Gavel Gamut

By Jim Redwine

UNANIMOUS FOR MURDER, A NOVEL

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sarah Jones had forgiven Henry for his weakness. When she thought about him the memories were mostly regrets, not anger. She remembered how as a twenty year old bride she had been impressed by the forty year old business man who was respected by the Posey County community and who, when he touched her, was gentle and unhurried. They had dreamed of children and success together, but when no children came, Henry gradually drew away. What Sarah never understood, because Henry was too embarrassed to discuss it, was that Henry’s retreat into work was not due to disappointment with Sarah, but himself.

Because Henry’s first love, whom he kept secret from Sarah, had a child by another man, Henry knew the problem lay with him. While their love for one another was sufficient compensation for Sarah, Henry’s inability to defeat his bitterness made the lonely Sarah vulnerable to young Daniel Harrison, Jr. by whom she had Hattie. Hattie’s birth lit the conflagration of murder and destruction sparked by Henry’s embarrassment and self-loathing.

Sarah knew Henry was not a cruel man. On his own he would have never murdered anyone, especially Daniel Harrison, Jr. Henry and Da, what everyone called Daniel, had formed a close bond when Da’s mother, Elizabeth Harrison, would bring Da with her when she cleaned the Jones’ home. Henry had enjoyed the light skinned youngster’s antics, and he had even started to teach him about Henry’s Pittsburgh Coal Company business. But when Henry’s white friends, William Combs and George Daniels, called Da Henry’s Colored apprentice, Henry’s insecurity sabotaged the opportunity for a vicarious relationship among Henry, Sarah and Da.

Henry may have been with Combs and Daniels when Daniel Harrison, Jr., was thrown into the firebox of that steam locomotive on October 10, 1878, but Sarah had never believed the man who was her first love was responsible. Henry’s suicide note and will recognizing his own sins and naming Hattie as an heir proved to Sarah that Henry was not evil, but weak. She found she still loved him for the early years and most of all for accepting Hattie as the child they had so desperately wanted together.

Hattie’s biological father, Daniel Harrison, Jr., may have been legally an African American, but Hattie looked white. She had brown hair, brown eyes and the powerful physique of her father, who was a descendant of the gigantic ancient Saos people from Chad in north central Africa.

By the time she reached puberty Hattie had grown into a tall mirror image of her beautiful mother. She also had read all of the avant-garde writings of one of Sarah’s heroines, the New Harmony, Indiana feminist, Frances (Mad Fanny) Wright, who believed that slavery, marriage and religion were equal partners in the subjugation of blacks and women.

Hattie studied Wright and learned from Sarah how the legal system in southwestern Indiana had allowed the murder of her father and the banishment of her and her mother. Sarah did not want Hattie to grow up as Sarah had, naïve and vulnerable. Sarah did not shelter Hattie from the facts of her history. But the history lessons did not shield Hattie from her life in segregated Tulsa. The locales changed but prejudices remained. It was these damaging prejudices that brought Hattie to her death in 1920 at age forty-three. The Tulsa race riots were to blame.

Hattie’s youth was filled with stories of what had occurred in Posey County, Indiana before her mother and her friends Ajax and Jane (Harrison) Crider had fled Indiana for the Oklahoma Indian Territory in the autumn of 1878. Hattie passed these bitter memories on to the younger Ajax Crider, Jr. who was raised with Hattie in Tulsa and the Colored community at Langston, Oklahoma.

When Hattie was killed by a white mob, the then thirty year old Ajax Crider, Jr. lost his surrogate older sister. His anger and hatred, along with Hattie’s stories of Posey County, were deeply ingrained in Ajax and in Hattie’s only child, Elizabeth, who was born when Hattie was barely into puberty.

Elizabeth was the product of a rape that occurred during a trip Hattie and Sarah took to the Osage Indian Nation. They had gone to visit Sarah’s friends with whom she had fled from Indiana, Jenny Bell, Emma Davis and Ed Hill. All Hattie could relate of the encounter was that the man was a large Indian who never uttered a word when he dragged her into the shadows as she was reading alone away from the house. He covered her head with a blanket to muffle her screams and left her badly beaten. Sarah cursed the rapist but loved the child whom she had Hattie name Elizabeth after Elizabeth Harrison. When Hattie was killed, Sarah raised Elizabeth with the help of Jane Crider. Elizabeth grew up with Ajax, Jr. to look after her and tell her of the tragedies that defined them.