As the boys moved around once they were older, they’d see other towns that had lynchings. Towns that had a certain prominent tree on the square, a hanging tree. A point of pride in these towns, maybe, a sign that read 33 Men Hanged Here. A stranger traveling through might think about what it did to a person to walk by that tree every day, to have a tree like that in your hometown. White or black or red or whatever. Just walking by that tree and knowing what was done there and what the purpose of that tree was, at least according to the people who ran that town. A tree that would outlive everybody.
Will Brown came from Cairo, Illinois, an island of a city at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi. This was in the papers. How he’d lived there a long while. He’d probably been there when Froggie James was lynched in Cairo a decade earlier. He’d have been there when they chased Froggie to a residential neighborhood and pulled him from the shed he was hiding in and burned him alive in an alley. Maybe Will Brown walked those streets to get to work. Maybe he went by that very alley sometimes. Where there were fire stains on the pavement and the eaves of houses.
Like there were bullet holes that marked the stone facade of the courthouse in Omaha.
The neighborhoods of the River Ward would be demolished piece by piece, Clandish in particular, until there wasn’t even a Clandish Street anymore, no tenements, just more rail yard with a bridge overhead to let cars go over without seeing. The maps amended, Clandish deleted from the index. Growing up, the boys thought they really came from somewhere, but it would become clear they came from nowhere. Some of them were around to see the big buildings downtown razed to the ground too. The old Gothic post office, the Bee Building, city hall, the Hotel Fontenelle, Jobbers Canyon itself. These monuments of their youth, that had once been of primal importance, held no importance. Only the courthouse remained. The courthouse, where the riot had been, where a man had been lynched, was the only monument that survived.
Both Jimmy Mac and Alfred hung around Clandish for a while, the same as ever. Sure, a guy like Joe Meinhof or Milt Hoffman could just disappear, and they both did—caught a train the evening of September 28, as a matter of fact, the riot still boiling, and were out of Omaha before any arrests were made, never to be seen or heard from again.
It wasn’t so easy for a boy like Jimmy McHenry. Jimmy had his picture in the World-Herald, that famous photograph of folks posing with the burned remains of Will Brown. Jimmy right up front, grinning large and proud. His cheeks all red from liquor. Surrounded by folks from all walks of life. Businessmen wearing the gaudy rings of their fraternal order; housewives with felt flowers on their hats and big ebony buttons on their pea coats; jug-eared mill workers; pissed-off men in trench coats; a guy in a tuxedo and bow tie; an Irish kid beside himself with self-importance. Jimmy couldn’t walk away from that. A picture of him in the paper, one that was reprinted on thousands of postcards sent all over the country. And what people wrote on the back of these postcards: See what folks in Omaha had going? A cookout at the courthouse. All OK here now. Maybe Jimmy didn’t know what he was getting into. How, as a result of that photograph, police were able to track him down. All the boys (all girls, women, and men, for that matter) who took part in the riot had to worry about being identified. It was a simple thing when it came to Jimmy Mac. His face in the paper. Still, even if he was identified as being present at the lynching, it was a more difficult matter to prove he was a party to the lynching. The county attorney declined to press charges, because he couldn’t prove Jimmy did anything other than pose for a photo, and plenty of folks did that. It wasn’t illegal to do so. Two weeks later a firefighter came forward and said he recognized Jimmy as one of the boys who stole a ladder from a fire engine as the courthouse burned. But the next day an anonymous donor sent a check to replace all equipment that was damaged in the riot, and suddenly the fireman wasn’t so sure after all that Jimmy was the boy who took a ladder. Jimmy was off the hook so far as the county attorney was concerned, but he still had to face his mother. He didn’t foresee his poor mother having to think about her son front and center at a lynching, and dumb enough to get photographed to boot. And then Mrs. McHenry being the subject of whispers at mass. The target of sidelong glances every day for months on the street. All because her boy had his picture in the papers. What a shame.
For Alfred Braun things were a bit different. He wasn’t in the photograph of the lynching, for one thing, so he didn’t have that to live down. Not in such a specific way.
After the riot Alfred reconciled with his father. After months of living in the dorming house, he apologized for everything. Said he was sorry for getting mixed up with that bunch of fascists in the Dennison machine, for what happened at the Santa Philomena, and how the Interrace Game was besmirched by a rotten play. Alfred was sorry for the courthouse, for Will Brown. He bawled his eyes out on the hallway side of the door to the Braun tenement room. Emil wouldn’t let him in, as he hadn’t let Karel in either. But Alfred didn’t slink off elsewhere, as Karel had. Alfred collapsed against the door and howled about how sorry he was until Emil couldn’t take it anymore. “Come here, my boy! What am I saying? Get inside! Get inside before the rats get you for good!”
Emil Braun was rejuvenated a degree after that. He stumbled along with a cane but was upright and moving at least. An improvement over being stuck in bed like he’d been the previous sixteen months. Braun needed Alfred’s help to get around. So they stood together in the cellars of Southside taverns that hung the black flag of anarchy, so Emil could speechify on the misdeeds of Omaha’s King Gambler and reminisce about the greatness of Josh Joseph, Braun’s friend, the best there was from a time when even a slaughterhouse floor worker knew how to respect the game.
None of the Brauns starved during the lean years to come, nor during the even leaner ones after that. Alfred was killed in 1927, in Seattle, Washington, when a riot-busting cop’s baton cracked his skull. Alfred Braun was decried in the Post-Intelligencer as a common thug, which he probably was. Most anyone who’d known him in Omaha agreed that this was right.