Gilded Needles

by Michael McDowell

  Lena had understood none of this address, until her lawyer leaned over and whispered: “Seven years on the Island, girls taken away.”

  Lena sat stupefied, with her hands pressed against her breast in agony.

  “The court has little hope that your seven-year sojourn in the female penitentiary will do you lasting good, Lena Shanks,” said Judge Stallworth, “and the court would have you there longer, but the laws of the state unfortunately limit the number of years you may be sequestered for the commission of your particular crime—though the court has little doubt you’ve committed others which, if proved against you, would have laid you beneath a sentence far heavier than the one the court imposes now. The court will enjoy, however, the satisfaction of knowing it has uprooted and broken apart a black tree which would have borne no fruit but that of corruption.”

  Judge Stallworth, after blinking his glowing blue eyes several times, rose and left the court. A policeman stepped forward to lead the stunned Lena away, but suddenly recollecting herself she wrenched herself loose from his grasp. She turned and spoke rapidly in German to her brother, who had accompanied her to the trial. She begged Alick to take the girls away with him so that the court could not get at them; and she would fetch them back when she was out of prison.

  Lena stared at Daisy and Louisa, who had understood perhaps less of what had happened in the court than their mother, and whispered “Vergisse mich nicht.” Their uncle hurried the girls out before any of the court officials thought to stop him.

  Lena and Cornelius Shanks were at Blackwell’s Island together during May and June of 1865 but no communication, other than a single interview on the day before his death, was allowed her. Lena was not permitted to witness her husband’s execution, though it took place only fifty yards from her cell on the other side of a high wall, but with a substantial bribe conveyed to the hangman, she secured the rope that had been wrapped around Cornelius’s throat. It was brought to her with the noose tied and the skin of her husband’s neck adhering in shreds to the coarse fiber. Lena kept that rope still, in a locked chest beneath her bed.

  For a great while, as she languished on the stony island, Lena Shanks was utterly cast down by the loss of her husband. Their final meeting had been brief, laconic, and tearless; but her grief over his death was genuine and intense. Her two little girls were being kept by relatives in Philadelphia but, the entire family being illiterate, Lena had no communication with them and had no idea whether her daughters were alive or dead, in health or sickness. Alick, suspected of a series of robberies that had plagued the inhabitants of Twelfth Street, had temporarily removed himself to Boston. Lena was alone.

  Gradually, however, she gave over her grief, vowing in the midst of her misery that when she got out of prison, she would be leaving never to return. She of necessity had formed an attachment to her cell mate, a murderess who acted as the midwife to the women of the prison. Lena became her assistant and received instruction in the delivering of infants, as well as training in the equally practical trade of inducing abortions. When the murderess died, deliberately choking herself on a shredded prayer book, Lena took over her duties. She had, in effect, the run of the women’s prison. From other prisoners she heard of all the various dodges and schemes that were practiced upon the simple and credulous, and listened to all the stories of thieves and pickpockets and adventuresses; and what she had not known of criminal New York when she was rowed from the shore of Manhattan to Blackwell’s Island, she knew when she made the return journey on Good Friday, 1872.

  At that time, Lena had nothing to her name but the clothes she had worn upon entering the place and the rope which had hanged her husband, but she was fortunate in that she left the prison under the protective wing of a young woman who operated a bordello on West Houston Street. This enterprising soul, who had been sentenced to a brief three months for the unintentional killing of a Negro laundress, had suddenly conceived the notion of setting Lena up as the resident abortionist and general physician to the entire neighborhood of prostitutes. Lena was given a room at the top of one of these houses and on a retaining fee she treated all the ladies in that area. A couple of years later, when her protectress decided to move to Montreal, Lena bought the house for a nominal sum and set up an expanded operation—though the little room at the top of the house remained the site for almost all her trade. Now secure in her own mind, Lena one afternoon took the cars to Philadelphia, made inquiries into the whereabouts of her relatives, and found them after a couple of days’ intensive search.

  Louisa and Daisy did not remember their mother well, but they had been so ill-treated by their relatives that they made no objection when Lena announced that she was taking them back to New York. Daisy at this time was fourteen, her sister Louisa two years older. Louisa, as the result of some illness that her relatives had not thought worth the expense of treating, had been deprived of her voice and been left wholly mute. Her hard aspect and general intractability alone had saved her from being set out on the streets as a prostitute, but Daisy had already been about her occupation for three years, since she was eleven. Her mother promised her, however, that she would be trained in the gentler and more lucrative employment of abortion.

  Lena Shanks lived close within the building on West Houston Street and rarely ventured out. The safe house and her discreet trade were her protection against future imprisonment. She grew sullen and fat from her sedentary existence, but had never really lost the fear that next week she might find herself once more between the gray stone walls of the prison on Blackwell’s Island. Daisy Shanks had been instructed that, in that dire event, she should prepare and administer a generous cup of poison to her mother; and Daisy had agreed.

  Judge James Stallworth, Lena knew, still presided over a court; and the one thing that Lena would not do for her ladies in trouble was testify in their behalf at trials. Though she had not seen him in fifteen years, the lacquered blue eyes of Judge James Stallworth still troubled Black Lena’s dreams. She had an almost superstitious dread of him, and had been greatly disturbed when she had seen those very eyes fixed in the egg-shaped head of the young man in Harry Hill’s place. And so soon after to have the dreaded name brought to her attention by Weeping Mary! It seemed as though the man had effected a wizard’s transformations and was creeping up on her in different disguises. Lena realized that now she must be doubly vigilant: the old man had slept for almost twenty years, but now was rising again, with awesome strength, and confederates who reproduced his burning eyes, or his hated name!

  Chapter 13

  Tammany Hall and Police Headquarters both felt the stings of the Tribune articles. The paragraphs written by Simeon Lightner and Duncan Phair were talked of in every saloon, every drawing room, every club, and on every street corner in town. Daring young men who before had confined their pleasure-seeking to the Central Park and long excursions to Coney Island now walked the streets south of Bleecker in thick bands, exquisitely fearful, and imagining that murderous prostitutes would swing upon them out of every doorway. Timorous ladies, when their husbands had left the house for their offices, would ascend to the attic and, wiping clean a grimy pane, train their opera glasses shudderingly on the red-brick maze of the Black Triangle.

  Other papers in the city at first deprecated the Tribune’s obvious strategy, but quickly, when they saw what commotion the articles and the letters stirred, took up the cause themselves. The Herald began an investigation of the tenements that still existed around Five Points, and the Sun gave daily and detailed instances of violence among the Jews, the Italians, the Cubans, and the Chinese.

  The police department’s defense was ineffectual, for it was by their own statistics that they were most sorely trounced; so Mulberry Street launched a campaign against the Black Triangle in hope of bettering its position with the clamorous public.

  On Thursday, January 19, the gambling hall that Duncan Phair and Simeon Lightner had visited on their first night out together was invaded by the police. T
hough protesting vehemently that they were quite up-to-date in the matter of bribes, the proprietors were arrested. Gentlemen gamblers were politely escorted to the street, where they quickly availed themselves of the convenience of an uptown car, but players of lower or criminal class were taken away to the Tombs for a couple of nights. All the machinery of gambling was broken up. The tables and chairs were hacked to pieces with hatchets borrowed from the fire department and piled in the middle of King Street. The heap was garnished with cards, dice, counters, script, and printed advertisements—and then doused with kerosene and set alight. It was a symbolic and picturesque action meant to mollify the public, but unfortunately also a dangerous one—for a strong wind blew a handful of burning court cards from a pinochle deck through the open doorway of a tenement house, where they ignited a quantity of oily rags. Simeon Lightner and Duncan Phair, who were in the next street, came by for the commotion and were able to report another piece of police negligence and ineptitude in next morning’s Tribune. The police countered lamely that the building had been vermin infested and the infant that had perished in the blaze was already consumptive, but it was another point made against them.

  Though somewhat daunted, the chief of police ordered that on the following Sunday some saloon be shut down, and a large place on Perry Street was chosen because it was the most ornate and nearly respectable in all the Black Triangle—not because it was forward in the matter of excise violations. Justified by the New York State law decreeing that no establishment selling liquor might be open during any hour of the Sabbath, seventy-three police invaded the place an hour before noon, dragged away the owners and bartenders, kicked the patrons out, broke every glass and bottle and mirror in the place, and smashed all the chairs and tables against the mahogany bar. Representatives from all the sympathetic press were there, and this was rather more of a successful engagement for the Democratic administration.

  Thereafter, almost every other day some business in that part of the city was touched: seventeen prostitutes arrested in one house, a fence dragged away from King Street, a stale-beer dive emptied of all its human and potable refuse, a meeting place of thieves boarded up and condemned.

  It would have gone harder with the Black Triangle had it not been for the other newspapers taking up the cause and celebrating, as it were, other criminal neighborhoods. The police were forced, to some extent, to deploy their forces to other sectors and show that they were intent on freeing all parts of the city from the dominion of corruption and depravity. But still, since the Tribune articles were the most virulent and powerfully antagonistic to the police, it was that area bordered by MacDougal, Canal and Bleecker streets that received the most frequent and meticulous attentions of the police department.

  On many counts, the police were unhappy in setting up this systematic persecution. It was a troublesome and dangerous under­taking, for the thieves and criminals of New York were entrenched, and most of them had the idea that they were somehow an essential, if unsavory, arm of the community, and had as much right as any cotton-factor or dressmaker or bookseller to exist and ply their trades. They took umbrage at the incursions of the police into places the police had never dared go before. Already three men had been killed resisting arrest, and one policeman escaped death only at the price of a severe knock on the head, which had taken him out of commission. And quite beyond this it was an expensive affair, for many of the police department, on all levels—but especially the very highest and the very lowest—were used to taking bribes in return for ignoring crime when crime could be quietly ignored. When men and women were arrested, the bribes of course dried up and the criminal classes lost faith in the word of the police.

  Those high in the police department and the city government who received substantial bribes from the larger criminals of the city and the politicians who depended on the wiles of petty malefactors to secure their offices year after year in election-day frauds, were necessarily made uneasy by this call for a wholesale sweep of the city’s criminal population. This was fortunately only January and the next election many months away; the politicians considered that, if all this were got through quickly, there would be time to recoup their losses or with large favors, win back the confidence of those on whom their positions and their fortunes depended.

  Lena Shanks watched these developments with increasing concern, and in her business was even more discreet than usual; for the first time in many a year, she actually gave out pawn tickets—printed up by Louisa on the small press that she kept in her bedchamber—in exchange for the merchandise that she received from her women. Her clients were fewer, and those who continued to come came less often, for all in the Black Triangle were fearful, and ever wary of the police.

  Lena had a standing order with Crook-Back Bob, the ragged newsboy who haunted West Houston Street, and each morning and afternoon the little cripple brought to the shop all the journals that carried the sensational stories of New York crime and New York criminals. Ella read the articles aloud, and in a few weeks her reading was substantially improved, though her eyesight had deteriorated.

  Lena was distressed by the frequency with which the Stallworth name cropped up, particularly in the pages of the Tribune. Every Monday the journal printed Edward Stallworth’s sermon enumerating and condemning the enormities of the Black Triangle. This minister, Lena discovered from Weeping Mary, was the son of the hated Judge James Stallworth, whose cursory trials, lengthy concluding remarks, and harsh sentencings appeared in the Tribune’s columns from Tuesday through Sunday. Many of those sent to Blackwell’s Island and Sing Sing Lena was acquainted with, and three of Lena’s women had already come up before the judge. Two received four-year sentences for prostitution and the third eight years for operating an illegal gambling establishment. There was even a female Stallworth—called Helen—who had signed her name, among those of many other ladies, to a letter that expressed horrified indignation at the number of abortionists—euphemistically called “angel-makers” in the epistle—allowed to practice within the precincts of the Black Triangle. Lena began to feel that the Stallworths had risen in a body against her and her family, threatening not only their livelihood but their very freedom.

  Chapter 14

  Edward Stallworth stood at the door of his church and greeted the Sunday morning congregation as it filed out. He modestly accepted his parishioners’ murmured applause for his powerful and affecting address, the fifth of his sermons dilating upon the dangers and iniquities of the Black Triangle. He was pleased with the compliment of a pretty young woman, reputed to be an heiress, who said, “Oh, Mr. Stallworth, with that voice of yours, and those hands of yours, you could talk me into rope dancing or arson.”

  He and Helen and Benjamin were expected at one o’clock at Gramercy Park for luncheon, but that was half an hour away and Edward felt the need of a little rest and liquid to massage his throat. Helen, according to her custom, had come to his church study directly after the postlude and prepared tea, and now Edward Stallworth sat comfortably back in a deep leather chair before the fire burning in the glazed-brick hearth. Helen sat opposite him with a saucer perched on the narrow arm of her narrow hard chair.

  “Helen,” said her father with a kindness prompted by the success of the sermon, “I suppose that tomorrow there will be another meeting of Marian’s committee.”

  Helen nodded hesitantly. “Yes, just at two o’clock, at Marian’s again.”

  “I hope it will be as successful as the last!”

  Helen said nothing.

  Her father looked at her with an exhausted wariness. “You do not feel, Helen, after two full meetings, that the Committee for the Suppression of Urban Vice has been a success?”

  “I suppose,” said Helen with downcast eyes, “it would depend on how one defined success, or perhaps on what one interpreted the aims of the committee to be.”

  “Go on please,” said her father blandly, but no longer with a smile. “With me, Helen, your words need not be chosen with s
o much care.”

  “All the ladies come dressed very fine,” said Helen meekly, “and they talk of the articles that appear in the Tribune and the Sun. Marian praises the articles highest of all, though of course she doesn’t say that it’s Duncan who helps to write them, so I wish that she wouldn’t—I think she should say as little as possible, for it’s sure to be found out sooner or later that it’s Duncan behind it, and then what will every­one think of Marian’s praise?”

  “They’ll think that she’s proud of her husband, as well she should be,” said Edward Stallworth. “Duncan’s exertions in this matter are entirely commendable, and I see nothing objectionable in Marian’s praise. But what did you object to, Helen? You seem to have disapproved of something more than Marian’s fulsomeness, which you ought to be used to by this time anyway.”

  “I . . . I do not concur with the ladies’ views on—the unfortunate people who live in the poorer sections of the city. They look on the whole matter rather lightly, as if it were nothing more than a new kind of scandal to amuse them. They talk about vice, and how the police ought to stop it, and how all those people ought to be put into the jails, and the houses burnt to the ground, and opera houses and restaurants and theaters set up there instead. They have”—she paused before making so stern a judgment—“little compassion. . . .”