All of this happened over a period of two to three weeks. Later, when the name Coalhouse Walker came to symbolize murder and arson, these earlier attempts to find redress no longer mattered. Even at this date we can’t condone the mayhem done in his cause but it is important to know the truth insofar as that is possible. Conversation at the family’s dinner table was now obsessive on the subject of this strange proud black man’s attempts to have his property restored. It seemed like such a foolish thing to have happened. It seemed to be his fault, somehow, because he was Negro and it was the kind of problem that would only adhere to a Negro. His monumental negritude sat in front of them like a centerpiece on the table. While Sarah served, Father told her that her fiancé would have done better after all to drive away his car when he could and forget the matter. Younger Brother bristled. You speak like a man who has never been tested in his principles, he said. Father was so outraged by this remark that he could find no words. Mother said, gently, that no one would be helped by the voicing of intemperate feelings. A peculiar kind of unseasonably warn breeze blew the window curtain in the Egyptian dining room. It had that breath of menace which makes the beginning of the spring so unsettling. Sarah dropped a serving tray of filet of sole. She retreated to the kitchen and held her baby. Sobbing she told Younger Brother, who followed her there, that the preceding Sunday Coalhouse had said he could not marry until he had been satisfied by the return of the Model T in exactly the same condition as when the firehorses had been driven across his path.
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obody knew Sarah’s last name or thought to ask. Where had she been born, and where had she lived, this impoverished uneducated black girl with such absolute conviction of the way human beings ought to conduct their lives? In the few weeks of her happiness, between that time she accepted Coalhouse’s proposal and the first fears that her marriage would never happen, she had been transformed to the point of having a new, a different face. Grief and anger had been a kind of physical pathology masking her true looks. Mother was awed by her beauty. She laughed and spoke in a mellifluous voice. They worked together on her wedding dress and her movements were altogether graceful and lithe. She had an excellent figure and she gazed at herself in the mirror with pride. She laughed in joy of her own being. Her happiness flowed in the mild of her breasts and her baby grew quickly. He was pulling himself to his feet and the carriage was no longer safe for him. He stayed with her in her room. She picked hi up and danced with him. She was a girl of perhaps eighteen or nineteen years, now satisfied that the circumstances of life gave reason to live. She was, Mother realized, the kind of moral being who understood nothing but goodness. She had no guile and could act only in total and helpless response to what she felt. If she loved she acted in love, if she was betrayed she was destroyed. These were the shining and dangerous facts of the life of an innocent. The boy was attracted to her more and more, and to her baby. He played gently with the child and there was solemn recognition between them. The mother sang. She sewed her wedding costume and tried it on and removed it. Underneath she wore a shift which rose to her hips as she pulled the white dress over her head. She saw the boy’s honest and attentive regard of her limbs and she smiled. To Younger Brother she offered the unspoken complicity of two members of the same generation. Her husband to be was an older man and the Younger Brother was set apart by age from the others in his family. And that was why he followed her into the kitchen and she confided to him the news of Coalhouse’s vow not to marry until he had his car back.
What will he do? Young Brother said I don’t know, Sarah said. But she had perhaps detected the violence underlying all principle.
The following Sunday, Coalhouse Walker did not appear for his visit. Sarah returned to her room. It was now clear to Father that the situation was deteriorating. He said it was ridiculous to allow a motorcar to take over everyone’s life as it now had. He decided to go the next day and talk to the Emerald Isle contingent, especially to Chief Conklin. What will you do, Mother said. I will make them see they are dealing with a property owner of this city, Father said. If that doesn’t work I will quite simply bribe them to repair the car and return it to my door. I will pay them money. I will buy them off. Mr. Walker would not like that, Mother said. Nevertheless, said Father, that’s what I’m going to do. We will worry about explanations later. They are the town dregs and will respect money.
But before the plan could be undertaken Sarah decided on a course of action of her own. As it happened, this particular season was the spring of an election year: a candidate on the national Republican ticket, Mr. Taft’s Vice-President, James Sherman, was to be in New Rochelle that evening to speak at a Republican party dinner to be held at the Tidewaters Hotel. She had remembered overhearing Father discuss his reasons for not attending the event. Knowing little of government, nor appreciating the degree of national unimportance of her Coalhouse’s trials, Sarah conceived the idea of petitioning the United States on his behalf. It was the second of the frightened and desperate acts provoked from her innocence. She waited in the evening until her child was safely asleep, and wrapping a shawl about her head, left the house without telling any member of the family and ran down the hill to North Avenue. She was shoeless. She ran swiftly as a child. She was prepared to run all the way to the hotel but instead found a streetcar coming along, its interior lights flickering, then driver tolling its bell angrily as she dashed across the tracks just in front of it. She paid the fare and rode downtown.
An evening wind came up and in the dark sky great heavy clouds massed for a rainstorm. She stood in front of the hotel among a small crowd of people awaiting the arrival of the great man. Car after car drove up and gave forth this dignitary or that. A few windswept drops of rain spattered the sidewalk. A carpet had been laid from the curb to the hotel doors. Not only the local police in their white evening gloves but a platoon of militia were on hand, keeping the entrance cleared and pushing the crowd back from the street in anticipation of the arrival of the Vice-President’s car. The militia were in constant attendance, as well as plainclothesmen of the Secret Service which had been commissioned to protect presidents and vice-presidents by Theodore Roosevelt after the assassination of President McKinley. As a matter of fact Roosevelt had come out of retirement this season to run against his old friend Taft. Wilson was the Democratic candidate, Debs the Socialist, and then four campaigns whipped back and forth across the country, blowing up hopes on the land like the winds that ruffled the great plains. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, just a week or so before, Roosevelt had arrived to make a speech. Leaving the railroad station and walking to a car he had been kept separate from a welcoming crowd. One man stepped out of the crowd and aimed a pistol at point-blank range. Shots rang out. A bullet tore through the spectacle case in Roosevelt’s breast pocket, ripped a hole in the fifty folded pages of his speech and lodge in his rib. He was stunned. The assassin was wrestled to the ground. There were shouts. Roosevelt examined his wound and was satisfied it was not serious. He went on to make his speech before he allowed doctors to treat him. But the acrid smoke of the act still lingered in the public mind. Anyone commissioned to guard a personage could not help thinking of the shooting of Teddy Roosevelt. New York City’s mayor, William J. Gaynor, had been bloodied by an assassin’s bullets not too long before. Guns were going off everywhere.