Son: A Novel of Racial Justice Based on True Events

By A.A. Allison

A family's compelling racial truth has been unearthed for future generations with Al Allison eloquently redefining justice and healing.
Joyce F. King, Author of Hate Crime: The Story of a Dragging in Jasper, Texas

It is 11 PM, July 8, 1932 in Austin, Texas. Sixty-year-old African-American Charles Jarrell is driving home from Bible study when a car full of white youths suddenly swerves in front of him. A brief altercation ensues. Convinced that the whites are threatening his life, Jarrell fires his pistol at their car and drives away.

The shot kills the unarmed, eighteen-year-old son of Michael Moss, a prominent cotton landlord, politically influential, and an advocate for racial justice. Turmoil explodes in both the black and the white communities. Although in great pain, Moss personally thwarts a lynch mob from taking Jarrell. Still, Moss wants and expects a fair justice system to convict and execute his sons killer. Jarrell himself fully expects to be lynched, either by the mob or the courts. But neither they nor anyone else can predict the impact of a unique confluence of political events and powerful personalities that bear on the all white, all male court system tasked to decide Charles Jarrells fate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 21, 2009
• ISBN: 9781935278016

A.A. Allison

A. A. Allison is a fifth-generation Texan with degrees from Harvard and the University of Texas. After serving in the Navy in Vietnam, he worked in business and politics in both the United States and Europe, where he lived for twenty years before returning to his Texas roots.

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Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

AUTHOR’S NOTE AND EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

What is justice? asked Socrates. It’s whatever the mighty say it is, responded the famous teacher Thrasymachus.

Or, asked Socrates, does justice transcend the mighty, even the gods? The quest for that justice became the two-and-a-half-millennia project we call western civilization. In 1932, an episode in the quest occurred in Austin, Texas.

CHAPTER 1

...As the son of a white mother and an African father, I pledge long overdue steps toward racial reconciliation, the great man’s face filled the television screen. I pledge an America where red and blue, Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative again unite in common purpose. I pledge an America where consultation replaces confrontation and conciliation replaces conflict...

The old man leaned at the door at the back of the room, drink in hand. He looked at the six young women—cousins—sprawled on chairs and sofas, listening intently. They took no notice of him. ‘They’re actually listening Their parents are in other rooms talking football and grandbabies, but they’re listening,’he thought.

When the great man finished, the oldest cousin turned and beamed, Hi, Uncle Bud.’

Happy Thanksgiving, ladies. He’s charismatic, all right, but the socialism?

The oldest flashed dark eyes, If that means no ridiculous wars, yes. If that means dealing with racism and the mean things we did, yes, Uncle Bud.

Of course, the mean things. Shameful things. He walked to the couch and sat. We have a little time before dinner. Maybe you’d like to hear something about your family you don’t know. In fact, nobody knows, but me.

Shrugs and nods. The oldest looked at her watch.

First, Ginger, you’re right. You come from an old Texas family. We owned slaves. Wefought for the Confederacy. We imposed Jim Crow. The only blacks we knew were laborers and maids. We resented their assault on private property rights in the civil rights era and their assault on our children’s educational and employment opportunities in the affirmative action era. We resented black surliness, the chips on their shoulders, the crime, and the vulgarity they infused into our culture. Your grandparents and I had all these resentments, and we didn’t even know that an African-American had shot and killed my father’s brother.

Excuse me, Uncle Bud?

Afew years ago, I learned that an African-American shot and killed your great-great-uncle Michael Morrison Moss Jr., who was eighteen-years old and unarmed. It happened in the African-American section of Austin, Texas, in 1932, when Jim Crow dictated Texas’s race relations.

‘At first, I was shocked. My father’s brother had been murdered, and my father never said a word, not to your grandparents or to me. That made me curious. I spent hours in the Austin history center. I researched newspapers, court records, directories, and unpublished letters. I studied Jim Crow, Reconstruction, the Depression, 1932politics, cotton, 1932 Austin, and the segregated district called East Austin. Although the people directly involved were long dead, I found people with stories and childhood memories."

He took a sip of his drink. His nieces were actually listening.

What I learned made me think. I thought about the incident. I thought about the killer. I thought about the all-white, racist Austin courts that judged him. I thought about our family’s culture. I thought about the killer’s dignity. I thought about a lawyer’s duty to the law trumping his duty to his culture. I thought about my grandparents’ love for the boy they called Son. I thought about that love, that dignity, and that duty. I thought about why we never heard about our uncle’s killing or the lynch mob or the trial. I thought about all these things, and then I wrote about them. If youre interested in reading the story, you might get a glimmer of what the great man is asking of us. You might have a different take on our meanness and our shame.

CHAPTER 2

FRIDAY, JULY 8,1932

East Austin

7 PM. Charlie Jarrell was washing off the day he’d spent with the late Nathan Budrow’s paperwork. For a week, he’d endured the funeral home’s stale hot air. For a week, he’d sympathized with moping employees and Nathan’s incompetent son. For a week, he’d suffered piercing eyes of the stuffed screech owl perched atop Nathan’s bookshelf. Charlie was dressing for Bible study and a session at Percy’s Hotel, but he wished he weren’t. After Nathan’s murder, he didn’t like driving the streets after dark. But he was choir president and couldn’t let the reverend down, just like he couldn’t let the Budrows down.

Percy Budrow had summoned Charlie to the farm three days after a farm boy discovered Nathan’s body in the back of his wrecked Buick. I want you to keep brother’s businesses going, he said. Charlie replied that if whoever was behind Nathan’s murder, was also after Percy, they’d be after Charlie, too. But Percy leaned hard. He was hiding out at his farm, but Charlie had to be at the parlor.

After Charlie dressed, he grabbed the old revolver he had recently retrieved from his cedar chest. He checked the bullet chambers, picked up his clarinet case, and walked to his Model T Ford. He set the clarinet case on the small back seat, placed the gun in the glove compartment, and took another look at himself in the rearview mirror. Then he set off for Annie Davis’s house.

Charlie had spent his entire adult life in East Austin. Charlie was comfortable in East Austin. The only times he’d left the five square mile district was on policy business for Nathan Budrow. He was one of the few who didn’t have to travel daily by foot and bus to manicure west-side lawns, clean west-side houses, cook westside meals, and raise west-side children. He loved the churches—shaking, loud churches that demanded respectful behavior, tithes, and brotherhood. He was proud of the schools and two colleges with few books but dedicated teachers. He admired East Austin‘s undertakers, grocers, hair stylists, café operators, garage attendants, and even the pawn shark. He didn’t mind that East Austin had never had a lawyer, had never had a movie theater, had never had a car dealer, a jeweler, or a department store. He hardly noticed that most of East Austin’s streets were dirt tracks, and he hardly cared that the two main roads were paved with baseball-size limestone rocks that rock-breaking county jail prisoners had produced at a local quarry. He did not dwell on the fact that East Austin’s sewers were insufficient to prevent cholera and typhoid from joining syphilis in providing the undertaker with a steady stream of business. He appreciated the electricity that the utility company had started to provide, but on a moonless night, the pitch dark still camouflaged that haints came out to tease those who dared to be on the streets. He believed that although East Austin had never had a library or a post office, someday it might, or so the white politicians promised when they needed East Austin votes.

Annie Davis was almost pretty that evening. He took her basket, made an appreciative noise about the fried chicken aroma, and walked her to the car. She was shorter than five-foot-six-inch Charlie, but, when walking beside her ample body, Charlie’s slight frame felt even smaller. Charlie and Annie had been a twosome for years. Neither had ever been married, but in 1910, they had had a daughter together. The little girl grew up in East Austin, married, and moved to Denver. Annie and Charlie each received letters describing how she could swim in the pools and drink out of water fountains. But the mountains and the snow depressed her, and her no-count man had left her. Charlie never gave much thought to marrying Annie. They were friends, he reckoned, damned good friends. But that was all, and she said the same.

As soon as the Model T sputtered from Annie’s house, she got straight to point, You hear about that Carl Stevenson?

I heard.

Charlie glanced at the glove compartment door that concealed the pistol and asked, Why would a Corsicana boy want to do that to Mister Budrow? His voice rose through the short sentence.

Charlie Jarrell, you knows it’s a set-up for something no good. Ain’t no Texas Ranger going to chase down a colored boy that kill a colored man unless there’s something else no good.

No ma’am.

Everybody say Stevenson’s a patsy, that Nathan was fooling with a white woman and the husband pay that boy to lure Budrow away.

‘She’s fishing about Budrow’s affair with the Sheriff Greene’s wife, of course,’ Charlie thought, ‘just fishing. All them ladies know about Percy Budrow’s white gals.’

Percy’s Hotel had entertained white big shots, university boys, and cowboys ever since Prohibition had shut down the west side. Their money was East Austin’s deliverance from the Depression that was beginning to make the west side poor. Annie knew that the sheriff’s wife had been one of those girls. She didn’t know that she had taken up with Nathan before she met the sheriff.

‘Maybe it would be all right if they think a jealous white man kill Nathan,’ thought Charlie, ‘or the Klan kill him, or white political bosses, or something like that. No doubt, the sheriff could have got Nathan if he’d a mind. No doubt, everybody noticed Mrs. Bess Greene at Nathan’s funeral, standing alone, as beautiful as ever, dressed in black, hardly acknowledging her friends from the old days.’

But while the sheriff shut down small stills and jailed petty bootleggers all over the west side of Austin, he allowed old Percy’s hoochie-koochie hotel to operate wide open. Nobody on the west side cared, but the sheriff was still taking a chance. ‘In Prohibition time, it’s whites only that get kicked by the law,’ Charlie chuckled to himself. The sheriff had also protected Nathan Budrow from the white San Antonio gang that tried to muscle into Nathan’s East Austin numbers racket—not a likely action from a man wild with jealousy. Whatever old Carson Greene knew about his wife, he was not the man who put that Carl Stevenson up to killing Nathan.

‘No,’ Charlie conjectured, ‘the folks that put that boy up to killing Nathan was after him ever since he used the undertaker association to run numbers outside East Austin. Hell, Carl Stevenson’s mama blamed Budrow, even me, for her husband’s disappearance from their Corsicana funeral home. Somehow, that San Antonio bunch got her son to lure Nathan away to the place where they killed him; and then they stuck the boy with the body and the blame. No doubt, the boy was involved somehow; no doubt, he tried to drive Budrow’s Buick all the way back to Corsicana with Budrow’s beat-up body in it. . . . Annie’s right about one thing. That gang’s got connections. Those Texas Rangers never work overtime to catch a colored for killing a colored, much less spend a week sweating out a confession. Somebody was real anxious to see that Carl Stevenson got all the blame.’

As Charlie guided the Model T to the parking space in front of the Rising Star Baptist Church, he asked Annie if she had heard that the woman behind Nathan’s murder was the wife of a lawman.

No, I ain’t heard, her grave voice was tinged with titillation.

Why, Miss Davis, I hear that Mrs. Sheriff herself was a visitor to the funeral home more than once.

Ahh, Annie breathed, as if she had something to ponder for a few days. The couple walked into the small church and happily greeted their friends.

They joked and laughed through Annie’s fried chicken and the week’s gossip, and when the Bible study students had finally put down the last of the peach cobbler, Reverend Adam Block introduced the head minister of the Ebenezer Third Baptist Church.

The summer at the Ebenezer Church had not been a happy one. In May, white boys wielding a banana tree from an open-top car had hospitalized a member of his congregation. On Wednesday, white vandals had thrown rocks at the church during choir practice. Shattered glass cut choristers while they were singing. The week before, he had buried Nathan Budrow, a deacon of his church, a close friend and a major benefactor.

My friends, I’m here tonight with the heaviest of hearts. Two weeks ago our great and noble friend Nathan W. Budrow went to the Lord at the hands of a heinous killer or killers. Who can fill the shoes of that giant?

Lord save Mister Budrow. Yes sir, Charlie and Annie said in unison.

If that ain’t enough, every week this summer, sometimes twice or more a week, white boys ride our streets like wild demons. They hurt our old folks, throw rotten fruit at our ladies, chuck rocks at our churches, and call us bad names. And what do we do?

Dumfounded silence. I say, as good Christian of the Lord, what do we do?

The visiting reverend did not wait for the answer, Well, lots of folks think we’ve got to turn the other cheek like our Lord Jesus His own Self. We just let the killers come to our houses and ask us to go on an errand of mercy and then kill us dead. And then we tell the killers—if they be white as icing on a wedding cake or black as a moonless night—we tell the killers to keep on killing if it makes ‘em feel good. Ain’t that right? Is that why we turn the other cheek, brothers and sisters?

Why, no sir, Annie Davis shouted.

Well, well, Sister Davis. You mean we don’t go to slaughter like sheep? That we have to stand up to evil? Like David stand up to Goliath? Like Samson stand up to the Palestines?

Amen. Amen

And when marauders rampage through our community, do we just say, ‘Howdy, thank you kindly for hitting me in my new dress with that rotten plum?’ Do we just say, ‘Bless you for throwing the rock that break the window of the Ebenezer Church, spraying one of our choir ladies with glass so bad she like to bleed to death?’ Do we say, ‘Please boys, act like the KKK and run poor, quiet colored folk down right on the streets?’

No, sir! voices cried.

***

The preacher was evoking unwanted images from deep recesses of Charlie’s memory. His mother had told him that when Master Jarrell announced they were free, she and his daddy left their east Texas plantation for central Texas where the Union occupying army provided the best protection from vengeful rebels. They took a tenancy of a forty-acre cotton farm that provided the young couple a tumbledown shack, a mule, a plow, and seed. When the Union army left, their landlord sold them the land on good terms. Once secure on their own property, they planned to live out their lives planting and picking cotton, bearing children, and spending Wednesday evenings and most Sundays at church.

Charlie recalled hot summer days picking cotton beside his parents, brothers, and sisters, feeling faint, always thirsty, but never faltering. He would never forget the morning his father so proudly drove his own wagon, heaped with his own cotton from his own farm, headed for the gin. Nor would he forget his father’s serious but determined face as he arrived back with the wagon still heaped with cotton. The ginner had offered him half the going rate. He said he’d take the load to another ginner the next day.

But that night the hooded riders came.

Charlie’s mother had jolted her children awake, screaming, Run! Run! Run to the fields and hide! Terrified, panting, stumbling, Charlie saw ghosts on horseback waving torches, shouting, and shooting guns over his shoulder. He ran to an old tree stump, crawled behind it, shut his eyes tightly, and made himself smaller and smaller, until he was invisible. But he could not block out the light of the flames that engulfed their house or his father’s piercing screams or his mother’s guttural cries of utter desolation.

Charlie stayed invisible behind that stump until the sun rose. When he looked out, he saw the stark silhouettes of his mother, brothers, and sisters standing by his father’s charred remains. That afternoon the preacher took Charlie in his arms and prayed for his daddy. Charlie couldn’t cry, not even whimper. When he was older, his mother told him that every day for almost a month he had sat in the church, the family’s shelter, staring at the door with

unblinking eyes and an open mouth. There is horror in the world, he had learned; best find a safe tree stump and stay behind it

For the rest of his life, when the world got rough, he searched for his psychic tree stump.

Everybody knew Charlie Jarrell had no use for confrontation. No one was surprised that he had managed to find a way to ignore the night marauders that summer. Two weeks before, he might have heard the commotion as three white boys standing in an open top car threw juicy peaches at men, women, and children walking leisurely through East Austin’s streets. Charlie might have heard, but he didn’t think so. The night the baseballer knocked an old man into the ditch, Charlie might have heard the cars racing through the streets, but he didn’t think so. The previous Wednesday night, Charlie might have heard the glass shattering at the Ebenezer Church. But the next morning, when told how flying shards cut several singers, he just shook his head and went about his business. What more could he do?

But not all East Austin was blinkered. Charlie knew that maids and yardmen complained to their white folks. Annie had worked for a lawyer for years. She had raised his children and now his grandchildren. She cooked most of the food the lawyer had eaten in his lifetime. She had nursed him and his children through fevers, poxes, poison ivy, and broken bones. ‘You bet,’ thought Charlie, ‘that white man has got an earful.’ Mr. Will Furr’s sister-in-law, who was president of the Baptist women, had complained straight to the mayor and the chief of police. ‘But Mrs. Furr’s just a riled up old lady,’ Charlie protested inwardly. Most men sulked until the riders went away. Charlie crouched behind his psychic tree stump.

Well, let us think on it.

The reverend’s think broke into Charlie’s reverie.

"What did old Gideon do when the Midianites rampage through his land? I’ll tell you: he rampage back, brothers and sisters. I know this ain’t the kind of Bible lesson you was expecting, but these times call for something different. A little while back, my dear friend

Nathan Budrow gave me this poem that a Negro named Claude McKay wrote in nineteen hundred and nineteen following a spate of bloody race wars. Y’all remember those days? Permit me to read.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mark at our accursed lot If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows, deal one deathblow!

What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Thank y’all for listening. I’ll say amen to Brother McKay and turn the meeting back to Brother Block.

Thank you, Brother. Your words make us realize what we have to do, said Reverend Block. Now, let’s pray.

After Reverend Block said Amen, Charlie and Annie said their good-byes and drove to Percy’s Hotel for their weekly drink. Ten years ago, they would have returned to one of their houses for comfortable lovemaking, but these days a drink was comfort enough. It was 9 PM.

As Charlie drove, he looked hesitantly at Annie, who made no effort to hide her enthusiasm for the evening’s sermon. He wondered if she thought that the preacher was saying old Charlie had to do something about those white rowdies.

‘Not likely,’ he shrugged. ‘Nobody think that be Charlie’s job. Not that preacher, not Reverend Block, and sure not Miss Annie.’

Annie took no notice when Charlie said nothing as she rambled on without stopping for a breath. His thoughts could not escape the preacher’s words.

And for their thousand blows, deal one death blow, Charlie mumbled. Annie seemed not to hear.

‘That’s what the preacher say,’ he thought. ‘It’s like a call for the Army. Why’d he look at me? It was like I wasn’t doing the Lord’s will. Hell, if that old fool thinks I’m going to go looking for trouble, he’s crazy. Not me. Not old Charlie. I ain’t the hero to save East Austin.’

Charlie turned the Model T from Chicon Street onto Seventh, stopped in front of Percy’s Hotel, grabbed his clarinet case, and escorted Annie to their usual seats at the bar.

When Prohibition had cast its dreary pall over Austin, hotel porter Percy Budrow took his considerable savings from pimping, bought the largest house in East Austin, where he put his girls to work, opened a bar, and provided work for blues singers coming out of the cotton fields and the jazz musicians that passed through town. Legislators, lobbyists, university students, cowboys, and farmhands followed. Percy set up a dozen satellite whorehouses and bought a barbershop.

Soon East Austin nights teemed with life—vibrant, exotic life. Business, gambling, religion, moonshine, home life, whoring, education, stealing, voodoo, and blues music comfortably merged with one another. Little girls grew up around the corner from houses where ladies wore underwear in public; while, a block away on East Austin’s one tree-lined street, Huston and Tillotson college professors had afternoon teas, conducted recitals, read poetry, and held seminars. Unlike other Texas Negro Districts, East Austin’s vice managed not to threaten the lives or the sensibilities of decent folk. Here, families, businesses, churches, and schools imposed a demand for unusual self-control on the hoochie-koochie culture. And that culture protected the professors, the proper ladies, and the little girls.

Percy’s brother, Nathan, had owned the funeral parlor, a burial insurance company, and the lottery racket called policy. His insurance and lottery empire required literate agents, so he employed most of the professionals and merchants living in East Austin, including the dentist, the teachers, and most of the Huston and Tillotson professors, all of whom were grateful for the additional income. Nathan had also been the kingpin of the East Austin vote machine, which he controlled through the churches; and he’d been Treasurer of the Texas Negro Undertakers Association, which gave him the central Texas marketing outlets for policy.

Both brothers gave generously to the Ebenezer Third Baptist Church, the Rising Star Baptist Church, and to various funds for the less fortunate. The Budrows were the overlords of East Austin. And like overlords everywhere, they were prime targets for ambitious usurpers or powerful invaders.

One night in late June 1932, a young African-American lured Nathan Budrow from his funeral parlor to deal with a corpse in the young man’s car. The next morning, 150 miles away, a motorist found Budrow’s Buick wrecked on a roadside with Budrow’s mutilated body in the back.

Typical of most early summer evenings, Annie and Charlie found Percy’s Hotel full of older folks enjoying the music and a little dancing. Youngsters and whites would not arrive for at least an hour, so Charlie and Annie had a little time to enjoy themselves in relative peace. Charlie ordered two glasses of shine from Percy’s own still and handed Annie hers. He tossed back his shot, he cleared his throat, he assembled his clarinet, and he sauntered to the bandstand. For the next half hour, Charlie jammed. Through the smoke, old spirits, praising God in harmony and time, swayed with Annie and some of Percy’s girls. Close on the heels of the blues, Charlie revved up the jazz. Agile couples began frantic dances to complement the music and the rhythm in their souls. After a few minutes, Annie glided her ample body to the bandstand with Charlie’s second and last glass. When he finished it, he shook a couple of hands, wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, put his clarinet in the case, took Annie’s arm, and departed.

It was after 10:30 PM when he returned her to her doorstep and headed home in a mellow mood.

House Park Field, West Austin

West Austin’s blood sport was politics, and in the summer of 1932, it played the game with exhausting ferocity. But three nights a week through May and June, weary partisans set aside differences and gathered in the stands of House Park baseball field to watch sons and nephews and neighborhood boys play under the new nightlights.

While Charlie Jarrell and Annie Davis were at Bible study, west Austin packed the stands to watch Derden Wormer’s Magnolia Oilers and Comet Buick, both undefeated. The Austin Statesman had declared Wormer incontestably the best twirler in Central Texas and rated as the best in the state by many observers. He had dominated city league batters with three shutouts and a one-hitter. He was also hitting .300. Comet Buick outfielders Ox Eckhardt and Darrell Pinckney were both hitting .400. Both had signed contracts with Saint Louis farm teams. Rumors were circulating about Wormer. Major league scouts were among the politicians and bureaucrats, as were Wormer’s friend Harry Garrison and three of his friends from Corsicana.

From the moment the umpire cried, Play ball, Wormer gave the stands the game they had come to see. With sniper accuracy inning after inning, the lanky, six-footer puckered the muscles in his mouth, turned his head, spat a lightning stream of brown juice, then coiled tightly bound sinews and fired bullets at his adversaries. Balls whacked so hard into the catcher’s mitt that as the innings passed, the big Comet Buick batters cringed further from the plate. That’s when Wormer started to paint the corner off-speed—strike three, or a dribbler to the infield, or a pop fly. In the top of the ninth inning, when the second Comet Buick batter was out, five thousand fans rose in a frenzy. Wormer had struck out seventeen and had issued just one walk. Then the twenty-eighth batter, Ox Eckhardt, took his stance. Wormer’s arm zipped its ninetieth pitch, a ball; then pitch ninety-one—a ball. The catcher called time and walked to the

mound. Everyone could see Wormer’s sneer. The next pitch caught the outside corner. Eckhardt fouled off the next. Then Wormer paused to savor the moment. He looked at Eckhardt and the words that formed by the movement of his lips were unmistakable: strike three. Amid the roar from the stands, the pitch left Wormer’s hand and sizzled into the catcher’s glove through Eckhardt’s flailing bat. No one heard the umpire’s call. The stands stormed the field. The team swarmed over Wormer. Laughing and whooping, he was on the ground. Then Harry Garrison and his friends grabbed Wormer, hoisted him to their shoulders, and proceeded to the parking lot in a triumphant parade. Soon five boys in a Chevrolet touring car sped out of House Park field emitting rebel yells and war whoops. They tore onto West Street down to Eleventh, and then turned left toward East Austin.

As Charlie Jarrell proceeded south on Chicon Street, headlights and screeching tires swerved out of Eighth Street, just a hundred feet in front of him. He slammed on his brakes, skidded by the car, and stopped. In his rearview mirror, he made out an open-top car stopped in the ditch. White men were out of the car, milling around. Instinctively, Charlie jumped out of the Model T, motor still running.

Y’all all right? he yelled.

One of them shouted back, Goddamned black bastard. Where’d you learn to drive?

Then a thud punched Charlie’s shoulder, followed by a sharp ache.

Hit the son-of-a-bitch! Knock his head off!

Rocks clunked on Charlie’s car. Another grazed his forehead. He jumped in his Model T and began to drive away. He heard a crack that sounded like a bullet ricocheting off the car body. As his car gathered speed, Charlie reached into his glove compartment, removed the loaded Colt .45, and set it on the passenger seat.

Within moments, Charlie heard the roar of a car passing him on the left. White riders were standing on the sideboards, fists shaking,

twisted mouths shouting cuss words. The open-top car sped to the corner of Seventh and Chicon Street, about a half a block further on, and it stopped under a light. As the Model T slowly approached the corner, Charlie again saw that the men were milling around the open-top car. A tall fellow stood upright from the front car seat and threw a rock that hit Charlie’s windshield. The faint whisper of a mantra began in his ear, ‘For their thousand blows, deal one death blow.’

Charlie knew better than to stop his car. He drove to the corner, turned right onto Seventh, and tried to speed away. Another crack, another ricochet. The whisper became