We stand up along with everyone else for the ancient soldiers, who stroll past us in their tattered uniforms. Mrs. Kelly had explained that when West Virginia seceded from Virginia in 1863, the people of the region were deeply divided. These old soldiers would be about seventy. Four are dressed in blue, three in gray.
I swipe my eyes with the back of my hand when I see the little children, their bicycles and pets festooned in red, white, and blue trailing along behind them. One little girl is leading a dog dressed up as Uncle Sam. Hester looks over, but I don’t care. Though I think of myself as a citizen of the world, there’s something about simple patriotism that moves me. I inevitably get a lump in my throat, and I don’t even know why. Maybe it’s because in Deerfield when I was young, Independence Day was such a big event.
First thing on a hot July Fourth, Father and I would go to the park near the river, spread our blankets on the lawn to save our place for the picnic . . . the Hungarian Polka Band would play in the Gazebo . . .
“Here come the horses,” the vet says, breaking me out of my reverie. Mares and stallions, ponies, and even burros prance along, their coats gleaming, their hooves washed, ribbons braided through their manes and tails.
“See that pinto?” He directs my attention to a beautiful white-and-brown horse. “See how she limps a little. Tore her back left leg on a barbed-wire fence last year, a hell of a repair. It took two hours, and I had to use chloroform.” And a little later, “There’s Mrs. Dresher riding sidesaddle on her new Morgan.”
The last two horses, black stallions, are ridden by men in long white gowns with white masks ending in a point, poor reproductions of KKK costumes. A hush runs through the crowd, then someone laughs and everyone joins in except for the vet and me. My jaw is so rigid I can barely speak. “Is this for real?”
“No, just some guys clowning around, trying to get attention by tagging behind. The parade committee wouldn’t allow any reference to the Klan.”
As the crowd disperses, he puts his arm through mine and guides me away toward a blue handcart where a vendor is spinning some kind of pink goo. The hot summer air smells of sugar. COTTON CANDY, the sign says. “Want to taste it?” Hester asks. He’s trying to divert my attention.
“No! Twenty-five cents is too dear. You already bought me a Coke.” The truth is, I’m still sick from the sight of the men in the Ku Klux Klan costumes. What if Bitsy saw them? She’s in the crowd somewhere with Big Mary. What if Thomas and Mrs. Potts are nearby? I am gritting my teeth so hard I might break them.
“It’s okay,” my companion says, pulling a quarter out of his pocket and handing it to the vendor. “You can’t take it with you.” Before he can receive the pink sugar stuff on a stick, I feel his shoulders stiffen and his head jerk up. Three heavyset men in overalls, across the street, are heading toward us.
“Hey, vet! Kill any good horses lately?” the one with a white cloth hanging over his shoulder yells.
“The Bishop brothers,” Hester mutters as he grabs my hand. “Let’s go.” He doesn’t even ask for his money back.
Race Riots
The last time I left a Fourth of July parade in a hurry was in our nation’s great capital.
It was 1919, and Ruben had to go to a meeting with Samuel Gompers of the AFL on July third, so he came up with a plan. “Why don’t you come?” he asked with his usual enthusiasm. “We could make a holiday of it.”
“I’ve seen fireworks and parades before.”
“Yeah, but not in Washington! A person should experience the festivities there at least once in a lifetime. It will be an adventure. We can stay with Sam Gompers.”
We both had money then. I was still working at Westinghouse and wrangled a day off with the section supervisor. Ruben was full-time with the union. We packed a bag and took the Capitol Limited out of Union Station on the second.
It was a bad time in the United States after the Great War. Patriotism had been whipped to a fury to overcome ordinary Americans’ reluctance to join what many thought was a European conflict. When the soldiers were discharged and came back needing work, there weren’t any jobs.
Meanwhile, in Russia, Lenin was riding the wave of the revolution and threatening to take over the world. There were a few bombings by anarchists in the United States, and suddenly people imagined a Bolshevik in every closet. The feds even pounded on our door one night, looking for Ruben, but Nora charmed them, wearing her red silk kimono, while Mrs. Kelly and I hid him in the attic.
Then the lynching of blacks started again in the South, sixty in 1918 and more in riots all over the country in 1919, several men still in their army uniforms. Pittsburgh wasn’t like that. Segregation was illegal, and there was a sense of peace regarding race relations, not that people of different races mixed freely, except radicals and jazz musicians.
Still, I should have known there would be trouble, but I was clueless until I saw the headlines of the Washington Post on Mrs. Gompers’s dining room table: 13 SUSPECTS ARRESTED IN NEGRO HUNT; WHITE POSSE SEEKS BLACK RAPIST OF TWO WHITE WOMEN.
“What’s this?” I ask the union leader’s wife as she pours tea for me from a silver teapot and the men talk union business in the parlor.
“Don’t pay any attention to that trash, dear.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a pack of lies by journalists competing with each other for the most sensational headlines. Race relations are already tense in Washington.” She passes the sugar “And the newspapers are making it worse, just whipping up trouble.” To illustrate, she shows me another stack of papers on the ornate oak buffet: the Washington Times, Evening Star, and the Washington Herald.
POSSES KEEP UP HUNT FOR NEGRO . . . WHITE POSSES AID POLICE IN HUNT FOR COLORED ASSAILANT . . . NEGRO FIEND SOUGHT ANEW!
“Have there really been that many rapes?”
The older lady shakes her head. “Not one that I know of, but the city’s become a racial tinderbox. There’s so few jobs that ex-doughboys are panhandling on Pennsylvania Avenue. The white soldiers bitterly resent the few black men who’ve been able to get work . . . even the lowest-paying jobs like messengers or elevator boys.”
The next day at the parade there was a scuffle, and I saw what she meant. As the U.S. Navy Band, dressed to the nines, marched past us, three white guys grabbed a black man in an army uniform, dragged him into an alley, and beat the stuffing out of him. Ruben chased them off, and we carried the injured fellow to a side street, grabbed a cab, and took him to Walter Reed General Hospital, but after that the fireworks held no interest and we left on the train the next day.