The Children's Blizzard(17)

The two prepared to head out into the storm that was not letting up, thank God; maybe this thing was going to turn out to be a tragedy, after all!

But as soon as he felt the first blast of ice slap his unprotected face, Gavin thought, once more, of that girl. How many ways could he come up with to describe what happened when young, hopeful—yearning—women were frozen to death out on the prairie?

Gavin looked up at the sky, hoping, to his own surprise, to see a break in the clouds, a glimpse of a fading sun.

But no such break occurred.





CHAPTER 7


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OLLIE TENNANT WATCHED THE MEN file out of his bar, successfully hiding his distaste. Not a one of them had mentioned the school where his children spent their days learning their lessons.

But Ollie was used to this; from the moment these idiots had mangled his name, assuming that he must be one of those Buffalo Soldiers whose legacies still loomed large in barely settled places like Omaha, he’d understood the way to deal with them. He’d understood that the only way to get a white man to respect you was to try to be as white as he was, at least in book learning. And you had to be braver, twenty times as brave as the average white gentleman, because the colored man was starting from a ways away from zero, in that category. At least in the white imagination.

So Ollie read his books, but he sometimes thought they were foolish—stories about the problems white people had, which couldn’t hold a candle to the problems darker people had. He mostly read for the show of it, although now and then a book—like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—surprised him. But his reading soothed the customers somehow. It made them feel more inclined to spend.

    And he’d smiled enigmatically when the stories sprang up about him—that he’d been a soldier, part of the famous 9th Cavalry that helped “tame” the Kiowa and Comanche down in Texas. All he’d done was buy a cavalry jacket off a drunk in Missouri, because the coat was warmer than the one he had on his back at the time. He’d never once said a word that wasn’t true; all he had to do was smile or force a far-off look in his eye when white folk jumped to their own conclusions.

A colored man got a lot further in this world when he didn’t open his mouth.

He wasn’t no former slave, either; that was the other assumption folks in Omaha made about people with skin darker than an Indian or Mexican. Ollie had grown up in a tiny village in northern Indiana, a settlement of mostly coloreds who farmed small plots and kept to themselves. But just because his skin wasn’t white didn’t mean that he, too, didn’t feel the tug of the West, like so many men. His first memories were of turning to face the setting sun, wanting to go with it, to see what it saw. He’d lit out as soon as he was able, wandering from outpost to outpost, finally ending up in Omaha, putting his money into this little bar that was fine for a while, sure, while the town was just itty-bitty, but now that it was booming, things were different.

First the railroad, then the stockyards; Omaha became a magnet for people who didn’t want to farm but who would do—and do happily—the jobs that a lot of natural-born white Americans didn’t want to do. The Irish, the Bohemians, the Poles, the Italians, the coloreds—they were willing to spend their days in a slaughterhouse or a canning facility, or bending over crooked rails and hammering them straight, or enduring the crippling fumes of a tanning house. Omaha had jobs like these in spades, and so they came, and the people who’d been here first, the white boomers and boosters, got rich off them, building rickety shacks for them to rent on the outskirts of town. There was Little Bohemia just south of here. Up north were the Hebrews, Italians, and people like Ollie himself; that was where the coloreds were starting to congregate.

    Ollie had bought his little tavern right in the heart of the downtown area when there wasn’t a downtown area. Back then, nobody seemed to care that they got their drinks from a colored man—one of the few in town at the time. But now, the city was civilized. Tamed, the newspapers trumpeted. Fine hotels and restaurants surrounded his little storefront. Just last week the Bee had run a story of a visiting colored man who tried to get a drink in a bar of one of those fine hotels, and—politely, the paper said—was asked to leave.

Ollie had been approached several times in recent months by groups of civic leaders pressuring him to sell. “Go north, Ollie. The land is cheap there; you could buy five lots for what we’re able to pay you for the Lily.”

Ollie was willing to admit he had a stubborn streak; he didn’t like being told what to do. He’d once massacred a passel of fireflies, running after them, catching them in his big mitt of a hand, despite his mother warning him he would squeeze them to death. He’d clutched them even tighter in response, and when he finally released them into the glass jar she’d given him for just this purpose, he’d discovered she was right. They were lifeless, his hand faintly smeared with their yellow dust, still glowing in the dark. He’d squeezed the life out of them by wanting them too much.

He’d spent the rest of his life trying not to want too much.

But he had a wife now, and two kids, and his wife hated living over the bar in this part of town where she wasn’t wanted; she felt it much more keenly than Ollie. She kept pestering him to move to the North Side, where her friends were. (Ollie didn’t have any friends and that was fine by him; he had no need for conversation. Nor did he have any love for some of the younger men coming to town, agitating for things like equal rights for the Negro. Ollie’d done just fine, hadn’t he? Why upset the apple cart and make the whites nervous and angsty?) Still, he was considering the latest offer. Because he had a customer who had kindly told him that if he didn’t, he could expect some kind of bill to pass in the town council that would annex his lot in the name of progress, and he wouldn’t get even a single dime.