Читать книгу The Lyncher In Me - Warren Read - Страница 14

CHAPTER 6

A fine stretch of summer days moved into the drizzly early dusk that is the trademark of the Pacific Northwest and I found myself finally able to settle in and devote more time to genealogical research. Night after night I sat at the computer, following one lead into another, collecting intriguing bits of identifying information on my parents’ various ancestors. The fact that there were people out there in the world, individuals whom I would never meet who were connected to me by some distant, far-reaching twig of the family tree was mind-boggling. They’d already laid the groundwork for me, recording names, dates, and birthplaces; I could take what I learned from one source and connect it to another found resource. It was giant jigsaw puzzle, the edges forming a frame and the interior just beginning to come into view. And then suddenly, after weeks of deciphering the great arching familial maps that had been created and posted on Web sites for all to see, I’d stumbled upon the final piece to the puzzle that, up to then, had perplexed me to no end. Old Uncle George had not been kidding.

While the search for my father’s side of the family had been going swimmingly (forefathers in Wales, a surprise Jewish ancestor, an owner of a sugar plantation), my mother’s side had proven to be frustratingly vacant. I found a bit about my mother’s maternal side, a maiden name here and there, and that was all. It baffled me. With a family name like Dondino, how could there not be usable results? There were Dondinos living in Italy, but I knew they were not my Dondinos. After weeks of futile searching, I’d assumed I was finished and that what little I’d found was all there was to be found.

Some weeks later I was browsing at the newsstand, killing time between errands, and I picked up an issue of a computer tech magazine. I’m not a tech-savvy kind of person, but a blurb on the cover about genealogical searches caught my attention. The article inside listed a half-dozen search engines that I hadn’t yet tried. When I got home that night, I decided I would try to find my mother’s family once more, see if in fact these additional tools would work where the other ones hadn’t. I wasn’t optimistic. I sat down at the computer and put the list of search engines in front of me. Fingers on the home row, I entered the first URL and pecked away at the familiar search terms, Dondino and Minnesota. Within seconds, a heading I hadn’t seen before popped up and the subtext was stunning. There was something about a rape, references to a lynching—and it had taken place in Duluth. An ominous feeling crept over me as I clicked on the link and began to read, scanning warily, baffled over where my family’s name would appear.

As I stared at the monitor, horrified, eyes burning and gut slowly knotting, the growing clarity of truth began to sink in. I scrolled down the text haltingly, my hands shaking. The link had led me to the June 7, 2000, issue of the Ripsaw News, a weekly news and entertainment newspaper in Duluth, Minnesota. The article was titled “Duluth’s Lingering Shame” and in it, writer Heidi Bakk-Hansen chronicled the night of June 15, 1920, when six black circus workers had been arrested in connection with the alleged rape of a white teenaged girl, accused by the girl and her boyfriend. Within hours, a mob of somewhere between five and ten thousand townspeople clamored around the Duluth city jail demanding vigilante justice. In the end, three of the six men hung dead from a nearby lamppost and a community struggled to come to grips with the awful truth that, once the facts reached the light of day, no assault had actually happened. The men had been innocent; the girl and her boyfriend had been lying.

As I read through the article, my initial excitement over discovering new information turned to trepidation and then dread as I began to realize that I was about to find something that might very well change everything I thought I knew about my family. About two-thirds of the way through the article, I came across a name that up until then I’d have given anything to find. Now, I was hoping it was somebody else.

Few members of the lynch mob received any punishment. Two who did stand trial, Henry Stephenson and Louis Dondino, served less than half of their five-year sentences for rioting.

My mind was spinning, not just at the news with which I’d suddenly been hit, but with the realization that I would very soon be forced to share this unthinkable story with my mother. That up until that moment I’d subscribed to an idealized view of my great-grandfather. To my mother, her grandfather had been a figure of warmth, of unconditional love. He was her hero. To me, he had been all of these things, too, but only because I’d heard the adoration in her voice and seen the longing in her eyes each time she’d spoken of him. The only concrete relationship I had with him was rooted in a few old photos and a singular memento that had been passed from him to me.

My grandfather had given me an old Hohner harmonica when I was about nine years old. It had come in a tidy black case with purple velvet lining, and on the side of the instrument was a small knob that, when pulled, changed the key a half step. I had little idea how to play it but I found that by rolling it slowly back and forth across my lips, moderating my breath in and out, pulling and pushing the knob, I could make sounds that were beautifully haunting to my young ears. It had a musty, delicious smell and when I wasn’t making music, I’d bring it down to the carpet among my Hot Wheels and pretend it was a shiny silver ferry boat, sailing sleekly through the blue pile carpeting.

The harmonica had belonged to my grandpa’s father, a man I knew as my great-grandpa Louis. My mother called him Pa. He’d died well before I was born, when my mother had been just a teenager. I used to imagine my great-grandpa Louis playing his harmonica as he danced in his kitchen—there had been a photo of him holding something up near his mouth that my young mind had always interpreted as the harmonica (I’d discover later, upon closer inspection, that the harmonica was in fact a pint bottle). Still, he’d lived on in my memory as a man to be loved and admired, a gentle soul who’d helped soften the jagged, rough edges of my mother’s young life. In photos, I can see that like the harmonica his hair is silver, like his son’s, his granddaughter’s and now, his great-grandson’s.

My own images of my great-grandfather had always been filtered through my mother and now, suddenly, I had a new picture of him coming at me through a journalist’s pen. It was my mother’s stories, her memories forced through the perspective of an adoring twelve-year-old girl that had created the man I’d known as Louis Dondino. Her wistful narrative combined the grinding organ melodies and thrill-drenched screams echoing from the carnival as she stood anxiously in the doorway waiting for her beloved grandfather to come, to take her from her drab house to the carnival, where the real excitement was. She told me how her fingers gripped the edge of the screen door, holding tightly to keep it still and quiet. It moved slightly against the weight of her body and a deep, smoky squeak echoed from the rusty hinges through the kitchen and into the living room, catching the attention of her mother, my grandmother Margaret.

“Nellie Rose, close that door or there’ll be more flies inside than out,” her mother had scolded. She’d always called her daughter by her first and middle names, a trait that she’d brought with her all the way from Gulfport, Mississippi, to their home in Edmonds, Washington. “He’ll be here when he gets here.”

It was Labor Day weekend and that meant the carnival was up and running on the campus of Edmonds High School, a few blocks from my mother’s home just north of the downtown core. It also meant that her grandpa Louis would be there to take his only granddaughter to the show. Sister, he called her affectionately, and she called him Pa. He was my mother’s savior and she was the apple of his eye. “This little girl is tough as nails,” he’d brag to his buddies at the Sail Inn Tavern. “She can shoot the neck off a beer bottle at forty paces.” And she could, too; first with a BB gun, then with the gift her daddy had gotten her on her tenth Christmas, a .22 rifle.

* * *

My mother would have no way of knowing it then, but she stood directly in the center of a tense, recurring battle between my grandpa Ray—her father—and her own grandfather. My great-grandfather Louis had been in the habit of spoiling his granddaughter as much as he could, and this fanned the flames of jealousy and paternal competition in his son Ray something fierce. My mother could never understand the explosive anger and disrespect her father showed to his own pa, the gentle old man whom everyone else in her life seemed to absolutely love. Insight would come in bits and pieces, usually in beer-infused diatribes from her father that were meant for both everyone and no one in particular. The emerging truth was that Ray could never reconcile how a man who had been so neglectful during his son’s upbringing could dare to present himself as a beacon of parental mores. Where had this jovial old man been thirty years earlier when his own boy needed a father, on those long evenings Ray spent on his knees scrubbing the orphanage floors and the early mornings in the sanctuary, forced to kneel in empty prayer?

“Get off your ass and do some work around here for a change,” my grandpa Ray would growl at his daughter whenever she’d return from doing some odd jobs for his dad. “I don’t understand why you got all this time and energy to do chores for that old man and not for me.” And there had been something more, something unspoken in the Dondino home. Even as a child, my mother could sense that there was something “really, really bad between Daddy and Pa,” though it never seemed to come to light.

* * *

She’d grown impatient, my mother who was that little girl, waiting for her Pa to take her to the carnival, for the sleepover afterwards on his wonderful, lumpy old sofa. She began to pace and complain, but a rattling sound caught her ear. She swung open the screen door to see her old Pa ambling up the alley, trudging behind his homemade wooden cart, his mutts Spotty and Teddy perched obediently inside. Alongside the dogs was her Pa’s shiny knotty cane, the one he’d made himself from the branch of an aged cherry tree. An old leg injury had made the cane his constant companion. My mother dashed back inside the house to gather her blankets for a sleepover with her grandpa, slamming the door shut.

“Now don’t be fillin’ up on candy and sodas,” my grandmother warned her daughter as she watched her pile blankets into the cart and scratch the rough fur behind the dogs’ ears.

“Oh now, Margaret,” Louis reassured his daughter-in-law, “it’s once a year.”

“And you,” she said, drying her hands on her apron and shooting a stern look at Louis, “don’t let me hear news that you took her gamblin’ again.” The previous year, Louis had shown my mother the mouse race at the arcade. The two of them had laid a bet on which color hole the mouse would run through when it was released. When my mother guessed correctly and came home with a pocket full of dimes, my grandmother was furious. Gambling in any form was a nonnegotiable for her. Her strict Southern Baptist teachings had forbidden dice or even a deck of cards in her house, a rule that would last until her dying day. When I stayed at my grandparents’ home years later I spent many tedious hours tearing paper into fifty-two scraps to create a playing deck of my own or labeling rocks with numbers for a decent roll of the dice. “Don’t worry, Margaret,” Louis assured my grandmother calmly. “I’ll be good.”

My mother grabbed on to her grandpa’s arm as they made their way to his tiny house, up the street toward town, just behind Brownie’s Café. Louis drew his hand from his pocket and reached toward his granddaughter. “Here ya go, sister,” he said. “You’ll need some spending change for the carnival.” Wisps of white hair lifted from the sides and top of his balding head; the characteristic crevasses that lined his forehead and formed bookends for his eyes deepened as his smile widened.

“I got my own, Pa,” she said proudly, beaming up at him. My mother had brought the change collected from days of combing the neighborhood for bottles. Beer bottles were worth a penny each then, sometimes a few extra cents if she’d kept them all neatly in the case. Quart beer bottles were more, three cents each, standard pop bottles were two cents, and a quart pop bottle was the big cash cow at a nickel each. She’d typically collect several cases of Rainier bottles from her own home, though her parents would only allow her to take a couple cases at a time so that people wouldn’t know how much her father actually drank (as if it would have been any kind of mystery in a small town like Edmonds). She also knew which other homes in the neighborhood were known to accumulate bottles and she’d wheel her booty to the back door of the Sail Inn Tavern and bang loudly, waiting for someone to come and open it. After inspecting her bottles (“You clean these out real good? I don’t want old beer stinkin’ up the place.”) the owner would pay her and she’d be on her way, briefly thankful for her father’s addiction.

Where her father was volatile, her Pa was gentle. Pa was good, where Daddy was bitter and angry. Pa was the calm in Nellie Rose’s otherwise unforgiving life and in his home she was safe and warm. In his house there was no need to worry about being awakened in the middle of the night by a drunken scene, her father cursing God and his mortal hucksters, spitting hatred and contempt for painful boyhood moments, while her mother loudly whispered pleas for forgiveness to her husband, “Please, Ray, lord have mercy it’s in the past, you gotta stop, Ray, just stop.”

In my mother’s memory, it’s been a wonderfully exhausting day at the carnival; she feels a quiet sense of peace, nestled in the warmth of woolen blankets and the slight glow of the streetlamp outside her grandpa’s living room. It is well past midnight, beyond the cliffhangers of the weekend radio serials, Dragnet and Mr. District Attorney, when her eyelids began to flutter at last, drooping heavily. The ominous music for the next episode of The Shadow swells from the cloth-covered speakers, a slight crackle in the background of the chilling narration, and she drifts off to sleep knowing that for this moment, all in her little world is perfect.