Forever (31 page)
H
e woke up in a windowless cell in the Bridewell prison. Packed
tightly with other men, who told him that almost eight hundred of them were now jailed on three floors. His head was splitting with pain, the back of his skull soft to his touch. The sword, he thought. They have my father’s sword. He wanted to cry for its loss but didn’t. He told himself: You will live through this. He told himself: Someday you will find the sword again. Now, he told himself, you must live.
He gazed around at faces filthy and faces haggard, then sat very still with his back against the rough wall. Oh, Bantu, you American warrior. Oh, Silver. Oh, Aaron. I will see you in the Other-world. Carlito: If you have escaped, I will see you in New York.
He began to examine his cage, taught by some of the others. The Bridewell stood beside the four-story poorhouse, which was flanked on its other side by the old town jail. All windows were barred but were open to the cold. Down below street level was a basement used as a dungeon for torture or executions. But men died on all the other floors of the Bridewell, stinking of shit and sickness, hunger and fever and British corruption. Smallpox took many of them, and cholera too (for nobody there was allowed to wash), and many starved. The rations were meager, bits of gristly pork, pieces of biscuit, some rice, peas, butter, a day’s normal food stretched over three, and some days no food at all. There were no blacks in this jail; they were being kept in a place called the Old Sugar Factory. But Cormac saw men laid here upon the floor at night, crushed against one another, trying to keep warm; and in the morning they counted the corpses, always one, but sometimes two or three, which were hauled away and dumped in the Negroes Burial Ground, four or five to a single grave, a burial intended to be an insult. And Cormac thought: Mr. Partridge, in his own sad grave, has plenty of republican company now.
Cormac was always hungry, always mildly sick, but while others died, he lived on. Month after punishing month. And thought himself lucky. At least they had not moved him beyond Manhattan to the prison ships in Wallabout Bay, for he would surely have died before being slammed in the fetid holds. I must stay here, he thought, stay in this Manhattan, this piece of the world defined for me by Kongo when he passed me the gift. Manhattan is my jail.
And in the jail, time was suspended. There were no calendars, no newspapers, as days turned into weeks and then into months. Men scratched lines into the walls with nails, trying to keep count, but lost the sums to fever and injury. They asked new arrivals what month it was, what day, what year.
The Bridewell was soon called by the prisoners the Bribewell. Every guard was corrupt. Everything forbidden was available for a price, except weapons. The guards looked the other way when relatives smuggled food, tobacco, or cash to prisoners. They knew the contraband was the currency of the prison, which was to say it helped them to earn a living. But Cormac had no relatives. And all his friends were dead.
On the western side of Broadway, trailing away to the Hudson, there were rows of shabby two-story houses, and from a few high windows of the Bridewell, the prisoners could see the Holy Ground, where the whores worked at their bitter trade. One chubby woman would emerge at dusk and fondle her naked breasts and place a hand between her chubby thighs while dying men masturbated in their cells; it was a whore’s version of charity. Or of a sweet American solidarity. Cormac too longed for a woman, and then erased that possibility with images of the dead and the dying. Of Bantu caressing a cub. Of Aaron longing for a home.
The whores’ numbers were swollen by the arrival of two thousand Liverpool women sent to provide comfort to the British soldiery. They were housed in the older homes of Tories who had fled. But Cormac knew, from watching, from words spoken by agents before his capture, from other prisoners, that the whores were, in fact, neutral. They serviced English soldiers and secret American patriots, gathering money for themselves and intelligence for both sides. Whores, Cormac knew, were always citizens of the country of money. But even in the Bridewell, with his skin scabbed by sores, his bones protruding from his eroded flesh, his hair crawling with lice, he soon discovered that he could not escape his past.
One morning a new prisoner passed him a sheet from a smuggled newspaper, and Cormac began to read every line. If there was a report about the war, it must have been on another page. On this page, there were items about shipping, and a disease without a name that was infecting North African ports, and then some social notes. Down at the bottom of the social notes, a name caught his eyes.
LADY WARREN SAILS
It said:
Lady Warren of Carrickfergus has sailed for Charleston on the
Intrepid.
She was in New York visiting her son, who is serving with the Crown forces. From Charleston, she will return to her estate in Ireland.
Lady Warren of Carrickfergus.
Bridget Riley.
Visiting her son.
It never ends, Cormac thought.
It never fecking ends.
The commander of the Bridewell was a major named William Cunningham. The older prisoners included a victualer named Anderson, who knew how Cunningham worked.
“He pockets half the money allowed for food and sends it home by courier,” Anderson said. “He doesn’t give a fiddler’s feck if we starve to death on half rations, and they are starvin’ right now on them ships in the Wallabout. He wants the war to last forever, so he can bank enough to join the gentry.”
Cunningham didn’t come often to see the victims of his corruption. But eight months into Cormac’s stay in the Bridewell, he looked up to see Cunningham’s new second-in-command. He was walking beyond the bars down a safe corridor beside Cunningham.
The son of the Earl of Warren and Bridget Riley. His hair was lighter, with highlights of red, but otherwise he could have been a twin of the earl in that year when he stepped from the black coach to look upon the broken body of Rebecca Carson lying in the mud.
T
hey called him Tony Warren. He worked under Cunningham, but
in all the small ways, Cunningham deferred to his noble blood. Together, they helped men die. The prisoners died of typhus. Died of floggings. Died of hunger. Died of tuberculosis. Died of cholera. Died because William Cunningham, the provost marshal, stole half the ration money while Tony Warren shrugged and cocked an eyebrow and chuckled.
All the prisoners knew the system and how it worked. They heard from new arrivals how Cunningham’s men starved and flogged and tortured the prisoners on the ships across the river on the Brooklyn side, over in Wallabout Bay. Eleven thousand of them were packed in those ships that never sailed. The soldiers tossed the bodies into the tides or shoved them into the mudflats, where the shrouds soon rotted and American bones could be seen at low tide. His men tortured the Africans who paid for their revolt in the Old Sugar Factory. In the Bridewell, Cunningham executed those he thought were Obnoxious Persons and those who were Cormac’s old comrades in the Sons of Liberty, their activities revealed by men who took the King’s shilling. A man could die for refusing to bow or defer to some red-coated dandy. A man could die for reading Thomas Paine or the secret newspapers of the Revolution. Trials were not necessary. Suspicion was enough. The killing took place at night, against the walls of the army barracks, all doors ordered shut in the neighboring houses of the Holy Ground, all windows sealed, all lights extinguished, and the prisoners were brought, blindfolded and gagged, and walked up the steps of the scaffold. The rope was attached. And then they were dropped into permanent darkness.
Cormac vowed to remember the names of the dead: Guinness and Sterling, Hewitt and Roberts, Arundel and Dubois, Frankie Hannigan and Sammy Payne. Good men and true, he thought, even with (or because of) the flesh hanging loose and gray on their brave bones, wrapped in flea-ridden blankets, and to the end refusing everything: refusing collaboration, refusing deferential manners, refusing to bow to any king. On the night of the Fourth of July in 1780, the prisoners roared defiance in the Bridewell, and sang the liberty songs, and cursed the King. Cunningham came himself that night, with Tony Warren behind him, their faces dark with fury, their leather boots clacking on the stone floors. They chose the men they wanted, Guinness and Sterling, Hewitt and Roberts, Arundel and Dubois among them, and then called on the services of Bloodstone, the army blacksmith. He was carrying a twenty-pound hammer. They laid each man flat upon the floor for all to see and then Bloodstone smashed their knees and elbows. They screamed and screamed and screamed.
“Fecking rabble,” Warren said, as he followed Cunningham out of the row of cells.
And as he whirled, his coat opened, and Cormac saw that he was wearing the sword. Saw the spirals etched in steel. Thinking:
My father’s sword.
Telling himself: I must get out of the Bridewell. I must find Tony Warren on the streets of New York. I must get to the end of the line. I must return my father’s sword to the blood of his blood.
Whores were the agents of salvation.
One of them was named Kitty Nevins: red-haired, full-breasted, with the guts (Cormac thought) of nine burglars. She devised the code and smuggled it into the prison and then chalked the first coded messages on slate that they could read from the cell windows. She it was, with two of her sisters in the life, who seduced the guards with perfumed flesh and smuggled in the guns. Who had horses waiting. Who waited in the hammering midnight rain while the prisoners used keys wrenched from drained guards and then smashed and threatened their way out, unlocking as many cells as possible. Suddenly more than twenty of the prisoners were running free, mad and desperate, filthy as sewers, manacled and bony. Cormac was with them, running into Broadway, a pistol in his waistband, a musket in a manacled hand. Hobbled, weak, fierce with life. In the break for the street, the shooting started. Cormac shot two redcoats, one with the pistol, the second with the musket. He dropped the musket, jammed the pistol in his waistband, lunged for one horse-drawn carriage, and fell short into mud, and watched the carriage gallop toward the North River. Heard shouts. Curses. More gunfire. And ran north through the black rain.
Then saw torches ahead. Veered left. More torches.
And then from the ebony darkness he heard the whinny of a horse. Familiar. A song. And here he came, black as the night, there when Cormac needed him.
Thunder.
They galloped together into the blind watches of the night. Moved like ghosts through blank spaces, across creeks and streams, heading to what was left of the Manhattan wild. Cormac gripping Thunder’s mane with manacled hands. As the rain pounded down, making a great drumming, ceaseless sound on the trees, obliterating all voices and the sound of gunfire and even the pounding of Cormac’s heart.
Until Thunder slowed, then stopped, then shook, as if telling Cormac to slide off here. He did. And could see a low, dark house, and some shacks beyond, and hear the lowing of cattle and the shuddering of other horses. Thunder galloped into the darkness. Cormac felt boneless from fatigue and could see nothing clearly through the curtains of rain. He bent forward, gripped his knees, breathing deeply and freely, gulping air as if it were food, then stood up and lifted his face to the cleansing rain. He whispered, in Irish: “Wash away the filth, please.” He whispered, in English: “Heal the rawness where the manacles bit my flesh.” He begged, in French: “Wash away typhus and cholera and fleas. Please.” He asked in Yoruba: “Save me.”
Then an arm gripped his neck, and he felt the tip of a knife against his back. “Who
are
you?” a deep voice growled.
Cormac said his true name. It was too late and too dark for deception.
The arm relaxed, and he was spun around. And there, soaked and grizzled, white hairs driving like tacks from inside his black cheeks, was Quaco.
“God damn,” he said, “if it ain’t you for true, Mister Cormac.”
Quaco saved him. He snapped the manacles with wire cutters, and his wife, now white-haired, fed Cormac lentil soup and meat and bread. He handed Cormac a blanket and fresh clothes and a bowl of warm water, and then shredded the prison clothes and fed them, piece by piece, into the fire. Roger, the oldest son, then opened a trapdoor leading by ladder to a room chopped out of stone beneath the house. Actually two rooms. The first room was loaded with coal and firewood. The second room was behind a door covered with thin layers of stone. A secret room with a bed, several muskets, trunks, a sacred African drum, and jugs of water. Refuge.
On the first night Cormac slept for many hours. He woke to the sound of heavy boots on the floor. Heard indistinct British voices. The trapdoor opened, and a grunting man came down the ladder and was very still. Cormac held his breath. The man saw only coal and firewood and then climbed the ladder and left as Cormac exhaled. He did not come upstairs until it was dark.
“You not the first Irisher been down there,” Quaco said, laughing. “Passed a few of you along, sure enough.”
Quaco’s four sons moved in and out, curious about this latest white man, and wary too. They lived in an area of free blacks, with Quaco carrying faked papers dating his own freedom to 1738, before the revolt. He and Cormac talked about the night when Cormac helped Quaco to escape with his wife, telling the story more for the sons than for each other. They talked into the night about those who were burned and hanged and mutilated, and those who disappeared and what might have happened to all the inquisitors and the mysterious fate of poor Mary Burton. They laughed. They mourned. One night, in the second week, Quaco looked at Cormac in an inquisitive way.
“You ain’t aged but a day,” he said.
“I don’t feel the way I look.”
“I ain’t even goneta ask how come.”
“Good.”
“But you was close to Kongo.”
“Yes.”
“The babalawo.”
“Very close.”
Quaco didn’t go beyond this, and Cormac just stared at the fire. Then they talked about the Revolution, and the future.
“I keep dreamin’ of home,” Quaco said on another night. “I keep dreamin’ of the village where I was a boy. I keep wantin’ to go home.”
“Maybe you can.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
But he didn’t seem to believe it. And he had little faith in the Revolution.
“You notice somethin’?” he asked one night. “The English, they promisin’ freedom to their slaves,
after
everything’s finished. But the Americans? They ain’t promisin’ nothin’.”
Cormac said to himself, You’re right, Quaco. You’re right.
When the snows melted, Cormac found work as a blacksmith with a man named Tingle, whose love of metals had driven him into the madness of alchemy. His forge in a dark forest glen was empty when Cormac arrived, calling himself Alfred Defoe and faking a Liverpool accent. Tingle was locked in a windowless shack trying to turn lead into gold and muttering about the philosopher’s stone. He said very little while Cormac built a new fire in the forge and took over the blacksmithing and moved from Quaco’s cellar to a heatless room above the barn. Each week, more British soldiers moved north carrying axes and saws to attack the forests. On a few summer days, Cormac serviced Tingle’s gaunt, forlorn, and childless wife, Juliet.
“Thank you,” she would say, “and you know that I would not do this if my husband wasn’t mad.”
Tingle didn’t seem to know that his wife offered herself to Cormac in the woods while he was chanting cabalistic numbers in his locked shack. But if he did know, he didn’t care. Their couplings were always in late afternoon, after the horses were shod or the scythes repaired. At night, Cormac was always moving, his face sometimes stained black with berry juice, visiting the scattered Africans. He made speeches in Yoruba and English, trying to persuade the Africans and their American children that their best hope for freedom lay with the Revolution. This was not easy. The Africans heard the news too, and it seemed almost certain that the military power of the professional British Army would defeat the amateurs commanded by Washington.
“If the British wanted to free you, they would do it right now,” Cormac would say. “They were the people who enslaved you. How can you trust the word of slavemasters?”
About a dozen Africans and their children believed Cormac. Most important was Quaco’s son Roger, now almost thirty years old, intelligent, literate, careful. He put together a new version of the black patrol and made certain that Cormac was a member, but not the leader. Together, they set fires. They stole ammunition. They released rats into food warehouses.
At the same time, disguised as a lame peddler or a hunched old man and even once as an Indian, Cormac tracked the movements of young Tony Warren. The son of the earl moved from barracks to confiscated house and back to the barracks, to the reopened John Street Theater to the whorehouses of the Holy Ground. He had the sword. Cormac wanted it back.
