stoned—they couldn’t stop six thousand from smashing out windows or rushing the doors, not if the mob party would risk getting hit with rocks too. Rubble rained on everyone near the building, not just the cops. Girls filled tin buckets with stones from a vacant lot and carried them to throwers. Cooks from a hotel kitchen carried dishpans filled with bricks from a demolished building.
There was an explosion on the west side of the courthouse, a fireball and plume of smoke. Karel took off sprinting in that direction. Jake tried to follow but couldn’t. He didn’t want to be there. Karel did.
When Karel got to the front he saw what caused the fireball: someone got the bright idea to steal gasoline from a filling station in a tin can. He was going to toss it through a window and start the courthouse on fire, but the gas exploded in his hand. Scorches marked the grass where it happened, charred earth, a trail through the mob where the burned man was being led away.
Evie stayed home as long as she could stand it, knowing from the start that Jake would find his way to the courthouse to see what was going on. With her window open Evie heard the masses simmer throughout the day and knew it had something to do with that Will Brown the police had captured, the one who did bad things to a girl. Evie saw folks run down her street to go join the action, saw a madam lock her door up tight, which meant real trouble on a night like this, when there was a lot of money to be made. But if it was too much trouble, if the money wasn’t even worth it to a madam, then something bad was going to happen.