Strivers Row by Kevin Baker Page A

somehow, on an island, despite shortages and ration cards.
    They had climbed up the ferry gangplank, waving good-bye to Adam and Isabel and their son, and he had thought that, Yes, I can do this, there is no reason to go. We can have a good life, just like other people. Even a life with children .
    But when they reached the mainland again, and got back to America, everything changed. Even before they had docked, Jonah had noticed the sharp looks that he and Amanda got from some of the other passengers. Trying to figure out if they really were both colored, he knew, giving them a wide berth in any case. There had been some derisive laughter, some things said—as always, just out of earshot.
    He had tried to ignore it, but then they had reached New Bedford and he had bought the newspapers. It was the same thing again, all the news they had been shielded from on their island off the rest of America, plastered across the front page of the Pittsburgh Courier edition he had managed to pick up. A colored private and his mother, both beaten by police and MPs for daring to use a phone in the white waiting room of a Houston train station...a colored officer in Columbus, Georgia, who was told to go to a different window for nigger tickets, then who was knocked to the ground over and over again by fourteen separate white cops armed with nightsticks. His wife struck down, too, when she put out her hand to help him... Eleven Negro shipyard workers hospitalized, two more feared dead in Mobile—
    The trouble had started when they had tried to put black welders on a job building Liberty ships—and the white welders had attacked them with iron bars and homemade clubs and bricks. Rioting until the government had been forced to give in, and put all the colored welders on a separate, segregated wharf—
    Segregated Liberty ships. His father had always talked about how his grandfather had been a skilled shipbuilder, but they wouldn’t let him make warships, not even in New York during the Civil War, claiming, This is an all-white waterfront —
    â€œWell, that’s progress for you. Eighty years, and we get our own Jim Crow wharf,” he had murmured.
    â€œWhat’s that, honey?” Amanda had asked, but he had only shaken his head.
    The worst, though, was just a small item buried in the back pages of the Boston Globe , a white paper—about a lynching in Vigo County, Indiana. It concerned a thirty-three-year-old colored man, James Edwards Persons, honorably discharged from the army. He had been accused of looking into farmhouse windows, and tracked down and beaten by a mob organized by the local sheriff to hunt him through the fields. But the very worst part of all was that it had happened months before. Somehow, even after his beating— even after the terror that must have suffused his being, turning his legs to nightmare lead weights—even after all that, Persons had escaped the mob, and hidden himself away. Only to be found dead now, not truly escaped from anything—
    Jonah was still thinking on the story when the white soldiers came into the car. No doubt he would have noticed them earlier if he hadn’t been so preoccupied, might have even discovered some ruse to hustle Amanda away from trouble. He was always alert, wherever he was, for groups of white men like that, though he tried not to let Amanda see his fear. He had slipped his clerical collar on before they left, an added precaution he thought worthwhile even if it had drawn a quizzical look from Adam, hoping that its authority would help him.
    But it hadn’t mattered. Nothing had, save for the color of his skin, and his wife’s. The soldiers had spotted them at once, the moment they had walked in from the parlor car, half in the bag and looking for a fight. Sticking their faces, with their sour, whiskey-soaked breath, right into their own—
    And no one around them had raised a hand to help. None of the white people in the