Eventually, bridle trails crossed Memorial Park; a polo club opened; no doughboy or doughboy’s wife could afford to go near it. In my duties for the Dallas mayor’s office, I’ve learned a lot about Houston. The two cities often compare themselves, competing in sports, finance, real estate. Several (white) lawyers jog in Memorial Park. Wealthy singles convene here, plumed in spandex, hoping to find True Love, or at least a love that will support them in the manner to which they’re accustomed.
The ghosts of the old Twenty-fourth remain, now, only in the wind huffing through all the soft magnolia leaves.
Across the street, wood-trimmed brick homes murmur with TV baseball. Lawn mowers buzz, barbecue sauce spices the breeze … what didn’t Mama like here?
I used to wonder why the city would place an army base so near a residential neighborhood. But the military was universally respected in those days (I’m what my stepdaddy calls a “cynical, post-’Nam babe”). Houston looked at World War I and saw a rainbow; it was the country’s largest cotton port and stood to reap a bundle from the feds.
Texas’s Anti-Saloon League recognized that young recruits might get rowdy from time to time and convinced lawmakers to establish a five-mile zone around all military installations, banning bars and bawdy houses. Citizens referred to these areas as white zones, long before the Twenty-fourth arrived.
Initially, the battalion settled peacefully into Houston. The city’s “colored population,” as it called itself then, hailed them as heroes. Businessmen welcomed the army’s money. From court records following the riot, I have testimony from a well-to-do widow who lived by the base. “I didn’t want those niggers tromping through my yard on their way into town, scattering all my chickens,” she said, “so I decided to make friends with them right away. Baked bread for some of the boys, let them use my kitchen phone now and then. I didn’t much like them — didn’t like the way they smelled — but I figured cordiality was the best policy.” So, through cordial, gritted teeth — the Southern way — the camp’s immediate neighbors accepted the “dark guard,” at first.
Most of the soldiers had never served in the South, had never been so intimate with Jim Crow, even on his best behavior. Right away, they resented the city’s streetcar conductors, who expected them to stand at the back of the cars. They resented the stares they got from white workmen at Camp Logan. They resented water coolers in their own camp, roped off and labeled WHITE for construction workers, GUARD for the troops. Cops on the beat, noting the newcomers’ attitude, began to mutter, “I never …,” started to whisper, “Uppity.”
By most accounts, on the night of the riot, August 23, fifteen black soldiers, ignoring their white commanders’ pleas, armed with Springfield rifles and ammunition pilfered from the post’s storage lockers, marched down Washington Road toward the streetcar loop. They opened fire on a jitney, killing the driver, severely wounding a passenger.
Over a hundred other troops, led by a previously exemplary sergeant named Vida Henry, avoided Washington Road’s bright lights, sticking instead to the smaller streets, Lillian and Rose, crossing Buffalo Bayou into the San Felipe district. They shot randomly into the dark in these usually quiet white neighborhoods. Two hours later, when the mutiny petered out, twenty people lay dead or dying in the streets.
Apparently, the whole thing had flared around the rumor that a pair of Houston cops had killed a Corporal Charles Baltimore of the Third Battalion. Later, he turned up in camp, beaten and bloody, but alive. More to the point, several weeks of “uppity” anger had broken free at last.
Court records show that Cletus Hayes, a young private, was captured neither on Washington Road nor the other rioters’ paths. He wound up near dawn, by himself, on Reinerman Street.
I walk there now. This block is not so well-appointed as its neighbors. A failed flower shop, dry and cracked, drops light orange paint flakes onto the grass next to Brock’s Combo Burger #2 and a row of modest homes. As a former history major, I can’t help but imagine the births and deaths, the tilled soil, the spilled blood on this spot, all so Brock can make a profit, now, off his fatty foods. The march of progress. Onions in the air.
Slack wire frames a vegetable garden by a sagging wooden home. The house is painted yellow. Corn wilts in the hard soil. I recall the court transcripts, following the riot: “Defendant accosted the young lady, Sarah Morgan, in her mother’s garden.” But over five hundred pages detailing this single incident fail to explain the woman’s presence among the cabbage at four o’clock in the morning.
That particular garden is gone; this yellow house, like those around it, dates from the thirties, no earlier. An accurate picture of the neighborhood as it appeared in the summer of’17 is impossible now.
But this might as well be the place. The Morgan home had to be near here. If Private Hayes had been hiding that night near the bayou, as MPs later claimed, then he would have approached this block from the southeast, up Oak Street or Pine, past the spot where a pimpled high school kid flips burgers now in Brock’s cockroachy kitchen.
Sergeant Vida Henry, the riot’s leader, shot himself by the bayou at around 2:05 A.M., several hours after the uprising ended. Private Hayes never denied accompanying him, though he claimed at the trial he’d never raised his weapon. Realistically speaking — if nothing else, peer pressure would have been irresistible — he’d probably shot out a window or two, shattered some white woman’s crystal lamp as she crocheted in her den.
If only I could see wholly from his perspective, slip past the surface details I’ve gathered and melt into the man … his strategies, hopes, rages — at whites? Women? White women?
Standing at the garden’s edge, I concentrate so hard my head hurts in the swirling afternoon heat. I try to lose myself, pour my ego from one container into another …
If I were Cletus Hayes that night, what would I do? I’d chuck my rifle, my cap, even my coat, so in the dark, in the swift sweep of headlights, I might not be recognized as a gunner. I’d stick to alleys and narrow paths between homes. I’d want to return to camp as soon as possible — to claim, perhaps, I’d never left my bunk. I wouldn’t dawdle — why would I dawdle? — in a wide-open vegetable garden in an all-white neighborhood.
Am I dumb? Impulsive? Arrogant? Who the hell am I?
Car horns blare by the burger joint. I open my eyes. Why do I care? Why go to all this trouble to snatch a ghost? Because, for some time now, I’ve suspected my origins are linked with his … but that’s an abstraction, no realer than believing the Founding Fathers had me in mind when they formed this nation. No realer than the Needle Men.
But maybe Cletus is my hoo-raw: a spirit dragging life and death behind him, like a wedding car’s clattery tin cans; a breath from the past who could fill my present if only I can inspirit him, inhabit him … so I shut my eyes … take up his uniform …
… and slink like a scarecrow down Reinerman Street, shivering, rank with dirty bayou water. I hear sirens south of here where several white-owned businesses — the Ruby Café, Claude’s Coffee Shop, Jack’s Fine Shoes — flatten in flames. Gunshots echo in the dark. No lights illuminate the homes. I pick my way past small magnolia trees, Fords big as buffaloes parked in narrow drives, wooden porches large as gallows, until I come to a neat, clear patch staked out in Bermuda grass. There — waiting for me? — among cabbages, tomato vines, and yellow-tipped cucumbers, a young lady in a blue cotton dress.