That Night at the Palace (12 page)

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ELZA, TEXAS

June 26, 1936

Jesse and Cliff were sitting on the steps of George Henry McMillan’s store sipping RCs. On hot days like this the boys worked their way around town. First they tended to their chores at home - that mainly applied to Cliff. Then they would meet up downtown at eight in the morning and head over to McMillan’s to sweep and stock shelves. Then they would go to Washington’s Feed Store to see if they could do a little work there. If they were lucky, they could get a dime for cleaning the place up. Sometime around ten Jewel would join them and they would all spend the rest of the day either hanging out downtown or heading to the bridge to fish. If Mr. Washington didn’t have any work, they would usually head back to McMillan’s and sit on the steps listening to the old men argue.

This morning they were sitting on the steps of McMillan’s.

To their left, Shorty Newman and one of the older men were sitting on a couple of old wooden chairs playing checkers. In Elza there were the men who had work, like Jesse’s and Cliff’s fathers, and there were the young men who couldn’t find work (or didn’t want to find work), who spent most of their days at the domino hall. Lastly, there were the old men who had long since done their work. These old men spent their days sitting around George Henry’s discussing the world’s problems while playing checkers. As a rule, the boys preferred to hang around with the older men. The old men had great stories, although rarely true, and they never asked the boys to go do anything without offering to pay a nickel or dime.

George Henry’s, being the best place to buy groceries in town, naturally got a lot of traffic. Everybody, young and old, came through the store sooner or later, and the boys found the conversation amusing.

Some days a couple of the younger men like Shorty Newman and Elza Police Chief Thomas Jefferson Hightower would be there. Shorty had a reputation for being the best checker player in town, and he’d been in the process of proving his prowess all morning long.

The events in Jacksonville the day before had both boys confused and even depressed, but neither understood exactly why. First, neither boy was prepared for the sight of a man being hanged. When they hopped in the back of Toad Lowery’s truck, all they were thinking about was the excitement of the moment. They had heard of hangings and lynchings, and somehow it seemed entertaining, but the thought that a man would actually die didn’t become a reality until they saw it happen. More importantly, both boys had felt that they were going up to Jacksonville to watch justice take place. A bad man was going to get what he deserved. But, Jesse, for one, felt sure that an innocent man was murdered by an angry mob, and the two of them, along with Jewel, were a part of the mob. And if, in fact, an innocent man was killed, they were as guilty of murder as anyone.

None of them had spoken all the way home. When they had gotten to Elza they were all three ready to go home even though it was still early in the day. So when Toad stopped in the middle of Main Street, the kids had simply said goodbye and headed their separate ways.

All morning long Jesse had wanted to bring up the subject to Cliff but didn’t know what to say. Sitting there on George Henry’s steps, he was still churning it all in his mind when an old Ford Model-AA pickup pulled to a stop at the gas pump.

The two boys knew the truck, as they did every truck around town. One glance and they knew exactly who was coming down the road. This truck was of particular interest to them. There wasn’t a man in all of East Texas that fascinated the boys more than old Cherokee-One-Leg. There were all sorts of stories about the man - that he had lost his leg to an alligator, that he had been a Buffalo Soldier and fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, and, some said, that he even helped track down Geronimo.

One day the boys were at George Henry’s with Cliff’s dad when some of the men began talking about how they should bring the Klan back and run all the blacks back to Africa. Before that Jesse had never seen Cliff’s dad angry. Both boys had gotten whippings from the man, more than once, generally for some trouble Cliff thought up, but even then he was only a little angry. That day at George Henry’s, Ned Tidwell was flat-out mad.

He had argued that many of the black folks in the area had a lot more right to live in this country than any of those men in the store. There were blacks, he had said, that fought at the Alamo. Then he said that there were six hundred black men who had stood alongside Andy Jackson and Jean Lafitte when the British tried to take New Orleans. As a matter of fact, he added that Cherokee-One-Leg’s grandfather was one of them. Then he said that Cherokee’s grandpa went on to become one of the first mountain men, and his father had scouted alongside Kit Carson. Cherokee, he said, fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt.

With this new information, combined with the fact that Cherokee-One-Leg had survived an alligator attack and wore the gator’s teeth around his neck as proof, the two twelve-year-olds were in absolute awe of the old black man. All things considered, the boys, quite rightly, held a lot more respect for the old, crippled man named Cherokee than they did most of the white men in and around Elza.

The two watched in wonderment as the lean old man gingerly climbed out of the cab of his Ford with his one good leg and the peg attached to the other. He had an old homemade crutch that he pulled out of the truck and used it to stiffly hobble over to one of the pumps to begin filling up his pickup. In Jacksonville and Henderson some fill-up stations had the new electric pumps, but McMillan’s had the old visible pumps with the glass tank at the top that bubbled as gas flowed down into the vehicle.

The old one-legged man used the pump handle to pump a couple of gallons of gasoline into the globe and then watched it drain into his tank. When he finished, he took his crutch and hobbled toward the front door. As he began up the steps where Jesse and Cliff were sitting, Shorty, who had been in the delegation from Elza the day before, asked, “So Cherokee, what’d you think about that hangin’ yesterday?”

The old black man stopped still. He slowly lowered his good leg off the step and turned to face Shorty. Standing tall, he stared icily at the man and said, “That boy didn’t do nothing’. They hung him like a damn criminal and all he done wrong was be born black.”

Jesse and Cliff froze as both felt a cold chill from the tension.

“Well that girl said he did. I know. I heard her,” Shorty cockily replied.

Jesse watched as the old man’s eyes, which had been yellowed with age, burn almost red with anger. “Bucky didn’t do nothin’. He was at my house. He was reading to me. My eyes is bad and I can’t read no more. He was readin’ the Bible. When he went home some of you boys grabbed ‘im and put ‘im in jail. And then yesterday ya lynched ‘im. No one bothered to ask. Nobody cared to ask if he did it or not.”

Jesse looked over at the police chief, who was sitting on a bench sipping a Dr Pepper, not appearing interested in involving himself in a scuff with Cherokee-One-Leg.

Shorty looked at the man, realizing that he may have started something that he shouldn’t have. “She said he did. You said he didn’t. Who are we to believe?”

The old man’s anger now burned. Jefferson tensed, knowing that he may have to do something.

Jesse and Cliff sat wide-eyed as Cherokee flung his crutch to the ground, straightened up, and walked without the slightest hint of difficulty to Shorty, who was now visibly frightened.

Standing directly over Shorty, the old Indian fighter said, “Bucky was with me. Are you calling me a liar?”

Shorty shrunk before Cherokee, who was easily forty years his senior, and with his head down, softly said, “No.”

Jefferson then stood to his feet, “We don’t want any trouble Cherokee. Shorty went too far. The fact is I should have shut him up before he opened his stupid mouth. Bucky was a good boy. I known him all his life. I don’t need you to tell me he didn’t do it. Anybody who knew him knows he didn’t do it. I’m sorry, Cherokee. I’m truly sorry.”

The old man looked Chief Hightower in the eye and nodded his head. The anger had altered slightly to sadness, and Jesse could see that there was a hint of a tear in the old warrior’s eyes.

As Cherokee-One-Leg walked back to the steps, Cliff got up, picked up the old man’s crutch, and handed it to him. The Indian fighter took the crutch, nodded his head to Cliff, and climbed the steps past Jesse and into McMillan’s store.

Jefferson sat back down on the bench, and Shorty got back to his game, but no one said a word. Jesse looked at Cliff, who motioned with his head for them to leave. Jesse got up and silently sat his empty RC bottle in the bottle crate by the steps, and the two boys started walking toward Main Street.

Once out of earshot of the store Cliff said, “Gemma Crawford’s daddy raped that girl.”

Jesse didn’t know what to say. He knew it was true but he had no words. He just nodded.

“We’re the only ones who know.”

“I know,” Jesse replied. “And he’s gonna do somethin’ bad to Jewel’s mama, too.”

“We’ve gotta tell somebody. Maybe we should talk to Jefferson.”

“He ain’t gonna listen to a couple of kids, especially one that got stuck in the Palace air shaft.”

“Should we tell Jewel?”

“What are we gonna tell her? That her mama is carrying on with Gemma’s daddy? We don’t even know if it’s true. She’ll just get mad at us.”

The two boys walked along the side of the road, silently in thought for a few minutes, when Cherokee-One-Leg pulled up beside them in his Ford pickup.

“You boys hop in the back,” the old man ordered without further explanation.

Jesse and Cliff looked at each other and then did as they were told. It wasn’t that either felt obligated to obey, but they both sensed something in the man, and they respected him.

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Cherokee turned the truck off the highway and headed down the old road toward the tracks. He turned left and followed the worn ruts along the tracks to the old trestle across the Neches. When he got to the bridge, he stopped and climbed out with what Jesse thought was amazing agility for a man in his eighties with only one leg.

The boys climbed out of the bed of the truck and without a word followed the old Indian fighter as he walked out onto the trestle.

“You boys come out here and fish, don’t you?” The old man asked, but it was really a statement.

Cliff and Jesse looked at each other, curious about what the old man wanted with them. Cliff finally answered the man, “Yes, sir, but we don’t catch much.”

The old man rested his arms on the crossbeam of the trestle and looked out at the river below. “This is a good spot. I fished here when I was a kid. That was before they laid these tracks.”

Jesse and Cliff climbed up and sat on the crossbeam that Cherokee was leaning on, just as they did almost every day.

“Did you grow up here?” Jesse asked, wondering if all the stories he had heard about the man were true.

“I was born here. My grandpa was the first black freeman to own land in these parts.”

“Is it true that your grandpa fought with Andy Jackson in New Orleans?” Cliff asked in awe.

“Grandpa Cort Bradford came over here from Spain, though I think he was probably born in Morocco. He was sailin’ with Jean Lafitte when the British attacked. After that he went west and explored the Rockies. He was there twenty years before white folks like Jim Bridger and Kit Carson showed up,” the old man answered with pride.

“Did you really help get Geronimo?” Jesse asked, full of excitement.

The old man was saddened by the question. “Yes, sir, I did. I was assigned as a scout for the Fourth Cavalry. We chased him all over Mexico and New Mexico.”

Jesse recognized that it was painful for the man to answer. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to…”

“It don’t bother me none. Everybody asks about that. But they wouldn’t ask if they know’d that my little brother was ridin’ with that old Apache. I had a good life in the army, but that expedition ain’t one of my favorite memories,” the old man said with pain in his voice.

Jesse and Cliff were silent as they thought about how the old man they so admired for his courage was a man suffering from a lot of pain.

Cherokee-One-Leg knew what the boys were feeling. He had been asked about Geronimo a hundred times but only mentioned Augustus twice and got the same reaction both times.

Cherokee wasn’t from the Cherokee nation as most people thought. Texans had given him the nickname when he was a child. He and his brother were born half Arapaho. Their father and grandfather were great admirers of the Roman Empire, so they were named Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar, no last name. Their great-grandfather had no last name when he got off the ship in New Orleans. He was simply Cort the deckhand. Upon seeing the face of slavery in the south, Cort chose to go west, first to Texas and finally on to Santa Fe and even California.

Because of his experience in the west and having learned a number of native languages, Cort had become a valuable scout and had spent time with Bridger, Kit Carson and even John Fremont. In the area now known as Colorado he met and married Nizhoni, the daughter of an Arapaho warrior. Cort’s family grew, and in the 1840’s he took his sons and their families back to Texas. He needed a last name in order to purchase property, so he took the name of his closest friend, Ephraim Bradford. Thus, Cherokee’s legal name was Julius Caesar Bradford.

Life was hard for a free black family in Texas in those days. Texas was a Republic, but it was a slave-holding Republic. It was worse on children who were as much Arapaho as they were black. Comanche raids had still been common, so the half black sons of a squaw were not welcome in the schools and often were not even allowed to play with other boys. In 1850, Cherokee’s father, Titus, went to meet his mother’s family in Colorado. There he eventually married an Arapaho named Cocheta. Five years later he returned to Texas with his wife, where their two sons, Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar Bradford were born. When the War Between the States broke out, Cherokee’s father took the family back west, where he had spent the rest of his life scouting for the Union Army.