I Am Abraham

by Charyn, Jerome

  “I can’t, Mr. President. I shit my pants.”

  “Well, Captain, my little boy shits his pants every day of the week, and I’ve managed to survive.”

  He shuffled a little closer in his prison slippers. “But Mrs. Lincoln, sir . . .”

  Mary was much braver than Wood and all his sentinels, who pulled back from the powerful sting in their nostrils. She fondled the captain’s tunic where his shoulder boards had been. I could feel the sweetness of her touch. She cradled her arm in his, and strolled with the captain in that infernal corridor. I saw him smile. Half his teeth were gone, and his gums were like black pits. He kissed Mary’s hand and sauntered back to me. I watched him rub at his tunic until his fingers were raw. I didn’t have the heart to interrogate him.

  “Captain, you don’t . . .”

  His eyes seemed to twist right out of their sockets as he hopped on his toes with a violent rhythm and commenced to croon. “An-tiet-am, sir. I was attached to the general. I watched him pace his tent. He was near undone when he had to lose lives. So I figured I’d stay healthy on account of the general. We loved to see him ride black Dan . . .”

  McClellan, always McClellan. It was as if I had no other generals. I could picture him charging up the stairs on Dan Webster’s back and rescuing this boy captain from the Super’s abominable sink.

  “I was in the middle of an apple orchard, with the Rebs fifty feet away, and I couldn’t fire my gun. A Rebel captain rushed at us with his colored orderly right beside him, and they were whooping and cawing like crazy crows. Next I remember I was in the Provost’s hut, with two of his adjutants kicking at me, and saying I led my own boys into a death trap. They never convened a court. I didn’t merit one, they said. They sent me here in a cattle car filled with Rebel prisoners . . .”

  It was one of Stanton’s tricks. He’d rather warehouse lost souls in the prison yards at A Street than surrender them to a court-martial that might rain down some bad publicity on the War Department. And if I interfered with that little gnome of a man who had all the wrath of Jehovah in his long, scratchy beard, I could wreck my own war machine. Truth is I preferred this boy to stay here than risk sitting on his own coffin in front of a firing squad. But that didn’t make me less angry at Wood, who was in cahoots with my Secretary of War.

  Mary brushed the boy captain’s cheeks with the soft bump of her hand, and he went back inside that squalid room, while I deliberated how to smash Wood’s little kingdom at Old Capitol. I’d never win. There’d always be another Wood with sentinels who seemed to have bands of leather and rough bark screwed tight into their skin.

  “Mr. Wood, you can tell your master at the War Department that if I don’t have fresh uniforms by this afternoon, you’ll have to strip in front of your sentinels and offer that boy captain your clothes . . . now find Mrs. Keckly.”

  We turned the corner and entered a corridor that swarmed with as many harlots as that Whores’ Lane just west of the White House. When Little Mac still ruled the District, he would chase the harlots to Boundary Street on one of his colossal whore runs. I could watch that roundup from my window, the harlots shrieking as Dan Webster flew right past, and they tumbled to the ground in their crushed crinolines. Didn’t seem to matter how often Little Mac made his runs. The harlots always reappeared in their petticoats, with the high-stepping kick that had become their hallmark. And here they were in the corridors of Old Capitol, with the same high kick that was halfway between a walk and a dance. They were not alone. They had their gentlemen callers—cardsharps in tall hats, confidence men, clairvoyants, even a Confederate general, who must have escaped from that officers’ asylum on the other side of the hall in his slouch hat. He couldn’t have noticed us. He clapped his hands, and one of the harlots raised her petticoats to the sky and revealed her quim—couldn’t see much more than a flick of her unwashed thighs in that somber light, and neither could my wife.

  “You cockroach,” Wood roared, “the Lady President is in this house—with Mr. Lincoln,” and he threw his baton at the general. The whole corridor emptied in a whirl of petticoats, and that poor general had to fend for himself. He stood on one knee and doffed his slouch hat. He was no general of the line, but a logistics officer who had been captured while sitting on a supply train.

  “I am inconsolable, Madame President,” he muttered. His eyes couldn’t seem to focus. One of his own commanders must have left him on that train, half out of his mind. He knew Mary’s people in Lexington and wouldn’t stop yattering about great aunts and prize peacocks and a duel over some damsel who lived down the road on Short Street.

  “Father,” Mary whispered, “we must find Lizabeth.”

  So we abandoned the general and marched into that enormous barrack where all the harlots had fled. It was as big and wild as the President’s Park—Number 19, where the commissary was situated and all the bartering was done—copulation was the prison’s prime affair. Number 19 was populated with an armada of curtains and privacy screens, where the prison’s prostitutes assembled with their clients. The Super couldn’t even suppress such business while Mary and I were there; it was beyond his purview, like the shifting chaos of battle. Yet Mother didn’t trouble herself about this charivari of grunts and groans.

  We had to survey Number 19, walk among the harlots in their cloaks and stockings rich as blood, but we couldn’t find Elizabeth in the general uproar. I glanced across that room like a chicken hawk on the prowl, went into every corner with my lazy eye.

  “Lizabeth,” Mary shrieked, “Lizabeth, where are you?”

  No one could have heard her in all that din.

  “Mother, wait here.”

  Now I went from curtain to curtain, trying not to bother about the copulations, but I had a peculiar lesson in geography; most of these harlots had painted their nipples and their quims with lip rouge; their eyes were camouflaged with charcoal. Some wore chains around their middles like Christian martyrs. They didn’t copulate on some old mattress. They clutched a curtain rod or the rails of a privacy screen and stood with their arses in the air, while their clients rutted them from behind, their faces half hidden. Else they danced in front of a feller, while he plucked on his own red root. And it kind of interrupted my search—I was caught in the sway of these prison house Salomes, with all their shivers and undulations, the tiny turns of their hands, the sweet pendulum of their breasts, and I might have plucked at my own root on another occasion. But I wasn’t as mottled in the head as that supply general. I noticed a Senator and a couple of Congressmen who must have entered Old Capitol through some private door. They were so inflamed, with their eyes squeezed tight, that I probably looked like one more shadow in Number 19.

  Then someone scratched at my sleeve—it was the mayor of Baltimore with nothing on but his boots; he had scars under his heart that looked like arrow heads, and I wondered if it was the price he had to pay for some scalping party. I should have realized that my Secretary of War had incarcerated him among all these slobbering fools.

  “Lincoln, you and that damn writ of yours. Stanton stole my life away.”

  I didn’t want to deal with him now, listen to his drumroll of complaints.

  “I have no time for you.”

  “Then you had better make some time,” he said and clung to my sleeve like a shoofly. So I had to stand there and jaw with him in that monumental harlots’ house.

  “You’re a monster,” he said, “tramplin’ on the law and suspendin’ habeas corpus. Judge Taney called you a tyrant and a maniac.”

  “Well,” I said, jabbing at the mayor, like a stick in his guts, “I might have the Judge keep you company at Old Capitol, jest like that.”

  The wind went out of him. “You can’t arrest the Chief Justice. That’s obscene.”

  I twisted free and shook him like a great rag doll. “What’s obscene, sir, is asking for troops to protect your little enclave in Baltimore, when all the while you plotted to kill me and my wife in bed.”

  His shoulders
slumped and his mouth twitched with alarm. “How did you . . . ?”

  Allan Pinkerton had planted a spy in the mayor’s office and read all the traffic between Richmond and Baltimore, or we couldn’t have squandered him and his plot.

  The mayor commenced to sob among all his cronies. But he might as well have been silent in all that squealing behind the curtains.

  “It ain’t right. These yards are your monstrosity, Lincoln. Your footprint is in every room.”

  And he wandered off. I did feel like some kind of dragon in his own lair. Old Capitol. Yet I hadn’t dragged Mrs. Keckly into these yards. I hadn’t hired sentinels with bullet ears and mean little eyes. I hadn’t built a locomotive heated up by harlots and their privacy screens. Every screen could have been painted by some prison artist, with castles and cornfields, lighthouses and ships of the line, hurricanes and desert storms, as if some biblical creature had reinvented the world at Old Capitol. But I didn’t want to reinvent the world.

  I overturned the screens, kicked at them, and finally found Elizabeth behind a curtain, hugging her knees, as she shivered on the floor. She was wearing some sort of smock that looked like a monk’s shirt; her hands and feet were filthy. Her hair must have been shorn by some sentinel who fancied himself a barber. There were bumps all over her scalp. She had bruises on her face. I couldn’t even tend to her. I had to give my autograph to certain ladies of Number 19, who kept their souvenir albums tucked inside their bodices. They gawked at me as if I’d tumbled out of a dream. They touched my beard while I tried to gather Elizabeth in my arms. She sat there frozen, her teeth rattling all the time. I whispered in her ear like some kindly serpent.

  “Elizabeth, we have to scatter, or this old jail might come crashing down on our heads.”

  She mumbled something, and I had to lean down on my coattails to catch her mutterings. “Mr. Lincoln—I can’t move.”

  And that’s when Mother arrived, amid all the copulations and a cacophonous din. She wasn’t even bothered by the groans and farts, the frenzied maneuvers around her.

  “Lizzie, get up. Goodness, you can’t sit here in all this filth. You’ll die.”

  Keckly stood up like Mother’s own marionette, but she started to totter. “My legs have gone daid.”

  “Nonsense,” Mother told her.

  It took Keckly five whole minutes to collect herself. She scrutinized that endless parlor as if she had landed in a forest of privacy screens, and wiped her face with Mother’s silk handkerchief.

  “I’ll never get out of here, Mr. Lincoln. I’m on the Provost’s list.”

  HIS NAME WAS ROSECRANS, like one of my generals. But this magistrate was a colonel with the Provost’s office. He sat in his own little court on the second floor. He could have been my age, though it was hard to tell. He wasn’t deformed, or anything like that, but he did have a tiny hump on his back—a war wound, I reckon, and that’s why he was stationed at Old Capitol. He had little concern for my Presidency. But his eyes rattled in his head when I entered his courtroom with Elizabeth and Mary and two sentinels. I’d seen him once before, riding through the District with George McClellan, on one of his mad dashes from the Powder Magazine to Lafayette Park, Little Mac flying out of the dust with his retinue, while half the city was agog and still worshiped him; Rosecrans was there, in his duster, as Little Mac and his family flanked the White House and rode across the Long Bridge, into Alexandria, went from camp to camp.

  “Mr. Lincoln, why did you come into my court with the prisoner?”

  “Her being here is a flat mistake.”

  He sat on a very tall bench, and I had to stand on my toes if I wanted to catch his eye. He rifled through a drawer and squinted at a sheet of paper with a magnifying glass.

  “Isn’t she Elizabeth Keckly, who’s been aiding and abetting criminals and deserters at a so-called contraband camp? We caught her flat out. She had the cheek to sabotage our investigations, sir, to hinder us from capturing such criminals. We don’t even have to charge the lady. We’re at war, sir.”

  He smiled to himself, like the petty tyrant he was. “Are you defending her as an officer of this court?”

  “Yes,” I told him. “I’m licensed in Illinois.”

  “Illinois don’t mean much in my court. This here’s a prison for soldiers and crimes connected to soldiering and sabotage.”

  “You have no authority over her. This woman works for me. Her contraband camps are a cover.”

  I’d scratched at his curiosity. “Cover for what?”

  “A training ground for future black officers.”

  He started to slink in his high chair. This magistrate had barked at prisoners and junior officers, at prostitutes and tramps, at bomb throwers and editors of seditious material, but not at a man who could bark right back.

  “I never received any notice about such an institution,” he muttered from his high chair.

  And now I prepared to break him, like some gullible alligator.

  “Rosecrans, you’re a magistrate, not the Secretary of War.”

  He started mumbling to himself. “And do these camps have a code name?”

  “Yes,” I spat. “West Point. These officers will command a regiment one day.”

  He slipped further and further into the well of his high chair. “Black regiments, sir?”

  “Some black, some white.”

  I’d crushed his belief in the world. He couldn’t bear to look at Elizabeth. She’d become a sign of his unworthiness. He stamped her release form. We might never have left that maze without his signature—dead or alive. Prisoners had a habit of getting lost at Old Capitol, which had its own gallows and mortuary. We climbed down the stairs, past the Rebel officers, who trudged back and forth in a trance, and the traitor-clerks, who screamed their oaths of loyalty into the walls, past the paupers, who congregated here until they could be sent to the Poor House, past the harlots and matrons who had spied on us and sat in a corner until some repatriation boat carried them to Richmond, past the child murderers, who wandered about in their chains, and the sentinels, who herded prisoners from hall to hall. Keckly shuddered, as the stench grew worse and worse. The sentinels hissed at me—a President didn’t have much quarter here—but they wouldn’t question the magistrate’s stamp.

  Elizabeth blinked into the bald light once we entered the yards. “Shame on you, Mr. Lincoln—bamboozling that poor magistrate.”

  And she corralled me with my own lies.

  “Would you like to visit West Point? We can ride through one of the contraband camps . . . and you can appoint a couple of colored cadets.”

  I jest couldn’t do it. My generals wouldn’t have tolerated a little college for colored cadets. They’d never serve with black officers. We’d have open rebellion in the ranks. I could shout until blood came leaking out my ears, and we still wouldn’t have been able to go on with the war. Richmond would have crept across the river like some land-and-sea monster, with Rebels swimming right on our porch . . .

  Elizabeth fell asleep against my shoulder on the trip back to the White House—we rode past Swampdoodle, a marshland of privies and shacks, where the Irish lived; most sane men avoided that swamp; enlistment officers rarely entered the Irish enclave, looking for raw recruits. We rode past an ambulance delivering certain fine ladies to the wharves—these were Washington matrons who’d been a bit reckless in their sympathies to the South; they sang “The Bonnie Blue Flag” smack in the middle of Union country.

  We are a band of brothers and native to the soil

  Fighting for the property we gained in honest toil

  And when our rights were threatened, the cry rose near and far

  Hurrah! For the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.

  There wasn’t much of a melody in their eyes. I noticed the bracelets on their legs; they were lashed to that ambulance. And they weren’t raucous with Mother and me.

  “We’re going to Richmond. Should we give your regards to Mr. Jeff?”

 
The ambulance was gone before I had the chance to utter a sound. I couldn’t stop thinking of those Belles Dames and their Bonnie Blue Flag. They must have dreaded that repatriation boat, a little. Still, they hadn’t woken Elizabeth—she was sobbing in her dreams.

  “Father,” Mary said, “you must shut down that rotten sink, or I will shut it myself.”

  “And where should I put all the prisoners? Stanton will store them in your flower garden.”

  “Mr. Lincoln, those were a poor excuse for prisoners. Strumpets parading with Senators. Soldiers who should be in an infirmary, or a mental ward. Half-blind saboteurs who kept bumping into walls.”

  And might have murdered Taddie in his bed.

  Mother wasn’t wrong. Old Capitol was a rotten sink and a circus for profiteers. I doubted Stanton collected a penny for himself. He must have realized that a penal house had to be run like any other business—with canteen cards and privacy screens. I couldn’t afford to shut it down, else we’d have to jump onto the repatriation boat with the Belles Dames and flee from all the chaos.

  Mary pouted for a while and then broke her silence with a smile.

  “Father,” she said, with a playful twist in her eyes, “do you think a black officer will ever command a white regiment?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Not even in Taddie’s lifetime?”

  “No. Not ever.”

  We rode along Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Willard, where every room was lit, and entered the reptilian darkness of the President’s grounds—the front porch had a single, sputtering flare; the stables looked like catacombs. I wouldn’t let the coachman handle Elizabeth. I carried her through the gate. Mother didn’t want her sleeping all alone in the attic, so I set her down on a divan in Mary’s headquarters and covered her with a blanket. I watched her breath for a little while, watched the flutter of her hands. The Locofocos liked to harp about the Miscegenation Balls we had at the White House, how the Lincolns lived incestuous lives. But their evil gossip couldn’t corral the feelings I had for Elizabeth; she was like an irascible sister you loved in spite of the quarrels you had, an angel in the attic, even without her bombazine.