Never again would she trust any official route. And on New Year’s Eve, while soldiers and civilians were preparing to unleash candle bombs and rockets in the harbor, Clara invited us to some mysterious party—perhaps another Ethiopian Ball at which she might again wear a mask. But she offered not a single detail. We drove along the road to Greenwich in Gertrude’s new carriage, with the castrato himself at the reins, Clara and Gert inside with several nuns, who sat in tiers, and I myself on top of the carriage with another cargo of nuns.
We had no escort, no attachment of armed riders, and Cowboys still lurked at the perimeters of Manhattan. Clara would not permit me to carry a gun.
“Darling,” I said, shouting into the wind, “our trip is full of danger and folly.” I did not even know our destination.
Her headdress appeared outside the carriage door like some tapered blond pole. “God will provide.”
I cared not for her sudden interest in the Great Provider. I have found it a sad but necessary truth that in most instances the Provider does not provide. But I couldn’t argue with wind in my mouth.
And then, on a lonely fork in the road, near the King’s Bridge, at the very northern limit of Manhattan, we did confront a band of highwaymen—five lads on spotted horses, long hats over their eyes.
“Stand and deliver,” barked one of the highwayman, with a pistol in either hand.
I crouched above the coachman’s seat, while Feltrinelli raised his horsewhip.
“Deliver or die,” said the same lad, as he shot the whip out of Feltrinelli’s fist. And that’s when Clara descended from the carriage.
“I’ll deliver you all to the Divil,” she rasped, knocking the highwayman out of his saddle. He groveled on the ground, hat still on his head.
“Forgive us, Your Highness, but we did not recognize ye in the dark.”
“Damn you,” she shouted, knocking off the highwayman’s hat, “you were commissioned to protect this road, not rob people.”
The other four removed their hats—I had to lower my lantern or I would have failed to recognize that these highwayman were all black.
And now we had our escort, as Clara’s Cowboys rode behind our bus.
WE ARRIVED AT AN ABANDONED BREWERY on the Hudson, just below Westchester. We did not leave our bus abroad, but rode it into the brewery, which was of a prodigious size—vast as the Fields as far as I could tell. ’T was filled with monstrous wooden tubs that smelled of malt, yet this cave above the ground had fewer than twenty inhabitants, the last men and women of Little Africa, who had to live among wooden tubs until Clara could ferry them to some faraway land where slaveholders did not exist.
I did not see my old compatriot, Prince Paul. Clara couldn’t seem to account for him, said he might have died in battle. But no one could say whether he had been fighting against the redcoats or against us. Perhaps he’d escaped to some other far country and might reappear at a kinder period.
But I did recognize someone else—Black Sam of Fraunces’ Tavern, and he wasn’t in a publican’s coat. He wore a scarf of many colors, like some Joseph in the land of Egypt. And I had to wonder how many of Washington’s former agents were involved in ferrying Negroes out of York Island. We were in a most pernicious war. The Cowboys of Westchester, it seems, had gone into the profession of “bird catchers”—viz., the lucrative field of capturing runaways and returning them to their masters. But there were only black Cowboys in the barn tonight.
We all drank Madeira from dented tin cans. I did not pose questions to Sam. Let him have his treble life—innholder, spy, and ferryman for slaves.
We could hear the salute of cannons in the harbor, hear the whistle of candle bombs. Yet we still had a dozen minutes ’til ’84. And there was no celebration on all the island that was as sweet and bitter as ours, inside this old brewery at Manhattan’s edge. The castrato enchanted us, sang from Handel’s Samson. How could we not have wept over the blinded brute, Samson in chains before the prison-house in Gaza, whilst the Philistines celebrate his defeat? Yet as wondrous as Feltrinelli was in all his voices, ’t was Delilah’s that held us in thrall.
“Sun, moon, and stars are dark to me!” Samson says. And then Delilah, his betrayer-wife, bursts upon the scene with her “odorous perfume.” The blinded brute catches Delilah’s scent, calls her a hyena and a whore. She does not sway. “I know thy warbling charms,” she says. She wants to touch his hand. He promises to tear her limb from limb. She burns with “doubled raptures” but is condemned never to go near him again.
And all of us—slaves and nuns, pirates and princesses, inn-keepers and colored Cowboys—might have read our own fate in Samson’s bondage, but were still subdued by Delilah’s songs. Perhaps ’t was Feltrinelli’s art, or my own primitive wish to hurtle headlong into a tale of love, no matter how desperate. I was “love’s prisoner,” like Samson himself.
I began to brood over this vast echo chamber where the sounds of Delilah rocketed off ceiling and walls. And I pondered whether the commander in chief had been involved in building this secret barrack. Had he visited the brewery whilst he was in Manhattan, meeting with this same band of angels?
“Mother,” I asked a minute before the New Year, “has Mr. Washington ever been near this fork in the road?”
The other queen answered. Queen Clara was suddenly formal with me, formal as a mask. “Thou art a dunce, Johnny One-Eye. The slave quarters at Mount Vernon stretches half a mile. Why would Mr. Washington succor Manhattan runaways?”
“Out of some natural affection,” I said.
“Yes, he hath much of that,” my mother said, clutching her Purple Heart—and I knew in my bones that Washington had been here, in this curious cavern. ’T was his last secret mission of the war, to look after these Manhattan runaways, who had been caught in a most dire whirlwind.
And as the cannons boomed at midnight—to mark our first year of peace—Clara kissed me on the mouth.
“The gen’ral’s left us some particles of himself, Johnny. Ain’t that enough?”
She kissed Gertrude, all the nuns, Black Sam, the colored Cowboys, and the brewery slaves. And as she moved from face to face, dancing on the toes of her slippers like some fierce Delilah born of song, I realized one little thing.
The Divil himself would have to kill me before I’d ever leave Clara again.
Hercules
AN ENDING
Mount Vernon
NOVEMBER 1799
He had become a wild man. He would not dress for dinner. He wore an old ribbon round his neck—not even his body servant knew from whence it came. “’Tis against the Divil,” was all he would say. He would finger that particle of frayed silk oft with a tear in his eye. He battled his estate manager, even had to whip a man. Martha was ailing and seldom went abroad. But Washington would ride about his farm immediately upon a breakfast of strong tea and spend the morning and early afternoon on his own acreage.
His enemies claimed that years in office had robbed him of his vigor—that he was a slavering fool with a mouth of hippopotamus ivory teeth. But the general had more vigor now than half a century ago, when Virginia wags had dubbed him “the stallion of the Potomac.”
Would that he’d had a stallion’s blinding want! But he did have a want in him that measured slow, like a fist or canker under the heart. He would ride along the broken boundaries of his farm and feel that fist begin to press. He was not a man who mourned what might have been. He was a farmer who assisted in the birth of foals and did not shy away from horse blood on his hands.
But of a sudden he had a dream that pursued him across his waking hours so that he had little rest. A pair of angels perched on his bedpost. He could recognize one angel by its blond curls—Mistress Clara, whom he had not seen in sixteen years.
The second angel was a much deeper puzzle. It seemed to have no face—not a feature he could discern, not a mark. Was it man or woman, light-skinned or dark? It set him to worry ’til he reasoned that such a formless face was a paradox w
ith features that he himself might fill in. Was it Hercules, his mulatto cook, who had vanished from Philadelphia but two years ago? With Clara’s help, he presumed.
’Tis Hercules who had saved his presidence. He’d come up north with Hercules in the spring of ’89. Martha did not accompany him. She was gloomy about the prospect of living in a metropolis, where noise itself was a form of debris. And Hercules gave him a wild root to suck on during the journey.
’T was Hercules who prepared his meals at the presidential mansion on Cherry Street, Hercules who sipped Madeira with him after those maddening levees, where he had to sit with scoundrels who wanted a piece of his hide, Hercules who behaved as his scout. He kept hoping that Gertrude might appear on Cherry Street. And when she did not, he sent Hercules to spy on Holy Ground. Hercules came back with a mournful look. “Excellency, Madame is dead.”
His hand shivered while he drank Madeira. He canceled his next two levees. Why had the nuns not notified him of her illness?
“Excellency,” Hercules said like some ambassador to Holy Ground,
“Madame has been lying in her grave these past four years.”
Gertrude had suffered for six months with a hideous tumor upon her chest. He cursed Clara and Johnny One-Eye for a full ten minutes ’til he realized that he alone was at fault. He’d buried himself at Mount Vernon, locked away in the daily rhetoric of his farm, lived with horses rather than men.
Could he offer condolences four years after the fact? Ten times he equipped his chariot for the narrow ride between Cherry Street and Holy Ground, with Hercules himself in the coachman’s box, and ten times did he annul the voyage. There were affairs of state, urgent letters he had to write, etc., etc.—’t was the excuse of a scoundrel and a poltroon. He could not confront Gertrude’s family of nuns, could not revisit the remains of his own past. But he did visit Gertrude’s grave after months of machinations. That’s how long it took Hercules to find the site. She was buried in the backyard of a free school for colored children in the Out Ward. Clara herself was now mistress of the school, Johnny its headmaster. He immediately deposed an anonymous gift to the free school, without his signature or seal of the United States.
’T was ten years ago. And now he understood why the two angels had visited him—the second one, with its unfinished face, was his own unfinished affairs. Washington was a man who needed families during peace and war—and his war families pressed against his mind: Hamilton and the other young aides who broke through his melancholy; and Clara, Gert, and Johnny One-Eye, who were like his own secret face. That’s why these angels haunted him so, as if he’d had a second, unlived life that he himself had denied, and was now denying him, like some marvelous sweetwater well at which he would never drink.
Yet the angels had not deserted him. He would harangue the one with blond curls.
“Clara, why did ye steal my Hercules? I have prepared a will—freeing Hercules upon my death.”
And the angel answered, “Excellency, Hercules believed he did not have to wait for a will.”
’Tis reasonable, he thought, but he still began to cry.
“Ye gods, where are you, Johnny One-Eye?”
And whilst he had such conversations in his saddle, his farm-hands would look at the Old Man wearing a frayed ribbon round his neck and wonder if this here gen’ral had ever been bossman of the Continentals. A portion of him lay with his redhead in that boneyard behind the free school for coloreds. A commander in chief ought to know—a battlefield was just a boneyard wearing a disguise. He’d flee Mount Vernon if he could take his angels and live with them under a war tent.
Peacetime was but a sweet deception, a winter without black drummer boys—there was no end to revolution.
Author’s Note
I HAVE BEEN WRITING Johnny One-Eye ever since I was nine, a street kid in the South Bronx. It was there that I learned about George Washington, the father of our country, who seemed much more benevolent and forceful than my own father, and who had become by some curious sleight-of-hand the patron saint of our borough. I clung to all the myths surrounding George: his devotion to Martha, his wealthy, diminutive wife; his steadfastness as he crossed the Delaware on Christmas night, 1776, and caught the Hessians by the seat of their pants; his agony at Valley Forge as his solders marched without shoes and left a bloody trail in the snow.
Still, Washington did not seem to have a voice of his own. He was a brooding giant, given to long silences, and had to depend on his wartime amanuensis, Alexander Hamilton, to write his letters and lend a certain song to his thoughts. Hamilton also had a sway over me, since he was the favorite son of my Alma Mater, King’s (later Columbia) College; it was at Columbia that I first discovered Jonathan Swift, and realized that the world was a poor substitute for my own little library, wherein I could find Lemuel Gulliver lying on the ground with Lilliputians in his hair and chortle with nervous terror and delight.
I much preferred the eighteenth century, with its measured music and comic nightmare, to the psychological minefield of modern times, where some poor Gulliver in the land of six-inch men would be looked upon as a gigantic codpiece, akin to Kafka’s cockroach, and analyzed to death. And within my eighteenth century, I could play with the ghosts of Washington, Hamilton, and Benedict Arnold, the bravest warrior of the Revolution until he danced with the Devil at West Point and sold himself to the British.
And so I began to write about Arnold, hoping to turn his betrayal into some kind of demonic quest, not to aggrandize him or explain away his skulking around behind Washington’s back, but to seek out his music, his voice, with all its sulfur, its vanity, its greed. I could not find this music no matter how many books I read. After he bolted from West Point, leaving his wife and infant son behind, there was little but bluster in every stance he took.
But the more I read about Washington, the more I liked. He was, it seems, an alarmingly moral man, a farmer who had to transform himself into a guerrilla fighter and live without the least ambition or sense of personal gain for seven years. He was the last man on the last boat when his army retreated from Brooklyn Heights during the Battle of Long Island, one of the worst debacles of the war.
He often stumbled, made mistakes, was reckless on his white charger, riding right into enemy fire. He’d been in love with Sally Fairfax, a freckle-faced flirt, when he was a much younger man. He swooned over this wife of a neighbor, wrote her letters that he begged her to burn. I seized upon this bit of indiscretion, and it would serve as an instrument to crack open his secretive nature. Washington did have a “voice” and a welter of feelings under his dour demean. And I created a counterpart to Sally, another freckle face, Mrs. Gertrude Jennings, who emerges as the redheaded queen of Manhattan’s most spectacular bordello. Her illegitimate son, Johnny One-Eye, is in love with Clara, the most coveted harlot of Gertrude’s house. Johnny, Gertrude, and Clara—all fictional—become Washington’s wartime “family” and continue to haunt him for the rest of his life.
Occupied by the British during seven years of war, riven by a fire that nearly ruined it, Manhattan was indeed a maelstrom of poverty and wealth, where British officers dined on blancmange while the rest of the population scrounged for scraps of food. Across the East River, on Wallabout Bay, was a fleet of rotting ships where the British stored their prisoners; the most notorious of these ships was the Jersey.
Manhattan did have a red-light district called Holy Ground (on Robinson Street, which no longer exists), where Britain’s commander in chief, General Sir William Howe, passed a good portion of the time. He did have a concubine, Mrs. Loring, whose husband Joshua served as chief commissary of the prison ships. Benedict Arnold did have a beautiful young wife, Peggy Shippen, who may well have been the most successful British “sleeper” of the war.
Other characters are wholly invented, including Sir William’s servant, Mortimer, and Washington’s orderly, Sparks, though I like to imagine that both Mortimer and Sparks did have their own historical counterparts. Yet it trou
bled me to learn how hidden African-Americans were during the Revolution. There was a lot of sound and fury about those slaves who joined the British side as sappers and stevedores, but much less is known about black Americans who composed one-quarter of the Continental Army by the end of the war. Some were sappers and cooks, others fought beside white troops, and still others had their own regiment, the First Rhode Islanders, chosen to take part in one of the very last skirmishes of the war. This was soon forgotten, or at least left out of our history books.
But Johnny One-Eye is both our narrator and “remembrancer” of the Revolution. He grew up on Robinson Street among a little nation of prostitutes, half of whom were black. When he’s dumped into a potato bin by Washington’s spymaster, Malcolm Treat (another fictional character), he comes out with black dust on his face and is called “Son of Ham.”
He is no Son of Ham. He’s a double agent wandering across the landscape, a picaro who befriends “Black Dick” Howe, commander of the British fleet, saves the life of Benedict Arnold, and tells children’s tales to George Washington, while reimagining the Revolution with his own “Divilish” rhythms and the infernal logic of an eighteenth-century child.
—Jerome Charyn
Paris, March 15, 2007
About the Author
Jerome Charyn’s most recent novel, The Green Lantern, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction. His work has been translated into seventeen languages, including Polish, Finnish, Korean, and Greek. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in New York and Paris, where he teaches film theory at the American University.
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