Paradise Alley (26 page)

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“
They're here,
” he told the Misses. Standing uneasily in the door of their office, hat in hands. Barely daring to breathe the words.

“What?” Miss Shotwell said, still uncomprehending, rising from her desk as if affronted.

“They're here, Misses. The mob. I just seen 'em out in the Fifth Avenue.”

“They're out there
now?
”

“Goin' by. Most of them looked like they were headed uptown.”

“Well, then,” Miss Murray said, relieved.

“We still have to
go,
Misses. We got to get the children out,” he told them, as forcefully as he thought he could.

“But if the mob is only moving past—”

“They'll be here again, soon enough.”

“But
how?
” Miss Shotwell asked, her voice fluttering slightly, though he could tell she was making a great effort to speak calmly and slowly.

“If the mob is out on the street, how do we move the children?”

“I don't know, Misses. But we got to.”

“Perhaps if we simply sit quietly, close up the gate and the front doors,” Miss Murray tried. “Shut the window, so it looks as if nobody is here—”

“And if they still come then, Misses, what do we do?” he tried again. “If they try to burn the place, what do we do?”

Both women were quiet then, concentrating. Having absorbed the worst, trying now in their practical Yankee manner to think what had to be done next.

“Mr. Dove,” Miss Shotwell said, very formally, the way she preferred to talk when she was giving out serious orders. “Mr. Dove, go up to the cupola, please, and see if you can make out where the mob is headed now. Before you go, kindly have Bert and Yolanda bring the children in from the yard. Miss Murray and I will assist them.”

“Yes, Miss.”

But we still have to go,
he thought, taking long, rapid strides down the hall. Thinking of the peach brandy again as he went past the kitchen. But he kept moving—going to the back stairs and climbing them rapidly, three at a time with his big stride.

He was glad for the chance to move freely, at least. Feeling the spring in his legs, despite how hot it was. The heat made him feel loose, and resilient again, like a good piece of wood. He never minded it, not like the Yankee ladies, or Ruth, who all but wilted in it.

Ruth.
The thought flickered across his mind like the shadow of a bird. He had to get back, but how?

There was nothing for it but to see where the mob was. He kept climbing, past the sleeping halls on the third floor. Looking in at all the small, iron bedsteads, lined up in perfect rows. Each one made up straight and neat as a pin, the children responsible for keeping the spaces around their own beds. It was easy enough, most of them with no more to their name than the clothes on their backs and a few pretty ribbons, some curio picked up off the street. Maybe a daguerreotype, or a photograph of their mother or father, if they were very lucky.

He went on up through the attic, then pushed open the trapdoor and crawled up into the cupola. It was barely high enough for him to crouch in—musky and stifling, and full of dead flies. He dropped to his knees and wiped the thick dust from the panes, looking out over the Fifth Avenue.

There were thousands of them now. Still moving uptown, all right—most of them wandering north, then east, toward the Third Avenue.

But why? What was there?

It came to him slowly, through remembered patches of conversation—from the talk of white men on the street, or overheard through saloon doors.
It was something that
they
never understood. How black men and women paid attention to everything they said. How we have to, since our lives depend upon it.

They were going to stop the draft, that was the talk. That must be where they were gathering, at the Provost Marshal's office. They were going to stop it, and break the wheel, and burn all their names. If they succeeded at it, Billy knew, they would run wild, doing whatever they pleased. And if they didn't—they would take it out on whatever they could find.

That will be us. A house full of defenseless black children.

His house.
He thought again of Ruth and the children, waiting for him back in Paradise Alley.
And what were they supposed to do?
Waiting for him with a mob loose in the streets—with Johnny Dolan somewhere in the City.

Ruth would not leave without him, he knew. They would wait for him, no matter what.
But how to get back?
He would be lucky if he lasted ten blocks, even taking the back lots, and dodging in and out of alleys.

And even if he could, what of his responsibilities here?

He twisted around, looking down through the cupola glass at the fenced backyard of the asylum. The Misses and Old Bert had formed the children into neat lines now—boys and girls, all of them lined up two by two. No sound at all drifted up from the yard now. Like all orphans, he knew, they were especially sensitive to the adults around them, attuned to the slightest shift in mood.

There was a commanding clap of hands from one of the Yankee ladies, and the lines of children moved forward at once, into the house. They were good children, obedient and well-trained, but he knew that if the worst happened, Old Bert and Yolanda and the Misses could not help them. The Yankee ladies would be swept aside, Old Bert and Yolanda lucky if they weren't lynched themselves—

And what could he do, exactly? If they had to run?

Billy did not know if he could do anything at all—but he slid himself back out of the cupola anyway, moving quickly on down the stairs. The decision all but made for him. He couldn't get back to his
own home, not through these mobs.
Better at least to try to do something here than to be run down on the street like a dog.

Besides, it was the orphans who had saved him. He had to admit that, much as he had always hated the work. It was the orphans who had gotten him a steady job, and kept the weakness from overwhelming him.

He had come to it by chance. Wandering far uptown one afternoon, after another morning spent scrounging for what errands and day work he could get around the docks. When he could no longer bring himself, even drunk, to dance for another fish or eel. He got what work there was to be had draining the dregs from the tavern barrels for the bucketshops, or mucking out cattle barges, or running messages when no white boy above the age of six was available. Standing on the Coenties Slip with all the other black men who would not stoop to dance, holding out their hands in silent supplication.

And we were the proud ones.

He had started to walk uptown, thinking to walk all the way off this damned island, if he could. He had walked and walked, vowing not to quit until he had found some rail bridge, or some ford he could swim or wade.

Instead, past the end of all the rail tracks and the omnibus lines—past all the mean-looking Irish shantytowns, and the stills and the rendering yards, hidden away amid the trees—he had come upon a whole town, full of free black men and women.

It was the place he had always known must exist, ever since he had stolen off with himself in his little boat. It was only two neatly raked dirt streets, with crude, square, whitewashed houses, and vegetable patches on each side, and a church at the head of each street. But everywhere he looked there were men and women of his own color—nodding their hellos, and regarding him without surprise or apprehension, a black man in a black town.

They called the place Seneca Village, and he discovered that it was made up mostly of escaped slaves, though there were also some old Negro families from the City, and a few whites, and half-Indians who had married in. He had soon discovered, too, that they still had to work in the white City, or scrape out a living on its edges. There was no black shipyard, no shop he could work in.

Free but not free—
but still he stayed on. Boarding with one family or another as they would have him. With scarcely a word exchanged for his board, no money or anything else expected, though he would go out and chop wood for their fire, or till the vegetables for them. Doing what carpentry he could, though most of the village didn't need anyone with his ability in order to bang together their own rude shacks and houses.

Instead he mostly occupied himself with putting up his own house. He had marked off a half-acre lot from the woods, and borrowed what tools he could to chop down the thin, tough trees, and dig out the stumps and roots. Their wood was no good for building with, but he had gone deeper into the woods, to cut down the biggest pine and oak he could find, and trim them into boards.

It was slow going, working with the poor saws and hatchets and axes he was able to procure, but he didn't mind. He took his time at it, delighted to do real work again—and even better, to work for himself. Working the way
he
wanted to—carefully, precisely shaving and chinking every board. Asking for help only in putting up the roof and then covering that himself, with shingles he shaped and cut out, one by one. Until when he was finished, looking over his little house, he could say that this, at least, was his own.

It was the Reverend Betancourt who had put him into the job at the orphans' asylum. Coming to visit one Sunday afternoon, after spitting out another one of his furious, uncompromising sermons from the pulpit of the All Angels Church. Stumping silently all around Billy's new house on his short legs, before confronting him directly.

“What kind of man is it, builds a house before he has work?” the minister had asked—glowering at him until Billy shrugged and looked away.

“A man who plans to stay, that's who!” the minister answered himself. “If you're going to stay, you need a way to make a living!”

He had taken him over to the orphans' then. Ushering him into the Asylum—the biggest building he had ever set foot in before, smelling then as always of boiled soap, and starch, and fresh whitewash. He had introduced him to the abolitionist Yankee ladies, already starting to go grey. Miss Shotwell, the taller one, formally shaking his hand and calling him mister—the first time any white woman had ever done such a thing.

“It's a good job for a man who can use his hands,” the Reverend Betancourt had told him. “A good job for a man who likes to build things.”

But in fact it was mostly nursemaid work. Minding the children as they played outside. Helping the cooks to fetch meals and clean up afterward. Cutting and hauling wood for the fires, and water from the well, and putting the orphans to bed at night in their dormitory rooms.

He had accepted it, at first telling himself that it was steady wages—that it would do until he could find a real position, somewhere in the shipyards. He had stopped spending any money on the drink, using every penny of his wages, beyond the barest necessities of food and clothing, to buy new tools of his own, like a real workingman. Preparing himself for the day when he would find a position in the shipyards.

Yet even as he did so, he had begun to understand that that time would never come. That there would be no job for him along the waterfront, or in any other profession in the whole City that paid a white man's wage. That there was no place where, the moment he walked on the premises, the white men there would not simply put down their tools and fold their arms, waiting for him to leave.

He had kept the job at the Asylum. Wiping the children's noses, and pulling their blankets back over them. Sweeping and raking out the yard every evening, cutting crude, square bats from the scrub pine for their games of base-ball. Doing whatever he was asked to do.

But he had given up buying new tools with his wages. He had tried going back to the few saloons he could find that would tolerate black men, but they were a long ways away now, and they changed all the time. The whole City was like quicksand for a man of color, shifting constantly beneath him.

He tried to buy himself a bottle of real whiskey—but drinking alone, he only became obsessed with the bottle itself. Watching it carefully as it slowly diminished from three quarters full—down to a half—then to a third. Taking another drink—and assuring himself that it was still mostly full, that there was still plenty left for him. And so on, down and down, until he could stand it no longer, and drained the last drop with a bitter sob.