The Resurrectionists

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  Thanks to the thin walls, closing the apartment door behind him did little to minimize the noise of his neighbors, but the delightful smells from their kitchens were certainly welcome. His outerwear shed and hung to dry, Hawley set about warming the kettle for tea while he carved off a thick chunk of bread and squares of salted meat to lunch upon.

  A banging on his door interrupted his meal. A deeply stentorian voice shouted, “Salem! You in there?”

  Chair scraping against the wooden planks, Hawley stood, taking one last bite of meat and bread, then wiped his hands against the thighs of his pants. He opened the door to a tear-streaked face in time to see the man swipe away snot from his upper lip with the back of his hand.

  “Jeremiah? Good God, man.” Hawley stepped back to let the disheveled man inside. Jeremiah had lost his wife and infant days ago, the former shuffling off her mortal coil in the failed delivery of the latter. In the span of mere hours, Jeremiah lost all he held dear in the world. He stood before Hawley, a hollowed man. The once square-shouldered figure now stooped with the weight of tragedy, his wet and tired eyes red and sunken atop thick purple bags that hung over cracked, downturned lips.

  “They took them,” Jeremiah shouted, pacing the length of the small living area. Boards creaked beneath every footstep.

  “Who?” Hawley asked, fearing he already knew the answer. His friend’s words bowed his head, and his heart sank into his belly, sickened.

  “Nina and Juliet. They’re gone, both of them.”

  The woman and her child had been buried together in the potter’s field at the end of Chambers Street, not far from New York Hospital. Hawley recalled the sight of the small infant swaddled in a bundle of stained white cloths, the mother’s arms crossed over the baby and clutching the child to her breast.

  “They didn’t even try to hide what they done,” Jeremiah said. “The ground was all busted up, their coffin broken apart.” He tried to speak more, but his words were reduced to blubbering sobs. His fingers pinched the bridge of his nose in a failed attempt to stem the flood of tears.

  Hawley put an arm around the taller man’s shoulders and guided him into the lone chair at the small kitchen table. Hawley took the whistling kettle off the fire and poured them each a cup of tea. He couldn’t shake the sight of those pigs tearing into the severed arm in the street, snow falling against ashen skin, nothing but bright white and deep red wounds against the mud. He leaned against the counter and took a tentative sip, blowing softly over the edge of the cup to cool the liquid inside.

  “What can I do?” Hawley asked, sure that Jeremiah had some idea on how to correct the injustice. Jeremiah had led the failed petition to the council before Nina’s and Juliet’s passing.

  “You’re the letters man,” Jeremiah began. “Would you be willing to write a letter?”

  “I would, if you think it will help.”

  “It wouldn’t be going to the council.”

  “Who then?”

  “Francis Childs,” Jeremiah said.

  Hawley nodded. The name was familiar to him. Childs was the editor and publisher of the New York Daily Advertiser. He was also anti-slavery, and while that fact did not immediately make the white man an ally, he would perhaps be more sympathetic to their plight than the city council would. It might even rile up some of his readers.

  “I will begin immediately.”

  “I want your help tonight as well,” Jeremiah said. “At the cemetery.”

  Hawley hid his rueful smile behind the cup of tea. Anger rose in him anew alongside the prospect of justice for Jeremiah and his family. Hawley was an accomplished man when he was angry, as both a scholar and a fighter, or at least he had been during the war. He found himself suddenly eager to see how true that still was. “Of course,” he said.

  Hawley spent the better part of the afternoon sitting before the fire, with a blanket over his shoulders to keep the cold air bleeding through the alley-side walls at bay as he drafted a letter to Childs. It needed to be concise but also emotionally appealing in its call to action toward an otherwise-indifferent crowd. He struggled to find an opening that would impart the gravity of the predicament facing the colored community and make the city pay attention to the abhorrent sacrilege they suffered.

  As if whites ever gave a damn about the black community, Hawley thought bitterly, beyond beating or killing us or selling us. He could ill afford to waste ink on a rant that would only lose him more ears than it would ever gain, and he had to fight for a moment to clear his mind before he was finally ready to set pen to paper.

  The repositories of the dead have been held in a manner sacred, in all ages, and almost in all countries. It is a shame that they should be so very scandalously dealt with, as I have been informed they are in this City. It is said that few blacks are buried, whose bodies are permitted to remain in the grave.

  A calmness came over Hawley as he wrote. He felt as if he were finding his groove. The message of import seized him, commanding him, and the words poured forth.

  Swine have been seen devouring the entrails and flesh of women! Human flesh has been taken up along the docks, sewed up in bags!

  Perhaps it was best not to dwell on the grislier aspects, he decided, still burdened with the grotesque imagery of pigs feasting on a woman’s severed arm while chomping and snorting noisily as they jostled one another for a seat at the table. He shoved those thoughts aside, needing to focus on offering a solution. He had outlined the problem, sought to rile up those who would read this letter, and engaged his audience emotionally. Now he needed to give them an action, something concrete and resolute.

  If a law was passed, prohibiting the bodies of any other than Criminals from being dissected, unless by particular desire of the dying for the benefit of mankind, a stop might be put to the horrid practice here; and the minds of a very great number of my fellow-liberated, or still enslaved Negroes, quieted. By publishing this, you will greatly oblige both them, and your very humble servant.

  He ended the letter with a flourish, using the pseudonym Humanio. Childs may have been anti-slavery, but Hawley knew better than to blindly trust a white man, and a stranger at that, let alone have his name published in a newspaper as well circulated as the Advertiser.

  Presuming, that is, it becomes published, he admonished himself.

  Childs spoke well and openly of his disbelief in the necessity of enslavement, but Hawley knew despite the effort of this composition to Childs, he could ignore the petition just as easily as the community council had. Besides, if Hawley put his own name out there, what would stop the resurrectionist bandits from employing live subjects such as him in their medical experiments?

  No, Hawley decided, it was rather prudent to err on the side of caution.

  “What do you think?” he said, handing the note to his friend.

  Jeremiah scratched at the patchwork of scruff across his jaw as he read, pulling slightly at the thin growths of hair populating his chin. Fresh tears stood in small beads against the thin beard over his cheeks, and he wiped them away with his sleeve.

  “They shouldn’t get any bodies at all,” Jeremiah nearly shouted. “What they’re doing to those people is an abomination!”

  Hawley nodded, although he had meant what he had written. He understood the necessity of cadavers for medical study and thought that perhaps a better education on the terms of the human body by practitioners would help advance the field of medicine. It might even have saved the lives of Juliet and Nina. Jeremiah, he knew, lacked any sort of disposition to hear such thoughts, and he dared not invoke the names of his departed beloveds. Instead, he merely waited for Jeremiah to cool.

  “Do you think this is good?” Jeremiah asked, holding the paper between his two hands, his eyes intent on the words. His was an honest question, not a reprobation.

  “I do,” Hawley said.

  Jeremiah studied the letter briefly before nodding and returning it to Hawley. “Fine then. We can drop it off this evening.”

&n
bsp; Hawley folded it into thirds and placed it into an envelope, which he scrawled Childs’s name upon. “We shall reconvene this evening then, downstairs.”

  He wrapped his arms around Jeremiah’s wide, muscular shoulders and patted him on the back. The man’s warm tears moistened Hawley’s cheeks.

  “Lord, I miss her,” Jeremiah said, choking the words out.

  Hawley, who had already spent so much time over the last few days commiserating and telling his friend how awful it was and how sorry he was, did not know what else to say. He squeezed the man in his arms and said simply, “We’ll get them. Whoever took them, we will not rest until justice is met.”

  The intervening hours were met with the sharpening of a blade. Hawley ran the stone over the tomahawk’s edge until he was satisfied with the weapon’s sharpness. He prepared a fresh cup of tea, which he drank as time slipped past.

  Both he and Jeremiah had performed scouting missions and reconnaissance during the war, typically during the night hours. Although their commander had initially been adamant that no Negro would serve in the colonial army, his superiors had made him relent. During the duration of their service, the commander had begun to realize how well a dark-skinned Negro such as Salem Hawley could be utilized. Silent, swift-moving, and with flesh the color of night, Hawley had often been dispatched ahead of his unit to spy on British placements and report back enemy numbers to the officers.

  An odd sense of calmness had always enveloped Hawley during those missions. The evening he left his apartment to meet Jeremiah, he felt much the same—prepared and with the quietude of professionalism settling into his bones. The axe hung from his belt loop, the blade hidden beneath his coat.

  Jeremiah followed him out the door a moment later, and their feet crunched through a fresh layer of snow. Together, they walked in silence, the sky above moonless.

  At the small office of the New York Daily Advertiser, Hawley slipped the envelope to Childs between door and jamb. The thin letter slid easily into the building. Their faces wrapped in scarves, heads capped by brimmed hats, Hawley was certain that if anybody were watching neither he nor Jeremiah could be easily identified. The office was dark, though, as were the neighboring shops, and he doubted any eyes at all had alighted upon them.

  The men continued on their way, following Chambers Street to its end then through uneven mud and slurries of churned earth, ice, and snow to the Negroes Burial Grounds.

  “Fresh graves are this way,” Jeremiah said.

  Hawley followed, conscious of the tomahawk hidden at his waist.

  Voices carried to them between strong gusts of wind over the plots of graves, the words indistinct. The two men dropped into a crouch, their feet light as they hurried quietly across the earth. Dim lanterns arranged around a burial plot revealed three resurrectionists breaking through freshly dug soil with wooden shovels. Two were in the process of opening a hole on either side of the grave marker, while the third kept watch, ignorant of Hawley and Jeremiah’s approach.

  Hawley slowly slid the tomahawk free, keeping his movements small as he tucked himself into the shadows. A flash of silver proved Jeremiah to be similarly armed.

  A hollow tap announced the meeting of the wooden shovel blade with the pine box buried beneath them. As Hawley made his approach, a splintering crack rang out in the air, and the men moved quickly.

  Hawley covered the distance between them as fast as he could, a mild horror shaking through him as one of the youthful white men dragged free from the earth a freshly dead Negro, arms hooked through the cadaver’s arm pits. A companion moved in to help, laying the deceased out on the cold ground.

  The crunch of a frozen clod of dirt popping drew the attention of the three men. Jeremiah darted forward, an inchoate scream of rage startling the body snatchers.

  “Jeremiah, no!” Hawley said. But it was too late. Whatever plan of stealth and distraction they’d possessed was gone, dismissed completely and utterly by his friend’s justified, yet ill-timed, outrage. And he’d given away his own position, drawing two of the grave robbers toward him.

  The watcher was the quickest, and he snatched up a shovel, moving forward to meet Jeremiah head-on. As Jeremiah let a fist fly, the watcher dodged the blow and stepped into the opening his larger opponent had made. The end of the shovel’s handle smashed into the underside of Jeremiah’s jaw. The rattle of his teeth was harsh in the silent night. The man took a step back, raising the shovel, and swung hard. Wood collided with skull.

  Hawley raised his tomahawk, careful not to put his back to either of the two men and to keep them both within his line of sight. They rushed him from either side. Hawley swung at the closest man and was rewarded with a surprised yelp of pain. But as he wounded one, the other closed in quick. When swung, the long shovel in his hand tidily closed the gap between them. Pain exploded along Hawley’s flank, stealing the wind from him as he was driven to his knees. The shovel came around at him again, and this time, he was ready. He took the hit to his ribs then pinned the shaft beneath his arm. He swung the tomahawk again, but he lacked the reach. The resurrectionist easily dodged the blade then yanked the shovel blade loose, pulling Hawley to the ground. The injured grave robber seized the moment and darted in, delivering a swift kick to Hawley’s belly. Then the man with the shovel joined in, and Hawley felt utterly helpless. That pained him more than the assault waged upon his body.

  Jeremiah’s screams were loud, louder than the unending noise of the flat side of the shovel’s blade pummeling Hawley’s legs and arms. In between his friend’s wails, Hawley heard, too clearly, the fracturing of Jeremiah’s bones. His friend’s cries were lost beneath the rush of blood in Hawley’s ears as his own attacker struck him with a shovel, raining down blow after blow along the backside of his body. From the other side, the points of a boot kicked into his ribs again and again. His tomahawk lost, Hawley curled into a ball, using his arms to protect his head, his eyes stinging. He cried in pain as much as shame.

  “Come on!” one of the resurrectionists said.

  Hawley hurt far too much to do anything besides watch as the trio gathered around the exhumed corpse and stripped it bare. The man’s burial clothes were left in a heap beside the open pit, the cracked lid of his coffin left carelessly on the mound of dirt. One resurrectionist bent and hoisted the cadaver onto his shoulder, then they were off. Blood pounding in his ears, Hawley could make out none of their words, but he understood their peals of laughter against the moonless sky.

  He dragged himself across the freezing ground to his old friend. Jeremiah had gone silent, his face a pulped, leaking wreck. Pulpy gray matter oozed from his shattered skull. Blood drained from his body and pooled atop frozen earth, the trodden snow surrounding him stained red.

  Chapter Four

  Hereford fished loose a cent for the street urchin hawking copies of The Daily Advertiser, then he jammed the folded sheet under his arm as he proceeded into a tavern. After a moment, his eyes adjusted from the fading sunlight to the candlelit interior, and he spotted a pair of familiar faces: Dr. Richard Bayley, his face softly lined with white hair hanging just past the tops of his ears, and his twenty-year-old protégé and son-in-law, Wright Post.

  “Good evening, Jonathan,” Dr. Bayley said.

  “Richard, Wright.” Hereford greeted them as he folded his coat over the back of an empty chair, squaring his hat and scarf over the newspaper atop the table beside his seat.

  “Have you read it?” Bayley asked, nodding toward the newspaper.

  “I’ve only just bought it. Perhaps I’ll save it to read over a brandy this evening.”

  “There’s quite a letter in there, written by a Negro complaining about our studies of the physic.”

  “Childs,” Post spat, the name of the newspaper’s editor an epithet on his tongue. A New York native, Post did not share his father-in-law’s London accent, despite the two years of study abroad undertaken at Hereford’s insistence.

  Hereford felt a twinge curling in his gu
ts, well aware of where Bayley was directing the discussion.

  “I understand some of your students had an encounter last night.” Bayley sipped his ale, watching Hereford over the rim of his mug.

  “Yes. John Hicks, Jr. and a few of his mates. I’ve spoken with him already.”

  “The boy is impudent,” Bayley said.

  “His youth gets the better of him,” Hereford said. Hicks was a fifteen-year-old freshman and the son of a doctor who had served as a physician at General Hospital during the British Occupation several years previously.

  Bayley, too, had been a Loyalist and served as a surgeon in the British Army, stationed in Rhode Island. His wife’s illness and subsequent death little more than a decade prior had brought Bayley to New York. He had resigned and focused on his medical practice and treating the poor.

  “See to it that it does not get the better of anyone else,” Bayley said. “We have come too far and have much left to do.”

  The note of warning in Bayley’s voice was unmistakable. Hereford was left with no recourse but to nod. He noticed that Bayley did not bother asking how badly wounded Hicks was, although in truth the injury was merely a trifle.

  Hereford understood the older man’s caution, even if he believed it to be unwarranted. Should the prior night’s activities come to light, he doubted it would be difficult to make the young Hicks into something of a hero. The public would be easily convinced that the Negroes had been robbing their own dead and that, upon hearing the commotion, Hicks and his classmates had sought to halt the desecration of these graves. Most blacks were little more than illiterate criminals, and perhaps they had been stealing the corpses to sell on the black market. It would not take much to court public opinion in Hicks’s favor. Even if most of that public itself was also illiterate and uneducated, they would trust a white man of means and money over an African savage, and the more salacious the crime, the easier it would be to sell.