TransAtlantic

by Colum McCann

  They hit and bounce. We are down, we are down, Jackie boy.

  But they know straightaway they are slowing too suddenly. A wheel maybe? A burst tire? A snap of tail fin? No cursing, no shouting. No panic. A sinking feeling. A dip. And then they realize. It is bog, not grass. The living roots of sedge. They are skidding across a green bog. The soil holds the weight of the plane a moment and they skid along fifty feet, sixty feet, seventy, but then the wheels dig.

  The earth holds, the Vimy sinks, the nose dips, the tail lifts.

  It is as if they have been yanked backwards by surprise. The front of the Vimy slams into the soil. The back end flips. Brown smashes his face on the front of the cockpit. Alcock pushes back against the rudder control bar, bends it with pure force. A shot of pain through his chest and shoulders. Good Jesus, Jackie, what happened there? Have we crashed?

  The silence, a noise in their heads. Louder now than ever. Suddenly doubled somehow. And then a relief floods up through them. The noise filters down into the rest of their bodies. Is that silence? Is that really silence? The racket of it. Slipping through their skullboxes. Good God, Teddy, that’s silence. That’s what it sounds like.

  Brown touches his nose, his chin, his teeth, to see if he is intact. A few cuts, a few bruises. Nothing else. We’re alive. We’re perpendicular, but we’re alive.

  The Vimy sticks out of the earth like some new-world dolmen. The nose is buried at least two feet in the bog. The tail in the air.

  —Crikey, says Alcock.

  He can smell petrol somewhere. He switches off the magnetos.

  —Quick. Out. Down.

  Brown reaches for the logbook, the flares, the linen bag of letters. Pulls himself up over the edge of the cockpit. Throws down his walking stick and it hits like an arrow in the bog below, stuck sideways in the soil. A burn in the leg as he lands. Hallelujah for the ground: it almost surprises him that it isn’t made of air. A living dolmen, yes.

  In the pocket of his flight suit, Brown has a small pair of binoculars. The right lens has fogged, but through the good lens he sees figures high-stepping across the bog. Soldiers. Yes, soldiers. They seem for all the world like toy things coming, dark against the complicated Irish sky. As they get closer he can make out the shape of their hats and the slide of rifles across their chests and the bounce of bandolier belts. There’s a war going on, he knows. But there’s always some sort of war going on in Ireland, isn’t there? One never knows quite whom or what to trust. Don’t shoot, he thinks. After all this, don’t shoot us. Excuse me. Nein, nein. But these are his own. British, he is sure of it. One of them with a camera bobbing at his chest. Another still in his striped pajamas.

  Behind them, in the distance, horses and carts. A single motorcar. A line of people coming from the town, snaking out along the road, small gray figures. And look at that. Look at that. A priest in white vestments. Coming closer now. Men, women, children. Running. In their Sunday best.

  Ah, mass. So, they must have been at mass. That is why there was nobody on the streets.

  The smell of the earth, so astoundingly fresh: it strikes Brown like a thing he might eat. His ears throb. His body feels as if it is still moving through the air. He is, he thinks, the first man ever to fly and stand at the exact same time. The war out of the machine. He holds the small bag of letters up in salute. On they come, soldiers, people, the light drizzle of gray.

  Ireland.

  A beautiful country. A bit savage on a man all the same.

  Ireland.

  1845–46

  freeman

  DAWN UNLOCKED THE MORNING IN INCREMENTS OF GRAY. The rope tightened hard against the bollard. The water slapped against Kingstown Pier. He stepped off the gangplank. Twenty-seven years old. In a black greatcoat and a wide gray scarf. His hair worn high and parted.

  The cobbles were wet. Horses breathed steam into the September mist. Douglass carried his own leather trunk to the waiting carriage: he was not yet used to being waited upon.

  HE WAS BROUGHT to the home of his Irish publisher, Webb. A three-story house on Great Brunswick Street, one of the better streets in Dublin. He relinquished his trunk. He watched a footman struggle with the weight of it. The servants stood in a line and greeted him at the door.

  He slept through the morning and afternoon. A maid ran a warm bath in a deep iron tub. It was filled with a powder that gave off a fragrance of citrus. He fell asleep again, woke panicked, could not tell where he was. He climbed quickly from the water. The print of his wet feet on the cold floor. The towel touched, coarse, at the back of his neck. He dried the sculpt of his body. He was broad-shouldered, muscled, over six feet tall.

  He could hear church bells ringing in the distance. A turf smell in the air. Dublin. How odd it was to be here: damp, earthy, cold.

  A gong sounded from downstairs. Dinnertime. He stood at the hand basin, before the looking glass, and shaved closely, shook the creases from his jacket, mounted his cravat tight.

  At the bottom of the stairs, at the end of a corridor, he stood for a moment disoriented, unsure which door to go through. He pushed one open. The kitchen was steam-filled. A maid was loading plates onto a tray. So very pale. The proximity of her sent a shiver along his arms.

  —This way, sir, she muttered, squeezing past him in the doorway.

  She led him along the corridor, bowed as she opened the door. A fire leaped orange in the ornate mantelpiece. A whirr of voices. A dozen people had gathered to meet him: Quakers, Methodists, Presbyterians. Men in black frock coats. Women in long dresses, aloof and elegant, the mark of bonnet ribbons still on the soft of their necks. They applauded quietly when he walked into the room. His youth. His poise. They leaned in close as if to secure his immediate confidence. He told them of his long travel from Boston to Dublin, how he was forced into steerage on the steamer Cambria even though he had tried to book first class. Six white men had protested his presence on the saloon deck. Threats of blood were urged against him. Down with the nigger. They had come within a whisker of blows. The captain stepped in, threatened to throw the white men overboard. Douglass had been allowed to walk the deck, even delivered a speech to the passengers. Still, at night, he had to sleep in the underbelly of the boat.

  The listeners nodded gravely, shook his hand a second time, said he was a fine example, a good Christian. He was guided into the dining room. The table was laid with fine cutlery and glassware. A vicar stood to give grace. The meal was exquisite—lamb with mint sauce—but he could hardly eat. He sipped from the water glass, found himself faint.

  He was called upon to give a speech: his days as a slave, how he slept on a dirt floor in a hovel, crawled into a meal bag to stave off the cold, put his feet in the ashes for warmth. How he had lived with his grandmother for a while and had gone, then, to a plantation. Was taught, against the law, to read, write, and spell. How he read the New Testament to his fellow slaves. Worked in a shipyard with Irishmen as companions. Ran away three times. Failed twice. Escaped Maryland at twenty years of age. Became a man of letters. He was here now to convince the people of Britain and Ireland to help crush slavery through peaceful moral persuasion.

  He was well-practiced—he had spent more than three years giving speeches in America—but these were respectable men of God and empire, in a new land altogether. The obligation of distance. The necessity to say precisely what he meant. To clarify without condescending.

  The nerves unbuttoned the length of his spine. His hands grew clammy. His heart hammered. He did not want to pander. Nor did he want to obscure. He was, he knew, not the first black man to land in Ireland to lecture. Remond had been here before him. Equiano, too. The Irish abolitionists were known for their fervor. They came from the land of O’Connell, after all. The Great Liberator. There was, he’d been told, a hunger for justice. They would open themselves to him.

  The guests watched as if a carriage was galloping along, but might suddenly overturn in front of their eyes. A bead of sweat rolled down between his shoulder bl
ades. He found himself faltering. He rounded his fist, coughed into it, dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief. He had made himself free, he said, but remained property. Merchandise. Chattel. A commodity in law. At any moment he could be returned to his master. The word itself was vicious. He wanted to smash it, ruin it. Massah. He could be whipped, his wife defiled, his children bartered. There were still churches in America that supported the system of ownership: an indelible stain on the Christian mind. Even in Massachusetts he was still chased down the street, beaten, spat upon.

  He was there, he said, to raise just a single hat, but eventually that hat would raise the heavens. He would go forth as a slave no more.

  —Bravo, called an elderly man.

  A tentative round of applause rang out. A young cleric rushed forward to shake Douglass’s hand.

  —Hear, hear.

  The approval sallied around the room. The maid in the black dress lowered her eyes to the ground. After tea and biscuits in the living room, Douglass shook hands with the men, politely excused himself. The women were gathered in the library. He knocked at the door, entered cautiously, bent slightly at the waist, bid them good night. He heard them murmuring as he moved away.

  Webb guided him up the curving staircase by the light of a glass-fluted candle. Their shadows spread haphazard against the wainscoting. A washbasin. A writing table. A chamber pot. A bed with a brass frame. He opened his trunk and took out an engraving of his wife and children, set it alongside the bed.

  —It’s an honor to have you in my house, said Webb from the door.

  Douglass leaned across to blow out the candle. He could hardly sleep. The sea was still moving in him.

  IN THE MORNING Webb drove him around in a horse and carriage. He wanted to show him the city. Douglass sat alongside him, up front, on the wooden boards, exposed to the weather.

  Webb was short, thin, narrow, proud. He used the whip judiciously.

  At first, the streets were clean and leisurely. They passed a tall gray church. A row of small neat shops. The canals ran straight and true. The doorways were brightly painted. They doubled back and went into the city, past the university, the Houses of Parliament, along the quays, towards the Customs House. Farther along, the city began to change. The streets narrowed. The potholes deepened. Soon the filth was staggering. Douglass had never seen anything quite like it, even in Boston. Piles of human waste slushed down the gutter. It sloshed its way into fetid puddles. Men lay collapsed by the railings of rooming houses. Women walked in rags, less than rags: as rags. Children ran barefoot. Specimens of ancient ruin glared out of windowsills. Windows were dusty and broken. Rats darted in the alleyways. The carcass of a donkey was left bloated in the courtyard of a tenement. Dogs went forth, leanshouldered. There was a reek of porter about the streets. A young beggar sang a melody in a tired voice: a police boot sank savagely into her rib cage and moved her along. She fell at the next railing, lay against it, laughing.

  The Irish had little or no order about themselves, he thought. The carriage went corner unto corner, turning, always turning, gray unto gray. It began to drizzle. The streets were muddy and even more deeply potholed. The sound of a fiddle was rent through with a scream.

  Douglass was unnerved by what was unfolding around him, but he stared out eagerly, absorbed it all. Webb cracked the whip down on the horse’s back. They clopped back up Sackville Street, past Nelson’s Pillar, towards the bridge, across the river once more.

  The Liffey was dimpled with rain. A low barge made its way down from the brewery. The wind ran raw and unstoppable along the quays. Vendors of fish moved over the cobbles, pushing barrows of stinking shells.

  A tribe of boys in rags jumped onto the side of the carriage. Seven or eight of them. They used the moving wheels to propel themselves on, then hung perilously by the tips of their fingers. Some of them tried to open the carriage door. Laughter and puddle-fall. One monkeyed across and landed softly on the wooden board, nestled his head against Douglass’s shoulder. A series of raw red welts ran along the boy’s neck and face. Webb had implored him not to give away coins, but Douglass slid the boy a ha’penny. The child’s eyes grew slick with tears. He kept his head on Douglass’s shoulder as if welded there. The other boys leaned in from the side of the carriage, shouting, pushing, cajoling.

  —Mind your pockets! said Webb. No more coins. Don’t give them any more.

  —What are they saying? said Douglass.

  The din was extraordinary: it sounded as if they were chanting in rhyme.

  —No idea, said Webb.

  Webb pulled the carriage up near a laneway, one wheel on the footpath, shouted at a policeman to scatter the boys. The whistle was lost in the air. It took three of the constabulary to dislodge them from the carriage. The gang ran through the laneway. Their shouts ricocheted.

  —Thanks, mister! Thanks!

  Douglass took a handkerchief to his shoulder. The child had left a long stream of snot along the arm of his coat.

  HE HAD NOT imagined Dublin this way at all. He had envisioned rotundas, colonnades, quiet chapels on the street corners. Porticoes, pilasters, domes.

  They passed through a narrow arch into a chaos of men and women. They were gathered for a meeting in the shadows of a theater house. A redheaded man stood on top of a silver keg, barking about Repeal. The crowd swelled. Laughter and applause. Someone responded with a shout about Rome. The words volleyed back and forth. Douglass couldn’t understand the accents, or was it the language? Were they speaking in Irish? He wanted to descend the carriage and walk amongst them, but Webb whispered that there was trouble brewing.

  They continued down a havoc of backstreets. A woman carried a tray of kale on a string over her neck, trying in vain to hawk the exhausted green leaves.

  —Mr. Webb, sir, Mr. Webb, y’r honor!

  Webb broke his own rule, handed her a small copper coin. She ducked away into her headscarf. She looked as if she were praying over the coin. A few coils of hair escaped, damp and coarse.

  Within seconds they were surrounded. Webb had to force the carriage through the crowd of stretched hands. The poor were so thin and white, they were almost lunar.

  A LADY ALONG George’s Street gripped her umbrella as the carriage passed by. A newspaperman who happened to glimpse him wrote afterwards that the visiting Negro looked rather dandy. An audacious whore on the corner of Thomas Street shouted that she would laugh at his best and whistle for more. He caught sight of himself in a shop window and froze the picture in his mind, stunned at the opportunity for public vanity.

  THE STORM MADE the carriage list sideways. Douglass looked for a crack of light in the clouds. None came. Rain fell more steadily now. Gray and unrelenting. Nobody seemed to notice. Rain on the puddles. Rain on the high brickwork. Rain on the slate roofs. Rain on the rain itself.

  Webb entreated him to sit below where he could dry off. Douglass descended. The seats inside were made of soft leather. The handles were brushed bronze. He felt foolish, cowardly, warm. He really should sit outside, bear the brunt of the weather, like Webb. He stamped his feet, opened the neck of his coat. His body steamed. A puddle grew at his feet.

  Up near the cathedral, there was a break in the rain. The city opened with afternoon sunlight. He climbed out and stood on the pavement. Children were jumping rope, calling rhymes to one another. One-Eyed Patrick Walker, met a girl, begat a daughter, the girl she turned to dirty water, one eye ’tain’t your fault, sir. They crowded around him, touched his clothes, removed his hat, pushed their fingers through his hair. Magpie, magpie, sitting on the sty, who oh who has the dirty greedy eye? They laughed at the feel of his hair: tall, bushy, wiry, uneven. A young boy shoved a twig in the mass of curls, ran off, whooping. A girl tugged on the end of his coat.

  —Mister! Hey, mister! Are you from Africa?

  He hesitated a moment. He had never been asked the question before. His smile tightened.

  —America, he said.

  —Christopher Columbus sailed
the ocean blue, he won’t pick me and he won’t pick you!

  The youngest amongst them was no more than three years old. His chest was bony. Leaves were tangled in his filthy hair. A fresh wound underneath his eye.

  —Come on and jump with us, mister!

  The rope twisted and twirled in the air, slapped in a puddle, rose again, kicked up water drops as it twirled.

  —Give us sixpence, will ya?

  He was wary of the mud that already dotted his overcoat. He glanced down at his shoes: they would have to be cleaned.

  —Please, mister!

  —Ah, come on.

  A boy spat on the ground and ran off. The girl coiled the rope, gathered the other children together, stood them at attention, instructed them to wave good-bye. A few stray youngsters followed the carriage until they fell away, hungry, tired, sopping wet.

  The streets grew quieter the closer they got to Webb’s house. A man in a peaked blue hat walked along, firing up the streetlamps until they glowed, a small row of halos. The homes looked warm and soft.

  The cold had insinuated itself into him. The damp, too. He knocked his boot against the seat to warm his toes. Douglass longed to be inside.

  Webb sounded the horn on the front of the carriage. Within seconds the butler had opened the door and was running down the steps with an umbrella. The butler splashed through a puddle and went towards Webb, but Webb said: No, no, our guest first, our guest, please. There was an odd smell in the air. Douglass still couldn’t figure out what it was. Sweet, earthy.

  He walked quickly up the steps with the butler in attendance. He was brought to the fireplace in the living room. He had seen the fire the night before, but had not noticed what it was: clods of burning soil.

  HE CRAWLED OUT of bed to write Anna a note. He needed to be judicious. She could not read nor write, so it would be spoken aloud to her by their friend Harriet. He did not want Anna embarrassed in any way. My dearest. I am in polite and capable hands. My hosts are witty, convivial, open. The air is damp, yet there is something about it that seems to clarify my mind.