“You have one minute more,” said the guard.
The Princess took the package. The policeman turned, watch in hand. They looked at each other. He let his eyes feast on her for the last time—that never, never again should they forget her grace and beauty and even the gray line of suffering that leapt from nose to chin; suddenly she sank to her knees and kissed both his hands, and was gone.
Next day a great steel gate swung to in Joliet, and Matthew Towns was No. 1,277.
Part III
The Chicago Politician
1924, January, to April, 1926
Winter. Winter, jail and death. Winter, three winters long, with only the green of two little springs and the crimson of two short autumns; but ever with hard, cold winter in triumph over all. Cold streets and hard faces; white death in a white world; but underneath the ice, fire from heaven, burning back to life the poor and black and guilty, the hopeless and unbelieving, the suave and terrible. Dirt and frost, slush and diamonds, amid the roar of winter in Chicago.
I
Sara Andrews listened to the short trial and sentence of Matthew Towns in Chicago in early January, 1924, with narrowed eyelids, clicking her stenographer’s pencil against her teeth. She was not satisfied. She had followed the Klan meeting with professional interest, then the porters’ strike and Matthew’s peculiar case. There was, she was certain, more here than lay on the surface, and she walked back to Sammy Scott’s office in a brown study.
Sara Andrews was thin, small, well tailored. Only at second glance would you notice that she was “colored.” She was not beautiful, but she gave an impression of cleanliness, order, cold, clean hardness, and unusual efficiency. She wore a black crépe dress, with crisp white organdie collar and cuffs, chiffon hose, and short-trimmed hair. Altogether she was pleasing but a trifle disconcerting to look at. Men always turned to gaze at her, but they did not attempt to flirt—at least not more than once.
Miss Andrews was self-made and independent. She had been born in Indiana of the union of a colored chambermaid in the local hotel and a white German cook. The two had been duly married and duly divorced after the cook went on a visit to Germany and never returned. Then her mother died, and this girl fought her way through school; she forced herself into the local business college, and she fought off men with a fierceness and determination that scared them. It became thoroughly understood in Richmond that you couldn’t “fool” with Sara Andrews. Local Lotharios gave up trying. Only fresh strangers essayed, and they received direct and final information. She slapped one drummer publicly in the Post Office and nearly upset evening prayer at St. Luke’s, to the discomfiture of a pious deacon who sat beside her and was praying with his hands.
For a long time she was the only “colored” person in town, except a few laborers; and although almost without social life or intimate friends, she became stenographer at the dry goods “Emporium” at a salary which was regarded as fabulous for a young woman. Then Southern Negroes began to filter in as laborers, and the color line appeared, broad and clear, in the town. Sara Andrews could have ignored it and walked across so far as soda fountains and movie theaters were concerned, but she wouldn’t. A local druggist wanted to marry her and “go away.” She refused and suddenly gave up her job and went to Chicago. There, in 1922, she became secretary to the Honorable Sammy Scott.
The Honorable Sammy was a leading colored politician of Chicago. He was a big, handsome, brown man, with smooth black hair, broad shoulders, and a curved belly. He had the most infectious smile and the most cordial handshake in the city and the reputation of never forgetting a face. Behind all this was a keen intelligence, infinite patience, and a beautiful sense of humor. Sammy was a coming man, and he knew it.
He was, in popular parlance, a “politician.” In reality he was a super-business man. In the Second Ward with its overflowing Negro population, Sammy began business in 1910 by selling the right to gamble, keep houses of prostitution, and commit petty theft, to certain men, white and black, who paid him in cash. With this cash he bribed the city officials and police to let these people alone and he paid a little army of henchmen to organize the Negro voters and see that they voted for officials who could be bribed.
Sammy did not invent this system—he found it in full blast and he improved it. He replaced white ward heelers with blacks who were more acceptable to the colored voters and were themselves raised from the shadow of crime to well-paid jobs; some even became policemen
