The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor

by Peter Abrahams

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that my dad’s being so nice to my mom lately. They’re getting along like I’ve never seen. They shared a bottle of champagne last night, and he had flowers delivered first thing this morning.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Oh? Just oh?”

  “I meant, that’s nice.”

  “My mom’s actually up and having breakfast at this very moment. Granola with banana slices!”

  “What’s strange about that?”

  “She never eats breakfast, hardly eats at all.”

  I glanced at Ashanti. No sign of the brooding expression that so often lurked beneath the surface of her eyes. She was happy today, plain and simple. So what was I supposed to do with this data point grenade I had in my possession? Keep the pin in, Robbie. If grenades had pins: not my area of expertise. And what if I, too, was misinterpreting? Finding a way through a problem like this: also not my area of expertise. Did I even have an area of expertise, a single one? None came to mind.

  • • •

  My mom was a lover of museums, so I’d visited lots of them, all over the five boroughs, including the Brooklyn Museum, which Ashanti and I entered as soon as the doors opened. We paid the suggested donation for students with valid ID and went up the Arts of the Americas floor, where I’d never been.

  “What would Silas do about the suggested donation thing?” I said as we rode the elevator.

  “He’d suggest zero,” Ashanti said.

  We walked past a bunch of Native American exhibits, didn’t see Mr. Wilders; there was no one around but a tired-looking security guard pacing her way to the end of the hall and back. We gazed at a picture of a shirtless Plains Indian warrior mounted on his horse. He gazed at something in the far-off distance.

  “We ground them up, but good,” Ashanti said.

  “We?”

  “Actually, you. My ancestors were getting ground up, too.”

  “On your father’s side?” I said.

  “No,” Ashanti said. “Not on my father’s side.” She took a deep breath, blew it out through her nose. “All this stupid history. What are we supposed to do with it? You can’t fix the past. Like basketball—you miss the free throw, and that’s that. Play in the now.”

  We said “play in the now” together. It was a favorite motto of our coach, Ms. Kleinberg, who had a sweet and deadly jumper and had starred for Dartmouth.

  “Thatcha!”

  “Comin’ atcha!”

  We high-fived. The security guard came a few steps in our direction, and called, “Help you with something?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  We moved away. “I think she missed the irony part,” Ashanti said quietly. There were two ways of doing the Thatcha-comin’-atcha thing, straight up and ironic. Ashanti and I were the ironic types. The kids on the student council did it straight up.

  “Does play in the now mean you should actually forget about history?” I said.

  “Sounds wrong,” said Ashanti.

  We came to the Canarsee exhibit. I kind of remembered something about the Canarsees, maybe that they were living in Brooklyn and Manhattan when the Dutch first arrived, and that was how come there’s a Canarsie neighborhood in Brooklyn. An explanation on the wall told all about how the Canarsees were part of the broader Lenape people, how they’d eventually sold or traded or lost everything—mostly had it taken away, actually—and how the last survivor was thought to have died around 1830.

  We gazed at the glassed-in display of Canarsee artifacts: spears, axes, beaded leather pouches, woven baskets, a drum. And a small stone head, a head with a simple engraved face: two eyes—one round, one a little irregular, a rectangular mouth, a few squiggles for the hair or else for forehead frown lines. Not much in the way of features, but somehow they seemed angry.

  And just as I was thinking that, the charm began to come to life. I could feel it warming against my chest, even stirring a bit, as though moving on its own.

  “Ashanti?” I said. “Something’s happening.” I shifted the charm out from under my shirt and into the open. Ashanti reached out and touched it. For a moment, her face changed, twisting in a way that kind of resembled the angry stone face in the display case.

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  “What?” she said, and immediately her face went back to normal. Had I imagined the whole thing? “It’s warm, yeah,” she went on, “but not as hot as it used to get.”

  “Right, but—”

  A door just beyond the glass case opened and out came Jim Wilders—Silas’s somewhat wayward dad, as he himself had put it—clipboard in hand, pencil between his teeth. His eyes, so much like Silas’s, took in the scene: Ashanti and me by the glass case, the charm out in the open, her finger on it.

  “Well, well,” he said. “Robbie and Ashanti—we meet again.”

  “Uh,” I said, tucking the charm back under my shirt.

  He glanced around. “Where’s Silas?”

  “At home, probably,” Ashanti said.

  “For a moment, I thought he’d come to visit me at work—which would have been a first.” We had nothing to say to that. He gestured toward the display. “You’re interested in the Canarsee people?”

  “Kind of,” Ashanti said.

  “Know much about them?”

  Ashanti shrugged. “They used to live here,” she said. “In Brooklyn. Then they all died out and—”

  “Died out?” said Silas’s dad. I noticed his name tag read Professor Wilders. “I guess it depends on what you mean by died out. The fact is there were decades, even centuries, of mixing between native peoples and Europeans, so there’s no reason to think Canarsee DNA doesn’t live on.”

  I took a long look at those braids, could feel Ashanti doing the same thing.

  “And if their DNA,” said Mr. Wilders, “why not some of their ideas and values?”

  He paused, glanced at each of us. I didn’t know the answer, wasn’t sure I even understood the question.

  “You’re saying ideas and values are in the DNA?” Ashanti said.

  Wow! What a smart question! Friends: I knew how to pick ’em. And I could tell from a new expression on Wilders’s face that her question sounded smart to him, too.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said.

  Ashanti’s gaze shifted to his braids. “Do you have Canarsee DNA in you?”

  He took a deep breath, let it slowly out. “Not to my knowledge.” He got a faraway look in his eyes; at the same time, one of his hands rose slightly and made a fist. Did he even realize it? “Let’s just say that ideas and values can live on, especially if we give them a boost.”

  “How?” said Ashanti.

  Mr. Wilders checked his watch. “Got a minute or two? I can show you some of the stuff I’m working on.” He opened the door by the display case and ushered us through.

  • • •

  Backstage at the museum, if that was how to put it, the look was standard office building, the characteristic museum smell—sort of airy and marbly—disappearing at once. Wilders led us into his office, a small windowless room coldly lit with strip lights. Books and papers were stacked all over the place and the walls were covered with art—mostly photos of Indians in the old west, but also some movie posters: Hombre, The Searchers, Little Big Man. Mr. Wilders went over to one of those stand-up architect tables and cleared a space, revealing a big map of Brooklyn.

  “Where do you kids go to school?” he said.

  “Thatcher,” said Ashanti.

  “That’s private?” he said.

  “Independent,” I told him; I liked that description much better.

  Mr. Wilders gave me a quick look, like maybe he was changing his mind about me. From what to what? I had no idea. He rolled up his sleeves and turned to the architect table. His arms were sinewy and s
trong—but what I noticed first was bruising and scrapes around his wrists. He pointed a pencil at the map.

  “Thatcher Academy,” he said. “Right about here. Not a spot that’s come up yet in my research, but that doesn’t mean it won’t—that’s one thing I’ve learned.”

  “What research?” Ashanti said.

  “See these areas shaded in yellow?” Mr. Wilders said. “Those were all places associated with Canarsee life. For example, here by this bend in the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a small village stood for the better part of a century.” He pointed the pencil tip down toward the water. “And here on a strand by Gowanus Bay, we’ve found extensive shell middens.”

  “Shell middens?” I said.

  “Just a kind of dump, really, where the villagers would deposit all their shells. But a totally organic dump, of course, without any negative consequences for the ecology.”

  “Seashells?” I said.

  Mr. Wilders nodded. “Clams and oysters, mostly.”

  “Oysters?” I said.

  “By the tens of thousands. The Canarsees loved oysters, and in those days, you didn’t have to pay three or four bucks a pop in some snooty restaurant—you just waded onto the flats and scooped them up to your heart’s content.” Mr. Wilders got a faraway look in his eyes. “The oysters thrived, what with the water being so pure back then. Is it too much to say that the oysters liked the water they inhabited in precolonial times, even loved it?”

  Yeah, I thought it was too much. There was a silence, kind of awkward. I’m one of those people who can’t take awkward silences for long. “I hear,” I said, “that the oysters are making a comeback.”

  He faced me, the faraway look fading fast. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Uh, my aunt, actually. My aunt in New Jersey.”

  “New Jersey,” said Mr. Wilders, his voice sharpening. “Is she an expert on shellfish?”

  “Maybe not an expert,” I said. I didn’t want to leave it like that, failing to stand up for my aunt. I liked Aunt Jenna. “But she taught me how to shuck them.”

  Mr. Wilders’s voice lost that edgy thing. “You like oysters?” he said.

  “Especially with cocktail sauce.”

  He turned to Ashanti. “How about you?”

  Ashanti made a face. Mr. Wilders laughed. Ashanti and I joined in, a nice, tension-free moment.

  “You seem like such good kids,” Mr. Wilders said, still chuckling. “So I was wondering what you thought about me getting busted at the Gunn Tower demonstration.”

  My laughter cut off just like that. “I didn’t know what to think,” I said.

  “I felt bad for Silas,” said Ashanti.

  Angry red patches appeared on Mr. Wilders’s face. “Why feel bad? His father took a stand for something he believes in.” He turned and stabbed the map of Brooklyn with his finger.

  “See this yellowed-in area? This huge yellowed-in area? That’s where Mr. Gunn is lusting to build his tower.” He glared at us. “Have you seen pictures of the plans?”

  “No.”

  Mr. Wilders tapped on a keyboard. A picture popped up on a monitor, one of those artist’s renderings where the sky is the bluest blue, the grass the greenest green, and the tiny people at the bottom seem full of purpose. Soaring above the tiny people on the screen was a dark tower—the windows dark, the steel dark—that made all of Brooklyn spread out below it seem small and insignificant, merely the setting for the tower, and no more.

  “For comparison,” Mr. Wilders said, “here’s the Empire State Building.” Gunn Tower looked to be about twice as tall. “In the early mornings, the shadow will stretch all the way across the borough and onto the East River.” I eyed the tiny people. They seemed oblivious to Gunn Tower, like it was just an ordinary tree or something. That didn’t strike me as realistic. I could feel the weight of its presence from here.

  “Yellowed-in means the Canarsees lived there?” I said.

  “Or that it was an important place for them,” Mr. Wilders said. “That’s the case here. I’ve established that there was a spring on this site—a stream rising out of the earth—that the Canarsees often drank from and considered sacred. It was also possibly a burial site—the gold standard for stopping development, if provable.”

  “Where’s the spring now?” Ashanti said.

  “Gone,” said Mr. Wilders.

  “How can a spring be gone?” I said.

  “A mere spring?” said Mr. Wilders. “That’s easy. The whole Colorado River’s practically gone. From what I’ve been able to discover, this particular Canarsee spring disappeared over two hundred and fifty years ago.”

  “Disappeared where?” Ashanti said.

  Mr. Wilders shrugged. “Dammed-up, filled in, diverted—who knows? Lost and gone, one of those losses you can’t put a dollar value on, no matter how many casinos get built on native land.”

  I didn’t quite follow the casino part, but the mention of dollars reminded me of something. “Is it true the Indians sold Manhattan for twenty-four dollars?”

  “Sixty guilders in trade goods,” said Mr. Wilders. “Which works out to about twenty-four dollars at the time. But the point is—what did the Indians think they were trading? Certainly not exclusive rights to the land, because they didn’t think of land that way, as something to be owned.”

  “What kind of trade goods?” Ashanti said.

  “Probably some useful things—iron tools and textiles. Plus some decorative objects that you call trinkets if you’re trying to make the natives seem like suckers, but that I prefer to call jewelry.”

  “Jewelry?” I said.

  “No gold or diamonds, but nice things, just the same—Italian glass beads, the odd silver charm or two.”

  “Silver charm?” Ashanti and I both said at once.

  He shrugged. “Small. Nothing fancy. Not unlike Robbie’s charm—the one you two seemed to be admiring when I came out.”

  My heart did a little stutter step.

  “In fact,” Mr. Wilders went on, “I wouldn’t mind taking a quick picture of it.”

  “You—you want to take a picture of . . .”

  “If you don’t mind,” Mr. Wilders said. “I’m getting some visuals together on old trading goods.”

  “Robbie’s charm isn’t old,” Ashanti said.

  “Granted, but it has the look I’m after.”

  Pause. A pause that got longer. What was there to do but hand it over? I handed it over.

  Wilders hefted the charm on his palm, gazed at it with interest, and then with a lot more interest. “Where did you get this?”

  “Um,” I said.

  “Wasn’t it a gift?” said Ashanti.

  “Yeah. A gift.”

  Mr. Wilders gave us a look. “And a very nice one. I suspect it is old, after all. Seventeenth or even sixteenth century, and also European, quite possibly Dutch.” He opened a desk drawer, took out a camera, snapped some pictures of the charm. “Who gave it to you?”

  “A friend,” I said, ready for once with the right kind of answer.

  “A very good friend,” Mr. Wilders said, giving it back. “Thanks for showing it to me.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “But it’s not really why we came to see you,” Ashanti said.

  “I didn’t think so,” said Mr. Wilders. “It’s about Silas, right?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Indirectly,” Ashanti added.

  “Is he in trouble?”

  “No,” I said.

  Ashanti chipped in again. “Not him.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  We told him all about Tut-Tut. Not all, exactly, but pretty close, except for the magic.

  He listened without a word, his only reaction being a vein that throbbed in his forehead. I realized my mom would have asked
a million tough questions; this was better. “I’ll see what I can do,” Mr. Wilders said when we came to the end. “And, uh, I hope you pass this on to Silas.”

  “Pass what on?” I said.

  “That he’s helping,” said Ashanti.

  Mr. Wilders closed his eyes in an embarrassed sort of way and nodded. Then came a knock on the door. “Jim?” a woman called. “That reporter’s here.”

  “Be right down.”

  14

  We met Silas at HQ. It was cold but not cold enough to see your breath: the space heater, pulled up close to Silas’s feet, glowed red.

  “Muffins,” I said, putting a bag of them on the desk.

  Silas opened the bag, poked through. “No icing? I like icing.”

  “These are healthy,” I said. “Blueberry, cranberry, orange, and carrot.”

  “Carrot cake?” Silas said.

  “Maybe.”

  He took the carrot muffin. “Tut-Tut loves blueberries,” he said, taking a big bite. “They don’t have them in Haiti,” he added—or something like that, hard to tell with his mouth so full.

  “Speaking of Tut-Tut,” I said, and started in on a description of our visit to the museum.

  “Huh?” Silas said, interrupting before I’d barely gotten out of the blocks. “You saw my stupid father?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “See, we got the idea that—”

  “Without even telling me first?”

  There was a silence. No comeback occurred to me. I turned to Ashanti. She looked Silas in the eye and said, “You’re one hundred percent right.”

  Silas gazed at her. Seeing her in a totally new way? I was considering that when he shook his head and said, “Can’t go that far. One hundred percent represents a degree of certainty you’d never find in situations like this. Call it about ninety-eight percent.”

  Another silence. And then Ashanti and I were laughing our heads off.

  “What?” said Silas. “What’s funny?”

  We couldn’t put it into words, didn’t even try. “The point is,” I said, “we’ve got to do something about Tut-Tut, and we thought your father was the type who might help out.”