It isn’t like Jake forgot all about those things. The riot. The lynching. But he didn’t like to talk about his ramshackle days down on the River Ward. He kept a garden and tuned up a Model T in his spare time. He loved his woman, they were married, they had a little bit of money, and then a boy and then a girl, both children with his blond hair and coarse Prussian skin. Jake had his woman. He had his kids. So what else was there to talk about?
Sometimes people, white people, if they found out Jake Strauss was from Omaha, they asked what he thought about the burning of the courthouse, the stringing up of Mayor Smith.
“Oh, sure. Just one of those things.”
Sometimes Jake came across somebody from Omaha. “Did you know Tom Dennison?” that person would always ask. “I mean personally. Did you ever meet him?” And Jake would tell the truth, at least partway. “I knew Tom. Worked for him for a little while.”
Then it could only follow: “You think Tom Dennison had anything to do with that riot?”
“Well,” Jake would say, “the way I see it.” He’d hesitate, but would tell them. “Of course he did. There’s no other way all that happens without Tom Dennison having a hand in it.”
The machine was still strong after the riot and would be for another decade. Those days, Tom Dennison had his hands in everything—everything except the mayor’s office during Ed Smith’s solitary three-year term. Tom had something to do with the newspaper coverage that year, in 1919, how they played up every detail of those twenty white women that were raped in Omaha and the hundreds more around the county and the lynchings from coast to coast. The Red Summer. Tom always had a hand in the papers. At least half those rapes weren’t committed by black men at all. Whether those were Tom’s men in blackface or not, who could say? But it wouldn’t surprise anybody to find out that they had been. Tom and his men did all they could to discredit the rule of law under the Smith administration. So Tom had something to do with the state of agitation. He had something to do with the riot. How the taxis ran all night, rushing downtown whoever wanted in on the action. The machine controlled the taxi firms. Tom had something to do with all the liquor passed around the crowd. He ran the liquor syndicate. And the boys’ dorming house. People wondered about that later. How a boy could find work if he stuck around a dorming house long enough, not moving boxes or cleaning out a house after the old lady living there died, but breaking windows. Going to demonstrations to cheer on a man who said bad things about the trouble black workers were causing. There was a different tin to things then. It was a fixed game. Machine lieutenants knew who a misfit was and recruited him. Fed him. Gave him a bed to sleep on. It was Tom Dennison who set this all up. Everybody knew that. Tom’s men organized things. Maybe he didn’t know how upside down the whole city would get. How could he have? Tom thought he was just like anybody else who was trying to ride out a spell of bad luck. He was desperate. Thinking it would be just one more concession, one more of his own personal rules he’d have to break, then that would set his world right again.
Maybe Tom Dennison didn’t lynch that man, Will Brown, not with his own hands. And he didn’t. But you couldn’t say he wasn’t involved. You couldn’t say Tom had nothing to do with the riot, nothing to do with the lynching. Who’d believe you? You’d be wrong.
He didn’t have to give an order to riot. He didn’t have to order the mob to smash out the courthouse windows and dump gasoline inside. He didn’t have to tell them to put a noose around the mayor’s neck. He didn’t have to tell them anything.
The men who ran things may not have caused the riots, but they certainly benefitted. Cowboy Jim Dahlman would win reelection in 1921 and remain in office until he died in 1930. Tom Dennison would enjoy his position of power another ten years before retiring. He would die in a San Diego hospital, in 1934, after driving his car off the road.
The boys on Clandish wondered about these years as they grew older—the war years, the riot year—and how their city wasn’t so splendid as they thought it was when they were young.
The boys took jobs when they were old enough to get them. Some in Jobbers Canyon warehouses, some in South Omaha stockyards. A few finished high school; even fewer went to college, became lawyers and insurance executives and city administrators. Some moved far away. Most of the boys on Clandish stayed close. They had kids of their own who went to battle in Europe in what seemed like only a short time later. Sons who died on the beaches of Normandy.
Those boys thought of what happened to Will Brown. Will Brown, who was buried in a potters’ field at Forest Lawn Cemetery. They knew so little about him. There wasn’t much of an effort to know more. Men like Will Brown just sort of disappeared those days. It was easy. A poor man might carry a state certificate in his billfold to prove he did in fact exist. He might only have one photograph of himself, alone in that billfold because nobody else would want it. A man like Will Brown. Who was he supposed to give a photo to? Even for a man like Will Brown, who was lynched, whose name was in all three local dailies and the New York Times, the situation was only marginally different. They had his photo in the newspapers. A reporter must have found it in a drawer in his place after the cops dragged him out. Unless it was his mug shot. Will Brown in his overalls. In a denim shirt and what passed for his good hat, one that had a solid brim at least. A man with no family around. With no friends who could stand up to defend the man as a man. Nobody to eulogize him. No funeral. No words at his burial unless the grave digger said something. Unless the grave digger spat on his grave, which was more likely. Nobody thought speaking on Will Brown’s behalf was worthwhile, the boys guessed. They didn’t know. Sure, the boys thought a lot about Will Brown, but they didn’t know him. To them, he was unknowable.