Chapter 25 Part 2

The Mystery of Wilberforce Johnson

Ernst did not wait for Jude when they left the chapel and strode furiously to and across Pennsylvania Avenue, a busy road leading to the hills west of Baltimore, and then abruptly turned northwards towards a new neighborhood being built around the old Bolton mansion, a relic from the days of Washington.

Jude had walked through this district frequently, eyeing houses he dreamed of buying for Eliza Angell. He liked the aura of comfort, not as grand as Mount Vernon but a distinct cut above most of Baltimore, and close to the new park at Druid Hill.

“Monotonous,” criticized Ernst, speaking to no one. “Identical rowhouses with identical parlors with identical lamps placed so carefully in windows lined with identical lace curtains so the world can have no doubts as to the virtuous and respectable prosperity of the inhabitants. Is that the aspirations of Americans so proud of their freedoms? To live just like each other in relentless uniformity?”

“Must you criticize everything?” Jude demanded.

“You take great comfort in conformity, don’t you, Jude Royer? You pride yourself for being American with all the freedoms in the world, and yet aspire to the most conformist life! That of the American middle class burgher! And you and all your fellow burghers distrust and judge those who actually dare want to exercise the great liberties promised by American freedom!”

Jude was angry. “That’s right! Foolish people who impoverish themselves and their families because they want to be creative or seek free love or whatever ridiculous fancies they confuse with principles. Ernst, you can be the most unpleasant man in all of Baltimore!”

“However unpleasant I may be, I am certainly not as rude as you were to Reverend Johnson. Did you not listen to Sarah Gratz’s warning?”

“I am not responsible for the obstinacy of a colored man who thinks too good of himself! These colored people don’t realize how much trouble they can be with the senseless fears and even lies they peddle.”

Ernst stared at Jude. He opened his mouth but then put a finger to his lips. Then he suddenly grabbed Jude and pulled him behind a half-completed carriage house.

After another minute a colored boy from the chapel came around the corner. No more than thirteen, he wore a rough cotton shirt and flat fronted trousers of cheap, scratchy wool, still too thin for the winter, and toes broke through the soles of his shoes.

As he walked past the unfinished structure, Ernst leapt forward and seized his collar. The boy briefly struggled but when he saw Ernst he broke into a wide grin and Ernst in turn laughed .

“What is your name?” the German asked.

“John Washington.”

“Why aren’t you in school instead of following us, Mr. John Washington?”

He giggled. “Mama needs money now that Pa can’t get no work. He used to be a caulker on the boats. But no more. Reverend Johnson teaches me the readin’ and writin’, but he’s got lots to do and many to teach. So I cleans and does errands for a saloon on Pennsylvania Avenue. And I see you come this way.”

Finding children peculiar things best left to womenfolk and with no attachment to his own childhood, Jude Royer was not fond of them. Incensed at being followed, he wanted to clip the boy by the ears, but Ernst gently asked: “To what honor do we owe the presence of your company?”

At this the boy squirmed. “I hear you at the church. I knows who you speak of. Ain’t many folks who talks about spiders and flies.”

“Astute boy! I knew there was a brain in your noggin when I laid eyes on you.”

“Her name is Lina.”

“Lina?” Jude said. The name of the colored woman who visited his office. Somehow it seemed to fit her so well.

The boy nodded. “Dunno more than that. She comes to prayer meetings. She don’t speak much. She ain’t sit with the others and gossip and suchlike. But I ain’t seen her in a while. She done up and disappear, oh, ‘bout a month ago. Reverend Johnson is worried, ‘specially now that you come to him.”

“A beginning at last,” Ernst surmised. “Is it too much to know a second name or where she lives?”

John shrugged.

“Why do you come to us,” Jude said, suspicious. “Why should I believe you?”

The boy looked at his shoes. “Folks are jittery. Ain’t just Reverend Johnston or us coloreds but white folks too. At the saloon, I hear things. For no one thinks a colored boy be listening. Men ain’t see me even if I be pushing a broom right underneath their noses. Then today I hear you speak of the spider and fly, like Lina done.”

“A secessionist scheme?” Ernst asked.

He paused, then started to nod, and then stopped and shrugged again.

“Tell me.”

“I can’t,” the boy said. “’Cause them folks don’t know either. It’s like how you walks into a cellar, and you can’t see nothing, but you senses there be something. Mebbe spiders. Mebbe rats. Mebbe something else. But you knows it’s there. Then the door slams shut and you can’t leave. And you’re ashamed to speak of it for you don’t want folks to know you’re a coward. Folks knows there be something in Baltimore. The way they talks ‘bout everything ‘cept this, you knows there’s fears.”

“And no one is willing to bring a lantern into the cellar with them?” Ernst surmised.

“There’s a man….” John said slowly.

At the men’s fixed expressions, he shrugged. “Someone people ain’t like. Who is back in Baltimore.” John paused. “But…”

“Go on,” Ernst encouraged.

He shrugged again. “That be all I can say. But sometimes I thinks there be something else, too.”

“Another man?”

His head shook. “The thing that we ain’t seeing in the cellar.”

Ernst retrieved a card. “Here is my address. I’m sorry to say this, but you will have to go to the back door for my landlady doesn’t take kindly to strange boys turning up on her front stoop if they are not there to scrub her floors. I expect you to call on me some time. I suspect you can be of great help.” He took out a nickel. “Get yourself a kossuth cake or molasses taffy and be merry.”

He gave John another reminder to call upon him and watched the boy run off.

“Why must people constantly lie to themselves?” the German demanded. “Why do men go to great lengths to hide from the truth instead of seeking it out?”

Jude waved him away. “We don’t need a colored boy. He can’t do anything for us.”

“John is as invisible as anyone can be in this America. And, ironically, that allows him to go into places we cannot. He can hear and see things we cannot. And he’s very smart. You saw his power of observation. People are aware that something is happening, and they are afraid to talk about it, letting euphoria and fear over secessionism obscure it. They cannot tolerate an inconvenient truth for it only makes them acknowledge the evils behind it.”

“It’s just another secessionist society,” Jude protested, “Catalogue it along with the hundreds of these societies we hear about daily. And that’s assuming we believe John.”

Ernst ignored Jude and looked up and down the street, frowning. “At first I thought it was fear of a future men could no longer believe in. A perception of change in the air and struggling to acknowledge it as the minds and passions and beliefs of millions of Americans are inexorably drawn towards a great clash of values. What a shock to you Americans to contemplate that tomorrow may not be better than today! So you pretend it cannot happen!”

He exclaimed in looking at the stolid houses. “But there’s something else too. Something so dangerous that both secessionists and unionists won’t talk of it. This is much more than just Mr. Swann.”

“Ernst, you know how the coloreds are. You can’t trust them. They’re not…,” Jude trailed off, trying to find the right words without triggering Ernst. “Educated,” he finally said. “John would only lead you on a wild goose chase.”

Ernst’s gaze fixed back onto Jude. It intensified. He folded his arms. “You don’t like Negroes.”

“I still don’t see how a boy can help us find Matthew Swann.”

“You don’t like Negroes.”

“And the relevancy is?”

“Why didn’t you introduce yourself to Reverend Johnson? Isn’t he good enough to know your name?”

Jude had not noticed this. Ernst placed one of his Spanish cigarillos in his mouth but left it unlit. “Whatever is going on in Baltimore cannot be as startling as the greatest secret of America. And do you know what it is, Jude Royer?”

He turned from Jude with a new disgust. “This country never fails to astonish me. Your anti-slavery Americans decry slavery and champion the cause of freedom, liberty and justice. But you do nothing when your society refuses to allow its free Negroes to join the ranks of prosperity. Most of the boat caulkers in Baltimore were once the free Negroes, who were skilled and could provide for their families. But white men got jealous and forced the shipyards to fire the Negroes. Now John’s father cannot afford to send his son to school. What does it tell you about American freedom? Is that justice?”

The cigarillo twitched. “The ladies whisper to one another that the Negroes are so dirty. But what happens when you force your Negroes to live in derelict houses on back alleys, with no clean water or drains to carry away the waste?”

He angrily threw the cigarillo into a stack of clay pipes. “You refuse to allow Negro children to be educated in the public schools and pass laws banning the teaching of Negroes and instruct them in the entirety of their lives they must be infantile. Then you mock the Negro’s stupidity and ignorance! They have an extraordinary gift for music and storytelling that should be the pride of America, and their generosity among themselves is second to none. And when they do show wisdom you refuse to concede respect while taking credit for their work. They work so very hard, perhaps harder than anyone else in America. But where is the monument to their efforts? Why are you Americans so afraid of the Negroes?”

To be continued

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