Paradise Alley (54 page)

His duty. His duty was with his wife and family. By God's grace he should be with them now.

It was nearly nightfall, the boxcar completely dark. Peering out the open door, though, he could tell that they were almost there. The train plowing through the Jersey meadowlands, the high, yellow stalks of marsh grass waving beside the track. Soon, he knew, they would cross Newark Bay, then on over to the Hoboken station along the river. From where the ferryboats would take them across to the City—

The same route he had traveled to the war, in reverse.
Coming back now, even, with three of the men he had signed up with, Snatchem and Feeley, and Danny Larkins. Black Dan Conaway left back on Marye's Heights. John J. Sullivan shot down in the wheat field at Gettysburg, by some bastard from Mississippi.

And now come back here, to fight in our own streets. Jesus, but it didn't make sense.
Fearing all over again what could happen to Deirdre, and the children. Surely no one would harm her, a respectable Irishwoman with five kids. But you never knew what could happen in a war. And then there was a special provocation on their block.

Ruth—and that black husband of hers, and their half-caste family. That would bring the mob down on them like nothing else.

It was his own fault, too, Tom knew, what had come between him and Deirdre. It was just that he had felt so sorry for that child, coming into their home, week after week, with her black eyes, her jaw and cheeks bruised and discolored from his beatings. So ignorant and helpless.
Or so it had seemed, anyway.
Deirdre had never taken to her, for reasons he didn't quite understand—though he had to admit now he hadn't understood his own feelings for Ruth. The queer pang that he got whenever he saw her, helpless and battered.
Something more—and less—than pity.

He had liked her husband, Billy, too, as much as he had ever liked any colored man.
A quiet sort, always brooding about something. But he had been quick and reliable enough when it had come down to it—when they had had to take care of Deirdre's brother—

Johnny Dolan.
Dangerous
Johnny Dolan, as they had it on his fight cards and his handbills. He knew that Deirdre still lit a votive candle
for him, once a month. Insisting on keeping his daguerreotype on their bedroom dresser.

Jesus, but that was a face to see, first thing in the morning with your pants half on.

Deirdre had treated him almost like a child of her own from the moment he'd shown up, and Tom couldn't blame her. He had gone ahead and gotten Dolan in the Black Joke, as she had asked. He had even gotten him some work with the road crews downtown, fixing the streets.

Yet Tom had known from one look at the man that there was something wrong there—something that no job, no fire company was going to fix. The rage floating just below the surface, ready to spill out over almost anything, like ashes bubbling up through the sewer grate.

How he had struggled in the boat that night! Tom hadn't thought that they could hold him, even with the sack over his head, taken by surprise. He had fought like forty cats, and if Billy hadn't subdued him with that grappling hook, he didn't know but he would have capsized the boat. Then there would have been the devil to pay—

Deirdre had never forgiven him for it. When Ruth had come to them that night—when she had
shown
them what Dolan had done to Old Man Noe—and proved it beyond any doubt, Deirdre herself had insisted that they hand him over to the law, whether it meant hanging or not.

Nevertheless, she had not forgiven him—

Or was it really that?
he had always wondered.
He had never been sure—was it that he was the one who had taken her brother away? Or was it because of Ruth?

It was a little after midnight when they finally pulled into the Hoboken station. The men slowly unbending and staggering over to the cattle-car doors. Those who had come the farthest, the men from the Michigan regiment who had come from Meade's army, dropped down to sleep right on the platform.

Tom tried to let himself down easy, but his wounded leg still crumpled beneath him when he hit the ground. He limped on out of the train shed, swearing quietly and punching at the muscles as he tried to get the feeling back. Wandering after Snatchem and some of the
others, to where they were standing now, just outside the station, by the edge of the Hudson River.

There he could see the great City again. His heart welling up at the sight of it, more affected by it than he had anticipated—longing to be home at last.

Yet he thought that the town looked scarred, too—even in the darkness, even from where they stood, so far across the broad river. They could see buildings burning, all along the West Side wharves, and plumes of smoke trailed across the moon. The rest of the night sky was lit up a bright red color, as if it were dripping fire into the City below.

“What's happening? What's going on?” Tom said agitatedly, to nobody in particular.

There was no answer, the other men as amazed and stupefied as he was, watching the stricken City.

“We got to get over there—”

•
54
•

A funeral train reels its way down the Bowery. Eight drunken
b'hoys,
hauling a black coffin. The epitaph chalked on one side:

Old Abe's Draft Died Monday, July 13, 1863

But the carnevale spirit is gone. It is too hot, and there are too many dead. There will be no more delicacy about saving Washington's picture now. The pallbearers themselves, surly and grim in their drunkenness. In Astor Place I watch a pair of Irish laborers haul down the colors and tear it to pieces, shouting, “
Damn the flag!
”

All over the City men are throwing up barricades in the streets. They are tearing up the rails in the Third and Fourth Avenues, uprooting the Hudson River and the Harlem lines, in the hopes that the government will not be able to bring in more troops. All of them arming themselves, in any way they can, grabbing up not only guns and knives and slung shots, but even adzes and axes, clubs and pikes.

Wherever I walk I can hear sounds in the air above me. I look up, just in time to see figures scuttling off along the rooftops. Dodging around behind the chimneys, plotting God only knows what new mischief. I can barely bring myself to put a foot down, for fear that the sidewalk will crackle into flames beneath me.

This is no city to take Maddy abroad in. I would not dare to walk a woman one block through these streets—though certainly there are
plenty of them out now, the red-faced harpies, plunging into the looting and calling for blood even more rabidly than their men.

Paint the town red.

From lampposts all over the town, now, there hangs a particular shame—worse than anything I have ever seen in the City. The bodies of black men, and black women—even Negro boys—hanged and cut open, mutilated and tortured.

Many of them have been there since last night, even yesterday afternoon. The mob chases off anyone who tries to cut them down. Their children even play under these awful effigies, running up to tell me all that they have done, while I nod and force myself to smile. Listening to everything,
seeing everything.

Over in the Ninth Ward, there is a black tar named Williams. He came ashore from the transport
Belvedere,
looking to buy a loaf of bread. Somehow, no one had told him what was going on in the City, or maybe he simply did not believe it. At the corner of Leroy and Washington Streets, he asked a schoolboy where he might find a grocery. The boy only stared at him, and a white man came out of the liquor store on the corner, to ask what it was that he wanted.

“Why, just bread, sir.”

The white man looked at him, and nodded. Then he hit him in the face. Knocking the sailor down in the street, and jumping up and down on his chest.

The rest of the mob was on him at once. The mob that assembles all at once now, from everywhere and nowhere—white men and boys, even women and girls, streaming out of the saloons, and the groceries, and the tenements up and down the block with terrifying speed.

They held Williams down while the first white man, leaning on a friend's shoulder, kicked over and over again at his eyes. They dropped stones on him where he lay in the street, still wearing his country's uniform, then they strung him up. Slicing open his arms and legs with knives, then pouring oil into his wounds and setting them on fire. Even a white tar, a shipmate from the
Belvedere,
ran up and plunged a knife into Williams's back while he hung there. The crowd watching eagerly, cheering as he twisted and burned.

“Vengeance on every nigger in New York!”

• • •

In West Twenty-eighth Street, they have hanged a man I knew by sight. Everyone did, he was a longtime resident of the neighborhood, an elderly, crippled black coachman who went by the name of Abraham Franklin.

It seems that they have murdered him for his name. The mob shouting “
Abraham! Abraham! Tell us your name—if ye dare!
” over and over again. Then they hanged and burned him from a street lamp, and gave three cheers for Jefferson Davis. A hulking Irish butcher's boy, still in his teens, cuts down the body and strips it, pulling it along the street by its genitals. Still wearing his butcher's apron, he cuts pieces from the old man, and tosses them to the mob for souvenirs—before hanging him back up from the lamp, the way he might hang up a sheep's carcass.

It is a stunning thing, almost beyond comprehension, to see someone you once knew—if only a nodding acquaintance—actually cut to pieces like a piece of meat, a
thing.
At least poor Abraham the coachman is dead. Elsewhere, they subject the living to every humiliation they can. In Thirty-third Street I come upon a young black mother, dazed and beaten, wandering along the sidewalk along with her little son and daughter—all of them as naked as the day they were born.

This has become their special humiliation—stripping any Negro they can catch in the street. Some of the mob inform me that they have to do this, after they caught a Negro man trying to board the Brooklyn ferry, disguised in his wife's clothes. (How dare he try to evade being tortured to death!) But there is more to it than this. I listen to them as they taunt the shamed mother, shouting and leering in her face:

“What's a nigger need with clothes? What's a jungle nigger need with clothes, anyway?”

I try to get the poor, stunned woman inside to shelter—though even to do this much is to risk the wrath of the mob. No one will so much as open their doors to her, no doubt afraid the crowd will burn their house to the ground. I am told that even at the Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the white inmates demanded that all patients of color be put out, lest someone fire the place.

I finally manage to get the woman and her children some horse blankets, from a looted stable, but that is the best I can do. The Negroes have
been all but left on their own, as if they were strangers among us. The mob attacking them anywhere they find them. Avenging themselves upon them for the war—for the crime of being below them in society.

In the Minetta Lane some of the coloreds have managed to arm themselves, and hold off the mob at gunpoint. Mostly, though, they are too scattered around the City, too vulnerable to do anything but flee. They take refuge wherever they can, in churches, and in the homes of a few brave abolitionists; in the British consulate—even on a French warship tied up along the West Side docks.

The police do the best they can to protect them; they have sent out a whole flying squad under Inspector Dilks, to rescue any Negroes they can and take them to shelter in the precinct houses. But as it is, the station houses themselves are being fired now—the 22nd Precinct, then the 23rd, the 10th—all up in flames. There aren't enough men to hold them now, and when the mob approaches, they hand over weapons they have to the Negroes, then wish them Godspeed and flee back downtown with them through the burning, smoking streets.

I go with them, back to the police headquarters on Mulberry Street. Trying to find out
something,
anything I can. Is the City about to fall? Is the army finally on the way? Should I take Maddy back to my house in Gramercy Park—or try to flee this wretched island altogether?

There is indeed more information at headquarters—all of it bad. The key continues to chatter away in the telegraph room:

The mob is firing the Negro sailors' boardinghouses along Roosevelt Street and Water Street . . . . They are looting the private homes of coloreds up in Baxter Street and Pell . . . . attacking the Metropolitan Gas Works . . . . firing the town of Harlem . . . .

Our resources are stretched nearly to the breaking point. General Meade still has yet to send any troops from Pennsylvania. General Wool is still huddled in his room at the St. Nicholas Hotel. Only General Brown, Wool's brigadier, has been able to wrench a few companies away from guarding the shipyards and the Sub-Treasury Building. A detachment from the 11th New York Volunteers is forming out in front of police headquarters now, under the command of Colonel Henry O'Brien.

Meanwhile, Commissioner Acton paces back and forth in Kennedy's office, haggard and infuriated. Swearing and barking out orders, dispatching his beleaguered forces wherever the next crisis erupts.

“They are always ahead of us!” he rails. “Striking wherever they please—while all we can do is react. At this rate they will burn down the entire City!”

An aide rushes in with another message, his face and clothes covered in dust and soot now, like those of everyone else in this City. Acton studies the paper he hands him, his own face reddening immediately.

“They've chased the guard from the Union Steam Works,” he tells me, and swears bitterly. “If they take that they'll be armed to the teeth!”

He turns back to the aide, orders him to have Inspector Carpenter's flying squad and O'Brien's troops sent up to the Steam Works at once. I tell him that I will go, too, and he pulls open his top desk drawer, revealing a row of shiny, new Colt revolvers.

“Do you have a weapon, then? No? Take one of these—I have three more in the next drawer!”

I pocket the piece immediately, grabbing up a box of shells as well. Acton shakes his head ruefully, plopping a pistol in one of his own pockets.

“This town is lousy with guns!”

Dan Carpenter's roundsmen reassemble in the muster room. Most of them are sporting plasters by now, or bloody red rags wrapped on their heads and limbs. No longer, quite, the merciless threshing machine they were the day before. Now they lean and even sit against the walls of the muster room, nearly exhausted now from a full day and night of almost continuous fighting.

This little space, this room, they have made their own. It is hung with testimonials and presentation swords, and the names of long-gone companions—with prints of Emmet and Daniel O'Connell, and the Bonnie Prince and the Wild Geese, Tyrconnell and Tyrone. Hanging here, too, now, are the battle flags from the Irish regiments at the war, shot through with holes. Gold harps on green fields, the sun bursting perennially through the clouds. Beneath them the old, romantic legend:
RIAM NAR DRUID O SBAIRN LANN—Who Never Retreated from the Clash of Spears.

“Up, men, up!” Carpenter calls them into line. “We still have a job to do!”

Tom Acton yells after them, frenzied now with lack of sleep and bloodlust.

“Quail on toast, boys, quail on toast! Quail on toast for every man of you, if you put down the mob!”

But they ignore him. They do not fight for such as that. Not against a wild mob that outnumbers them a hundred to one, and includes so many of their friends and neighbors.

Inscrutable race.
What do they fight for, then?
For the love of this country, this City that despises them for being poor and Catholic? For the love of dear old Ireland, then? Or for this room—this little place that is theirs?

“Form up!”

They rise and fall into ranks. Not exactly springing up but still willing. Tapping their nightsticks on the pavement again as they move out into the street, beating that policeman's proud tattoo.