Never Been a Time by Harper Barnes

Author:Harper Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walker Books
Published: 2008-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

“This Was the Apocalypse”

About two P.M. , rioters began torching flimsy railroad shacks on the Mississippi River bottomland west of the South End, near the Free Bridge. The scattered fires, fanned by a light wind from the west, slowly licked eastward into rickety, overcrowded rows of flats and small industrial buildings and warehouses.

Charles Roger looked to the west from the chemical plant he ran at Sixth Street and Walnut Avenue south of downtown, and he could hardly believe his eyes. The fires were about two blocks away, and the smoke was dark with creosote from railroad ties. As he looked down Walnut toward the railroad yards and sandy bottomland along the river he saw half a dozen white men emerge through the smoke. The men were jeering and throwing bottles and stones at the blacks who ran out of the buildings to escape the fires. For the moment, the whites seemed content to see the homes destroyed and let the blacks escape with their lives. Roger saw no guns, although he could hear sporadic gunfire from other parts of the city. An hour or two later, he saw the first soldiers, not that their arrival did anything to stop the rioters.

Roger had been born and raised in Scotland but he had spent half of his forty-nine years in the United States, the past seven managing a chemical plant and freight company in East St. Louis. He thought he knew the place well, but he had never expected to see anything like this, and it shocked and frightened him.1

In front of his building, three or four black men huddled on the sidewalk along Walnut and watched the jeering whites. Suddenly, another black man came running toward them from the east, gripping a pistol in his right hand. He yelled something as he approached and waved with the pistol toward a small gang of white men who were chasing him. They were less than a block behind him, shouting racial curses.

The black men all began running south toward the Free Bridge. Roger figured they could escape across the river, if they could fight their way through the whites who, Roger had heard, were massed at the bridge, beating blacks and forcing them at gunpoint to jump into the deep, churning Mississippi. It was a plunge few could expect to survive,

Roger turned away for a moment, horrified at what he had seen that day, fearful of what would happen to the businesses he had been put in charge of—$300,000 worth of plant and warehouses—and worried about the lives and homes of the people who worked for him. The plant had its own hauling company that delivered freight by horse-drawn wagons, and one of his teamsters was black. Understandably, that man had not reported to work that morning, and Roger could only hope that he was safe.

An old African American pensioner who did odd jobs around the company’s horse yards and stables had come in early, as usual, but as soon as Roger

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