Our knowledge of this clandestine history comes to us by Younger Brother’s own hand. He kept a diary from the day of his arrival in Harlem to the day of his death in Mexico a little more than a year later. Coalhouse Walker had militarized his mourning. His grief for Sarah and the life they might have had was hardened into a ceremony of vengeance in the manner of the ancient warrior. It was Younger Brother’s impression that Coalhouse’s eyes with their peculiar gaze of unswervable intention appeared now to be looking beyond what they saw to the grave. His command of the young men’s loyalty was absolute, probably because he had not asked for it. None of them was a mercenary. There were five besides Younger Brother, the oldest in his twenties, the youngest not yet eighteen. Their respect for Coalhouse bordered on reverence. They lived together there in the basement of the brownstone pooling their wages as stock clerks and delivery boys. Young Brother added several comparatively munificent pay envelopes from the flag and fireworks plant before he abandoned New Rochelle altogether. The bookkeeping of the communal treasury was scrupulous. Every penny was accounted for. They mimicked Coalhouse’s dress and so the suit and carefully brushed black derby was a kind of uniform. They came and went from their rooms like soldiers on patrol.
At night they sat for hours and discussed their situation and what it could leas to. They studied the reactions of the press to what they had done.
Coalhouse Walker was never harsh or autocratic. He treated his followers with courtesy and only asked if they thought something ought to be done. He dealt with them out of his constant sorrow. His controlled rage affected them like the force of a magnet. He wanted no music in the basement. No instrument of any kind. They embraced every discipline. They had brought in several cots and laid out a barracks. They shared kitchen chores and housecleaning chores. They believed they were going to die in a spectacular manner. This belief produced in them a dramatic, exalted self-awareness. Younger Brother was totally integrated in their community. He was one of them. He awoke every day into a state of solemn joy.
On both of Coalhouse’s attacks he used automobiles the younger men stole for him in Manhattan. The autos were returned without damage to their garages and if the phenomenon of their disappearance and return was reported to the New York Police it was never connected by them to the events in Westchester. After the bombing of the Municipal Fire Station, when Coalhouse’s picture was published on every font page in the country, he sat down with sheet over his shoulder and permitted one of the young men to shave his head and his neat moustache. The change in him was striking. His shaven head seemed massive. Younger Brother understood that whatever its practical justification this was no less than a ritualistic grooming for the final battle. A day or two later one of the band brought in the daily papers with photographs of the Model T raised from the pond. This tangible proof of the force of Coalhouse’s will made them all feel holy. By the time they received news of Willie Conklin’s flight and sat down to discuss the proper response, they were so transformed as to speak of themselves collectively as Coalhouse. Coalhouse gone to that coal and ice yard, one of them said, Willie be a dead man now. We missed our chance. Naw, Brother, another said, he better to us alive. He keeping Coalhouse in the folks’ minds. He a plague. Now we going do something so terrible bad in this town, no one ever mess with a colored man for fear he belong to Coalhouse.
33
h, what a summer it was! Each morning Mother opened the white-curtained glass doors of her room and stood looking at the sun as it rose above the sea. Gulls skimmed the breakers and strutted on the beach. The rising sun erased the shadows from the sand as if the particled earth itself shifted and flattened, and by the time she heard Father astir in the adjoining room the sky was beneficently blue and the beach was white and the first sea bathers had appeared down at the surf to test the water with their toes.
They breakfasted in the hotel at tables covered with starched white cloths. The service was heavy hotel silver. They dined on half grapefruit and shirred eggs and hot breads, broiled fish, ham slices, sausage, a variety of preserves dispensed to oneself from tiny spoons, coffee and tea. And all the while the breezes from the ocean lifted the bottoms of the window curtains and shivered their salt thrill along the high fluted ceiling. The boy was always eager to be up and out. After the first few days they allowed him to excuse himself and watched from their table as he appeared moments later running down the wide steps of the porch with his shoes held in his hand. They were on nodding acquaintances with several of the guests. This would yield to speech eventually and then the mild curiosity aroused by this one’s looks on that one’s dress would be satisfied. They were in no rush. They felt they looked grand and prosperous. Mother brought beautiful summer ensembles from the boardwalk shops. She wore white ad yellow and in the informality of afternoon abandoned herself to no hat and only carried a sun parasol. He face was bathed in soft golden light.
They would swim in midafternoon, when the air became still and the heat oppressive. Mother’s bathing costume was modest but she required several days to feel comfortable in it. It was black, of course, with skirt and pantaloons that came below her knees and low-cut swim shoes. But her calves were exposed and her neck, almost to the bodice. She insisted that they separate themselves by several hundred yards from the nearest bathers. They encamped under a hotel umbrella with its name imprinted in orange upon its escalloped fringe. The Negro woman sat upon a straw chair some yards away. The boy and the brown child studied the tiny crabs that buried themselves with a bubbly trail in the wet sand. Father wore a horizontal striped blue and white sleeveless one-piece bathing suit that made cylinders of his thighs. Mother found it distasteful to see the outlines of his maleness in that costume when he emerged from the water. Father liked to swim out. He lay on his back beyond the breakers spouting water like a whale. He came in staggering through the waves, laughing, his hair flattened on his head, his beard dripping and his costume clinging to him immodestly, and she felt momentary twinges of dislike, so fleeting she didn’t even recognize what they were. After sea bathing everyone retired for a rest. She would remove her costume with relief, having wet it only for a few moments in the foamy surf, and sponge the salt from her skin. She was so fair that the shore was dangerous for her. Yet cooled by her ablutions, powdered and loosely gowned, she could feel the sun stored in her, spreading in her blood, lighting it as the noon it did the sea, with millions of diamond flashes of light. After-the-swim was soon established by Father as the time for amour. He would make his lusty heedless love every day if she allowed it. She silently resented the intrusion, not as in the old days but with some awareness of her own, some sort of expectation on the skin that was only pounded from her. She thought about Father a good deal. The events since his return from the Artic, his response to them, had broken her faith in him. The argument he had had with her brother still resounded in her mind. Yet at moments, for the whole days at a time, she loved him as before — with a sense of the appropriateness of their marriage, its fixed and unalterable character, as something heavenly. Always she had intuited a different future for them, as if the life they lead was a kind of preparation, when the manufacturer of flags and fireworks and his wife would lift themselves from their respectable existence and discover a life of genius. She didn’t know of what it would consist, she never had. But now she no longer waited for it. During his absence when she had made certain decisions regarding the business, all its mysterious potency was dissipated and she saw it for the dreary unimaginative thing it was. No longer expecting to be beautiful and touched with grace till the end of her days, she was coming to the realization that whereas once, in his courtship, Father might have embodied the infinite possibilities of loving, he had aged and gone dull, made stupid, perhaps, by his travels and his work, so that more and more he only demonstrated his limits, that he had reached then, and that he would never moved beyond them.