Alexander C. Irvine (6 page)

The morning
sun
was welcoming, and Archie Prescott left his room a good two hours before he had to be at the
Herald
to clean the presses and begin setting type. It did him good to walk the city on sunny days. The light banished the worst of the morbid affectations to which he found himself susceptible during the night. When he got out into the streets, amid the shouts and clangor of New York commerce, he was able to see beyond himself a little. Or perhaps he was just able to distract his mind from the enduring pain of loss.

He considered himself a broken man. Not one of the poor raving wretches who limped aimlessly through the Whiskey Wards in search of some lost vision of themselves they’d lost through gambling or drunkenness, no. Just a man unable to make peace with the losses life had inflicted upon him. Archie had spent years trying to deny this to himself, but in the end he had to admit that something inside him had died along with Helen and Jane in the fire seven years before. It was better, he believed, to appraise oneself honestly.

Sunlit days and the bustle of the city helped him, though, and Archie was not so self-pitying as to deny himself what pleasures he could still take. Walking was one such pleasure. Drink was another, chiefly nocturnal, indulgence.

From inside the door of his rooming house, Archie peered into the street, resting his hand on the doorknob until he’d satisfied himself that the mad little street urchin who thought she was his daughter was nowhere in sight. This determined, he opened the door and walked quickly out of the Five Points. Out on Broadway, he felt better. He nodded at shopkeepers and pedestrians, bought a loaf of bread for his lunch, wandered south and west for a while before eventually doubling back and finding himself on Nassau Street.

A young, balding man in a clerical collar thrust a handbill in front of Archie. “Are you familiar with
Prigg versus Pennsylvania?
”
he asked.

Archie’s first instinct was to brush the paper aside, but he checked the impulse. A journalist had to pay attention to voices in the streets.
“Prigg versus Pennsylvania,”
he echoed the clergyman. A Supreme Court decision. He remembered reading about it somewhere, in one of the papers, but couldn’t recall the substance of it.

“I’m not,” he said, and accepted the handbill.

“Imagine being born to slavery,” the divine said. “Reaching your majority amid the crack of the whip and the groaning songs of Africans yearning for the freedom God ordains for every man. Imagine, then, that you steal away one night. You elude the searchers with their rifles and hounds, you survive a barefoot sojourn through the mountains of the Cumberland or the Tidewater swamps of the Carolinas. You avoid the pickets at the Ohio River, or the slave-catchers at the ports of Baltimore, Savannah, Charleston. You voyage north toward freedom and encounter kindness, sup for the first time at the table of dignity. You build a life for yourself, working and living as a free man in Philadelphia or Boston or here in New York, becoming the full soul that God intended. Would you not say, sir, that a man of such strength, of such fortitude, deserves the reward of freedom?”

“Yes,” Archie said before he’d had a chance to think about it.

“Then you must join us in protesting this outrage of
Prigg versus Pen
n
sylvania!
”
the divine cried. “The Supreme Court of this land, charged with upholding our constitutional and God-given rights, has sunk instead to the basest, most scurrilous pandering to those who value dollars more than souls. After
Prigg versus Pennsylvania,
those brave Negroes who survive the awful rigors of their boreal flight to freedom may be brutally snapped up and returned at any moment during the rest of their lives. When they’ve married, had children, become churchgoers and pillars of the Negro community, they must suffer the constant fear that a bounty hunter may lay vile hands upon them and spirit them away from home and family to the living death that is chattel slavery! Can such a thing be tolerated? Can we suffer such a gross abridgment of liberty in this, a free country under the eyes of God?”

“But
Prigg versus Pennsylvania
was decided in March,” Archie said, remembering more about its specifics, “and the Fugitive Slave Act—”

“Is an abomination in the sight of the Lord!” the divine interrupted thunderously. “The most execrable obtrusion of evil ever to afflict this continent! This was the test of
Prigg versus Pennsylvania,
and seven justices unfit to bear the appellation failed it. Are slaveholders pursuing their human chattel to be treated in the same fashion as banks, amassing their resources unimpeded by any but corrupt federal oversight? Are slaves so many gold bars, to be hoarded for the enrichment of a few wealthy men?
Prigg versus Pennsylvania
says yes. The Supreme Court has ruled that the right of a slaveholder to recover his property—
property!
.
—outweighs the inalienable right of that property to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No Negro is safe when a slave-catcher can contest his citizenship, can call into question his very status as a human being. And no right-thinking citizen of the Republic can be safe when such injustices can be freely perpetrated upon our most helpless brethren. Have you, sir, ever heard the term
blackbirders?”

Archie had. He had seen quite a few of them, in fact, haunting the Five Points, which as New York’s poorest neighborhood was also its most racially mixed. Blackbirders purportedly hunted fugitive slaves, but their actual activities consisted mostly of hunting for opportunities to accuse Negroes of being fugitives. Each blackbirder had a group of ready witnesses and a preferred magistrate, and they did a steady business in removing unlucky Negroes from New York to (the clergyman’s words rang in Archie’s head) Baltimore, Savannah, or Charleston.

“Then you know,” the clergyman said, “the depredations these blots on humanity visit upon the liberty of your black brothers.”

Archie nodded. An expose on blackbirders, he thought. Bennett might take an interest in that. The publisher didn’t like Negroes, and he hated abolitionists, but he was a very bloodhound after judicial corruption.

“Did you know that these abominable men even steal children?” the divine went on. “Just this past Sunday—Sunday, sir!—a Negro girl, eleven or twelve years old, skipped down Anthony Street to get water from a pump in the tenement adjacent to hers. Fifteen minutes later her father went to look for her, and found the bucket she’d taken, half-filled next to the pump. In a frenzy of worry he searched for the girl, and at last—O heartbreak!—he discovered her fate. Can you imagine, sir? An eleven-year-old girl whisked away in the foul hands of a trader in human souls? And her
father
… ?” The clergyman paused, seeing something in Archie’s face. “Now you see,” he said. “You are of an age to have such a daughter, aren’t you? And you possess a sensitive soul. You can see yourself in this poor girl’s father, running through the streets in a futile desire to recapture your child, to see your flesh and blood safe again. With you again.”

Archie took a step away from the clergyman, bumping into someone behind him. The clergyman closed the distance between them again, and a softer expression banked the zealous fire in his eyes. “If I have caused you pain,” he said, “it is to my regret. But we all must begin to share the pain of the oppressed.”

He started to go on, but a chorus of vulgar shouts from the other side of the street cut him off. Archie turned in time to see a volley of eggs and rotten vegetables splatter across the cluster of agitators. A window shattered behind him, and as he flinched he caught a glimpse of the plaque next to the building’s doorway: American anti-slavery society. Ah, he thought. William Lloyd Garrison’s band of Baptists. No surprise there. But who’s breaking it up?

Across Nassau Street, a group of young Irishmen readied another vegetable salvo. That made sense too. Irish and blacks competed for the same housing, the same jobs, so naturally the Irish were violently proslavery. Slaves had no influence on wages; free Negroes did.

Each of these b’hoys wore red piping on his trousers, though. That was the uniform of the Dead Rabbits, one of New York’s more organized and dangerous gangs. The Rabbits were Tammany muscle, too. This was no random act, then, but what interest did Tammany Hall have in abolitionism?

The clergyman who had first arrested Archie’s stroll around lower Manhattan now strode across the street, his head thrust forward and right index finger jabbing at the Irish gang. “You!” he shouted, and his voice cracked. The Dead Rabbits laughed and echoed “You!” in sarcastic falsetto.

“You of all nations,” the clergyman went on, “who have known tenant slavery under the English crown, who are beaten in the streets by nativists, despised and kept from common society just as Negroes are. Of all living souls, you should understand the justice of our cause!”

One of the Rabbits stepped forward and knocked the clergyman down with a slashing right cross. “Never compare an Irishman to a nigger,” he said, and broke an egg over the clergyman’s head.

Several women, their black dresses and severe braids speckled with eggshell and tomato seeds, rushed to the clergyman’s aid. “Shame!” one of them cried. “Is this what your pope teaches you?”

“Enough, Margaret,” the clergyman said. He wiped blood and yolk from his face. “We will not,” he said, standing with a hand on her arm, “answer their vitriol with our own.”

Together the abolitionists recrossed Nassau Street and went into the headquarters of the American Anti-Slavery Society, followed by jeers from the red-piped b’hoys. The protest had dissipated, and Nassau Street slowly began to refill with traffic that crushed beneath wheels and feet the broken rinds and rotted pulp of the hatred (Archie thought, already composing the article in his head) that the poor reserve for each other.

Archie was distracted
and clumsy at work that afternoon, spilling boxes of type and once dumping a bottle of ink over the imposing table next to the press. Luckily Bennett hadn’t come out of his office all day, and Archie’s misdeeds cost him only a little joking from the other pressmen. Blackbirders, he thought over and over again, trying to focus on the angle for the article he wanted to write. The clergyman’s words to him, though, kept repeating themselves in Archie’s head:
You are of an age to have such a daughter, aren’t you? And you possess a sensitive soul.
Archie’s hands shook whenever he thought of that poor Negro shouting through the Five Points in futile pursuit of his daughter who was gone to bear chains and cry out at the crack of the overseer’s whip. Better, almost, to know that one’s daughter had died. At least then a man could mourn and go on.

As you, Archie said sardonically to himself, have done so admirably.

Udo arrived with fresh paper as Archie was munching his bread around sunset. Looking at his old friend, Archie could not help a spasm of jealousy. Udo had prospered in the years they had known each other. He delivered personally only to Bennett and one or two other important customers; others received their goods from one of Udo’s growing staff of drivers. His success showed around Udo’s waistline, and he had become a sort of avuncular pillar of
biergarten
society. His wife was fertile as a flowerbed, his children learned French from tutors, his house had stained glass in its parlor windows. And through all of his success, Udo had not forgotten his friendship with Archie. He still took his own stein when he met Archie for beer and conversation.

“I saw an abolitionist rally today,” Archie said as they rolled paper through the
Heralds,
loading door. “The Dead Rabbits broke it up.”

Udo shook his head and paused to mop his scalp with a handkerchief. “Troublemakers, all of them,” he said. “Abolitionists and Rabbits.”

Archie knew Udo hated to discuss politics with friends, but he couldn’t forget his mental image of the bereft Negro father discovering the bucket of water and knowing. He must have known what had happened. “Blackbirders are stealing children off the streets,” he said. “Children. How must that feel?”

Udo looked Archie in the eye. “You have sorrow enough, Archie. Don’t go looking for more.”

That wasn’t good enough. “Children, Udo.”

“Archie, I hire blacks. I pay them like I pay whites. This is what I can do.” Udo looked as if he might say something more, but instead he pocketed his handkerchief and walked toward the door. “Let’s finish up.”

S
ometime after midnight
, Archie rounded the corner onto Orange Street, his fingers sore and purpled with ink that never quite washed away. Music played from a basement grocery somewhere, accompanied by yells in a language Archie didn’t understand. He looked up and down the street. An oyster vendor hitched up his horse and left for more comfortable parts of the city, or maybe just went home. Sailors swaggered, whores beckoned, the destitute watched it all from windows or shadowed corners. Archie was exhausted.

On the steps of his rooming house sat a child-sized figure wearing a hat and heavy coat. Archie stopped in his tracks.

No, he thought. I can’t face her tonight. Not with that damned weeping Negro chasing after his daughter in my head. Tonight I need to be able to remember my daughter as she was. That maniacal, horrible shambles of a girl has no right to stalk me the way she does, no right to claim my daughter’s name.

Better to have lost one’s daughter, Archie thought for the second time that day. He backtracked around the corner and found his way into a grog shop on Leonard Street. Better to mourn and go on.