The Last Ballad(109)

Hampton stepped back inside and closed the door, locking it just as Dixon had. The wail of the sirens still came from up around Franklin, and Hampton figured that whatever was making the noise—a police car or an ambulance—had parked at the scene.

What could he do aside from wait? After the anger he’d faced at the rally, he didn’t feel safe leaving the house. He had nowhere to go, no one to take him in, no one to hustle him out of town, where he could catch the next train to New York. Sophia and Ella and Violet were probably miles away in Bessemer City. They wouldn’t learn of the gunshots and the sirens until morning.

Loud voices rose from the street outside Hampton’s window. He pulled back the curtain, kept his body in the shadows of the room, and looked out onto the street. A group of ten or so men walked quickly past the house and away from whatever was happening on Franklin. One of them stopped and looked back. The group continued on until another man stopped and spoke to the lone member who’d paused.

“Come on!” the man called out. “You want to go to jail?”

Hampton let go of the curtain. There was nothing he could do now but wait until morning.



He knew he must have fallen asleep because the noise he heard jolted him upright: a loud bang, followed by another. The sound of automobile doors slamming shut. He scrambled off the bed and went to the window, where he opened the curtains just wide enough for one of his eyes to look out on the street. Trees obscured his vision but he could see a vehicle parked in front of the boardinghouse. He realized the sirens had stopped, but at what point he did not know. Then, on the porch downstairs, out of sight from where Hampton stood at the window, someone banged a fist against the front door.

He stepped, nearly fell, away from the window. He looked around for something with which to protect himself, but his room was nearly bare: the cot, the small table, the chair sitting before it. Nothing that would be any match for a gun or a knife or a gang of men like the group he’d seen on the street earlier.

There were voices downstairs. Whoever had been at the door was now inside. He could hear Miss Adeline’s voice coming through the floor. The other voices he could hear spoke in low whispers, but Miss Adeline nearly yelled. He tried to discern if she sounded mad or confused or scared. He couldn’t tell. He returned to the window and parted the curtain. The truck was still there. He thought of lifting the windowpane and climbing out, jumping to the ground. It was twenty feet, no more than that, but there was grass beneath. He pictured himself running down the street, cutting up through a yard, trying to hide in a crawl space beneath one of the small houses until the morning light allowed him to find his way to the headquarters, where he’d beg someone to help him.

The voices on the first floor had grown quiet, but now Hampton heard the creak of the stairs; then he heard footsteps coming up the flight toward the landing outside his room.

Like his father had done, Hampton decided he would fight with a fury fueled by fear and anger. He stomped across the room, the footfalls making him sound larger, stronger than he knew he would feel once he opened the door. He turned the lock as if chambering a round and threw open the door.

Miss Adeline’s face collided with his chest. Her forehead slammed into his lip, drawing blood into his mouth. The old woman stumbled backward, collapsed, more out of shock than the violence of the impact. The oil lamp she’d carried skidded across the floor, snuffed itself out. Hampton looked down at the old woman, touched his lip, saw the blood, tasted it. He bent toward her, and tried to help.

“You got company,” she said.

A woman’s voice, then another, called to him from the back stairs. Already on his knees, Hampton pivoted and looked around the banister. Sophia stood at the bottom of the stairs, Ella beside her.

In what seemed to be one motion, Stamp Dixon turned the lock and flung open his door so that he had to stop it from slamming shut after it bounced against its hinges. He stood above Hampton, the light of his room behind him, tucking his undershirt into a pair of pants he struggled to button at the same time.

“You damned nigger,” he said. He stepped out and grabbed Hampton by the collar, his other hand grasping at whatever it could find: Hampton’s arm, his shirt, his pants’ waist. Dixon pulled him toward the stairs, pushed against Hampton once his body teetered on the top step. Hampton felt himself going over, the small world of the boardinghouse’s attic landing and then its narrow stairwell closing in around him as he tumbled head over feet to the story below.

As he fell, he scratched and kicked at the walls, did his best to stop himself before he reached the bottom, before he heard his neck snap, before the already dark stairwell was suddenly thrown into complete blackness. He caught himself halfway down the stairs, realized that he hadn’t fallen as far as he’d thought. He was on his back, his legs splayed against the wall, the fingers of both hands grasping the stair rail’s wooden spindles. Dixon stood in the hallway above. Beside him, Miss Adeline was on her feet.

“You damned nigger,” Dixon said again. He raised his hand and pointed toward the street in front of the house. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on out there, but I know you and those white girls down there got something to do with it. I’m going to tell you right now to get gone. I’m calling the police. You ain’t done nothing but made things worse. Nothing but that.”



Outside on the darkened street, Ella and Sophia begged Hampton to get inside the truck, to hunker down in the floorboard, but he refused.