Paradise Alley (61 page)

Like Ruth. But why had she gone to him there? And why had he let her?

He had thought about it often enough over the years. Why he had never married any of the Negro women in the village, despite the Reverend Betancourt's efforts to thrust different prospects before him. He had always wanted to wait, to have something he could offer a wife—a real job, a decent wage. Something he could respect himself for. The truth was, he had had precious few women at all in New
York, even prostitutes.
The very idea of how little he had, how little he had done shriveling him up inside.

He had never intended to have anything to do with a white woman. He had seen how mixed-race couples were treated in the City, even in the Five Points where they were common. Their very appearance drawing the rage of white men much more than even the ordinary sight of a Negro, and he had wanted nothing to do with that.

But there she was, this skinny little girl, standing out in the road, waiting for him, and what was he supposed to do with her? She had not screamed when the slavers came. She had not balked or quailed, or asked him for anything. Only coming to his home and begging him to have her, and what was he to do?

That small, indissoluble strength, evident even then. Beaten and battered as bad as she was, ignorant, unlettered girl. Still coming back for more. She had been able enough to figure out who could help her when she needed to get rid of Johnny Dolan. She was willing to do whatever she could for him, too, never shirking from it.

Was it courage?
he wondered.
Or just the blind, burrowing urge of existence? Going on and on, breeding and surviving, no matter the point.

Before he knew it, he had married her. And thank God, too, he supposed, for when the village had been plowed under without warning he had been able to go back with her, down to the white wards of the City. To live on her block, with her people—

Another trap.
The village pulled out from beneath them. A lot of white talk about legal deeds, and property rights, all to take a man's land away from him. It was gone just like that—the ramshackle houses they had so painstakingly jimmied together, and the two streets, and the small, whitewashed churches, and all the people. Scattered down through the fetid, noisy tenements and alleys where it was decided they should live instead. All the green niggers and the smoked Irish, mixed in together.

He had never liked it down in Paradise Alley. They had lost the first girl, Lillian, soon after moving in, and he had always blamed it on the place—on how close and foul the air was, the pigs running wild on the street. And down there he had always had to look out for the slavecatchers, especially at night. It was so much easier for them to get close to a black man along the dark, narrow streets—even a freed
man, or one who had never been a slave in his life. Slug him or drug him, and bundle him off to the docks before anyone knew he was missing.

Living there, he had thought for the first time that he might just disappear. He had never felt quite that way before, not even at the very depths of his existence, dancing for eels on the waterfront. He had begun to stop in at The Glass House and the other saloons more than ever, even though he knew how dangerous it was. Even though he knew his children needed every penny of his wages, and he could not stand to see the look in Ruth's eyes when he came home drunk in the evening.

The thought had occurred to him that it would be easy enough to
make
himself disappear. Ruth would not even blame him for it. She might suspect—but she could put it down to the slavecatchers, or some river gang, trawling the docks for bodies. He might even go back, after a while, if he had gotten any money together. Say he had escaped again, or been shanghaied off to Peru.

He knew Ruth would take him back, even then. She would hold him, and feel sorry for him, and welcome him back in without question. Maybe, if he found some other, good place, he could even send for them—

But he could not leave her. He could not say for sure if he had ever really loved her, but they had a bond between them by then. He had helped her to take another man, and bind him over to Egypt, and then there was the family they had raised together. He could never forget how she had cried when he came back and told her that they could not afford a daguerreotype of Lillian. She had accepted it, she had not even held it against him, but he knew what she must have been thinking. How any expense could be spared for the fleeting pleasure he drew from a bottle, but none for a picture of the child—

Yes, they had a bond. The usual bond of long-married people, forged out of matching grudges and animosity, as much as anything else. And yet, maybe he did love her.

He had stayed on. Still going to his job every day, looking after the orphans. Collecting his wages, and trying not to drink them all up on the way home.

The war had awakened him again, for a while.
It would even give him an excuse, a good, brave excuse to go.
He read the
North Star,
and the
Anglo-African,
and the
Ram's Horn.
Eagerly searching for any
word of a Negro regiment, and dreaming of going off to the fight. Listening in rage whenever he heard some street-corner Tammany orator go on about the perfidy of his race.

“Not a black man in the Union lifts so much as a cook's spit to help defend our liberties—”

But the colored regiments had never been called. He could not even fight. It didn't make it any better, knowing that he should not go even if he could. That he had too many obligations here—Ruth, and the children, and the debts piling up, with everything costing more and more in the City since the war.

Then had come the strike, just a month ago. There had been strikes before, some in the very same shipyards that had rejected him, but he had never answered the call for strikebreakers. Telling himself that no matter what he was, he would not take another man's job, take bread out of the mouths of his children—not even a white man's.

But the longshoremen had walked out, and the strike had spread all along the waterfront. The ship joiners and the caulkers, the carpenters and the sailmakers and the mechanics, and he could not resist the idea of building a ship, at least once more, just to see how it felt again. Handbills had gone up, calling for men—even for skilled Negro workers—and the next morning he had risen even earlier than usual, and gone down to the waterfront with all his fine, unused tools.

The wharves along the Hudson were in a tumult. Even before it was light out yet, the Irish and German strikers were jamming the surrounding streets—setting smoky fires in the ash bins, screaming and grabbing at the scabs. Pummeling any black man they could get hold of, yelling out their old refrain:

“This is a white man's waterfront!”

He had had to go through an empty warehouse he knew about, dashing across the street to the dock where the handbills said to report. He had just made it, at that. Along the piers a large contingent of soldiers, with fixed bayonets, was barely holding the strikers at bay. The troops had had to pull him almost literally out of the hands of the mob, and on into a small wooden shed on the dock. There he had huddled inside, at the end of a row of white drunks, reeking of bad whiskey and body odor. One other colored man, dressed in his best clothes, squatted on the other end of the line—carefully avoiding his eyes.

“
Name?
” the hiring agent had asked—a burly, bearded Yankee working a toothpick around with his teeth. Two more uniformed soldiers, also with rifles and fixed bayonets, standing just behind him.

“Billy. Um, Billy Dolan,” he had said, holding on to his own name, out of some last hope that he might need it again.

“All right, Billy
Dolan,
” the hiring agent had snorted. “Tell all your friends in County Cork you can bring 'em over. Two dollars a day, twenty-five cents for overtime.”

“Two dollars?”

“That's right. Take it or leave it. More,
maybe,
if you can do skilled work.”

“But they're only asking for one seventy-five a day,” he said wonderingly, gesturing back toward the howling mob outside.

The hard, acute Yankee's eyes glinted with amusement.

“Well, don't worry, Mr.
Dolan.
It ain't like it's gonna last.”

He had gone ahead and signed his name—his made-up name—and the Yankee agent had dribbled his signing bonus, a few small gold coins, into his hand. Then he had walked back out on the slip with the other scabs. Some thirty or forty of them now, all told—himself, and the man he had seen in the shed, the only Negroes.

It was a white waterfront even now—even for scabs. But then what were the strikers yelling about? Did they see only the black and tan?

A leaky, moss-covered barge was poled up alongside, and they were ordered onboard. There they waited—for what, nobody bothered to inform them. Instead they simply stood in the boat, a steady, drizzling rain beginning to fall. The water pooling up in greasy puddles around their feet, in the shallow bottom of the barge. They could see the mob, up along the wharf, still shaking their fists and screaming at them, just held back by the soldiers.

“Dirty scabs! Dirty scabs! Dirty, dirty, nigger scabs!”

Niggers? He looked at the white drunks on either side of him—

“You'll never live to spend it!”

A hail of rocks, and thick clods of dirt, and horse manure came pelting down upon them. One of the rocks hit the man standing next to Billy—knocking him down, cutting a bloody divot in his head. He fell, and Billy and another man helped him back up, looking toward where the rock had come from.

Billy studied the faces of the men above them—pinched and
hollow-cheeked and dirty, cheering viciously at the blow they had landed. Their eyes gleaming with hatred. They jabbed their hands around their necks, to imitate a noose.

“You'll never live to enjoy it!”

A steam sloop chugged slowly up, fastening itself along their starboard side. A long line of soldiers clamored over into their barge, the strikebreakers silently falling back to make room for them.
Protection at last,
Billy thought—but then he saw that the soldiers were all unarmed. Many of their faces were slack and sallow, their uniforms loose and ill-fitting, some of them with arms still in slings. Then came another group that had to be helped over by the rest of them—five or six men at a time, and all chained to each other by their ankles.

Invalids and convicts,
he realized.
That's who we're fit to work with.

He had stood there watching them slowly fill up the boat, with his satchel of shiny, still-new tools in one hand and the rain soaking through his hat. The chained men, clinking and shuffling slowly onto the boat, the water rising up their ragged blue pants.

He had climbed up off the barge then—moving quickly before he could think anymore about what he was doing. He had hoisted himself back onto the wharf with one arm, tucking his precious tools up under the other.
Still unused.
Not that his repentance would do him any good, he knew. He had to sprint back into the City as fast as he could—the men from the mob on the dock chasing after him at once, seeking to vent their rage on whoever they could get hold of. Billy's lungs pounding in his chest, the jeers of the mob trailing after him.

And afterward, he had gone back to his house, and tried to hold in his rage. Ruth had been understanding, though she didn't even know what it was all about, and he had appreciated it, and loved her for it. But the truth was, she still did not know, she still had no good idea of what it was that he had lost—

There was the sound of shouting, and running feet, suddenly very loud and near. Billy listened to it in the torpor of the basement, not understanding it at first as anything more than the same sounds of the riot. Then Sergeant Murphy came running down the steps.

“Pardon, ma'am, but they're very close now,” he reported to Miss Shotwell.

“What? What's that?”

She blinked and pulled herself up straight—as much in a trance as Billy was from the heat.

“The
mob,
ma'am. There's a bunch of the bummers just outside now. Sergeant McCluskey an' me have been watchin' 'em. They brung a keg a whiskey they been enjoyin', but now they're eyein' the precinct house. When they drink up enough courage, you can expect 'em to come.”

Miss Shotwell blinked at him.

“I see.”

“Sergeant McCluskey an' me thought you should know, ma'am,” Murphy went on—the urgency clear in the man's voice, beneath his cool, deferential words. “We'll stay as long as we can, but you got to get the children out. By the back, if you can—”

“Thank you. Thank you for your help.”

Miss Shotwell repeated the words dully, as if she did not quite understand them. She stared around the cellar at the orphan children, crouched in the shadows, the recesses of the basement.

Like a child's game,
Billy recognized. Trying to fade back into the corners, the dark places. Just trying to disappear.

But it wouldn't work—not if they burned the place. Fire worked its way into every corner, that was its terror, its usefulness as the mob's weapon. They could try to stay out of the way as much as they liked, it would not work with the white folks.

Another trap—

He stood up—seeing the children's eyes swing over to him. As alert as ever to any movement—to danger—despite the heat. Fully aware of what was going on, just waiting for their next instructions.

How they trust us, just because we're adults. As much as that trust has been betrayed.

He saw Miss Shotwell's face, looking strained to the point of desperation now. Still willing to go on—but where? What chance did they all have, so many of them together, with the whole City on fire?

“Don't go anywhere. Don't go anywhere,
yet,
” he told her quietly, making sure she understood, and headed for the stairs. Pausing for a moment by the banister when he saw Tad there, crouched under the staircase. Staring silently up at Billy, his face blank now—still clutching his tiny tin horse in his hands.