Good Morning POU!
Robert survived and is now in Memphis, where he starts his new life.
In his first few days as a free man in Memphis, Robert met a woman named Louisa “Lou” Ayers. She was a former house slave for a prominent white Memphis family and remained a servant after the Union forces arrived. Lou had been provided an education and could read, write and speak a few words of French. She was 17 with soft features, skin the color of sand with loosely curled hair pinned in an updo.
Robert lacked Lou’s formal education and genteel manner. To most that encountered him, he was gruff and spartan, betraying his upbringing as a riverboat slave. Often he spoke only when spoken to and lapsed into broken English.
He began to call on Lou and thought of asking for her hand in marriage. He was nagged by thoughts of his slave wife, Margaret Pico, and their daughter Laura, in New Orleans. In Memphis there was peace as the colored troops of the Union held control of the city, but elsewhere the Civil War made much of the South a dangerous battlefront and there was no way to get to them. He thought it best to simply move on from Margaret. A few months later, he asked Lou to be his wife.
Robert and Lou married in Memphis in 1863, in the yard of the mansion that belonged to the family that owned her. Captain Church attended and the family that owned Lou, purchased her an expensive wedding dress from New York City. A few months later, Lou gave birth to a daughter on September 23, 1863, just months after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. They named her Mary Church, after Captain Church’s wife and daughter.
Robert was eager to introduce the child to his father. He traveled across town to his father’s estate. The old ship commandeer bounced Mary on his knee. “You’ve got a good girl here, Bob. You have to make sure you raise her right,” said the Captain. It would be years before Robert would reveal to his own child that Captain Church, his former owner, was her grandfather.
In 1866, Robert Reed Church traveled to New Orleans to see Margaret Pico and his 7 year old daughter Laura. Margaret had gotten married and given Laura her new husband’s surname: Napier. Robert requested that he be allowed to take Laura to Memphis. A year later, Laura was bought up to Memphis via steamboat. In Tennessee , she lived with Robert, Lou and Mary, and changed her name to Laura Church.
In the months after Emancipation, the Union troops stayed in town to keep the peace. The town was full of former Confederate luminaries such as Nathan Bedford Forrest and ex-Confederate president Jefferson Davis, as well as a population of former slaves. The local government was dominated by rebel-sympathizing Democrats. In many towns colored troops were left in place to protect free blacks. However, the troops presence stirred resentment in the ex-Confederates.
The Union troops in Memphis were mostly black men, many former slaves. During the day they patrolled the streets and kept order. At night the colored troops enjoyed drinking and carousing the parlors and brothels.
Robert, saw a business opportunity. With a loan from his wife who had opened a successful wig shop, he started a billiard hall. He applied for a business license in 1866 but was denied due to his race. To hell with them, he thought, and set up his business anyway. He set up his bar on Gayoso Street, near the riverfront, and stocked it with whiskey. He built a ballroom where he threw soirees and dances.
One night two white police officers showed up and arrested him for operating a billiard hall without a license. Robert hired a lawyer and the case went to trial in April 1866, mere days after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. The Act was passed by the Radical Republican caucus, overriding a presidential veto by Andrew Jackson.
On April 17th, the charges against Church were dropped. The Confederates were livid. Robert swaggered away from the courtroom a free, but marked, man.
In Memphis, an uneasy peace existed between the races that would soon come to a head.
Black men, the Union soldiers, were taking a liberty that the ex-Confederates could not stomach: having sex with white women. A riot began with a quarrel between the Memphis police and black Union soldiers outside a brothel on the riverfront, where black Union troops were known to bed white prostitutes.
It escalated and several Union troops were gunned down. The Memphis police then went on a murderous crawl throughout the city, shooting black men and white northern carpetbaggers, raping black women and destroying black homes and businesses. Word reached Robert that the mob was looking for him. They wanted to kill the black man who had opened a business in spite of the state and then used the Civil Rights Act to get off scot free.
As Robert dressed, Lou begged him to stay for fear he’d be killed. But he slicked back his hair, his goatee and mustache and put on his jacket. “No.” he told her. He would not hide.
He showed up at his billiard hall and opened shop, but hardly anyone came. Still he refused to close up. He wasn’t hoping to avoid the white mob, he was waiting for them.
It had just begun to rain when the men finally showed up.
“Get out here” the men holding guns and wearing police uniforms yelled. David Roach, an Irish police officer, told Robert to close up shop. Robert turned his back on him and walked back into his shop. He heard the crash of glass as bullets started to ring out. He then heard a pop and felt a burning in the back of his neck. It took him a moment to realize he’d been shot.
The men stormed the store as Church lay bleeding on the floor. They drank all the whiskey, took money from the cash register, broke his tables and left him for dead as they put a torch to his building with him inside. The rain slowed the flames as they engulfed the store, somehow Robert dragged himself from the building, half dead with a bullet wound in his head.
No one heard from Robert. Was he dead? Alive?