Read One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) for Free Online

about selling the Brooklyn Bridge, and I wondered how it was sold, and asked some questions about it.” 23
    As much as it was a feat of engineering, the bridge stood also as a symbol of a new urban identity. Only a year before, in 1898, the city of Brooklyn, on the east side of the river, and the city of New York, on the western bank, had been wed, Brooklyn playing the reluctant bride and Manhattan the rakish groom. There was one city now—Greater New York—with a single police force, a single fire department, and a single seat of political power.
    What Battle thought on crossing the bridge will never be known. Nor can it be said what transpired after Battle and Anne descended to the Brooklyn shore, there to complete the journey to Anne’s dashing relatives, William and Killis Delamar. Battle shared with an interviewer only these slim impressions: “Brooklyn was a great big place. The elevated made so much noise you couldn’t hear. There was so much traffic. Of course, I came from a nice quiet little town where everybody spoke to you, but here if I knew somebody and wanted to speak to them they’d think you were fresh or something.” 24
    He stayed in Brooklyn for only two days. The parting with his mother came quickly and sadly. Many long years later, pencil in hand, he wrote of Anne: “I admired and idolized my angelic mother, I loved her better than anyone in the world . . . and always said to myself if and when I married I would choose a girl as near like my loving mother as I possibly could.” 25
    Likely, Anne embraced her son’s big body, the body that had been so large at birth and that was going to carry him forth into the world as a sixteen-year-old claiming manhood. Likely, he spoke of the dream he was setting out to pursue, that of going to college as soon as he could earn the money for tuition and then on to becoming an attorney. Likely, they spoke with earnest optimism of reunions to come. There would be some. They would be few. Mother and son would rarely feel one another’s touch again.
    AFTER AN OVERNIGHT voyage on a steel-hulled steamer, Battle’s sister Nancy and her husband, Alexander Taylor, met Battle at a Connecticut River wharf in Hartford. Taylor had built a painting business. The summer being his busy time, he hired Battle at a salary of $1.50 a day, an amount that seemed princely. When Taylor’s trade fell away in the fall, Battle began picaresque travels in search of work. An early excursion took him to the all-white town of East Glastonbury. A German couple owned the local boarding house. They gave Battle dinner and put him up for the night, marking the “first time I had ever been lodged with white persons.” In the course of the evening, Battle met the superintendent of the nearby Crosby Woolen Mills. Battle told Hughes:
    He was a dapper little man, friendly and talkative, and after dinner we got into a conversation that lasted quite late into the evening. We discussed every subject under the sun except a job. Finally I got around to that, broaching the subject of possible employment in the mill.
    “I would be willing to employ you,” he said. “But I don’t know how the owners would take it, or the other employees. We have never hired a Negro.”
    “Why don’t you hire one and learn how it would take?” I asked.
    Battle wound up with a job in the dye house—at least partly because the dye master jealously guarded his formulas and believed that an African American would lack the intellectual capacity to steal the secrets. In fact, Battle learned the art of fabric dying well enough to run production when the dye master fell ill. A team of mechanics also taught Battle how to operate equipment they had newly installed.
    “The result was that when the mill reopened, I was retained in the carding department as a kind of unofficial overseer in charge of the maintenance of the machinery,” Battle remembered. “I got more pay than my fellow workers but, since I was colored, the