The Blackest Bird

by Joel Rose

  “No? Well, it ain’t no secret I don’t like you, Tommy b’hoyo. And I don’t much like no Irish pig runt rat telling me what to do.”

  “Stay away, Ruby. Stay away if you don’t want to be took out.”

  RUBY PEARL SWORE up and down the Bowery that vengeance would be his. He enlisted the other local native gangs to join his throng of Butcher Boys: the True-Blue Americans, the American Guard, every last stick and straw of the rest of the Bowery russers, making threat to march on Tommy Coleman’s wedding, the festivities of which were to be held in Paradise Square, and fillet Tommy on the spot in front of his new bride, making her a widow.

  Armed guards, all emanating out of Eire, and all over six feet tall, were volunteered, primarily out of the ranks of the Plug Uglies and Kerryonians, to protect the nuptial celebration. These giants, in their reinforced stovepipe hats and hobnailed boots, were located strategically on the Five Points side streets and alleys and around the wrought iron fence that surrounded the square, as added deterrent, per Tommy’s orders, a rusted but workable cannon placed on Cross Street facing east.

  But all was quiet and the wedding went off without incident.

  Still, a small, festively wrapped box came, delivered by a toothless old woman in a yellow head rag. In it was the carcass of a dead white piglet, and a note that read: IT’S NOT OVER YET, with no signature, no nothing, but Tommy Coleman needed no signature to know the low style of a Bowery Butcher Boy.

  20

  The Dark Deeds

  of Ruby Pearl

  After Tommy Coleman married the sister of his late brother’s late wife, as it turned out, some citizens of the metropolis were not exactly in his corner. The doomed romance of his brother and his new wife’s beloved sister hung over many. Her parents were desperate for fear that the terrible scenario would be played out again, and before the marriage, in their most intimate moments, even she, the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl, said to him that she was repelled at the same time as attracted.

  Now people were saying that she was even prettier than her sister, prettier than the Pretty Hot Corn Girl. Her head could be turned. She was not above that.

  Many gossips said Ruby Pearl had put out the word right after the romance began: Any Bowery Boy or True-Blue American found buying an ear of corn from the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl would find himself answering to the Butcher Boys.

  After Tommy had won the hand of his future intended, it proved more than a victory for him, it was a statement, because not only had he vanquished his rival, Ruby Pearl, domo of the hated Bowery Butcher Boys, but also (maybe even more importantly) it was wider acknowledgment to all that a brash, clever rogue the likes of Tommy Coleman might live a life of leisure off the steaming ears sold out of that cedar bucket.

  No one ever mistook Tommy Coleman for a gentleman. After marrying her he had no qualms about partaking in his new wife’s success, evidently having desired the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl, whether he knew it or not, not only for love, not to mention what a bleak mort like her represented in his ward, but also for the lucre she’d bring in.

  But not surprisingly, with all the warnings and dire onus, the gay blades, the biggest contributors to her business, stayed away in droves, and the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl found her income shrinking.

  Like his brother before him, Tommy Coleman was not good in taking disappointment, especially disappointment of the economic kind. Scarcely eight weeks into the marriage, when she came home with less than five shillings, Tommy became volatile. Day after day, her income had failed to measure up to his expectations. By now, at the end of two months, he was able to endure no more. She had been making sixteen, eighteen dollars a week, now she made only five. Since they were married she handed all her money over to her new husband, but Tommy did not like only five shillings, and they were squabbling, shades all over again of her murdered sister and his hanged brother.

  “Can’t you make money on your own?” the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl shouted back at him following Tommy’s rage and rampage against her. “Give me a break? Why don’t you use your gang? Do you always need to depend on me?”

  “You’re right,” Tommy admitted reluctantly. “I have the boyos and they’ll make plenty of conscript for me when I give the say-so.”

  “So there you have it,” the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl said gaily to her husband, and kissed him.

  “The only catch is, they’re not you. It speaks well of a bloke to be supported by his woman.”

  “I’m going to give up peddling corn on the street for a while, Tommy,” she said. “I’m pregnant,” truly heartfelt, touching even him who was not so touchable. “I’m tired. Maybe I need to rest before the baby comes.”

  “Okay,” Tommy relented as the notion of an heir intrigued him. “But just until the baby finishes suckling. We got a good thing going here. I’d hate to see you spoil it.”

  Tommy had wanted a son, but he swore, his eyes misting, that the newborn Daughter of the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl was the most beautiful baby in the Five Points, and maybe on the face of the earth.

  “The spitting image of her mother!” he boasted.

  For a number of months Tommy did not mind that his wife was not on the street plying her trade, raking in the money. His Forty Little Thieves were doing well for themselves, lying in wait, jacking drunks, stealing purses, smacking heads, leaving their victims naked and unconscious on the sidewalk for the roundsmen to discover and— if luck was with the mark—wake.

  But then one crisp day there came a problem.

  Two skull-bashers, older boyos left over from the reign of his brother, Crags Mahoney and Greedy Armond, who had run in the days with the original Forty Thieves, were strolling by the waterside, near the seawall at Castle Garden, when they came upon a newly arrived German immigrant. The man had twelve cents in his pocket. They clubbed him and tossed him in the river, where he promptly drowned, while Crags and Armond repaired back to the Green Turtle’s to divvy up their plunder.

  First they asked for a drink. The Turtle took a hose and squirted some swill down each of their gullets. Then Greedy Armond, living up to his name, announced that because he’d tossed the fat German into the river he deserved seven cents of the twelve.

  “No!” Crags Mahoney retorted. It was he who had struck the blow that put the man out. If anyone deserved seven cents, it was him. Common sense said if the man weren’t jacked out, Crags argued, Greedy Armond never would have been able to lift him up to propel him over the seawall in the first place.

  Such a statement infuriated Greedy Armond. With deep conviction he took hold of Crags’ nose in his teeth. Lest his nose be bit off, Crags pulled a knife and slid it between Greedy Armond’s ribs. Unfortunately for Crags, the knife between the ribs barely slowed Greedy Armond, although he did let go of Crags’ poor nose, but sorry to say, the alcohol-swollen fleshy bulb of it was still clenched in the vise of Armond’s brown teeth.

  For the next half hour the two of them rolled around the barroom floor, looking for advantage. Eventually Greedy Armond got hold of the knife and thrust it in Crags’ throat.

  Crags collapsed on the floor, weak from loss of blood. Seeing him helpless there, Greedy Armond promptly stomped him to death with his heavy hobnailed boots.

  Tommy Coleman and all the Forty Little Thieves present that evening at the Green Turtle’s, of which there were many, stood in abject silence.

  After that Greedy Armond made good his escape, leaving poor Crags lying dead on the floor with his head caved in.

  The timing of these two rogues couldn’t have been worse. Only a few weeks before, the body of Mary Rogers had been discovered floating in the Hudson, and from Jersey came word that Fourth Ward gangsters might have been at work in the woods nearby.

  For rowdies it was not a good time to call attention to oneself.

  When it was learned that Five Points gangs were prime suspects, Sergeant McArdel of the Night Watch with five leatherheads
came around the neighborhood to Rosanna Peers’ greengrocery and One-Lung Charlie Mudd’s Murderers’ Mansion, asking for alibis. Old Hays came poking around the Green Turtle’s again, for the second time questioning Tommy.

  No one could ever connect any of the Forty Little Thieves strong enough to the killing of Mary Rogers to make indictment. Still, Tommy’s income took a dramatic plunge, seriously wounded by his gang’s persecution, the inevitable result of such social and political heat.

  Tommy flatly told his wife it was time for her to hit the city byways again. Always thinking and considering, he had his own ideas for her to improve sales from what they had been at their best. Not only would she walk the streets of the Broadway by City Hall Park peddling her wares, but their little daughter, the beautiful blue-eyed two-year-old Daughter of the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl, dressed identically to her mother, carrying her own little cedar bucket, would also toddle the streets. Their sweet voices in tandem a sweet song of jingling coins:

  Corn! Hot corn!

  Git your lily white hot corn!

  All ye that’s got money,

  Poor we that’s got none,

  Come buy our lily white hot corn

  And let poor us’n git home!

  What realistically might the expected income from such a setup be? The righteous man dare not hope, confabulated an ecstatic Tommy, but even a conservative soul might in these hard times speculate twenty a week minimum.

  So here was the motive, later to be underscored by a staunch prosecuting attorney in the Essex Street police court, and eventually pondered by a jury of Tommy’s peers, because less than a month after they had returned to the city’s best thoroughfares to peddle their golden wares, the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl, like her doomed sister before her, and even more tragically, her beautiful darling, the little innocent Daughter of the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl, were found in the back of Cow Bay, lying in the mud, beaten to death. Nearby was discovered the body of the thick-necked, redheaded native American butcher Ruby Pearl.

  At Tommy’s trial (Tommy would never forgive High Constable Jacob Hays for confronting him with the bodies of his brutally murdered wife and daughter in the Dead House), the wily prosecutor alleged that Pearl had once again become paramour to the comely Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl. That Tommy had discovered their reentanglement, finding them in the back of the loathsome Cow Bay alley spooning and kissing there, and that he had grown vicious mad, lost all control, and had made short shrift of them both, and then, as afterthought, laid waste as well to his young daughter, the Daughter of the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl, learning or suspecting or having fallen prey to either poison notion or malicious rumor that the Daughter of the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn girl was not the fruit of his loins at all, but the child of Pearl.

  Tommy denied all this in court.

  “Lies!” his defending lawyer, young Hummel of Centre Street, pronounced in his high-pitched Bavarian immigrant’s mutilation of the English language. “Scurrilous lies!”

  Tommy testified in his own defense. “Now this is what happened that fateful night. Nothing more, nothing less. My wife and daughter was out working, but they was late and I grew worried. I went out looking for ’em and come acrost that native rat, Ruby Pearl, in the back of Cow Bay alley, my wife dead at his feet, my daughter tossed off in the corner, like a rag waiting for the picker.”

  Tommy’s eyes gleamed in what purported to be memory. He went on with his blithe recollection: “The redheaded bastard was standing over them he was, they no longer of this eart’. I challenged him. I said, ‘Whatsamatta, boyo? Why you do this?’ He says, I swear, ‘Whaddya care? I did it. What you gonna do about it?’ Right there and then I took him out, and mark me if I don’t feel good about it.”

  Now, ignoring his lawyer, rising to face Ruby’s supporters, who were in attendance that afternoon at the proceedings, challenging, shouting, “You hear me you low-life butcher apprentices!” Tommy’s gaze flitting back across the curiosity seekers, to the box, swiveling back to catch the black-robed judge, looking him square in the eye, the jury, “Now which one among you would not do the same?”

  But unfortunately for Tommy, his twelve peers did not buy his story. With High Constable Jacob Hays looking steadily on from the gallery, he was condemned to be hanged, and remanded to the Tombs to meet his fate forthwith.

  21

  During His Time

  in the Tombs

  During his time in the Tombs, John Colt never suffered. Rarely did he seem rattled, bothered, or unsure.

  The Colt family never dreamt John would be found guilty of the capital act of homicide, much less condemned. When he finally went to trial in the winter of 1842, they hoped for a verdict of self-defense or, at worst, manslaughter. Justice in the city had traditionally been available to the wealthiest for a price. It was John’s misfortune, however, to have committed what his lawyers called “this lamentable act” in the midst of a reform movement.

  Following the murder of Mary Rogers, citizens of exaggerated morality and heightened conscience began to find their way to elevated positions of opinion and power in the public discourse. With the death of Mary Rogers still unsolved and the more recent crime against Samuel Adams, these reformers pitted themselves in opposition to those corrupt agents of the law who readily made themselves available, according to the reformers, to be bought off by wealth, privilege, power, and/or sex, in the form of sin and evil.

  Certain editors, particularly Horace Greeley at the Daily Tribune, railed his fellow citizens to take a stance, to fight the good fight against the evils of corruption, indiscriminate power, and entitled class.

  Greeley, although against capital punishment (and the eating of animals), saw himself on an evangelical mission on behalf of virtue and decorum, and had publicly dedicated his print to the moral, social, and political well-being of the people.

  At the rival Herald, James Gordon Bennett scoffed at what he termed “this posturing.”

  “Greeley is nothing more than a galvanized New England squash,” Bennett charged.

  Bennett’s most important single journalistic precept was that a newspaper publisher should make a great deal of money. Before the trial, he unearthed and printed gleefully all kinds of purported dirt in regard to John Colt, including that he had been a Mississippi knife fighter, a gambler, and had once even seduced away the comely quadroon mistress of a riverboat captain, only to abandon the harlot after he had had his fill with her.

  But sensing a change in the wind—and never failing to recognize an opportunity to sell a great many more newspapers—just before the trial was to begin, Bennett seamlessly changed direction, to take sides with the sainted souls.

  HOW AS A SOCIET Y CAN WE ALLOW A MAN LIKE JOHN COLT TO ENDURE?

  wondered he in the Herald, utilizing its boldest black ink.

  Seeing their chance and seizing it, even more self-appointed do-gooders, men of God, temperance kings, and self-styled preachers, now quickly enlisted in the crusade, making their own demands for equal rights and proper justice for all under the law, rich and poor alike.

  John Colt became the symbol of whom these demagogues demanded example needed to be made. Not only had Colt murdered the tradesman Samuel Adams, but it was also now endlessly written in the public prints how he was living in sin and taking advantage of the innocent young woman Caroline Henshaw.

  Still worse, the unmarried Miss Henshaw, it was now publicly revealed, was with child.

  Bennett, with his knack for indignant superiority, led the community in calling for John Colt’s blood in retribution for his moral denigration.

  To fight back, the Colt family hired a team of lawyers to represent John’s case at his trial in the Essex Street police court. Leader of the bank of three attorneys was Colt family cousin Dudley Selden, a former representative to the Democratic Congress in Washington. Second-in-command was John Morrill, earlier that year the successful defender of the “female physician” A
nn Lohman, known better by her nom d’abortion, Madame Restell. Last but not least was transplanted activist New York attorney Robert Emmet, son of the fiery Irish rebel Thomas Emmet.

  The three law hounds were rumored to have been retained with a onetime payment of two thousand dollars, and promised an additional eight thousand dollars in stock in Samuel Colt’s new arms manufacturing company.

  There was never a question that Colt had killed. He had admitted so graphically after his arrest in his very public confession published by Bennett in the Herald. But his legal team’s allegation was that his response to Adams’ aggression was one of self-defense, that he had been insulted, then attacked, and it was only when he was himself being choked and in danger of losing his life that he picked up the lethal instrument off his desk, in order to protect himself, and unfortunately, what the two-headed tool was was half hammer, half hatchet, and the result turned morbid before he even knew what it was he was doing.

  Judge William Kent presided at the trial that promised much sensationalism. As conjectured in the public prints, controversy centered on the point of law was Colt’s act murder or manslaughter?

  Gossip on the street swirled about the feasibility of an insanity plea for the accused. Middle Colt brother James Colt fed a story to Bennett that insanity ran in the Colt family. He cited the case of their sister, confessing she had poisoned herself to death.

  John himself, James contended, had several times become insane.

  The trial began pretty much by rote. John was attracting so much vitriol and bad publicity his team of three defenders tried to have the press banned from the courtroom.

  To no avail.

  Judge Kent ruled that it would indeed have been strange in the vast and vibrant city of New York if such a murder had not precipitated such shock and outrage.

  “But I have no doubt,” declared he from the bench, “that this court will remain uninfluenced by contamination from without.”