Cape Fear Rising Read online

  CAPE FEAR RISING

  BOOKS BY PHILIP GERARD

  Novels:

  Hatteras Light

  Desert Kill

  The Dark of the Island

  Short stories:

  Things We Do When No One Is Watching

  Nonfiction:

  Brilliant Passage

  Creative Nonfiction:

  Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life

  Writing a Book That Makes a Difference

  Secret Soldiers: The Story of World War II’s

  Heroic Army of Deception

  The Patron Saint of Dreams

  Down the Wild Cape Fear: A River Journey through the Heart of North Carolina

  The Art of Creative Research

  The Last Battleground: The Civil War Comes to North Carolina

  Writing Creative Nonfiction (co-editor)

  CAPE FEAR RISING

  PHILIP GERARD

  BLAIR, DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA

  Copyright © 1994 by Philip Gerard

  Reprint edition 2019

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover design by Laura Williams

  Interior design by Debra Long Hampton

  Blair is an imprint of Carolina Wren Press.

  The mission of Blair/Carolina Wren Press is to seek out, nurture, and promote literary work by new and underrepresented writers.

  We gratefully acknowledge the ongoing support of general operations by the Durham Arts Council’s United Arts Fund.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner. This novel is a work of fiction.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gerard, Philip.

  Title: Cape Fear rising / Philip Gerard.

  Description: Durham, NC : Carolina Wren Press, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018053694| ISBN 9781949467024 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781949467031 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—North Carolina—Wilmington—History—19th century—Fiction. | Riots—North Carolina—Wilmington—History—19th century—Fiction. | Wilmington (N.C.)—Race relations—Fiction. | Wilmington (N.C.)—History—19th century—Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3557.E635 C36 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018053694

  For all those who stand up against injustice

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOREWORD: WILMINGTON IS BURNING!

  PROLOGUE

  PART I: THE WORD

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PART II: THE CAMPAIGN

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  PART III: THE BALLOT

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PART IV: THE COUP

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  EPILOGUE

  AN AFTERWORD FROM THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author is grateful to the following people for their valuable help in researching the historical figures and events portrayed in this novel:

  The Cape Fear Museum staff, especially Harry Warren

  Robert R. Crews, Wilmington Light Infantry Reserve Corps

  Bob Ferguson, building manager, Public Services Division, city of Wilmington

  Leland Smith and the staff of the Fort Fisher Museum and Historical Site

  Michael Glancy

  The Archives and Manuscripts staff of Joyner Library, East Carolina University

  The Lower Cape Fear Historical Society archival staff, especially Diane C. Cashman and Merle Chamberlain

  Aileen LeBlanc of WHQR public radio

  Dr. Melton McLaurin, UNC-Wilmington, Department of History

  Dr. Daniel Noland, linguist, UNC-Wilmington, Department of English

  The New Hanover County Courthouse Vital Records staff

  The staff of the North Carolina Room at the New Hanover County Library

  The staff of the William R. Perkins Library Special Collections, Duke University

  The staff of William Madison Randall Library, UNC-Wilmington

  The Thalian Hall staff

  The staff of the United States Army Ordnance Museum, Aberdeen, Maryland

  The staff of the Wilmington Railroad Museum

  The staffs of the Southern Historical Collection, the North Carolina Collection, and the Photographic Services and Photographic Archives Sections at Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill

  Robert H. Wooley, historian

  Thanks to Stephen D. Kirk for his good work in preparing this manuscript for publication.

  The author is grateful for a research grant from UNC Wilmington and a fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council in support of this book.

  The author owes a special debt of gratitude to Dr. James R. Leutze, chancellor emeritus, and the late Owen Kenan, former trustee, of UNC-Wilmington.

  Thanks to Lynn York and Robin Miura for many hours of careful work in creating this special twenty-fifth anniversary edition; to Laura Williams for designing a cover that captures the haunting violence of the story; to Carla Aviles-Jimenez for her work with marketing and publicity; and to Arielle Hebert for managing all the business details with efficiency and grace.

  This novel was inspired by events that actually happened. Some of the characters are based on historical persons. In taking dramatic liberties with the action, the author has tried to remain true to the spirit of the facts.

  But this is fiction—only a storyteller’s history.

  An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.

  Edmund Burke, 1789

  FOREWORD: WILMINGTON IS BURNING!

  Randall Kenan

  WHAT AMAZES ME MOST about the 1898 Wilmington Insurrection is how little most Americans know about it 120 years later. I consider it a grave pity that so few Americans know of the only duly-elected government in the United States to be overthrown by mob violence and intimidation, a true coup d’etat. How the so-called Secret Nine literally ignited a conflagration that would take back the largest city in North Carolina from progressive, Reconstruction-leaning Republicans and the majority African American enfranchised voters; how scores of black families quit Wilmington forever, and how anywhere from 60 to 300 people lost their lives. Some historians estimate more than 2,000 white citizens took to the streets of New Hanover County that August, wreaking havoc on black property and lives, and a thriving black middle-class world was utterly devastated.

  Perhaps the shame of the thing, the enormity of it, the injustice of it, is what has kept the story so relatively quiet over all these years. Perhaps, to paraphrase Toni Morrison, it was not a story to pass on.

  Of course, for decades the initial tellers of the tale, the winners, mischaracterized what happened by calling it a “race riot.” As if the black citizenry of Wilmington rose up against the white aristocracy and the white folk fought back. Those who won the spoils championed this version of things during the height of Jim Crow Redemption and Restoration, a period that saw the raising of so many monuments to the Confederacy, a time when White
Supremacy ran amok, unchecked and lethal.

  Yet, impressive and sparkling scholarship has been written about the incident over the last century. (Is there a better title than “‘The Vampire that Hovers Over North Carolina’: Gender, White Supremacy, and the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898”?) And the clarion call of fiction has weighed in from time to time, beginning with Charles W. Chestnutt’s powerful 1901 novel, The Marrow of Tradition, and more recently Barbara Wright’s young adult novel, Crow (2012), which tells the story of the horrific event through the eyes of a young black newspaper reporter. Between those two poles came Philip Gerard’s 1994 Cape Fear Rising, a well-researched historical novel that tells the tale from multiple vantage points and accomplishes what we hope is the business of powerful fiction: it takes you there; it helps you understand the world a little better. His dialogue is raw and convincing, and you can smell this nineteenth-century world on the front door of the twenty-first century, though stubbornly holding onto the past.

  In all honesty, understanding the fear, sense of entitlement, hatred, and un-Christian animosity of figures such as the future governor of North Carolina, Charles Aycock; Raleigh News & Observer publisher, Josephus Daniels; or of Captain William Rand Kenan, is beyond reckoning. (For the record, I am not a blood relative of the Kenansville, NC, native.)

  Nonetheless, Philip Gerard did us a service not only in exploring the darker angels of our nature, but also by helping to keep the story alive and on the tongues of Americans in an era of misinformation and mass forgetfulness.

  Let us all join in remembering.

   PROLOGUE

  1831

  STRANGERS, THEY COME TO TOWN. Six men—black, furtive, traveling by night. They cross the Cape Fear River by rowboat from the west bank and gather in the shadows of stacked cotton bales on the wharf.

  The August heat steams off the river in a clinging fog.

  The six are frightened. There has been an uprising up north in Virginia—black men murdering whites in their beds. The roads are busy with armed riders—runaway patrols—galloping here and there after rumors of fugitives.

  But there is work here for free blacks, they’ve been told. This is a free port. Full of West Indians, freedmen, mulattoes from white mothers. A place that needs strong backs and clever hands. Worth the risk. There’s a man they have to see—owns a mill. Come daylight, they’ll find him and show him their papers. Meantime, best lie low.

  All but one are wearing homespun. Their faces are dusky and lined, their hands horny and rough from work. The other, the one they call Daniel Grant, is slender and lithe. His hands are smooth as a woman’s, and yellow—like his face. His complexion is so fair that even in daylight he can pass for white. He wears a flannel suit and a linen shirt with a white man’s name, the mill owner’s, inked onto the inside of the left cuff. He is the only one of the six wearing shoes.

  His voice is soft and resonant, a voice that comes up from his stomach and whispers things that sound so true five men have followed him a hundred miles from home to this river town.

  They hunker on the wharf listening to the rush of the outgoing tide. The moon is invisible above the fog, silvering it with an otherworldly light.

  One of the country men says, “The spirits is up and walking around, brothers.” He carries a forked cypress switch to ward off evil spirits. Now, he rubs it between thumb and fingers until it is warm from friction.

  “Hush, now,” Grant says. “Don’t go talking haints and voodoo. It’s only the river fog.”

  “Feel that chill? The spirits is floating down the river to the ocean. Going back to Africa, brother.” The country man rubs the forked stick some more. The love of Jesus is one thing, but a body needs every edge he can get in this wild river country.

  “Just the night air cooling down,” Grant says. The fishy stink of low tide fills the close air. “‘The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters,’” he continues quietly, “‘yea, than the mighty waves of the sea.’”

  “Amen,” one of the men murmurs.

  Another laughs. “For spirits, they’s pretty ripe.”

  “Don’t be taking it lightly, brother. Time of night to be indoors, bolt the shutters.”

  “Ain’t that the word. Give me a soft place to lay my head.”

  They have been sleeping out-of-doors for weeks. For two whole days, they wandered lost in the swamps, eyes peeled for cottonmouths and gators. At last, they found the river. Providence had left a derelict rowboat stranded on the mud flats at the mouth of a feeder creek. “We’ll just borrow this boat awhile,” Grant had declared, and they oared across at turn of tide. The current was stalled, and the dark water piled up in foaming ridges—unnatural.

  Now, the Cape Fear is once again rising.

  Stiff and travel-weary, they settle in among the bales to sleep one last night in the open. But all at once, the river sounds change. There’s murmuring out in the fog, the rasp of boots on rough boards—a boat?

  Grant and the others peer into the fog. But it is a trick of the ear—the men come not from the water but from behind, down Market Street.

  “Dust yourself off, brothers,” Grant says when he sees them, “and mind your manners.” In the sudden glow of a dozen lanterns, they all get to their feet, hands clasped at their stomachs, backs slightly stooped, heads nodded forward: don’t look the man in the eye.

  Except Grant. He stands erect, hands clasped behind his back. He balances on the balls of his feet, ready to move.

  The crowd of whites, armed with tool handles and rifles, fills in around them, backing them against the river. They listen to the steady slap of ax handles against palms.

  “What have we here?” A tall white man approaches. Unlike the others, he is unarmed. He wears a frock coat and a four-in-hand, even in this heat. The lanterns make it hotter. His hair and beard gleam with oil. As he speaks, his long, smooth fingers play with a silk handkerchief.

  “Cap’n,” Grant says, “pardon us for loitering at your wharf. We meant no harm. We have come seeking work.”

  “Hear that, Colonel?” one of the white men says. “Damned fugitives.”

  “You want to work?”

  “Yes, cap’n. We only just arrived.”

  The white man lifts a lantern and thrusts it close to Grant’s face. Grant doesn’t look away. The man leans in, squinting. “Why, you’re the creamiest nigger I ever did see!”

  “A volunteer nigger,” someone in the crowd says. “Could pass, if he was smart enough to try.” Laughter.

  “Bad night to be a volunteer nigger,” someone else says. More laughter.

  Grant says, “My daddy was a white—”

  The Colonel slaps him—not hard, but so quickly that Grant is taken by surprise. The slap is almost ladylike—it hardly stings. “Don’t ever let me hear you talking like that around here,” the Colonel says quietly.

  “Yes sir, cap’n.”

  “Don’t look me in the eye, boy.”

  “Yes sir, cap’n.”

  “Why are you niggers skulking about at this hour? Plotting murder, are you?”

  “We weren’t skulking, cap’n. We’re freedmen.”

  “Come into the light, all of you, where I can see you.”

  One by one, they shuffle closer to the lanterns. The Colonel scrutinizes their dark faces. “You one of Nat Turner’s niggers?” he softly asks each in turn—speaking close to their faces. Grant can smell sweat, naphtha, perfume.

  “No sir, cap’n.”

  “I think perhaps you are,” he says to Grant. “Part of that murdering gang of wild apes up in Virginia. Going to slit our throats while we slept, were you?”

  “We’re freedmen, cap’n—I told you.”

  The Colonel yanks Grant’s collar, tearing his shirt. “Where is your badge, boy?”

  “Cap’n?” Something’s wrong now, Grant thinks, getting more wrong every second.

  “Every free nigger is required to wear a badge of cloth sewn onto his left shoulder—here.” He c
uffs Grant, hard. “The badge says ‘Free.’ Cost you a dollar at the town hall.”

  Someone murmurs, “Colonel, nobody goes by that old law.”

  “Cap’n, we don’t mind buying a badge, once we working.”

  “Too late. Can’t buy it now. You-all are unregistered niggers violating our curfew.”

  The country man fingers his stick and mutters, “Now they making up all kind of laws.”

  One of the white men snatches his stick and snaps it in half. “Don’t be running that African voodoo on us.”

  “Colonel!” one of the men calls from the sea wall. “It’s Parmele’s skiff—got all his gear in it.”

  The Colonel folds his arms. “What have you done with the fisherman who owns this boat? What have you done with his body?”

  “Wasn’t no fisherman,” the country man mutters.

  “Please, cap’n, we’re just poor field niggers looking for a job of work.”

  “Carter! Henry!” the Colonel says. “See if you can find Dal Parmele.” The two men disappear into the darkness, and soon hooves are clopping fast on cobblestones. “What about you?” He grips Grant again by his linen shirt. “You a field nigger? You don’t look like any field nigger I ever saw.” He turns to his followers. “Gentlemen, what is your opinion of this fellow?”

  “Damned rabble-rouser,” one of them says. Others murmur assent.

  “No sir, cap’n—”

  “Yes, that’s what I think. A rabble-rouser.”

  Grant remembers the name inked on his cuff. “Mr. Maclver can vouch for us, cap’n.”

  “Maclver? The Scots are all upriver. Make up another name.” The men behind him laugh. “Are you the leader of these fugitives?”

  “Cap’n, these are freedmen. They go where they please. We have papers—”

  He tears the papers out of Grant’s hand. “I don’t see any papers.”

  “You didn’t even look—”

  “Don’t back-sass me, boy,” he warns softly. He rifles through the papers impatiently. “Well, what do we have here?” he announces, unfolding a yellowed newsprint pamphlet—David Walker’s Appeal to the Enslaved Negroes of the American South. Walker, the son of a North Carolina slave, went to Boston to preach against the evils of slavery. Grant was given the tract by a liveried slave on a rice plantation across the river. He meant to throw it away in the swamp.