“No, and I don’t know her age, neither,” she says in reply to an additional question posed by the sergeant. “Look, if I’d had all these facts and figures at my fingertips, I would have said so downstairs and saved myself the trouble—and you two gents, as well. She was young, though. Ten, maybe, or eleven. And then there’s that silly name, like something in a nursery song. It didn’t help her gain regular customers, I can tell you.”
“It looks like nothing helped her,” the sergeant observes.
Dutch Kat releases another long sigh, and she and her visitors continue crowding into Claire’s small and rank-smelling room. The sergeant again writes in his ledger while Kat swings around to face Thomas Kelman, then immediately regrets her decision. “I don’t wish no trouble with the law,” she mutters, attempting to crinkle her eyes and flutter her lashes in a practiced picture of naïveté. The expression only makes her look deceitful and cunning, while the effort greatly increases her distress. Men like this fancy gent don’t have any place in Kat’s fancy house.
“Not a clue,” she huffs in reply to the sergeant’s next question: this one concerning the girl’s parentage. “Sold by her father to some wealthy gent, I’d imagine. I get a lot that’s been sold—then released by their masters to fend for theirselves. The men that buy ’em don’t take ’em for long—once they’re no longer babies, that is. And it’s simple enough to purchase another kid.” She shrugs her ample shoulders. “‘God helps those that help theirselves’; that’s what the Good Book says, ain’t it—?”
Another question interrupts her, and Kat’s tone turns more belligerent. Her fleshy bosom heaves. Ill concealed beneath a lace and cambric bodice that is none too clean, her upper body gives off an acrid odor like cold boiled cabbage. “No, I did not inquire what her family name was, constable!” she all but sneers. “Oft times, the girls don’t know, neither. We’re not all blessed with fancy pedigrees—or didn’t you know?” As she says this, she forces herself to stare at Kelman, who returns her suggestive gaze without flinching.
Kat has a sudden mind to grab for his crotch; it’s a lunatic notion, and she finally and truly grins at the boldness of the thought. Her front teeth as she produces this garish expression are intact and very white. No matter that the rest are gone; it makes for “easier business.” “You’re a right gentleman, ain’t you, mister?” she demands of Kelman. “I can always sniff them out. What I can’t figure, though, is what you’re doing poking around down here on lower Lombard Street. Don’t you get enough pickpockets and footpads bothering the fancy folk over on Washington Square?”
Kelman doesn’t reply. Instead, his black eyes regard her intently. Kat, shorter by far, unkempt, unwashed, feels herself squirm under the relentless scrutiny. “Can we finish this up?” she demands. “I got paying customers waiting.”
“We can haul you in as a common scold,” the sergeant growls. “The Criers’ Docket has plenty of those. Adultery, too.”
“Don’t make me laugh!” Kat throws back. “‘Common scold.’ I’m only saying my peace as a law-abiding citizen.” Then her pugnacious façade again begins to crumble under Kelman’s steady perusal.
Inadvertently she touches her rumpled curls. She knows they need coloring; years and strain have turned their former blond to patchy gray, and she imagines him gazing down into the mismatched thicket as if surprised at such a multitude of colors. “This is a clean house, Dutch Kat’s is,” she states in defiance. “We’re recommended in the Guide to the Stranger—only forty-four of us fancy houses made the list. Most exclusive, the publication is. The pamphlet’s carried in the best hotels and lodgings.” This last statement ends as a sort of appeal. She looks to Kelman, but he makes no response.
“Can we finish this up?” Kat repeats with a nervous giggle. “It’s a chill night out, and I have gents waiting for my better girls. Men like a bit of warming on a bitter winter evening like this. Now, I could supply you two with something to cozy you up. We’ll get this palaver over first, and then—”
The sergeant shakes his florid nose, then blows it on a rumpled bit of linen. He looks tempted by Kat’s offer; Kelman does not.
“That’s not the Bible you’re quoting,” he says in a tone of such resonance that Kat unexpectedly thinks of church bells. Church bells in a house for ladies of pleasure! “The words were penned by Benjamin Franklin—”
“As I live and breathe.” Kat forces a snicker. “Our fine guest’s got a tongue in his head after all!”
Kelman stares down at her. “And you can’t tell us who did this?” he finally says, his fingers indicating the bed. Not one pair of eyes follows the gesture.
“I already said I hadn’t a clue, didn’t I, mister?”
“But there must have been something you noticed, madam. A slight limp or a manner in which he carried himself that might have indicated his age … whether his face was broad or thin … there must have been some discernible mark—”
“He was wearing a scarf and expensive coat. That’s all I can tell you. Look, if I’d known what mischief he was up to I wouldn’t have let him in, would I? I’m a business woman, not a monster.” Kat spits out these words. “And it will be a right mess to clean it up, too! A nice mattress, that, horsehair. Feather pillows, too. They’re pricey bits, and bloodstains don’t disappear with soap. Lye soap, neither.” Dutch Kat snaps her ruined teeth in frustration, then stabs the floor with a grubby foot. “Country girls! They’re more bother than they’re worth.”
The sergeant again makes an entry in his book. “You’re certain she was a country lass?” he asks.
“Look at that hair, why don’t you, constable? Blond—and plenty of it. And her skin! Not a mark upon it. Leastways, not one made by nature. You don’t get that type here in the Fifth Ward or the shacks north of Cramp and Sons Shipyards. Them girls is small and gray as rats, but they don’t kill easy.”
She stamps her heel as she speaks, and the vehemence of her movement shakes the bedstead. Kat and the two men look down just in time to see Claire’s naked body slide downward to lie in a small, angular puddle on the dusty carpet. Murdered, she was posed half on the bed, her arms bending forward gracefully, her head turned gently sideways, and her thin, young legs trailing floorward as if sleep had overwhelmed her at her prayers.
Finding Claire thus dozing during working hours, Kat had first upbraided the girl for being “stuck on religion.” Then she noticed the red-black sheets, the deep gash slicing the neck, and the child’s pale tongue placed like an offering on a separate pillow.
Cherry Hill
“CHERRY HILL” IS WHAT THE locals have dubbed the place. The name is accompanied by a twisting set of the mouth that indicates a combination of contempt and terror, because Cherry Hill is no longer the broad and bountiful cherry orchard that once sat atop a promontory at the bucolic northern outskirts of the city, but a penitentiary for Philadelphia’s convicted criminals. None inside, neither the warders nor those sentenced to repent their crimes in solitary confinement, call the prison Cherry Hill, however. But then those who reside within its stout stone walls seldom speak. Absolute silence is the prison’s rule.
Absolute silence within ten acres of land that’s been divided into a central rotunda from which emanate cell blocks, a kitchen and laundry, a surgery, kennels for the Great Danes that guard the walls, a vegetable garden, and a pump house where dray horses pace endless rotations. Built a brief thirteen years ago in 1829, the complex officially called Eastern State Penitentiary is a miracle of modern invention; warders monitor each cell door through a series of mirrors that image interior corridors, and so maintain an appropriate air of monastic repentance and mute reflection. The notion that isolation and prayer can teach murderers and thieves alike to atone for their crimes has made the prison a famous place not only in the nation but abroad. All foreign dignitaries and European artistes touring Philadelphia insist upon visiting it.
But the prison is also notorious for its stench. Human waste is flushed through the great
drains twice a month only; when flooding or heavy rains occur, the sewers regurgitate inside the cells themselves, carrying drowned rats, mice, swimming toads, snakes as thick as eels. The stink permeates the air, burrows into the skin and clothing of those incarcerated and even into the great stone slabs themselves. The smell and the enforced seclusion make suicide endemic.
Ruth is one of the newer inmates. She’s nineteen, or thereabouts, a free Negress, not a runaway slave; and nearly three years of her life have been spent in a tiny, barrel-vaulted cell with a food slot cut in the thick oak door and a slit roof-window. Unlike her male counterparts, who are provided with private outdoor spaces as well as indoor beds, females are assigned to only one interior room for the duration of their term. The architects who designed the building reasoned that men, being muscular, needed light and air; women, even those confined, were to be protected from the elements at all times.
Ruth was once a maid-of-all-work. Caught stealing potatoes to tote home to her sickly baby son—he was born doubly afflicted: a victim of the falling disease, and offspring of a white father who forced himself upon her one unlucky day—she was released without references, a sentence nearly tantamount to death.
With her mulatto child in tow, she returned to the Negro ghetto bordered by South and Seventh Streets, doing what meager work passed her way, existing on meals of scraps and refuse. When she could no longer afford even a sleeping place on a vermin-infested floor, she bundled up her son and quit the ghetto, taking to the streets to beg pennies off the well-to-do whose warm and lamp-lit homes adjoined Washington Square.
Begging proved problematic. To the abolitionists, Ruth was an object of pity, sometimes even of sympathy, but to the many newly arrived Irish who struggled with their own poverty and unemployment, she was a pariah. Men and women alike spat upon her, kicked at her baby as he lay sleeping in her lap, called her a “sambo” and her son an “antichrist” while they glared at her child’s paler skin and the features that looked so much like her nameless oppressor.
Ruth cowered under the threats, remembering every horrific moment of the riots of the 1830s when entire houses along Fitzwater and St. Mary’s streets were burned to the ground, and neighbors dragged off shrieking into the night. She’d lost what little she had of family in those dark times.
Driven by hunger, despair, and the mewling cries of her son, Ruth finally gave up begging in favor of a nervous kind of thievery; she would dart between market-bound farm wagons so that the bellowing drivers were distracted, and objects from their varying cargoes could be removed by nimbler and more daring fingers than her own. A ham, a bushel of peaches, flour stitched into a sack: The goods would be shared between Ruth and her accomplices.
Her baby, quivering and glassy-eyed when the fits came upon him, limp and slack-lipped after they’d passed, ate and grew.
Finally arrested and pulled before the slumbrous-voiced and heavy-lidded Judge Alonzo Craig, Ruth stood tight-faced and silent, and was sentenced to Eastern State Penitentiary for three years. “Larceny” and “the receiving of stolen goods” were her twin crimes. Incarcerated, she was to experience regret for her evil ways; fortnightly and with an unseen teacher, she was to be engaged in learning the rudiments of reading and figuring, as well as mastering the skill of sewing. As for her child, a stranger took him from the courtroom; he was two years old, and as he walked away his body heaved with terrible tears. When he stumbled, the stranger dragged him forward. That was the last image Ruth had of her little boy.
“‘Whither thou goest, I will go,’” she now murmurs in the smallest of whispers. Her voice feels strange in her throat, like that of one who is deaf. She sits on her cornhusk-filled mattress, upright, hands resting on her lap. The warders, whose shoes are muffled with swaddling, are adept at peeking through the cell eyeholes just in time to catch and punish profligate behavior: handiwork dashed to the floor, words of protest, rage, and grief scribbled on the whitewashed stone walls.
“‘And where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:’”
She begins the lines again. “From the Book of Ruth,” the Quaker lady told her during one of her visits. The choice of Scripture was inadvertent; not knowing the prisoner’s name, race, creed, or age, the woman sat in the corridor, speaking quietly and unseen through the door slit where food is delivered daily. “The Old Testament. Thee must learn thy Bible, child.”
The lady’s queer Quaker speech remains in Ruth’s ears: thee, thine, thou. “The story tells of the widowed Ruth,” the woman continued in the same hushed tone, “who journeys with her mother-in-law, Naomi, to dwell in an alien land, and is then raised up by marriage to the wealthy and powerful Boaz. Ruth will become the great-grandmother of David, the king. I tell the story to teach thee about overcoming adversity. Ruth was a loyal and loving woman; she did not succumb to temptation nor to vice as thou hast—”
“I am Ruth,” Ruth had suddenly blurted, although she knew that sharing her identity was as forbidden as talking aloud.
The Quaker lady remained silent, then finally responded with a constrained “Thee mustn’t speak or say thy name. Only the warden can know thy history. It’s for thine own good, girl, so that departing this place, no one shall guess thy past. That is why a sack is placed upon thy head the moment thee enters the gates—”
“But I’m also a Ruth” had been the stubborn—although hushed—reply, but the lady rejected the effort, proceeding with a placid:
“And why thou art conveyed to thy cell blindfolded, why thee and thy fellow penitents are dressed in identical and prison-stitched clothing, why thou dost not know among whom thou lodgest: male, female, old, young … Thee must remain B415 to me.”
“I am Ruth,” was the sullen and louder answer, “dwelling in an alien land.”
“Thou blasphemest, child. Now keep silent, or the warders will force me to go.”
Remembering this exchange, Ruth feels her eyes narrow and her fingers clench. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. She bows her head. Whose God? she wonders. Whose people?
Something that sounds like a club bangs sharply against the cell’s wood door. The onetime maid-of-all-work leaps up, surprised to see her meal tray sliding inward through the food slot. In her three years in Cherry Hill, she’s never grown accustomed to the arrival of her keepers.
She takes the tray but doesn’t attempt to peer through the opening. According to prison rules, no words are exchanged. Brown bread, water, a dented metal bowl of meat gristle: She carries the meal back to her bed. The whale-oil lamp sputters, emitting a choking, fish-innard odor that for a moment masks the all-enveloping stench of the prison.
Thy people shall be my people, she tells herself silently, then, unwittingly and against all better judgment, thinks of her son, her little Cai. Almost five years old, he would be now. Five years this winter. But whether he lives or whether he has died, Ruth doesn’t know.
While ruth cowers in the upper reaches of the female wing, another prisoner practices his walking in his own quiet cell on the ground floor of the men’s wing. He’s a slight man, thin-boned and sprightly, save for one terrible flaw. He was born with a club foot. Or, rather, no true foot. Where his right heel should be, he has only an ankle, the vestigial right toes curling up backward around a scrawny calf.
Unlike Ruth, he’s white and because he’s male has been assigned both a cell for sleeping and a solitary one for exercise. The advantage of such beneficence is lost upon him.
Long ago and despite his affliction, he glimpsed a better future for himself. He envisioned a man of modest means, his own small shop (he was a tailor by trade before his arrest for thievery), and a wife and children dwelling comfortably above his place of business. He pictured a weekly supper of roasted meat, a jug of ale upon the table, neighbors to whom he spoke and among whom he was admired.
From his earliest youth, he worked toward this gilded dream, teaching himself to walk erect and tall, not giving in to his withe
red right extremity. When he turned eight—he was called Dicket back then—he strapped the first of many hand-hewn sticks to his leg. His father by then being dead, his mother apprenticed him to a tailor. It was the last Dicket saw of her or of home.
His tailor-master renamed him Josiah, as his own name was deemed too juvenile for the trade he was entering. The tailor was a religious man beside being a shrewd one.
When Josiah reached sixteen, this master died, leaving his estate in ruins and his apprentice adrift. Josiah strapped on a “good” leg and walked carefully—and without a crutch—through the town seeking a new position. By then he’d learned to attach an empty shoe to the stick, to wrap the harsh wood in cotton batting, to stitch on a clean stocking. The bogus foot often looked better than the real. Josiah’s secret remained his own.
The slim beginnings of prosperity ensued, and Josiah (now a hired man) dared to take a wife. She produced a daughter, a pink and round-faced child almost perfect except for her predominant brow. All babies have big heads, Josiah told his bride. Susan will grow into hers like every other infant.
The child proved him wrong. Her head grew and grew; her body followed fitfully, turning fat where it should have been long, her shoulders rounding into pasty lumps, her hands lying listlessly at her sides. She rarely reached for objects as other children did; instead, her eyes became milky, staring at nothing. When her mother held her, spittle ran from the little girl’s mouth; when her parents tried to teach her the sounds and meaning of speech, she merely gurgled and drooled all the more.
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