The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘Like Australia?’

  ‘No, it was too early for anyone to be talking about Australia. This was 1863. I’m talking about Europe. If you had to ship goods to Europe, where would you do it from?’

  ‘New York?’

  ‘Exactly – greatest natural harbour in America. Everything the slaves produced, sooner or later, was coming into New York. At the least it was before the beginning of the Civil War. So the newspaper owners knew how much New York benefited from slavery and they started publishing articles, stories, pieces in their newspapers designed to make working-class Irish and Germans angry at the Federal Government for introducing the draft law.’

  ‘But they were already angry.’

  ‘That’s right, they were. But the newspapers could stir things up, make them even angrier. And they did. They criticised the Federal Government for causing all this trouble just for what they called a “nigger war”. They encouraged a climate in which white working-class men thought that their value was slipping compared to the value of slaves. Whereas a slave might sell for about $1000, the Irish and Germans thought now they could be bought for just $300 ‘cause it took $300 to buy them an exemption from the draft.’

  ‘Yeah but they’d still be free. The slaves were slaves forever till they died.’

  ‘That’s absolutely right. But this is how grown men were thinking at that time because they were scared, poor, angry, and sick with that virus.’

  ‘Racism.’

  ‘You bet! Racism. Saturday 11 July the first New York draw was held to see who’d have to go to fight. The whole city was uneasy. It was hot. People, especially working people, were living crammed together in the tenements downtown. Whole families were living in one room. To get out, to get away, men went to the taverns and drank. They drank and they talked about all the things that bothered them. A lot of things bothered them so they drank a lot. Two days later, some time between six and seven in the morning, mobs of men started to form on the lower East Side. They moved west across Broadway and headed towards the draft office. They were armed with wooden sticks, planks and iron bars.

  ‘As they moved uptown they collected more and more men, dissatisfied angry men who’d already been so humiliated by their circumstances, by their poverty, that they didn’t know themselves any more. They had lost their individuality. You know what I mean by that?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Each man had forgotten what made him different from the next guy. And now, added to all the chronic humiliation was his anger at the unfairness of the draft, at the possibility of becoming, not a man any more, but an animal in a pack of animals. There were thousands of men like this and they headed towards the draft office on 3rd Avenue. By the time they reached it there were 15,000 of them and they set to destroying the building. They smashed and burned it. They set all sorts of things on fire, other buildings, everything. They cut the telegraph wires so that reinforcements couldn’t be sent to assist what few police were there. Remember that many of the regular police force were already in the Army. There was a small military detachment at the draft office and, even though they were armed with rifles, they were no match for the mob. It was too big. One soldier was disarmed, then beaten and kicked to death and then his body was thrown twenty feet to the ground. Train tracks were ripped up. Street cars were destroyed. The armoury on 21st Street was looted then destroyed.

  ‘Columns of black smoke blotted out the July sun. They went after any policeman they could find, politicians, anyone who looked rich enough to pay the $300 needed to be exempt from the draft.’

  ‘How could they tell?’

  ‘By the way someone looked, the way they were dressed.’

  ‘But they could be wrong. Maybe a poor person was wearing their best clothes.’

  ‘They could be wrong but they didn’t care. It didn’t matter to them. Watch your case. Are you watching your suitcase?

  ‘By eleven-thirty that Monday morning the draft, at least in New York, was suspended. But it was too late. The mob was in charge of Manhattan. At two-thirty that afternoon it reached the Colored Orphan Asylum. This was a charitable institution for black children who had lost their parents and who had no one else to take care of them. It had its own nursery, a school and an infirmary. There were 230 or so children. They were having a normal day when suddenly the building was rushed by the mob. Anything that could be taken, lifted, carried from the building was looted; sheets, blankets, clothes, even food. They took toys. Everything else was set on fire after someone in the mob yelled “Burn the niggers’ nest!” They were black orphaned children. Was there anyone more vulnerable in all the city? The mob set upon the asylum. With clubs, brick bats, anything they had to hand. It only took about twenty minutes to destroy the whole place.’

  ‘Did anyone try to stop it?’

  ‘Actually, yes. It was reported that one man – he was Irish – pleaded with the mob to help the children but they set upon him too.’

  ‘And what … what happened to the children?’

  ‘The children, carrying whatever belongings they could hold, were led out through a side entrance by some staff and through the streets with a police guard. Some soldiers armed with bayonets came to escort them and keep them from the mob.’

  ‘So none of them were killed?’

  ‘One of them was, a ten-year-old girl.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘As she was being led away from the building, a piece of furniture hurled out the window of the asylum by the mob hit her in the head. It’s horrible, Adam, what people can do, what they’re capable of.’

  ‘Did her friends see, the other children, I mean? Did they see her get killed?’

  ‘I guess they must have.’

  ‘And what happened to the rest of them, the children?’

  ‘Well, I read one account that said they were taken to a police station on 35th Street and another version said they were put on a barge and towed out to the middle of the East River to keep them safe from the mob.’

  ‘Which one’s right?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe someone knows. Maybe it’s one of those things … one of those things people don’t know.’

  ‘Why don’t people know? Why are there two versions of the ending? Does that mean that one of the versions is wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s what historians do, that’s for historians. They take raw material and piece together the stories that make up history for the rest of us.’

  ‘What do you mean, “raw material”?’

  ‘Whatever they can find, eyewitness statements, police statements, newspaper reports – anything they can find. You want to see where it happened?’

  ‘The Colored Orphan Asylum?’

  ‘It’s only a block away. You can probably see where it was from here. It’s 43rd and 5th. Look, just there, that corner, you see? We’ll go there but then we’ll have to get a cab.’

  The cab would take them to the airport where Jake Zignelik would say goodbye to his son Adam and put him on the long flight back to his mother. But before that the father dragged the son who dragged his suitcase to the corner of 43rd and 5th where the Colored Orphan Asylum had once stood. Young Adam craned his neck and looked up. He was looking in the air for furniture that might be thrown out of a window by people wanting to kill children, children who had already lost their parents. It had happened right there. It was no fairytale, not even a dark one with hidden meanings known only to grown-ups, known only to students of history, some sinister tale not really meant for children, a tale that had crossed the Atlantic from the thick forests of Europe. No, this was something that had happened right there on the corner of 43rd Street and 5th Avenue. It was New York where the Colored Orphan Asylum had been attacked. It was New York where a ten-year-old black girl had been killed when furniture pushed out of the window fell on her as she was fleeing the mob that had invaded the orphanage she’d been sent to after she was abandoned. This was the same New York his dad worked and liv
ed in.

  More than the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building, the Statue of Liberty, Broadway or Times Square, this was the New York young Adam thought about when he got home to his mother. This was the New York he took with him on the plane. New York was the city where the orphans were attacked. Irrespective of whether Jake Zignelik thought he had turned the exercise of separation, first from his wife, then from his son, into an art, irrespective of the delis with wise-cracking old waiters who knew everything, irrespective of his dad’s doting lady friends with their intoxicating perfume and cigarette cases that snapped shut with a crisp sound you wanted to try to emulate, pretty ladies who ran their fingers through a little boy’s hair with the genuine but transient affection of someone temporarily engaging with a cat they were visiting, irrespective of shows he didn’t always understand and museums and art galleries that were interesting up to the point where the back of his legs hurt, irrespective of the parks and the park, Central Park, and irrespective of kindly William McCray and his son Charles, who took care of Adam from time to time when their fathers had important work to do, New York was first and foremost to young Adam Zignelik the city with the Colored Orphan Asylum. This was the place of the orphans. Do you know about them, he would say, do you know what happened at the Colored Orphan Asylum? New York was the city of orphans.

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What was the little girl’s name?’ Adam asked his father in the cab on the way to the airport, looking out the window at late 1970s Queens.

  ‘Which little girl?’

  ‘The little girl who was killed by the furniture the mob threw out the window at the Colored Orphan Asylum?’

  ‘You know, I don’t know.’

  ‘Do people know?’

  ‘I don’t know that either.’

  ‘But if the other children … if some of the other children saw it happen then … some of them would have known her name, even if she was shy … and they could have told the soldiers with the bayonets so some grown-ups would know her name.’

  Jake Zignelik, whose thoughts had been elsewhere, realised how much his son had remembered of the story he had told him and he didn’t know whether to be pleased, proud or perhaps alarmed.

  ‘Maybe they did,’ he said to his son in the back of the cab, now running his fingers through Adam’s hair, ‘maybe her name is known and it’s just that … I don’t know her name. We don’t know her name. Maybe that’s something you could look into next time you visit me. You could read up about it and tell me her name.’

  William McCray was a better father to his son Charles than Jake Zignelik was to his son Adam. ‘I never see him,’ Jake Zignelik said to William McCray over coffee during an adjournment in the US Supreme Court.

  ‘Well, that’s not his fault. What did you talk about with him when he was here? You talked to him about the decision in Brown versus Board of Education, didn’t you?’

  William’s son, Charles McCray, was now the Chairman of the History Department at Columbia. One of the youngest people ever to hold the position, he was also the first African American to hold the position. He had married a woman some ten years younger named Michelle. Uncommonly beautiful, Michelle was a social worker. Much as she tried to dress down, she found her looks hampered her work. Charles and Michelle had one child, a daughter, Sonia.

  Adam Zignelik never forgot his father’s account of the events leading up to the New York draft riots and the mob attack on the Colored Orphan Asylum in the summer of 1863. But he never found out the name of the little girl who had been killed by the furniture they had thrown out the window.

  Shortly before 4.30 am that Monday morning, Adam Zignelik was to awake momentarily uncertain of where he was and experience a shortness of breath sometimes associated with a heart attack or at least with the tart panic of a nightmare. In the minutes before he woke a montage of images in his mind, mostly in monochrome, had induced a series of increasingly violent bodily tremors almost indistinguishable from a convulsion. The images, except for those of his father and of a white television newsreader on Australian television broadcast in black and white, were mainly of black people. They were from another time. He saw Emmett Till and Emmett’s mother, Mamie. He saw Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Addie May Collins, all aged fourteen, and little Denise McNair, aged eleven, smiling, her braided hair tied tight with ribbons, the four little girls who had been killed when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed by white segregationists. He saw Arthurine Lucy. He saw Elizabeth Eckford and the others of the ‘Little Rock Nine’. And he saw the Colored Orphan Asylum at the corner of 43rd and 5th. But he couldn’t see the little girl from there who had been killed by the falling piece of furniture. He looked but could not find her. There he was, aged eight, alternately looking for her, looking out for falling objects, and looking out for his father, who had been there a moment ago. And whenever he thought he saw her it wasn’t her but little Denise McNair, her braided hair tied tight with ribbons, smiling.

  It was impossible to begrudge anyone trying to protect Denise McNair, impossible to begrudge anyone trying to help her people fight unmitigated evil, impossible to begrudge your father. But William McCray, who had fought both Hitler and Jim Crow, had managed to be a good father to his son Charles, now head of History at Columbia, and William McCray was someone his son could find, someone his son had always been able to find. But on the corner of 43rd and 5th Adam Zignelik couldn’t find his father.

  ‘Hold on to your suitcase.’

  That was him, but when Adam looked around he wasn’t there any more. Adam was there, trying to look out for Denise McNair as everybody else on 5th Avenue brushed past, oblivious to the danger. They were killing abandoned children on that very block. There had been Jake’s legacy, but it was largely Charles McCray’s example and later, his assistance, that had led Adam to the History Department at Columbia. He went there first as an undergraduate. He graduated with a history major but, uncertain what to do next and with some guilt at leaving his mother alone, Adam returned to Australia and tried to make a career for himself as a journalist. For almost six years he toiled away but it irked him that he wasn’t progressing faster. It was Charles McCray, with whom he had kept in regular contact, who got him to consider a PhD in history with a view to becoming an academic historian. At twenty-eight, Adam moved back to New York and enrolled in the PhD program of the History Department at NYU. The fashion within civil rights history over the previous decade or so had been to eschew the ‘great man’ theory or school of civil rights history in favour of social history that focused on the nameless people who constituted the bulk of the movement.

  Adam used his father as an inspiration for reacquainting scholars with the importance of the civil rights legal strategy. His argument was a reminder that without concomitant changes in the law there would have been no grounds on which the local activists could base their fight. It was because of the success of the legal strategy in cases such as Brown versus Board of Education that the local activists were able to galvanise black communities around the country, particularly in the south, and tell them the law was now on their side. The fight could be taken from there. Adam’s dissertation served to remind historians in the area just how difficult it was in those days, in that climate, to win the cases from first instance all the way up to the Supreme Court and how hard it was to get civil rights legislation enacted. He wrote of the need to look again at the legal strategy, not as engaged in by one great man or great woman, but as the outcome of the concerted efforts of a group, a group of lawyers.

  All the while he was at NYU he stayed involved in the Columbia community. He took classes at Columbia and once a month came uptown for a ‘Twentieth Century Politics and Society’ seminar. He met and maintained friendships with Columbia graduate students from the History Department. It was through one of them that he met Diana, the woman who had grown not unaccustomed to the rhythm of his recent nightmares. And of
course, there was Charles McCray, who was for him a cross between a mentor, an older brother and a ‘co-conspirator’. The ‘conspiracy’ was one between children of the movement. They could say things to each other that it was almost impossible to say to anyone else.

  It was a game Charles and Adam used to play, alone and in private. It involved saying things that were unacceptable within mainstream political discourse. Sometimes the ‘things’ were statements or propositions many people knew to be true or likely to be true. At other times they were simply defamatory statements they came up with to amuse each other. But none of the ‘things’ could be said, at least publicly, without contravening political correctness. Often after a few drinks, the ‘things’ were just things they both knew the other didn’t believe. This latter category of ‘thing’, even more than the former, would have them in tears of laughter by the end of an evening.

  It was on the strength of his PhD and, again, with the assistance of Charles who, though not yet chairman, was already a highly respected member of the department and a well-regarded scholar of the Reconstruction, that Adam joined the faculty at Columbia. His dissertation became the basis for a book. As the telegenic son of Jake with a Britishoid accent, Adam, for a time at least, was plucked up by the media as ‘the son’ and, consequently, the book had sold better than anyone, including Adam, had expected. He wrote a few non-scholarly articles in newspapers and magazines and was even asked to be a ‘talking head’ in a television documentary for public television.

  But even as this was happening, he wondered whether other people were wondering whether his public persona was going to his head. It wasn’t. His anxiety over what his colleagues might be wondering would not permit this. It crowded out most other things. Whether they were wondering this or not, colleagues did start to ask, ‘So what’s your next project about?’ More importantly, he started to ask himself the same thing. When he didn’t have an answer for himself it amplified a deeper question he had long fought to silence. Was he an intellectual lightweight? Perhaps he was only ever going to have one idea. He wondered if he was capable of writing another book that would contribute to scholarly debate in any meaningful way.