Forever

by Pete Hamill

  Cormac and the patrol moved separately north. Then, at the bottom of the Common, he stood very still and saw flames rising in the immense steeple of Trinity Church. The tallest building in New York. The symbol of English domination. The flames burned on the surface. They burned inside the church. The tongues of the fire were pointed toward New Jersey, blowing hard, and were jumping roof to roof all the way to Barclay Street, somehow missing St. Paul’s Chapel. But he could not stop himself from gazing at Trinity. That was not one of their targets. And now the flames were eating at it. The steeple wobbled, then gave off a noise like an immense complaint and fell straight down in a giant roar. The burning pinnacle of the steeple lay on its side in the graveyard, like a corpse. Screams of awe filled the air. He remembered the way, on an afternoon thirty-five years earlier, Diamond had been burned on the edge of this Common, and the way John Hughson’s corpse had turned black and Sandy’s turned white, and the way the Rev. Clifford had grasped at his crotch in a delirium of death.

  It was time to go. He hurried to the hill above the Collect, where the Africans waited. The sky to the south was as bright now as at noon, and they could see tongues of flame rising from many houses below Wall Street.

  “Let them sleep in snow,” Bantu said.

  When the long night was over, 407 houses had been reduced to smoking rubble. Now it was the Tories’ turn to trudge north to their estates or to board ships for England. And the redcoats came down upon the Americans with all of their fury. Every young man was a suspect. Men with histories in the Sons of Liberty were arrested and questioned and executed by firing squads. Others were crammed into the Bridewell prison, built upon the grass of the Common. Six men were hanged from the ancient gibbets on the hill above the Collect. Others were rounded up and press-ganged into dousing water on the smoldering rubble of the 407 ruined houses. All events were canceled at the John Street Theater. There were no more tinkling dinner parties. Soldiers, hard Tories, and Americans settled in for a long occupation.

  Cormac and the black patrol found shelter in the swamp beyond the Collect, in an old cabin shrouded by tangled vines and dense thickets. Each day, one of them would slip into the town, to find food, to pick up news and gather information about future targets. They learned that the English were making concessions to the Africans now. They didn’t call them concessions. They called them pledges. But the message was simple: If the Africans swore loyalty to the Crown, if they defended their masters, they would be freed at the end of the war.

  “Do you believe them?” Cormac asked Bantu one cold night in the swamp.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You take freedom. Nobody give it to you.”

  Silver said: “But some Africa people listen. They want to believe. You tell them, this is a trick. They say nothing. But they thinkin’ ’bout it, all sure.”

  “They think Washington is finish,” Carlito said. “They think it be over soon, so they listen, they listen.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we keep fighting,” Bantu said.

  On another early morning, after a night spent cutting ditches through a main road to harass coach traffic, Cormac asked them what they would do when they were free.

  “Farm,” said Aaron. “With my woman, my children. Farm up in the island. Grow potato and yam. Have chickens to sell. Milk… Send my boys to school. And girls too, ef I have girls.”

  “Open a shop down by Wall Street,” said Silver. “Make all kinds of leather stuff, belts and shoes and cases, all leather things. Live upstairs. Drink rum on Saturday night. Eat turkey on Sunday.”

  Carlito said nothing. He shrugged as if the idea were too far in the remote future.

  “Go home,” Bantu said. “Go find my family. See who lives, who died.”

  He told about how he’d been captured with a net when he was fifteen by a search party from another tribe, how he was turned over to Arabs and herded in shackles to a fort on the coast, how English traders came to change cowrie shells and rum and guns for the Africans penned in the fort.

  “I don’t want to kill people,” he said. “Just find my sisters, my boy brother, and say prayers for my father, and then bring them here, all the people that’s alive.”

  None of them wanted to return forever to Africa. They didn’t want to live in a land where human beings were trapped like animals and then sold to others. Africa was a bitter memory. They wanted to live out their lives in America.

  “This, my country,” Bantu said, digging hands into the loamy earth that made the floor of the shack. “This.”

  One night, Cormac asked the men to vote for their leader. He had recruited them, but that didn’t make him their leader for all the days of their lives. In this army, this revolutionary army, they should choose. After all, they called themselves the black patrol and Cormac was white. The blacks should make the choice. They seemed surprised at this suggestion from Cormac, and asked for time to discuss it. He felt certain they would choose Bantu. Instead, after huddling together outside the shack for about ten minutes, they returned to face Cormac.

  “We all the leader,” Silver said. “You die, Bantu the leader. Bantu die, Aaron the leader. Aaron die, Carlito the leader. Carlito die—”

  “Then we fucked,” Bantu said, and laughed. “Then some god the leader.”

  They all laughed then and hugged one another. But Bantu slowly grew somber.

  “We better die together,” he said.

  For weeks, scavengers worked the mounds of ruined houses. Redcoats did the work for the first few weeks, finding pewter and scorched paintings and clothes for men and women and saddles and bottles of wine in cellars. All were taken to Fort George, where they could be awarded to friends, or passed through merchants to the empty slavers that were still heading for Africa. The later scavengers were Americans, including some loyal to the Crown, searching for remnants of their lives, or secret rebels looking for hunks of old iron, gnarled candelabra, anything that could be melted down to make ammunition. Sometimes at night, as scavengers worked the cold piles, they could hear the uilleann pipes, mournful and defiant.

  The English authorities did not clear the site of the most destructive fire in the history of their colonies. They left the steeple of Trinity lying on its side. They did not replace the ruined houses. They left the rubble as a kind of monument. One that said, Here is what your Revolution brings you: destruction and rubble. Choose sides now.

  The rich were gone, but the poor now gathered on the fringes of the ruined streets in tents made of old sailcloth, the place soon named Canvastown. They killed off the pigs and ate them. They stole apples and potatoes from abandoned farms and kept pots simmering on fires through the cold nights. On his forays into town, sometimes dressed as a peddler, sometimes hobbled by age, Cormac saw that the town was filling with predators. Sharpers from London bargained for goods that could be sold in Jamaica or Charleston or even back in England. Slavers offered good prices for Swedish ingots, chintz, Italian glass, brass kettles, knives and axes and guns. There was no money in Africa, other than cowrie shells; things were the currency of slavery. Men and women from Canvastown stole to supply the market, while the better-off families, their fortunes shrinking, sold off their own small treasures to the slavers, who could turn things into purchased humans.

  The gray weather added to the sullen sense of corruption. Snow fell, blanketing the town, then melted, turned black, then fell again. The tents of Canvastown sagged under the weight of snow, and sometimes collapsed, and people were found frozen on the streets. Lone chimneys rose toward Heaven from the white mounds of the ruined town like the masts of ghost ships.

  They received news in whispered conversations, in messages delivered by old men and Africans and a few women. Washington was losing every battle, off in New Jersey and in Pennsylvania, but he was not defeated. As long as he remained alive, the Revolution lived. The English were working hard to control Manhattan, which was the headquarters of the entire enterp
rise. They were mapping the island. In the spring, when the frost went out of the trees, they would begin clearing the island of its ambush lanes. The Americans continued refining their own operations. They had a system of couriers now, taking information to Washington’s small and battered army. They exercised their own rough justice against informers. A dirk in the heart. A rope tied around a neck.

  The black patrol destroyed seventeen bridges. It fired two more warehouses. One night, Bantu and Aaron waited patiently in the darkness on South Street and killed a London slave merchant who was to leave at dawn for Newport. Bantu placed a cowrie shell in the dead man’s mouth.

  They moved when instinct told them to move. One night, while Cormac and Bantu, Aaron and Silver packed their things for a shift to a new place, the English arrived, passing through the tangled paths of the swamp as if they had a map. A soldier from Leeds cut Carlito’s throat where he stood watch. Then an officer bellowed at the shack.

  “Hallo, in there,” he said. “We know you’re there, and it’s best you surrender.”

  Bantu snuffed the candle with his fingers. They listened tensely to the officer’s voice.

  “You’re to walk out with your hands above your heads. You are to lie facedown on the ground. Any sign of a weapon will be a sign of hostility, and you’ll be killed.”

  Cormac and Bantu glanced at each other, Aaron and Silver inhaled and then sighed.

  Then they rushed out the door, firing guns, Cormac wielding the sword. The redcoats were surprised. Two fell dead. Then another, and the black patrol drove a wedge into their line. For a long moment, men screamed and cursed and shouted. Jesus Christ, Cormac thought, there must be a hundred of them. He slashed and swung and pivoted and slashed again. Men cried in pain.

  He saw Bantu’s chest explode. He saw the front of Aaron’s face vanish. He turned for Silver, and then his own head exploded in high white pain. His face fell into the wet earth. He could hear the howl of a wolf. Then he was gone.

  68.

  He woke up in a windowless cell in the Bridewell prison. Packed tightly with other men, who told him that almost eight hundred of them were now jailed on three floors. His head was splitting with pain, the back of his skull soft to his touch. The sword, he thought. They have my father’s sword. He wanted to cry for its loss but didn’t. He told himself: You will live through this. He told himself: Someday you will find the sword again. Now, he told himself, you must live.

  He gazed around at faces filthy and faces haggard, then sat very still with his back against the rough wall. Oh, Bantu, you American warrior. Oh, Silver. Oh, Aaron. I will see you in the Other-world. Carlito: If you have escaped, I will see you in New York.

  He began to examine his cage, taught by some of the others. The Bridewell stood beside the four-story poorhouse, which was flanked on its other side by the old town jail. All windows were barred but were open to the cold. Down below street level was a basement used as a dungeon for torture or executions. But men died on all the other floors of the Bridewell, stinking of shit and sickness, hunger and fever and British corruption. Smallpox took many of them, and cholera too (for nobody there was allowed to wash), and many starved. The rations were meager, bits of gristly pork, pieces of biscuit, some rice, peas, butter, a day’s normal food stretched over three, and some days no food at all. There were no blacks in this jail; they were being kept in a place called the Old Sugar Factory. But Cormac saw men laid here upon the floor at night, crushed against one another, trying to keep warm; and in the morning they counted the corpses, always one, but sometimes two or three, which were hauled away and dumped in the Negroes Burial Ground, four or five to a single grave, a burial intended to be an insult. And Cormac thought: Mr. Partridge, in his own sad grave, has plenty of republican company now.

  Cormac was always hungry, always mildly sick, but while others died, he lived on. Month after punishing month. And thought himself lucky. At least they had not moved him beyond Manhattan to the prison ships in Wallabout Bay, for he would surely have died before being slammed in the fetid holds. I must stay here, he thought, stay in this Manhattan, this piece of the world defined for me by Kongo when he passed me the gift. Manhattan is my jail.

  And in the jail, time was suspended. There were no calendars, no newspapers, as days turned into weeks and then into months. Men scratched lines into the walls with nails, trying to keep count, but lost the sums to fever and injury. They asked new arrivals what month it was, what day, what year.

  The Bridewell was soon called by the prisoners the Bribewell. Every guard was corrupt. Everything forbidden was available for a price, except weapons. The guards looked the other way when relatives smuggled food, tobacco, or cash to prisoners. They knew the contraband was the currency of the prison, which was to say it helped them to earn a living. But Cormac had no relatives. And all his friends were dead.

  On the western side of Broadway, trailing away to the Hudson, there were rows of shabby two-story houses, and from a few high windows of the Bridewell, the prisoners could see the Holy Ground, where the whores worked at their bitter trade. One chubby woman would emerge at dusk and fondle her naked breasts and place a hand between her chubby thighs while dying men masturbated in their cells; it was a whore’s version of charity. Or of a sweet American solidarity. Cormac too longed for a woman, and then erased that possibility with images of the dead and the dying. Of Bantu caressing a cub. Of Aaron longing for a home.

  The whores’ numbers were swollen by the arrival of two thousand Liverpool women sent to provide comfort to the British soldiery. They were housed in the older homes of Tories who had fled. But Cormac knew, from watching, from words spoken by agents before his capture, from other prisoners, that the whores were, in fact, neutral. They serviced English soldiers and secret American patriots, gathering money for themselves and intelligence for both sides. Whores, Cormac knew, were always citizens of the country of money. But even in the Bridewell, with his skin scabbed by sores, his bones protruding from his eroded flesh, his hair crawling with lice, he soon discovered that he could not escape his past.

  One morning a new prisoner passed him a sheet from a smuggled newspaper, and Cormac began to read every line. If there was a report about the war, it must have been on another page. On this page, there were items about shipping, and a disease without a name that was infecting North African ports, and then some social notes. Down at the bottom of the social notes, a name caught his eyes.

  LADY WARREN SAILS

  It said:

  Lady Warren of Carrickfergus has sailed for Charleston on the Intrepid. She was in New York visiting her son, who is serving with the Crown forces. From Charleston, she will return to her estate in Ireland.

  Lady Warren of Carrickfergus.

  Bridget Riley.

  Visiting her son.

  It never ends, Cormac thought.

  It never fecking ends.

  The commander of the Bridewell was a major named William Cunningham. The older prisoners included a victualer named Anderson, who knew how Cunningham worked.

  “He pockets half the money allowed for food and sends it home by courier,” Anderson said. “He doesn’t give a fiddler’s feck if we starve to death on half rations, and they are starvin’ right now on them ships in the Wallabout. He wants the war to last forever, so he can bank enough to join the gentry.”

  Cunningham didn’t come often to see the victims of his corruption. But eight months into Cormac’s stay in the Bridewell, he looked up to see Cunningham’s new second-in-command. He was walking beyond the bars down a safe corridor beside Cunningham.

  The son of the Earl of Warren and Bridget Riley. His hair was lighter, with highlights of red, but otherwise he could have been a twin of the earl in that year when he stepped from the black coach to look upon the broken body of Rebecca Carson lying in the mud.

  69.

  They called him Tony Warren. He worked under Cunningham, but in all the small ways, Cunningham deferred to his noble blood. Together, they h
elped men die. The prisoners died of typhus. Died of floggings. Died of hunger. Died of tuberculosis. Died of cholera. Died because William Cunningham, the provost marshal, stole half the ration money while Tony Warren shrugged and cocked an eyebrow and chuckled.

  All the prisoners knew the system and how it worked. They heard from new arrivals how Cunningham’s men starved and flogged and tortured the prisoners on the ships across the river on the Brooklyn side, over in Wallabout Bay. Eleven thousand of them were packed in those ships that never sailed. The soldiers tossed the bodies into the tides or shoved them into the mudflats, where the shrouds soon rotted and American bones could be seen at low tide. His men tortured the Africans who paid for their revolt in the Old Sugar Factory. In the Bridewell, Cunningham executed those he thought were Obnoxious Persons and those who were Cormac’s old comrades in the Sons of Liberty, their activities revealed by men who took the King’s shilling. A man could die for refusing to bow or defer to some red-coated dandy. A man could die for reading Thomas Paine or the secret newspapers of the Revolution. Trials were not necessary. Suspicion was enough. The killing took place at night, against the walls of the army barracks, all doors ordered shut in the neighboring houses of the Holy Ground, all windows sealed, all lights extinguished, and the prisoners were brought, blindfolded and gagged, and walked up the steps of the scaffold. The rope was attached. And then they were dropped into permanent darkness.

  Cormac vowed to remember the names of the dead: Guinness and Sterling, Hewitt and Roberts, Arundel and Dubois, Frankie Hannigan and Sammy Payne. Good men and true, he thought, even with (or because of) the flesh hanging loose and gray on their brave bones, wrapped in flea-ridden blankets, and to the end refusing everything: refusing collaboration, refusing deferential manners, refusing to bow to any king. On the night of the Fourth of July in 1780, the prisoners roared defiance in the Bridewell, and sang the liberty songs, and cursed the King. Cunningham came himself that night, with Tony Warren behind him, their faces dark with fury, their leather boots clacking on the stone floors. They chose the men they wanted, Guinness and Sterling, Hewitt and Roberts, Arundel and Dubois among them, and then called on the services of Bloodstone, the army blacksmith. He was carrying a twenty-pound hammer. They laid each man flat upon the floor for all to see and then Bloodstone smashed their knees and elbows. They screamed and screamed and screamed.