Empire of Sin (15 page)

When he saw the police wagon at about three
P.M.
, Charles collected his weapons and retreated into the closet under the stairs on the first floor. With the closet door slightly ajar, he had a clear view of the front door of the annex, which opened onto a courtyard separating the front and back portions of the building. Charles sat there—on the chair he had been using when making bullets—with the loaded Winchester on his lap.

In the courtyard outside, Sergeant Porteus and one of his men, Cpl. John Lally, were now questioning the main tenant of the place, a black laborer named Silas Jackson. Without preamble, Porteus asked him where “
his brother Robert Charles” was. Jackson, who had just woken from an after-work nap, replied that he did have a brother named Charles
Jackson
, but that “Robert Charles was no relation of his.” Porteus, hoping to intimidate the man into revealing what he knew (and Jackson almost certainly had to be aware that the fugitive was hiding in his back annex), insisted again that Charles was his brother and placed him under arrest. The sergeant then demanded that Jackson let them search the premises. Jackson could do little but agree, and he led them to the door of the annex.

Once inside, Porteus caught sight of a water bucket standing on a little table across the room, just outside the closet where Robert Charles was hiding. Claiming to be thirsty, Porteus stepped over to the bucket and grabbed the dipper. Charles didn’t hesitate. He thrust the barrel of his rifle through the crack of the open closet door and fired a shot point-blank into Porteus’s chest. Then he turned the rifle on Lally and shot the corporal in the gut. Both officers fell to the floor with fatal wounds.

As Silas Jackson ran in a panic from the room, Charles gathered up his supply of homemade bullets and carried them, along with the rifle and his Colt revolver, up the stairs to the second-floor room. Once there, he began to kick at the wood-and-plaster wall that separated the room from its counterpart in the other half of the duplex building. He managed to pound a large hole in the flimsy wall, which he then crawled through into the empty room next door. Now, with access to both sides of the duplex, he would be able to watch the courtyard in front of the annex and the alleyways on either side of it. Clearly he was preparing to make a last stand, and he was going to make his capture as difficult for the police as possible.

Within minutes, scores of white neighbors and passersby were filling the street in front of the building. The other two policemen who had come with Sergeant Porteus had by now called in the shooting and were awaiting backup. But others were not so cautious. Dozens of white neighbors, apparently thinking that Charles had decamped, were soon flooding into the alleys and courtyard around the back annex.
One off-duty police officer—Patrolman Peter Fenny, who lived down the block—entered the ground-floor room and saw Porteus dead and Lally sinking fast. The latter, sitting upright on the floor in a slowly expanding puddle of blood, requested a priest. Feeny ran out to the street to find one, and before long was leading a Father Fitzgerald from a nearby church through the milling crowds and into the ground-floor room.

At this point, Robert Charles decided it was time to make his continued presence known. Scanning the crowds in the yard below, he selected a white youth standing near the fence, aimed his Winchester out the back window, and fired. The young man—nineteen-year-old Arthur Brumfield—was hit in the hip and fell to the ground amid panicked mayhem. While others scrambled to exit the closed yard, Brumfield began crawling toward a stairway leading into the front building. He looked back and apparently saw Charles in the second-story window, still aiming the rifle. “
For God’s sake, don’t shoot!” he allegedly cried. But Charles fired again, this time sending a bullet into the youth’s chest that killed him instantly.

By now, word of the discovery of Charles’s hideout was spreading through the entire city. Police from stations all over Uptown New Orleans were arriving on the scene, along with hundreds of armed white civilians drawn from their homes and workplaces. The special citizens’ police force was mustered again and quickly dispatched to the scene. Mayor Capdevielle, notified of the situation as he enjoyed
a Turkish bath at the St. Charles Hotel, realized instantly the great danger the situation posed to the city. He called on the state militia to hurry to Saratoga Street with their two Gatling guns—allegedly with orders to fire into the white mob if their fury degenerated again into widespread violence against innocent blacks.

Utter chaos now reigned in the streets around 1208 Saratoga. An estimated ten to twenty thousand people were thronging the neighborhood. Hundreds of men had climbed onto rooftops surrounding the house and were now taking potshots at the second-story windows of the back annex. Charles, moving back and forth through the hole he’d kicked in the wall, would occasionally appear at one window or another to fire back. Each time, his shot would be met by
dozens of answering reports, the bullets shattering the glass panes and shredding the wooden façade of the annex. How many times Charles himself was hit would never be known, but he was taking a heavy toll on his attackers. Seven of them—police and citizens alike—were seriously wounded in these exchanges, with a dozen or more others sustaining lesser wounds. Whatever else they thought they knew about Robert Charles, they now knew for sure that he was an excellent shot.

But
the standoff was not to go on indefinitely. Capt. William King of the Julia Street fire patrol, along with a few other men—apparently acting without permission—had managed to sneak into the ground-floor room of the annex of 1208 (from which the bodies of Porteus and Lally had been removed sometime earlier). They found an old horsehair mattress in the room and carried it over to the foot of the stairway leading up to the second floor. Then, while Charles paced across the two rooms above their heads, they poured kerosene on the mattress and set it afire. King doused the flames with water, so that the fire would smolder and produce copious amounts of smoke. Then he and the other men retreated from the room.

For five minutes, the crowds looked on expectantly as black smoke filled first one side and then the other of the two-story annex. But Charles seemed unfazed, still pacing the two rooms and firing from the windows. Finally, however, the stairway of 1208 caught fire. The heat generated by the mounting flames must have been intense, and when fire and smoke began penetrating the roof, many of the spectators wondered if Charles would be burned alive. But then the fugitive appeared at the front door of the far side of the annex, the Winchester leveled at shoulder height, his derby hat pulled low over his eyes. Taken by surprise, no one got off a shot at him as he raced across the courtyard to the front section of the building. Still aiming the rifle ahead of him, he rushed into the ground-floor room of 1210—only to find several men lying in wait inside. One of them—a medical student named Charles Noiret, a member of the special citizens’ police—was the first to react; he fired at Robert Charles just as he stepped into the room. Charles fell face-first to the floor, and was just rolling over to shoot back when Noiret and every other man in the room began emptying their firearms into Charles’s body. The gunfire didn’t stop, as dozens of other men, howling in triumph, raced toward the room and discharged their own weapons into the corpse. The orgy of shooting let up only when the last man’s last bullet thudded uselessly into the lifeless body.

Eager to show their quarry to the crowds outside, several men lifted Charles’s corpse and carried it to the front door. They dumped it on the stoop, and then, when it was understood what had happened, a cheer ran through the crowd outside. Several men ran up to the porch and dragged the body into the street. A few fired their own weapons into the corpse; others kicked or spat at it. Then a policeman carrying a double-barreled shotgun pushed his way through the crowd. It was Corporal Trenchard, the lavishly mustached patrolman who had humiliated himself during the incident at the yellow cottage, cowering in a darkened room long after Charles had fled the scene. He had borne the brunt of much scornful criticism since then, but here he felt he could redeem himself. “
Now who says I am a coward?” he crowed. Then he put the muzzle of his shotgun to Charles’s chest and fired both barrels.

Content at first to let the mob vent its rage on the corpse, police stepped in when someone brought up a container of kerosene to burn the body. They forced the would-be arsonists back and made room for the patrol wagon to be pulled up. Two officers lifted the body by the arms and legs and flung it roughly into the back of the wagon. The frustrated mob attempted to get at the body again, but police held them off. The patrol wagon pulled away then, Charles’s head hanging precariously over the edge of the wagon’s bed, as hundreds of screaming, rock-throwing citizens followed in its wake.

And so the “hideous monster” had been punished, but unfortunately black New Orleans still had to endure
one more night of terror before it was all over. Dissatisfied with the fact that Charles had endured so little physical retribution before he died, white New Orleanians went on another ugly rampage that night. Again the mobs ran through the streets, ostensibly looking for “accomplices” but actually attacking any black person they found on the street. Two more bystanders were killed, and the Lafon School for black children—regarded as “the best Negro schoolhouse in Louisiana”—was burned to the ground. Throughout the night, there were other threats of arson and attempted massacres of black citizens. But thanks to the intervention of the special volunteer police, the bloodshed was not nearly as bad as it had been on Wednesday night. By the time dawn broke on Saturday, the mobs’ anger was all but spent, and the city was relatively quiet.

The weekend papers generally expressed satisfaction at the quick resolution of the Saratoga Street standoff, and relief over the end of mob violence in the city. Surprisingly, they also admitted to a certain amount of grudging respect for the bravery of the gunman who had sold his life so dearly. “
Robert Charles was the boldest, most desperate and dangerous Negro ever known in Louisiana,” the
Picayune
wrote. Even Henry Hearsey of the
States
seemed impressed. “
Never before was such a display of desperate courage on the part of one man witnessed,” he wrote. “[I] cannot help feeling for him a sort of admiration, prompted by his wild and ferocious courage.” But all of the papers made sure that the proper lesson was drawn from the Robert Charles affair—namely, that any future challenge to white supremacy in Louisiana would be met with the harshest retribution. The days of even moderate racial tolerance in New Orleans were officially over.

This new low point in the city’s racial atmosphere became increasingly palpable to blacks in the aftermath of the riot. For when the incident had finally played itself out—after the mutilated body of Robert Charles had been buried in an unmarked plot in the city’s potter’s field, and after the post-riot investigations had led to
the inevitable conviction of absolutely no one (except for five police officers who were convicted of cowardice and dismissed from the force)—the city emerged as an even harsher and more hostile place for its black citizens. Political disenfranchisement and social segregation were now reinforced by a hardened resolve among whites to actively “keep the black man down” in the century just beginning. This new attitude was perhaps best expressed by one white city official in 1902: “
The nigger’s all right in his place,” the man explained to a reporter for the magazine
Outlook
, “[but] when he tries to get out of it, hit him on the head, and next time he’ll come in with his hat off.”

For the musicians in New Orleans’ nascent jazz culture, the changing environment would mean
more outright suppression of their livelihood—more reform campaigns against the dance halls they played in, more police disruption of their parades and picnics. Most of them had escaped physical harm, but the psychological effects of the riot were to linger on. And at least one musician had lost his life in the violence. “Big Eye” Louis Nelson’s father—a butcher and occasional accordionist—had been killed by a mob in the Vieux Carré on the first night of the major rioting. His body, battered and shot-up, was found in a gutter on Decatur Street and was carried to the hospital in the early morning hours of July 26.

“
Nobody knew him,” Nelson later recalled, “[but] when they showed him to
me
, I knew him. It was my daddy. They had snatched him off his meat wagon down at the French Market and killed him.… Was I angry about it? Well, sure, I was. But what could I do? It just wash away. It all just wash away. Couple of days later, I was back there at 25s playing harder than ever.” That’s when Nelson learned that to play the new music right, you had to “shove in
crying
wherever you get the chance.”

But it was one thing to suppress the spirit of self-assertion represented by Robert Charles—and, for that matter, by jazz itself; destroying it would be something else entirely. In the years after 1900, in fact, Charles became something of a folk hero among the black citizens of New Orleans. Legends soon grew up around his name—that he had killed thirty-two policemen, for instance; that he’d shot one officer at a funeral, killing the cop but leaving the priest standing beside him unharmed. Some people even said that Charles had never died in that house on Saratoga Street, that somehow he’d escaped and lived to a ripe old age in hiding. And, of course, this last legend was in a sense true. Robert Charles did live on—in a song about his exploits, composed by an unknown hand in the days after his apotheosis. It was played in private all-black gatherings for years thereafter, though rarely in public. According to Jelly Roll Morton, who was just fifteen years old at the time, “
This song was squashed very easily by the [police] department, and not only by the department but by anyone else who heard it, because it was a trouble-breeder. So that song never did get very far. I once knew the Robert Charles song. But I found out it was best for me to forget it.”