Citizen Tom Paine (3 page)

If he thought of himself at all, it was with pity; when he could afford a bottle of wine it went down in such self-sympathy that he would usually wind up a mass of maudlin tears. And he didn't have to drink alone, since there was usually a tavern drunk to keep him company. Look at his own life, he would point out. Had he a chance? Staymaker when he was still a boy, finding a woman he loved and then losing her, grinding through what lower-middle-class England called life, drunk two weeks, a month on bad gin, the whole world like a fluttering pinwheel, groping in a haze for a little beauty, himself ugly and raw and unkempt.

He wasn't a fool; often he told himself, passively, that the mere fact he had wanted so many things proved it; and never acceptance, since he had hated with such ferocity kings, noblemen, ladies and gentlemen of quality, beggars and thieves and fat, prosperous merchants, sluts and whores and decent women too—and whom had he loved?

There was once a woman he loved, he knew.

Now he didn't love and he didn't hate; he had accomplished one great thing, his passage to the thin fringe of colonies on the American mainland; thereupon he rested. No one gave him shoes, and his shoes wore out; his stockings were a blunt deception; he had been given an old coat that flapped threadbare about his shoulders, and he meandered through the streets with his head down against the cold blasts of wind, his appearance unusual enough for people to begin to know him in such a small city as Philadelphia was then.

“There goes Tom Paine,” they said.

A committee of Quaker ladies called on him. They brought him a new coat and a vest. “Thee are a shame to us,” they pointed out. “Thee will go on this way until God will turn away his face.”

He had been drinking, and he said, smiling foolishly, “I lick God's belly.”

That got around the city, and he lost half his tutoring jobs.

That month, January, in the year 1775, was the beginning of a year that would change the destiny of mankind, yet it was such a January as we often have in the midlands, rain sometimes, snow sometimes, sleet sometimes, and sometimes a clear warm day that might very well be June. It was the beginning of a year that was the beginning of an era, and Christ himself might have walked on earth to raise so fierce yet so gentle a voice from long speechless mankind. Yet men for the most part didn't know and didn't care, what with one and a hundred things to be done, buying and selling and providing, loving and hating, profiting and losing.

In Philadelphia, it promised to be a good year. The town was rapidly becoming a city, and situated as a keystone among the nations of America, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts and the rest, the city gave promise of being one of the great urban centers of the earth. Through its streets, its centers of commerce, which were the coffee houses, its warehouses and its wharves, teemed the trade of all the English colonies in America and of several European nations. It is true that already in the past year a somewhat incoherent body called the First Continental Congress had met in Philadelphia, but they had accomplished nothing, and solid citizens did not believe that the Congress was any menace to the security and prosperity of the colonies. There were disturbances and mutterings, in Boston for the most part and in other Yankee towns to the north; but when was there a time without disturbances? There was unrest in the back counties of the South, but what more could you expect of wild woodsmen who tramped around free as Huns with their six-foot-long rifles?

On the other hand, there was more than adequate compensation. In the highlands, the beavers were thick as rabbits, and shepherded by lean Scotsmen and black-bearded Jews a steady stream of glossy pelts poured into the city. The Tidewater tobacco crop was better than good; the Jerseys were bursting with food; and raft after raft of good white pine floated down the Delaware. Never had the pigs in the German counties been so fat and never had the sheep, grazing in the rolling pastures north of the city, been so heavy with wool. In the wild woods, the Allegheny reaches, the lake country and the Fincastle Highlands, the deer ran thick as flies; venison in Philadelphia sold for fourpence a pound and bear meat could hardly be given away. The deer hides by the thousands piled up in stinking bales on the wharves, ready to change men's fashions in all of Europe. Master carpenters were fighting the fad for Chippendale and Sheraton and other English cabinet makers; with a loop, a claw, and a turn, a slim back, a graceful leg, they were not merely imitating but creating a truly American furniture. The working men of the city were strong and their hands itched to make. Houses were going up, and sometimes the bricks were native as well as the cement.

There were stirrings and murmurings, but there was also an abundance of good things. There was discontent, yet there was enough content. War was in the air, albeit vaguely, but people did not want war; freedom was in the air, too, but most people didn't give two damns about freedom.

The city was a good one, carefully laid out, bought by Perm, not plundered from the red men, full of rich Quakers and poor Quakers, and rich and poor who were not Quakers; but altogether with such a determined air of middle-class prosperity as you would not find in any European city. The houses were solid structures, mostly brick, some half-timber, some frame. Many of the streets were cobbled, named not for men in an ungodly fashion, but for trees, or descriptively, or numbered. There was a good fire department, a good guard, a good library. There was a philosopher, Ben Franklin, come out of the city. There was more good glass, linen, silver, and furniture than anywhere else in America; and after a fashion there was more freedom of religion and thought. Here in the promised land, Philadelphia was the promised city.

Paine went to a slave sale, not because he wanted to buy or had the money to buy, but because it was on an afternoon when he had nothing else to do, and because he was curious to know what it was like to see human beings bought and sold. The auction was held in a big old barn, with the doors locked, and there were a dozen merchants present. It was a sale of breeding wenches, which meant that only women would be put on the auction block, that they would be either virgin or pregnant, and that the bidding would be very brisk. Not only that, but from what Paine had heard it would partake of other aspects than mere buying and selling.

He was hardly drunk today, only rosy, only enough to say to himself, “Why shouldn't they buy them and sell them? White, too, why only black?” Yet he was neither angry nor offended, but rather pleased with himself that he had persuaded the good merchants to let him in. They were good enough to call him a scrivener instead of a shilling-tutor, and he had a half-formed thought that he might write something about this and try to sell it to a magazine.

In the half hour before the bidding started, the merchants sat around, perched comfortably on bales of hay, smoking, taking snuff, talking a commercial brand of filth, yet at the same time nervous and shy as adolescents in a bawdy house. For a while, Paine couldn't understand, and then it came to him that they would show the Negroes naked. His throat constricted; he was hot and cold and ashamed and eager, and for the first time in months he despised himself.

He saw that he was unshaven, unkempt and ragged; his fingernails were black crescents and his stockings like ladders; his pity for himself was a wet sop, a lie and a delusion, and if no one could offer proof of any kind for man's nobility, they could at least exhibit Tom Paine as satisfactory evidence of man's debasement.

The auction started. Miles Hennisy, one of the greatest slave callers of his day, came out of the little pen behind the barn where the Negroes were herded, prodding a sixteen-year-old girl in front of him with his silver-headed stick. Hennisy, from his powdered, beautifully curled wig to his polished pumps, was a glorious vision of sartorial splendor; the stockings were silk, the knee breeches black satin, die vest a brocade of silver and gold thread; at his neck and at his throat was bunched lace, five pounds' worth, perhaps; he wore a coat of black Portuguese broadcloth and a three-cornered hat of soft and lovely felt. Such was Hennisy, who was a legend, who sailed to Africa with his own slave ships, who had sold a black emperor, four black kings, and at least a hundred royal fledglings, who prided himself on the fact that when he sold a pregnant Negress, she was pregnant by him. He was a devil and a murderer—and the darling of Tidewater society; he had a long, handsome brown face and tiny blue eyes, and he spoke seven west-coast dialects.

He smiled now, and poked the girl up onto the wooden platform. She was wrapped in a blanket, with only her woolly, frightened head protruding; sweat and terror gave her strange round face a sheen like black marble. Hennisy said, “This, gentlemen, my good friends, is sixteen years old, soft as a lamb, strong as an ox, virgin and beautiful to look on, and old Solomon himself would have given a jewel of his crown to possess her. Her blood is royal, and as for her mind, already she speaks enough of the King's tongue to make herself understood. Her breasts are like two Concord grapes, her behind like the succulent hams of a suckling pig. I start the bidding at fifty pounds to give her away; and, gentlemen, make it a hundred and call out stout and strong; gentlemen, take her home, or to bed, or into the hayloft; make it sixty, gentlemen, make it seventy-five, make it eighty. The blanket goes off at eighty!”

“Eighty pounds!” someone called.

Hennisy ripped off the blanket; she was a little girl, frightened and shivering. She cowered back as Hennisy called, “Virgin, gentlemen, virgin, come up and see for yourselves!”

Paine stumbled through the snow. He had wanted to kill a man, and he had been afraid; he had roamed the streets of Philadelphia for three hours; his feet were soaking wet and cold. As darkness approached, he went into a tavern and sat down in front of the fire, and for half the night he sat there without speaking or moving.

Robert Aitken was one of those lonely, unsmiling Scotsmen who had been drifting into America by ones and twos ever since it had been opened for colonization. They were curious people, utterly beyond stamp or index, likely to settle down and become rich and satisfied, or just as likely to go off and trade for a lifetime with the Indians, never seeing a white face. Perversely, out of their Calvinism came as much broad tolerance as close stubbornness, and it was a common thing for a Scotsman and a Jew to become lifelong partners in die fur trade. Considered a foreigner by the bulk of Americans, who were of English descent, the Scotsman nevertheless put his finger on the soul of the little nation and kept it there.

Aitken was long and narrow, with a tight face that told people who never talked to him that he was dull and without imagination. He had a store where he bought and sold books; he had a box of upper-case type, a box of lower-case, and a straight up-and-down press. Now and then he published a small book or a pamphlet. He had in his mind bigger things, but he was obstinate in going about them and perverse in approaching Paine. It was the day after the slave sale, and Paine had come into his store.

“What can I do for ye?” Aitken asked.

Paine explained, stammeringly, that he was a writer of sorts, that in England he had written a pamphlet or two, and that here he had been a shilling teacher.

“And a mighty drinker,” Aitken said sourly.

Paine nodded.

“I hold toward temperance,” Aitken said. “Look at the image of yerself, dirty, filthy, wretched—and a mighty nerve you got to come in here and ask me for an honest living!”

“Give me a chance,” Paine said.

“And why should I do that? The talk is that you came off the boat with a letter from Franklin, and sure you did the good man false. You're walking around the city like a man daft and wanting his own soul. Sure as God, you're a bad penny!”

Paine turned toward die door, but with his hand on the knob, heard the Scotsman's sharp voice calling him back.

“Would you work for a pound a week?” Aitken demanded.

Paine's big, ugly head nodded; his twisted brown eyes fixed themselves upon Aitken as if the skinny bookseller were the sole arbiter of his fate.

“Seen it hard and lonely,” Aitken said more softly. “I don't look at a man, but underneath him. You're in no way a fool, and neither am I, although a lot of fat bellies in the town here would think us both so. I put a shilling by, but I spend a shilling when I have to, and I mark a good investment.” He went to his till and took out a handful of silver. “Here's a pound, and if you drink it down, don't let me see your dirty face again. Go to a barber, and then buy some decent clothes and put a coat on your back, and then come back here.”

Paine nodded, took the money, and went out; he couldn't trust himself to speak, not to think even; as if he had been released from jail, starving, he felt a sudden sickening hunger—he wanted the whole world; he could have it—he wanted the Negro maid, trembling on the auction block; he wanted to take her in his arms and tell her that it would be all right; his sense of power was only the result of the simple fact that he still lived, that he still wanted and hungered and hoped.

He came back in brown homespun, with his face shaven and his hair powdered and his nails clean. Aitken gave him dinner, and then they sat down and talked. The bookseller was an extraordinary man, not brilliant, but filled with a detailed material knowledge about the colonies. He told Paine, frankly “I have faith in ye because you come cheap. That's the Scotsman in me, and maybe the fool.”

They talked all evening, and by midnight, the Pennsylvania Magazine was born. That night, Paine stayed over at Aitken's house, not sleeping, but lying on his back and staring into the darkness.

3

THE RAT TRAP

P
AINE
was a bad one; a boy or a man should know his place, but Paine beat his head against the wall. At fourteen he was mute, but his silence was dark and sullen, and that revealed to people clearly enough that there was a devil inside of him. Once the Squire whipped him half to death for trespass, and Paine screamed out through his agony, “God help you and your kind! God help you! God damn you! God damn you!”