Ragtime

by E.L. Doctorow

Father slept through the incident.

more vulnerable than ever. He found their new friend, the Baron, a momentary distraction. Mother thought he was endearing but he felt no special sympathy from him or for him. He wanted to pack up and leave but was constrained by Mother’s security in the place.

As it happened Pierpont Morgan was not even in New York. He was two days to sea on the S.S. Carmania bound for Rome. He was making a slow pilgrimage to Egypt. Coalhouse had not known this either. So the entire action, misdirected and poorly timed, seemed to enjoy some special grace.

He was stunned by the calm businesslike tone of the black man. My demands are the same, said the voice on the phone. I want my car returned in just the condition it was when my way was blocked. You cannot bring back my Sarah, but I want for her life the life of Fire Chief Conklin.

He knew that Red Emma Goldman, the anarchist, was in New York. He ordered her arrested.

America. There was a national obsession of law enforcement officers to connect her to every case just as a matter of principle whether they believed she was guilty or not.

The oppressor is wealth, my friends. Wealth is the oppressor. Coalhouse Walker did not need Red Emma to learn that. He needed only to suffer.

equality. He had written a best-selling book about his life, a struggle up from slavery to self-realization, and about his ideas, which called for the Negro’s advancement with the help of his white neighbor.

He seems cowardly by this account

lyceum

The educator closed his eyes and locked his hands in his lap. Oh Lord, he said, lead my people to the Promised Land. Take them from under the Pharaoh’s whip. Free the shackles from their minds and loosen the bonds of sin that tie them to Hell.

Coalhouse sat lost in thought. Mr. Washington, he finally said, there is nothing I would like more than to conclude this business. He raised his eyes and the educator saw there the tears of his emotion. Let the Fire Chief restore my automobile and bring it to the front of this building. You will see me come out with my hands raised and no further harm will come to this place or any man from Coalhouse Walker.

So bent on perfect justice that he can't relent. Control is just that: terrifyingly limiting. I understand that in different ways

He lay in the rain on guard and felt, though he could not see, the presence of thousands of quietly watchful New Yorkers. During the night he thought they made a sound, some barely detectable mourning sound, not more than an exhalation, not louder than the mist of fine rain.

Such was the state of things when Father arrived. He was escorted through the police lines and marched past the bareheaded silent black men standing in prayer. He looked for a moment at the Library and then went up the stairs of the brownstone. Inside he was left to himself.

Finally seen as important

Whitman thrust the cable into Father’s hands. GIVE HIM HIS AUTOMOBILE AND HANG HIM, the text read.

The rain had gone and the stars were out. The horses were hitched to the bumper and they pulled the car up to the road. Then they began the long journey to the city, clip-clopping along, the driver standing up in the front seat holding the reins in one hand, grasping the steering wheel with the other.

Like a funeral procession

You signed your letter President of the Provisional American Government. Coalhouse nodded. It seemed to be the rhetoric we needed for our morale, he said. But we meant it! Younger Brother cried. We meant it! There are enough people in the streets to found an army!

my death was determined the moment Sarah died.

It is not I who reduce my demands but they who magnified them as long as they resisted them.

To get justice Coalhouse Walker was ready to have it done to him.

They recognized his decision as suicide. They were forlorn at their abandonment. By the late afternoon the Library was in gloom. The young men watched

listlessly from the windows as the automobile in which Coalhouse had done his courting reappeared at the curb.

The policemen were firing at will. The horses snorted and shied.

Up in their Harlem hideout the Coalhouse band could reason what the outcome would be. They were all there but the man they had followed. The rooms seemed empty. Nothing mattered.

The streets were white dust. Here were billeted some of the forces of Francisco Villa’s Division of the North. He attached himself to them and was accepted as a compañero.

He seems to need attachment in order to survive.

renunciatory

If the royal families were not melancholic they were hysterical. They overturned wineglasses or stuttered or screamed at servants. He watched. The conviction came over him that they were obsolete. They were all related, from one country to the next. They had been marrying one another for so many centuries that they had bred into themselves just the qualities, ignorance and idiocy, they could least afford. At the funeral of Edward VII in London they had pushed and shoved and elbowed each other like children for places in the cortege.

He wanted to feel in advance the eternal energies he would exemplify when he died and rose on the rays of the sun

the stars had faded and the rhomboid of night sky had grown gray.

He could see his own name upside down on the marquee of the Palace Theatre five blocks to the north. Automobiles honked and trolleys ganged together at Times Square as their drivers stopped to see the excitement.

It was as if, now that his mother was dead, heaven had to be defended.

Poor Father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self.

She adored him, she loved to be with him.