“ ‘Lynchings are justifiable on two grounds,’ says a thoughtful writer: ‘First, if they are consonant with the moral dignity and well-being of the people; and secondly, if they stop, and are the only sure means of stopping, the crime they avenge.’ Lynching does not stop crime; it is but a subterfuge for killing men. It is a good excuse, to use a rough expression, to ‘go a-gunning for niggers.’
“Lynching was instituted to crush the manhood of the enfranchised black. Rape is the crime which appeals most strongly to the heart, of the home life. Merciful God! Irony of ironies! The men who created the mulatto race, who recruit its ranks year after year by the very means which they invoked lynch law to suppress, bewailing the sorrows of violated womanhood!
“No; it is not rape. If the Negro votes, he is shot; if he marries a white woman, he is shot; if he accumulates property, he is shot or lynched—he is a pariah whom the National Government cannot defend. But if he defends himself and his home, then is heard the tread of marching feet as the Federal troops move southward to quell a ‘race riot.’
“The South declares that she is no worse than the North, and that the North would do the same under like provocation. Perhaps so, if the offender were a Negro. Take the case of Christie Warden and Frank Almy, which occurred in New Hampshire only a few years ago. Where could a more atrocious crime be perpetrated? The refinement of intellectual pursuits, the elegancies of social intercourse, were the attributes which went to make up the personnel of the most brutal murderer that ever disgraced the history of crime. Centuries of culture and civilization were combined in his makeup. The community where the girl lived and was respected and beloved did not lynch the brute. The white heat of passion led men to lay aside all pursuits for days in order to hunt the criminal from his hiding-place. New Hampshire justice gave him counsel and every means to defend himself from the penalty of his horrid crime. That was in the North!
“Human nature is the same in everything. The characteristic traits of the master will be found in his dog. Black, devilish, brutal as they may picture the Negro to be, he but reflects the nature of his environments. He is the Hyde who torments the Dr. Jekyll of the white man’s refined civilization!
“My friends, it is going to take time to straighten out this problem; it will only be done by the formation of public opinion. Brute force will not accomplish anything. We must agitate. As the anti-slavery apostles went everywhere, preaching the word fifty years before emancipation, so must we do today. Appeal for the justice of our cause to every civilized nation under the heavens. Lift ourselves upward and forward in this great march of life until ‘Ethiopia shall indeed stretch forth her hand, and princes shall come out of Egypt.’ ”
When he had finished there was not a dry eye in that vast audience. Every heart followed the words of the pastor as with broken utterance he invoked the divine blessing upon the meeting just ended. Slowly they dispersed to their homes, filled with thoughts that burn but cannot be spoken.
The papers said next day that a very interesting meeting occurred the night before at the church on X Street.
XVI
John Langley Consults Madam Frances
Macbeth
Macbeth Tell me, thou unknown power— First Witch He knows thy thought:
Hear his speech but say thou nought.Macbeth Whate’er thou art, for thy good caution thanks;
But one word more—First Witch He will not be commanded: here’s another,
More potent than the first.
Many things troubled John Langley. The fact that Dora and he seemed to have lost the close relationship which had distinguished the first period of their engagement, and that she now studiously avoided him and accepted with alacrity all the attention which her childhood’s lover so ardently showered upon her, did not disturb him so much as the utter indifference of Sappho Clark. How to bend her to his will was the thought which absorbed his waking hours and haunted him even in sleep. She should not escape him; on that he was determined.
This morning as he walked down town to his office he turned over various plans in his mind, and finally determined to go that very day and consult Madam Frances, who had been voted such a tremendous success at the fair which had just closed. John believed that the seeress could help him, and he was not so polished and refined as to hesitate to use such means to accomplish an end.
When he reached the office he noticed that an invitation to a dinner given that very evening by the Canterbury Club lay upon the desk; in his absorption in other things he had forgotten the dinner. He pushed his work at the Court House to a quick finish and retraced his steps to the office, and telling the boy that he would not return before three o’clock, hurried toward the quarter of the city in which the fortune-teller lived.
Joy Street is in the very heart of what is called the “Negro quarter” of the West End; it is also popularly known among colored people as “the Hill.” Here Madam Frances lived in a small ten-foot wooden building which she hired.
“The Hill” has been the scene of many stirring incidents in the peculiar history
