Forever

by Pete Hamill

  Each emigrant gave a name, and the burly man checked them off a list and pointed to a space in the rain to the left of the Slave Market where they must wait. The lieutenants took up positions at each corner of an imaginary square enclosing these indentured servants. The message was clear: If one of the Irish runs, he (or she) will be shot. Other men (in fancier clothes, with their own Africans holding umbrellas) began to bargain over their fate, pointing and choosing, and pinning small colored ribbons on the emigrants’ soaked clothes. These were badges that made each emigrant the property of specific American agents. Some would remain in New York. A few were sent to New England. Most were bound for South Carolina or Virginia to work with the African slaves. Now some of the indentured servants found their tongues. This woman needs to go with that man and not be separated from him (for they’d fallen in love in the purgatory of the crossing). Or that woman is carrying my child, for the love of God (in pleading Irish and clumsy English). Or I’ll not move a bloody inch until my child is fed!

  A huge black man suddenly detached himself from a group of agents. He was about six-foot-two with muscles rippling under his denim vest. A leather whip was curled in his huge hand. Cormac heard some of the stevedores call his name. Quaco.

  He stood alone in front of the unruly Irish. He didn’t say a word but simply glared, and they hushed. Cormac knew why. They were cowed, beaten, beyond humiliation, with the rain falling steadily on their heads and shoulders and hopes.

  Then a man on horseback arrived at the edge of the crowd and leaped down. He tethered the horse to a rough-hewn post in front of a meat shop. Quaco looked hard at him. He was about forty, his gray hair pasted to his skull by the rain, his broad shoulders pushing from beneath a coarse mechanic’s shirt. His eyes were wide and frantic as he pushed through the crowd to the huddled emigrants. He was calling a name. Caroline Heaney? Caroline Heaney? Has any of yiz seen Caroline Heaney? Heads shook slowly, as if concealing a secret. Heaney? Caroline Heaney? He turned to the Fury, peered at wet faces, and then walked hard to the man under the umbrella, the man checking off names. Quaco eased around to the side, as the new arrival whispered to the man with the Irish list. He was given a negative shake of the head and a jerk of a hand in the direction of the ship. There Mr. Blifil stood alone at the foot of the gangplank, holding a sheaf of his own papers in one hand, an umbrella in the other. The man went to him. Caroline Heaney. Mr. Blifil flipped a few pages, paused, said something, and looked away. The man fell to the flagstones, writhing, weeping, cursing. His fists hammered at the earth. Oh, my God; God damn you: Oh, my Caroline, oh, my sweet Caroline, I never should have wrote you, oh, Caroline, oh, oh, oh, oh.

  Some of the women broke past Quaco and bent over the man and held him and whispered to him (no doubt about the fate of Caroline and how she was now in Heaven, or the Otherworld), while the rain drummed harder on the roof of the Slave Market. Quaco did not intervene, even when an agent barked something at him and pointed at the disturbance of the grieving man. Quaco waited and watched until the grief ebbed and the man stood up and walked off to the place where his horse was tethered. Two English soldiers in rain-stained scarlet jackets were watching from their place in front of a cooper’s shop. One of them laughed. Cormac wished he could unsheathe his sword.

  39.

  At last nine Africans were brought up on deck, with Kongo in the lead, all that was left of the original thirteen men and one woman. For a few defiant minutes, they stood shoulder to shoulder in a line, facing the American shore. The place of the enemy. The place of their captors. Behind them, Captain Thompson slipped into his cabin, presumably to wash his hands. The Africans wore only breechclouts. Their bodies were thin but not frail, and in the rain their skin was as glossy as wet coal. Their hands and feet were shackled, the hands tightly, the feet more loosely. With gestures and scowls, the boss beckoned them forward, his lieutenants tensed, as if ready to drag them ashore. Quaco watched from a distance. Kongo obviously calculated the odds of escape, and they were too long. Then he led the way down the plank, walking with small hobbled steps, but somehow managing to look like a victor.

  The Africans stood very still on the flagstones along the edge of the pier. The boss agent said something and pointed to the stage of the Slave Market. The slave with the umbrella translated for his boss. But Kongo didn’t move. Quaco watched more intently. The biggest of the private guards nudged Kongo sharply with the musket. Still Kongo refused to move. Then the guard hammered him on the back with the butt of the long gun. Kongo bent from the blow but did not go down.

  Cormac rushed in.

  “Wait,” he shouted. “Don’t do that!”

  “And who are you?” the boss snarled, examining Cormac’s young face and new clothes.

  “I know this man. He’s a good man and proud. Treat him well. Treat him like a man.”

  “I’ll bust ’is fecking head, I will. If that suits you, sir.”

  “And then what? Can a man with a broken head be sold?” One of the laughing English soldiers suddenly appeared, no longer laughing. His lip curled and he was annoyed by the rain that was soaking his scarlet coat to the color of old blood.

  “What’s all this?”

  “Nothing,” Cormac said, afraid now of an arrest, a request for papers. “Just trying to protect someone’s property.”

  “Well, get on with it. We need no trouble here.”

  With a shrug and a turn of the head, Cormac urged Kongo to go along. The African looked at Cormac with that familiar mixture of anger and suspicion, then glanced around at the crowd. Quaco was staring at both of them. He was detached from the Africans, charged only with controlling the Irish. But he nodded at Kongo. A moment of contact, with something else built into it: a promise, a hope for a better moment. Kongo took a deep breath and led the way to the stage of the market. Walking like a captured king.

  Then Mr. Partridge returned from his tasks, his face wet, his eyes angry. From a distance, he had seen Cormac’s small intervention. He pulled his beaver hat lower on his brow.

  “Are you mad?” he whispered, taking Cormac’s elbow and leading him away.

  Cormac looked back at Kongo as he moved up the steps leading to the tin-roofed stage. He was branded, as they all were, as Tomora had been, with a flared cross on the shoulder blades. A consignment of merchandise.

  “They could have arrested you, you young fool,” Mr. Partridge said.

  “I suppose.”

  “Suppose? Sup-pose? That’s their business. Their merchandise! They are shameless monsters, the lot of them. But that’s why they’re here. To peddle humans for money. Confronting them physically is foolish bravado.”

  A clipped English voice started announcing the imminent auction. The words were tossed and fractured by the rain. Cormac saw nobody who resembled the Earl of Warren. But when he gazed at the gray turbulent sky, a lone raven was making wide, slow circles above the town of New York.

  40.

  Then it was all settled on the quay at the foot of Wall Street. The huge crate was safely stored in Van Zandt’s warehouse. Mr. Partridge shouldered his heavy bag, refused Cormac’s offer to carry it for him, grabbed two smaller satchels in each hand, and they set off together into the town.

  They walked up the slope of Wall Street, heading west, and the crowds filled Cormac with a sense of the marvelous. Here were all the nations of the earth, their languages drifting through the soggy air, or cleaving passages between the nouns and verbs of English. He didn’t yet know French from German or Spanish from Dutch, but Mr. Partridge kept saying, Listen, listen to them, lad while telling him the names of the languages. The faces seemed to fit the words themselves, and their smooth or jarring rhythms: lean or fat, dark or fair. Cormac felt that he had entered the main street of Babel.

  New York was an English town, of course, and had been one since 1673, the second time the English took it from the Dutch at gunpoint (Mr. Partridge said), the way they’d taken Ireland from the Irish. As they moved past the meat market, w
here great slabs of beef were loosely covered with burlap and tradesmen in blood-stained aprons shouted in London accents, the words on the walls were all in English. The signs above shops spoke English too. As did the quick, furtive men in rain-soaked coats and beaver hats calling to them from doorways: Room to let, sir? Place to stay? Good big meal after a long journey? A nice entertaining bit of fluff?

  “Don’t talk to any of that lot,” Mr. Partridge said. “It wouldn’t suit you to get a clap the first day in America.”

  He waved them away as if they were flies, and they passed through the lower part of Wall Street. Women revealed themselves among the milling crowds. Hatlesss women with rain-slick hair. Swaggering women and big-hipped women, coarse and fleshy women. And a few younger women flashing eyes at them, wearing paint on their faces. Cormac looked at one of them and she smiled in an available way. He averted his gaze (certain his face was flushed) and saw women pale as ghosts in upstairs windows, and women moving down the jammed side streets, stepping out of small houses made of yellow bricks, or backing out of shops. Their high-heeled shoes lifted the rims of their skirts above the mud.

  Mr. Partridge grunted and paused, short of breath, but still refused Cormac’s offer to carry his heavy bag, with its books and papers and secrets. And while he paused, Cormac now noticed how many Africans there were in the streets. “They’re a fifth of the population, lad,” Mr. Partridge explained. “A fifth, out of eleven thousand souls.” Most of the Africans were young, like those on the ship and those who worked around the stage of the Slave Market, but some were older, shouting in good English, and a few were very old, squatting against walls, their hands open for alms. They were dressed like all the other workingmen, in rough muslin shirts, some with vests over the shirts, most with caps or hats because of the rain, all in heavy work boots. Two Africans maneuvered a load of cut lumber, removing it from a cart, while a horse shuddered and a white man gave orders in English. The Africans might have been a fifth of the people, but after you grew used to them (their like did not work in Belfast) they didn’t stand out; they seemed part of the hurly-burly of the street. Cormac wondered if Kongo would become just another one of them.

  There were black women too. They didn’t resemble Tomora. Most were in the company of white women, carrying their bundles from the shops, or packages of meat from the market. The African women held umbrellas over the heads of their white mistresses, unless their hands were filled with packages, and then the white women gripped their own umbrellas, shifting to keep the packages dry. White or black, there were fewer women than men. At least on Wall Street. But the African women seemed more casual in their movements than the black men, as if they had settled for living out their lives here on this continent far from home. Cormac wondered what they were thinking on this jammed New York street, and in what language they dreamed.

  As they walked, Mr. Partridge tried to fill Cormac with the lore of the place, but the younger man was too busy seeing it before him to listen to what it was. They stopped again, at the corner of Broad Street and Wall. Mr. Partridge leaned his bag on a stone marker, holding it in place with his body. He struggled for breath. That immense steeple up ahead, he told Cormac, is Trinity Church. It rises one hundred and seventy-five feet into the air. Cormac was astonished. This was the tallest structure he’d ever seen. Mr. Partridge didn’t see it as architecture, and hissed: “It’s just another attempt by the bloody Church of England to impose itself on people who’re not in the least bit interested.”

  Across the street, that three-story building was the City Hall. “Look quickly,” he said. “It’s sure to get bigger and grander in the blink of an eye.” He told Cormac that the Dutch had governed themselves from a tavern, but the Crown, in its majesty, preferred arcaded bricks. “Security!” Mr. Partridge said. “Order!” He laughed. “That’s what they mean by God and King!” Gazing at the City Hall, Cormac remembered the plain weathered bricks of Belfast.

  On their side of the street, a small crowd of men was gathered in the rain, cupping lit cigars or smoking clay pipes, talking in low tones, observing each new arrival at the City Hall. The arrivals were tall, well-dressed men with cold faces and the manners of command. A few emerged from horse-drawn carriages. Most arrived from side streets to the north. Cormac thought: If the Earl of Warren is in this town, he’s certain to come here.

  “Look at those faces,” Mr. Partridge said. “Enough to make you a revolutionist.”

  Then he sighed and so did Cormac. They were now too exhausted to do almost anything at all beyond finding the solace of a land-bound bed. They turned into Broad Street. Mr. Partridge paused at the entrance to the Black Horse, where he would stay until he found a shop for his press. They agreed to meet the next morning (after a good night’s sleep) and every day after that (if necessary), and then he pointed Cormac down the wide, crowded avenue toward Stone Street.

  “And don’t eat anything sold in the street,” he shouted in farewell. “That’ll kill you faster than the voyage.”

  41.

  Broad Street was unpaved, widening out as it moved away from Wall Street, with a shimmer of harbor light at its distant end. It was filled with even more human beings than Wall Street. As the rain eased into a fine mist, dozens of motionless carts and wagons were engulfed by customers, shouting and bargaining with the peddlers. Many peddlers were women with coarse, thick, plain faces, selling eels and venison, oysters and fowl, limes from the Caribbean and vegetables from Brooklyn. Cormac’s stomach coiled with hunger. Two soldiers on horseback rode by at a trot, splashing gluey mud around them, and some of the women yelled insults at their scarlet backs. Then there was a great surge and shouts, and Cormac was pushed aside, and suddenly a giant sow thumped in among them in a whirl of mud and fury, followed by six piglets and a large man shouting in what Cormac learned later was Dutch, and more men coming behind him. It was the biggest pig Cormac had ever seen, and probably the smartest, for it dodged and slithered and ran, eluding the men. It would not easily become bacon. The women shouted and cursed the pursuing men, clearly rooting for the sow. Cormac looked up the sloping street from which the sow had charged and saw more pigs, calmer, burying their snouts in mounds of garbage while a few young boys watched over them. He was too hungry to watch the end of the pursuit race, but like the peddler women, he was surely on the side of the pigs.

  His new clothes were soaked now, as he searched for Stone Street. No street was marked with a sign. Three Africans were coming up Broad Street, one after the other, with poles braced across their backs, carrying immense pails of fresh water.

  “Excuse me,” Cormac said. “I’m looking for Stone Street.”

  “Two block,” one of the black men said in a breathless voice. “Can’t miss.”

  “Thank you,” Cormac said. The African nodded in a surprised way and they moved on. Cormac passed more shops, a bank, a tobacconist, a button maker, and more carts, and finally reached Stone Street. The cobblestoned street sloped down toward the wooden stockade walls of Fort George. On the ramparts, he could see the shiny peaked caps of soldiers, slashes of scarlet, the points of bayonets, and a British flag dripping and limp from the rain. It was as Mr. Partridge had described it to him, the place where the governor lived, the center of colonial power in the province, cut off from the people as if its inhabitants feared them. But it told Cormac that he was truly here. He had crossed the fierce Atlantic and was here in New York.

  At the bottom of the street on the left stood an old Dutch brewery converted into a warehouse, and across the street was the tavern run by John Hughson.

  The house was three stories high with sloping eaves and a chimney at the back. There was a careless quality to it. Dark blue paint was peeling on the front door, showing a coat of pale blue underneath. The window frames were crooked. One wall sagged, as if it had been built before the earth below it had settled. A half-dozen loose slates were askew on the roof. On each side of the doorstep, patches of earth made for flowers were slick and bald and mudd
y. Pausing there, facing the tarnished brass knocker, Cormac remembered the straight true lines of their house in Ireland and flowers bursting from spring earth. All now ash.

  He knocked on the door. Waited a long while. Then knocked again.

  The door was jerked open, and he was startled by the woman who stood before him. Sharp, beaked nose. A slash of mouth. Gray, suspicious, disappointed eyes. There was a hint of rouge on her cheeks and a silver stud glistening in each earlobe. Her hair was pulled straight back. Her bosom was large and pillowy.

  “Is it a room you want?” she said.

  “Aye.”

  “Are you Irish?”

  “Aye.”

  “Are you Catholic?”

  “No.”

  “Three shillings a week, meals included. In advance. Do y’ have money?”

  “Aye.”

  “Come in,” she said, “and don’t be clompin’ them boots on our nice dry floors.”

  They were in a tight hallway, with coat hooks on the wall, a bench, a chipped porcelain umbrella stand, stairs leading to the next floor, and a closed blue door at the rear of the hall. She turned her back on him, and he noticed that she had wide hips and was wearing a scent.

  “Mary?” she called up the stairs. “Mary? Come down here, girl.” Then she turned to Cormac and scowled.

  “Take off the boots,” she said, “and the socks too, if you’re wearing any.”

  He sat on the bench, unlaced the boots, peeled off the socks. The odor of rain and feet and wet wool filled the tight hallway.

  The stairs creaked, and he looked up and saw a young woman’s bare calves first, and then the rest of her: dark brown hair, sullen eyes, full lips, small waist. She was wearing a loose blue sweater over a white blouse and a long dark blue skirt. She inspected him in a chilly way.

  “This is Mary Burton,” the older woman said to Cormac. “Your name is…?”