IT was the next night. In the gully on the road leading from that
one out of Central City which went northward, there was being held a
hastily called meeting of Central City Klan, Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan, Realm of Georgia. Before, there had been three hundred robed
figures. To-night, three months later, the popularity of organized
intolerance was attested to by the presence of fully five hundred.
What had happened to Nancy Ware had acted as a powerful incentive to
the recruiting of new converts. It was mighty fine to have a strong
and powerful organization to shut mouths of those who talked too
much about the night-time deeds of loyal Klansmen. And, by gum, if
you're doing anything you don't want known or stopped, you'd better
be on the inside.
A figure whose arms waved excitedly as he talked was haranguing the
crowd, which paid close attention to him. Had Tom Tracy been there,
he would certainly have recognized the voice of the speaker. Ed
Stewart's wife, had she been there, would also have recognized it
and dragged the speaker home by force had he resisted.
"White civilization in the South is tottering on its throne!" he
shouted. "We who hold in our hands the future of civilization have
been asleep! While we have gone about our ways, the damn niggers are
plottin' to kill us all in our beds! Right now they're bringing into
our fair city great passels of guns and ammunition marked ‘sewin'
m'chines' and ‘ploughs'! They're meetin' ev'ry night in these nigger
churches all over the county and they're plottin' an' plannin' to
kill ev'ry white man, woman an' chile in this county and take the
lan' for themselves! They're led by a damn nigger doctor right here
in Central City named Harper! I know it's so, ‘cause another nigger
doctor named Williams tol' me yestiddy mornin' all about it and said
that this nigger Harper was leadin' this vile plot! He's been goin'
all over the county stirrin' up the damn niggers and incitin' them
to murder all of us! What're you men goin' to do?" he challenged in
a voice that shrilled in pretended rage and terror.
A deep-throated roar answered him. Cries of "Kill the bastards!"
"Lynch 'em!" "Kill every black bastard befo' mornin!" It was the
age-long voice of the mob bent on murder—the pack in full cry. But
it was more than the voice of the mob of the Roman Colosseum, for
that ancient cry was one of pleasure at the death of a single
Christian. This was the shout of those intent on a wild, murderous
rampage that spared neither man, woman, nor child.
"Klansmen!"
A voice like that of a bull roared until the tumult had subsided. It
was the Exalted Cyclops of the Central City Klan. He stood in
silence until the group of hooded figures was still.
"The noble order of the Ku Klux Klan don't handle situations such as
this like a mob!" The figures stood expectantly, eagerly waiting to
hear what would come next.
"We have listened to the story told by our fellow Klansmen. Hol'
yo'se'ves ready for the call of the Invisible Empire at any minute.
We have planned the way to en' this dastardly plot and to punish
those responsible with death!"
"That's right! Kill ‘em! Lynch 'em! Burn th' bastards!" shouted the
crowd.
"That'll be done till ev'ry one is killed!" promised the Exalted
Cyclops. "But it can't be done so's it can be laid to our noble
order! Already our enemies are charging us with crimes! The Fed'ral
Gov'nment will be down on our heads!"
There were cries of "Damn the Gov'nment!" from some of the more
hot-headed. But calmer judgment prevailed. Something was to be done,
but what that ominous "something" might be, was not revealed. Each
man was to be ready for instantaneous duty upon call of the Klan.
Immediate action was not wise, for the Klan investigators had not
completed their work. Action must wait until that had been done, for
it was essential that not one of the plotters should escape.
This last point was emphasized. At last the crowd became more calm
with the determination to postpone its vengeance until it was
certain of being complete. It then dispersed its several ways,
dissolving into separate groups that talked excitedly of the
astounding and terrifying news, the need of prompt action, the great
luck the white folks had had in discovering the plot so soon,
violent denunciation of the Negroes in the plot.
In one of the groups the conversation was different. One of the
group was the Exalted Cyclops, in private life Sheriff Bob Parker;
another was the Kligrapp, otherwise Henry Lane, Commissioner of
Health; the third was the speaker who had revealed the plot, Ed
Stewart, Tom Tracy's landlord.
Sheriff Parker chuckled softly. "Well, Ed, looks like somethin' is
about to break loose, eh?" he observed.
"Yep, I reck'n you're right. Them damn niggers've got a hell of a
nerve! Formin' sassieties to ‘stop robbin' share-croppers'! When we
get through with 'em, they'll be formin' coal-shov'lin' sassieties
in hell!" The other two joined in the laugh at his grim joke. "We'll
put in th' papers they was formin' to kill white folks and they'll
never know but what that ain't true."
Parker laughed again. Waving his hand at the departing Klansmen,
there came to his face a cynical sneer. "An' them damn fools really
think they're sho'ly goin' to be murdered by the damn niggers!"
In another section of Central City there was being enacted at the
same time another scene of poignant drama that threatened to
translate itself into tragedy. The place was a darkened bedroom in
the home of Roy Ewing on Georgia Avenue, and the actors in it were
four in number. Roy Ewing, owner and manager of the Ewing General
Merchandise Store, whom Kenneth had seen but little since Ewing had
discontinued his nocturnal visits to Kenneth's office, was one of
the actors. His wife, whose face still bore evidences of a youthful
beauty that was fast fading, was a second. A third was old
Dr. Bennett, who sat by the bed, his hair dishevelled, his face
lined with perplexity and anxiety, as he apprehensively watched the
fourth actor in the drama, a girl of nineteen who was restlessly
tossing in pain on the bed. Row Ewing stood at the foot of the bed.
His wife sat on the other side uttering little snatches of phrases
of soothing sympathy which her daughter did not hear.
Dr. Bennett was plainly worried and at a loss what to do to relieve
the torture Ewing's daughter was so clearly experiencing. He turned
to Ewing. "Roy, to tell you the truth, it don't seem like I can find
out what's the matter with Mary. When she had that first attack, I
thought she had appendicitis, but she ain't got no fever to speak
of, so it can't be her appendix that's botherin' her. Looks like t'
me she's got some sort of bleedin' inside, but I can't tell."
Ewing and his wife looked anxiously first at their daughter, then
interrogatively and pleadingly at the old physician as he watched
the sufferer in her contortions of pain and agony. Mary, married two
months and her husband working in Atlanta, had lived with her
parents after a short honeymoon. She had her mother's beauty—that
is, the delicate, patrician, statuesque charm that had been her
mother's when Roy Ewing had courted and won her two decades ago in
Charleston, South Carolina. It was not the harsh-lined, blonde
beauty of Georgia but the fragile old-world, French loveliness of
that spot in South Carolina where French tradition and customs and
features had not yet been barbarized by the infusion of that
Anglo-Saxon blood which is the boast of the South. She lay there, a
pitiful sight. Her face was pale, covered with cold, clammy
perspiration; all blood had fled from it. She breathed with great
difficulty in short and laboured respiratory efforts. Her pulse was
failing, very rapid and thready; at times it was barely perceptible.
She had been seized with the attack around seven o'clock, when she
began vomiting. Now she appeared to be so weakened with the pain she
had endured that a state of coma was obviously fast approaching. At
least it seemed so. Dr. Bennett tried to revive her, but with little
success. The absence of fever puzzled him. He feared an internal
hæmorrhage—all signs pointed to such a condition—yet he did not
know. Roy Ewing and his wife were among his closest friends. He
would have tried an operation had they not been. That he feared to
risk with their daughter. Yet, what could he do? Mary was obviously
so weak that he knew she could not be moved to Atlanta, three
hundred miles away. Nor would a physician be able to get to Central
City in time to operate.
"I'm puzzled, Roy, mighty puzzled," he said, turning to Ewing. "I
might as well tell you the truth. Looks like t' me she c'n hardly
last till mornin'." It was gall and wormwood for him to admit his
impotency, but he did it.
"Dr. Bennett, you've got to do somethin'! You've got to! You've got
to!"
It was Mrs. Ewing who cried out in her agony—the piteous cry of a
mother who sees her first-born dying before her eyes. Her face was
as blanched as Mary's—every drop of blood seemed to have been
drained from it. She looked pleadingly at him, chill terror gripping
her heart as she realized from his words that her Mary, who had been
so happy and well that morning, was about to die.
"If you—all wasn't such good friends of mine, I'd try it anyhow,"
Dr. Bennett answered her, his voice as agonized as hers. "But I'm
skeered to op'rate or do anythin' that might hasten her on."
Ewing walked over to the doctor, grasped the older man's shoulders
so fiercely that he winced in pain.
"By God," he shouted at Dr. Bennett, "you've got to operate! I can't
see my little Mary die right here befo' my eyes! Go ahead and do
what you think best. It'll be better'n seein' her die while we stand
here doin' nothin'!".
"Roy," Dr. Bennett groaned, "you know there ain't anythin' I
wouldn't do for you—'cept this." He waved his hand vaguely towards
the bed. As he did so, he looked with keen appraisement at Ewing in
the dim light. He seemed to be debating in his mind whether or not
he dared take a very long chance. If the chance would not be more
disastrous. If Mary's life might not be better lost than that! Ewing
almost stopped breathing as he saw the momentary indecision in the
physician's face. Mrs. Ewing saw none of this by-play, for she had
sunk down on the bed, where her body was shaken with the sobs she
could not restrain.
"There's jus' one chance t' save her," Dr. Bennett hesitatingly
began. Ewing leaned forward in his eagerness.
"There's jus' this one hope," Dr. Bennett repeated, "but I don't
know if you'd be willin' to take that chance."
"I don't give a damn what it is!" Ewing shouted in his anxiety.
"I'll take it! What is it, Doc? I don't care what it costs! What is
it?" He quivered as with a chill in his excitement—the excitement of
the drowning man who sees a possible rescuer as he is about to go
down for the third time. Mrs. Ewing had stopped crying—she seemed as
though she had forgotten to breathe. They both waited eagerly for
the older man to speak. At last he did. He paused after each word.
"Th'only—man—I know—near enough—to op'rate—in
time—is—a—nigger-doctor—here—named—Harper!"
"Oh, my God!" groaned Ewing as he sank to his knees beside the bed
and buried his face in his hands. "A nigger—seein' my Mary—operatin'
on her—Good God! I'd rather see her dead than have a nigger put his
hands on her! No! No! No!" He fairly screamed the last in his fury.
"I didn't think you'd do it," said Dr. Bennett miserably. "I jus'
felt I oughter tell you. He's jus' out of school—studied in one of
the bes' schools up No'th—and in France. He might save Mary—but I
can't blame you none for not havin' him."
While he was speaking, Ewing jumped to his feet and paced up and
down the room like a caged and wounded tiger. On the one hand was
the life of his daughter—on the other his inherent, acquired,
environmental prejudice. None but those who know intimately the
depth and passion of that prejudice as it flourishes in the South
can know what torture what a hell—what agony Ewing was going
through. Prejudice under almost any circumstances is hard enough to
bear—in Ewing's case his very soul was tormented at such an
unheard-of thing as a Negro operating on his daughter.
"Roy!"
He turned abruptly at the sound of his wife's voice, having
forgotten for the time everything—wife, surroundings, all—as he
struggled with the problem he faced.
"Roy!" Her voice was weak because of the ordeal through which she
was passing. She ran to him, seizing his arm and looking up at him
pleadingly.
"Roy! I can't see our Mary die! I can't let her die!"
"Would you have a nigger see her naked?" he demanded of her
fiercely. "Would you? Would you?"
Her head went back sharply at the roughness of his tone. In her eyes
flashed that brilliant, burning look of mother love that submits to
no dangers, no obstacles.
"I'd do anything to save her!" she cried.
"No, no, Mary," Ewing pleaded, "we can't do that! We can't!"
She did not hear him. Brushing past him, she caught Dr. Bennett by
the arm as he rose to his feet. "Get that doctor here quick!" she
demanded of him. …
When Dr. Bennett telephoned him to come to Roy Ewing's home as
quickly as he could, Kenneth was somewhat puzzled. He went at once,
deciding that one of the servants was sick. When told that it was
Mary Ewing he was to treat, he could not conceal his amazement. He
followed Roy Ewing and the doctor to her room, the while he was
trying to make himself realize that he, Kenneth Harper, a Negro
doctor, had been called to treat a white person—a white woman—in the
South. Reaching the bedside, though, he put aside his bewilderment
and began at once the diagnosis to discover what the trouble was. He
listened without speaking to Dr. Bennett as the old man told him the
symptoms Mary had shown and what he thought was the matter. Ewing
was sent from the room. Kenneth rapidly examined the patient—and
decided that she was having severe internal hæmorrhages. It looked
like an acute and dangerous case.
Immediate operation seemed the only hope. And even that hope was a
slim one. He informed Dr. Bennett of his diagnosis.
Ewing was summoned. Briefly Kenneth told him his theory of the
trouble—that the only hope was immediate operation. Ewing faltered,
hesitated, seemed about to refuse to allow it. At that moment a loud
scream of pain was wrung from Mary's lips. He winced as though he
had been struck. He shrugged his shoulders in assent to the
operation. …
Kenneth telephoned Mrs. Johnson, the nurse who had helped him
before, to be ready to go with him for an operation in ten minutes.
He drove rapidly home, secured his instruments, ether, sterilizer,
gown and other equipment, bundled them into his car, called for
Mrs. Johnson, explaining briefly to her the nature of the case as he
drove as rapidly as he could to the Ewing home.
Mary was carried downstairs and placed on the dining-room table.
Dr. Bennett agreed to give the anæsthesic. Kenneth went rapidly, yet
surely, to work. In his element now, he forgot time, place, the
unusual circumstances, and everything else. Swiftly he began the
delicate and perilous task as soon as Dr. Bennett had sufficiently
etherized the patient. Yet, even in the stress of the moment, he
could not keep down the ironical thoughts that crept to his brain in
spite of all efforts to bar them. The South's a funny place, he
mused. Must have been a mighty hard thing for old Bennett to have to
admit that he, a Negro, knew more about operating in a case like
this than he did himself. Roy Ewing must have had a bad half-hour
deciding whether or not he'd let a Negro do the operation on his
daughter. Hope nothing goes wrong—if it does, might as well pick out
some other town to go to. Oh, well, won't let that worry me. Have to
make the best of it—save her if possible.
Weakened by the severe hæmorrhages she had been having, Mary was in
a condition of extreme shock. The least slip, Kenneth realized, and
nothing could save her. Her face wan and drawn, Mary's life hung
precariously in the balance—the odds were all against her while the
grim spectre of death crept slowly but surely upon her.
Beads of perspiration stood upon Kenneth's brow as he fought for her
life. Though he could not have done the operation himself,
Dr. Bennett sensed the gravity of the situation. The older man
leaned forward in his anxiety—hardly daring to breathe for fear of
interrupting the deft, sure touch of the operator.
Ten—fifteen—twenty—thirty—forty—fifty minutes crept by on lagging
feet—to the two doctors and the nurse each minute seemed an hour.
Despite all his efforts, Kenneth knew Mary was rapidly sinking. The
loss of blood and strength, the severity of the shock, the
enervating spasms of pain she had suffered, had sapped her strength
until all resistive power was gone. Kenneth knew that Dr. Bennett
knew this too—even in the desperate struggle he wondered what the
other would say and do—if the girl died. He tried to shake off the
fear that seized him—fear of what would happen if it became known
among the whites that Mary Ewing had died while a Negro was
operating on her. No mortal could have done more. Even were that
known and admitted, it would not save him, Kenneth knew.
The tense situation became too much for him. When he should have
been steadiest, the double strain on his nerves caused his hand to
slip. Blood spurted forth. Kenneth feverishly caught the bleeding
artery with a hæmostatic and sought to repair the damage he had
done.
"Tough luck," muttered Dr. Bennett. Kenneth looked up at him. The
older man grunted and smiled encouragingly. A burden seemed lifted
from Kenneth's shoulders. Mrs. Johnson wiped the perspiration that
streamed from Kenneth's face. She seemed endowed with a sixth sense
that told her his needs almost before he was aware of them himself.
It was a strange sight. Anywhere in America. In Georgia it was
amazing beyond belief. A white woman patient. A white anæsthetizer.
A black nurse. A black surgeon. …
All things must come to an end. Kenneth rapidly sewed up the
incision. He bandaged the wound tightly. She yet breathed.
Kenneth opened the door and admitted Ewing, who had paced the hall
since the operation began. Every minute of the hour he had been
there, he had had to fight hard to keep himself from bursting into
the room and stopping the operation. He had been restrained by the
positiveness with which he had been ejected from the room by
Kenneth—there was something in the physician's air that had warned
him without words that he must not interfere. Something within him
told him Kenneth was right—knew what he was doing. The colour and
race of the surgeon had been almost forgotten in the strange
circumstances. "Will she live?" he asked, his words whispered in so
hoarse a tone they could hardly be heard.
"I don't know—it'll be forty-eight hours before we can tell—if she
lives that long," answered Kenneth. The strain had been greater than
he had known. Kenneth felt a strange weakening—lassitude gripped his
body—he felt a nausea that came with the reaction after the mental
ordeal. Ewing stood by the table on which lay his child. Tears which
he forgot to wipe away stood in his eyes as he watched her laboured
breathing. Dr. Bennett put his hand on Ewing's shoulder.
"He did all he could!" he declared, nodding at Kenneth. There was
admiration in the old doctor's voice.
Ewing rushed off to give the news to his wife. …
The three men carried the unconscious form to her room. With a short
"Good night" to Dr. Bennett, Kenneth left the house with
Mrs. Johnson and drove away. …