by Pete Hamill
“I don’t know what that means. To truly live.”
Kongo paused again, his eyes wandering to the walls of the cave, to the blackness at the far end.
“To find work that you love, and work harder than other men. To learn the languages of the earth, and love the sounds of the words and the things they describe. To love food and music and drink. Fully love them. To love weather, and storms, and the smell of rain. To love heat. To love cold. To love sleep and dreams. To love the newness of each day.”
He stared at his hands.
“To love women. To pleasure them. To make them laugh. To be foolish for them. To protect them. To respect them. To listen to them.” He paused. “They are the lifegivers. To live is to love them….”
He picked up some doubt in Cormac’s eyes, a kind of smiling uncertainty.
“You will see,” he said. “The proof will be in your living.”
Cormac hesitated, intimidated by Kongo’s seriousness.
“There are only two ways to find release,” he said, and sighed.
“How?”
He closed his eyes and his brow tightened, as if he were receiving a message.
“I told you the first. If you leave this island, then you will die, and be forever banished from the Otherworld.” He smiled in a thin way. “But someday, if you choose, there can be an end, after all your living.”
He folded his arms across his chest, gazed at the walls of the cave.
“You will meet a dark-skinned woman,” he said. “Her body will be adorned with spirals. You will love her. She will love you. You will lie down with her here, in this place, you will enter her in this deep part of the granite island, and then, only then, if you wish, will you be able to pass to the Otherworld.”
A dark-skinned woman marked by spirals. So said the babalawo. The prince of spirits. The shaman. He gestured to a pile of Cormac’s clothes, dry and clean of blood. Cormac began to dress. Remembering their flight from death, the mingled blood, the sensation of riding Thunder through the night.
“The great horse is gone,” Kongo said, as if reading the younger man’s mind. “I sent him back. Now you must go on foot. As must I.”
“We can go together, Kongo.”
“No, I must go home now. There’s a ship that will take me to Africa. Leaving from Boston, and I must go there. A privateer.” He smiled. “It’s all arranged. In this country, money makes everything possible.”
Cormac said, trying to sound casual, “What is happening in the city?”
Kongo breathed deeply.
“The rebellion is crushed. The Spaniards didn’t come to the harbor. The English burned or hanged eighteen Africans and four Irish. They enjoy killing when they think their God has given a blessing…. But it was not a failure, just a defeat.” He said this in a tone edged with doubt but empty of bitterness. “It will live in the minds of all who saw it, and victory will come later.” He stared directly at Cormac. “Here. In all places.”
“Was Mary Burton the informer?”
“Yes.” He sighed. “The major one, but not the only one.”
“Where is she?”
“Gone. But she is being tracked.”
“Don’t kill her,” Cormac said.
Kongo shook his head as if the trackers had no choice.
“She wanted to be free,” Cormac said. “Like you and all your people. She might be carrying a child and wanted the child to be free too.”
“Yah, and she caused much death.”
With that, he embraced Cormac and kissed his brow. “Remember: To live—you must live,” he said. “I will see you again. That I promise.”
He turned and walked quickly into the darkness, to follow the forest trails to the sea trails that would take him home.
FIVE
Revolutions
Those cart loads of old charnel ashes, scales and splints of mouldy bones,
Once living men—once resolute courage, aspiration, strength, The stepping stones to thee to-day and here, America.
—WALT WHITMAN, “LEAVES OF GRASS,” 1891–92
65.
They waited in the dark with the ridge of forest at their backs and Kip’s Bay before them. Cormac moved among them, his own face as black as theirs, skin stained with ink. He nodded at Bantu, who was stocky and muscled and cradling a smoothbore musket.
“Maybe they don’t come,” Bantu said, speaking English with an Ashanti accent.
“They’ll come,” Cormac said.
“Good,” Bantu said. “I kill them and be happy.”
They squatted together for a while, listening for sounds, staring at the dull waters of the East River. All around them in the cool September night there were other soldiers, thousands of them, it was said, being very still, not smoking, all waiting. But here they only cared for one another: the black patrol. Six of them including Cormac, who had recruited them in the months before the beginning of the war. Here beside him was Bantu. Over to the right were Silver and Aaron, lean and black as night, deadly with short swords and long-bore rifles. Below him on the slope, screened by dense shrubs, were Big Michael and Carlito. Cormac went from man to man, whispering the words that had brought them there, the most important of which was “freedom.”
“We have to smash them here,” he whispered to Carlito. “After Brooklyn, we have to hurt them, let them know they will pay a terrible price.”
“Donde están?” Carlito said in Spanish that had been driven into him like nails on the sugar plantations of Cuba. “Where are they?”
“Out there,” Cormac said. “Brooklyn.”
The disaster in Brooklyn haunted all of them. Cormac hadn’t fought in Brooklyn; he could not leave Manhattan, even for a cause greater than himself. So while the armies faced each other on the fields of Brooklyn, the black patrol had moved through the lower city, setting small fires as diversions, hoping to panic the English, to draw redcoats away from the field of battle. Their work did Washington no good. The battle of Brooklyn was, by all reports, a rout. Soldiers broke and ran. Fifteen hundred Americans were killed, blown apart by artillery, shredded by rifle fire and bayonets, and more than two thousand captured. The redcoats swept the field, and Washington led the survivors down to the river and into boats to fight again on another day in Manhattan.
“We will beat them here,” Carlito said. “Then we go back to Brooklyn.”
“First we must beat them here, ’mano.”
Silver and Aaron dozed against the trunk of a giant oak tree, swords in hand, rifles on their laps. They smiled when they saw Cormac. All glanced at the river.
“They must be praying,” Silver said in Yoruba.
“Or toasting the King,” Cormac said.
Aaron smiled. “Foog the King.”
“And all his foogin’ court,” Silver said, and laughed.
Alone, alert to sounds in the forest and echoes from the river, Cormac closed his eyes and leaned back against a tree. They had been waiting now for two days for the force that Washington was certain would come to this cove along the river. He remembered the first time he saw Washington, bending under a lintel to enter a smoky room on Beaver Street, full of conspirators. He was even larger than Cormac had imagined from the descriptions of others; in every room he ever entered, Washington was the tallest man. Six-foot-four at least, with broad shoulders, the large ass of a horseman, huge hands, large booted feet. His skin was pockmarked. His cold blue eyes had an odd Oriental cast, the eyelids slanting upward. His nose was hawked, long, the taut skin rosy from the sun, the nostrils quivering as if trying to sniff out the person who would betray him, betray them all. While Cormac picked up that thought, asking himself: Which of them, in this room packed with men, was Mary Burton?
Now, remembering that first sight of Washington on the eve of the war, hearing again his laconic words about the coming struggle, the need for all of them to take arms and if necessary sacrifice their lives in order to be free, he wondered if Mary Burton was still alive. In those months in 174
1, she had given her names to the inquisitors, adding new ones as she went along, and then had vanished. He had never heard from her again. She would now be fifty-one, ancient in these colonies of the young. Across the decades, as he had eased back into New York and returned to the print shop, he hoped he would find one morning a crudely written note from her, telling him she was alive, telling him about the child. He placed several blind advertisements in newspapers. Mary, please write, C. But immediately thought the effort was useless, since she could barely read and almost surely didn’t care about anyone in New York. There were no replies. She was gone. As Kongo was gone. As Quaco and his woman were gone.
And I am here, he thought, obeying the command to live by taking lives, killing strangers. He looked like the same seventeen-year-old who had learned the printing trade in a shop on Cortlandt Street. The same young man who had buried Mr. Partridge after the cholera took him in 1753, while he raved about the coming republic of America. The same young man who had sold the print shop to a competitor and gone to work at the John Street Theater to be instructed in the use of masks and dyes and the postures of disguise. In the mirror he was that same young man. The one who last saw Kongo in a cave in Inwood, and learned across the years that the words he spoke to Cormac there were true. He was alive and young while everyone else his age was old or dead.
“They come,” Bantu said.
They arrived at dawn in eighty-four six-oared longboats, each carrying a dozen men. The English wore red and the Hessians wore blue. The guns of the frigates roared. All around them, the earth exploded with fire and metal. Cormac heard a young voice screaming in the dark: “Oh, Ma, oh, Ma, help me, Ma.”
The black patrol waited, saving ball and shot. They could hear scrambling in the woods behind them, men panting. A bony farm boy came up from the river’s edge, his gun as useless as a reed, yelling, “Run, run, there’s thousands of them.” Bantu shot him and picked up his rifle.
The naval barrage was ferocious. Cormac didn’t need to tell the black patrol to lie flat, to use tree trunks as shields. Now trees were falling, splintered by cannon shot, and more young men were running past them in the dark.
“Don’t shoot them!” Cormac shouted. “Let them assemble in the rear!”
Now they saw four Hessians lumbering up the hill from the river’s edge. They waited. Then killed them all. Cormac felt nothing. They come to kill us, he thought, and so we kill them.
As the sun struggled to rise in Brooklyn, they could see Kip’s Bay more clearly, and the steady movement of empty longboats returning for more soldiers and packed longboats rowing toward the shore. To the left, Cormac glimpsed a long blur of scarlet. He gestured to Bantu, pointing to the rear, then went down and told the others. Big Michael didn’t want to retreat.
“I come to kill these bastards,” he said. “Let me kill them.”
“We will,” Cormac said. “Come.”
“Where we go, man?”
“The rock pile.”
They eased around in the darkness in a single file, glancing behind them at the blue-and-scarlet lines. The cannon kept exploding the earth and felling trees, and new troops of the Crown chose to pause until the fierce barrage had ended. The six men of the black patrol found their way to a cluster of jagged boulders at the crest of a hill. Now they could see the Americans in flight: farm boys and city lads, brave while marching, panicky in the face of cannon and bayonets. It was one thing to wave Common Sense on the streets or join the mob that toppled the statue of George III in the Bowling Green; it was another thing to face English guns. The young Americans dropped their ancient flintlocks and old fowling guns, their dragoon pistols and close-bore rifles. They abandoned a few pieces of cannon. They left tents for the invaders. They were in full flight.
“Don’t show yourselves!” Cormac told the others. “And don’t shoot our own lads. Hold as long as you can.”
They knew that the six of them would have to cover the retreat of thousands. Cormac thought: It’s absurd. The amateurs are running, and the professionals are coming. But we have to stop them, for at least an hour. And so they waited, huddled down, peering at the assembled scarlet-and-blue masses below them. Off to the left, smoke had begun to rise from a fire on the forest floor. Cormac thought: Good. That will give us some cover, a dark screen.
Then two columns began climbing the slope, about twenty yards apart.
“Wait,” Cormac said.
The climbing men were heavy with packs and rifles.
“Wait,” Cormac said.
A lanky Hessian paused, looked behind him, then squinted at the drifting smoke. He took a deep breath, said something to the men behind him, and resumed the climb.
“Wait,” Cormac whispered.
A fat, sweaty Englishman led his column into their view on the right. He mopped his brow with the sleeve of his free hand. In the other hand he held a rifle.
“Now,” Cormac said.
The air exploded as they poured fire on the troops below. Men fell like broken dolls, face forward or whipped to the side. A few knelt to fire and were knocked over. Cormac aimed at one Englishman but then saw his face explode from a shot by Big Michael.
“Gone down,” Big Michael exulted, starting to rise. “He gone down.”
Then Big Michael was dead. A ball tore open his chest, and he sagged and went down with one leg twisted under him. The black patrol kept firing, and saw the blue and scarlet uniforms turning to find cover. Cormac saw a beplumed officer and shot him between the shoulder blades. Then he turned to the others.
“Toward the smoke,” Cormac said.
They fired another volley and then ran, one at a time, squatting low, spaced apart, toward the screen of smoke, leaving Big Michael where he’d fallen. Bullets and balls whizzed around them and pinged off stone. Then they were in the smoke.
So were hundreds of the retreating Americans, coughing, gasping, climbing, falling, desperate to reach the crest of the hill and the plain beyond, all of them beaten without firing a shot. Cormac and Bantu, Silver and Aaron and Carlito aligned themselves in a picket, ten feet apart, and raised hands to break up the panic.
“Stop running!” Cormac shouted. “Stop or we’ll shoot you for desertion!”
One brawny blond-haired man lowered his rifle to shoot his way out. Carlito killed him.
“Hold this ground,” Cormac yelled at the deserters. “Face them and fight them!”
They ignored him and ran to the side or plunged back down the slope, hands in the air, to surrender. He heard shots crackling below and knew the Crown forces were killing those who wanted to surrender.
And then through the smoke and noise, they saw Washington. He was high on a sorrel horse, waving a sword in his right hand, his eyes ablaze, his mouth a tight slash.
“Are you soldiers or mice?” he shouted. “What do you call yourselves?”
He swung the sword at one fleeing man and missed, and then glanced at Cormac and the blacks and then peered down the slope at the advancing blue and red uniforms. He paused, and then started forward. Into the guns. It was as if he wanted to be shot down to end his shame.
Cormac grabbed the reins of Washington’s horse and wrenched with all his strength and turned the horse.
“Stop, you stupid bastard!” Cormac screamed.
“Unhand this horse!”
“We need you alive, God damn you,” Cormac said, and hauled the horse around and pointed him west. Bantu ran up and slapped the horse hard on the haunch, and away he went, carrying the general through the trees.
Silver and Aaron and Carlito stood laughing, bumping one another’s shoulders. Then they turned, backing up, and killed more men.
66.
In the vast camp in Harlem Heights, Cormac was escorted to Washington’s tent. Almost five thousand men were sprawled around the camp, cleaning guns under a dim moon, soothing horses, eating at campfires. A few were singing. Many were sleeping. Two lieutenants flanked Cormac as if he were a prisoner.
The gen
eral was seated in a camp chair, examining his gleaming fingernails. An empty chair faced him. His cocked hat was on a table, with gloves folded neatly on its crest, and the buttonholes of his frock coat were embroidered. The man took care about the way he dressed. Too much care, Cormac thought. Behind Washington was the famous six-and-a-half-foot-long cot that was carried with him everywhere. A coal fire burned in a stove. Maps were spread on a table, along with a few plates and a bottle of wine. He didn’t look up.
“You can leave, gentlemen,” he said to the officers. They stepped outside.
Washington turned over his large hands and looked at his knuckles.
“You’re the man who jerked my horse?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know that I’m the commanding officer of this army?” “Yes, sir.”
Washington stood up as if stabbed, the hands turning into fists, the eyes blazing.
“Why did you do such a goddamned thing?”
“To keep you from being killed, sir.”
“That’s for me to decide, God damn it. And how could you be sure I would die? How could you be sure that they would not run?”
“You’re one man, General. One ball could kill you. One of my men—”
“They can’t kill me!”
“They can kill anyone they can shoot, General.”
Washington snorted. He turned, flexing his hands, rolling his shoulders. He was breathing hard, struggling for control.
“What’s your name?”
“Cormac O’Connor.”
“Irish, of course.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Catholic?”
“No.”
He paused, breathing more normally now.
“How many men did you kill today?”
“Our patrol killed about thirty.”
“Your patrol? What patrol?”
“The black patrol, sir. There’s me and five blacks. One of them was killed today. We’d like to go in tomorrow, sir, and bring out his body.”
