Forever

by Pete Hamill

  Slaves couldn’t work as coopers or coachmen, they told Cormac (while the music pounded and the porter flowed), because the white coopers and white coachmen couldn’t compete with them for wages. “Nobody competes with us,” said Sandy, “ ’cause we get no wages, sir.” This in an English accent (he was born in New York, and then his mother died and his father was sold to a man in Canada while he was sold to a brickmaker). “They see us as mules, sir, or horses,” Sandy said, waving a thin hand. “Sell us, trade us, rent us.” Diamond murmured, “They sure to be a day.”

  Mary Burton heard this fragment of talk and said, “Explain about the great God-fearin’ dog-feckin’ shite-eating Bible-thumpin’ piss-drinkin’ Christian churches!” The three Africans laughed and so did Cormac. “We can’t be Christians,” said Sandy, “because that would mean we had souls, sir. Mules don’t have souls, sir, horses don’t have souls—”

  “And if you don’t have a feckin’ soul, then they can give yiz the feckin’ lash!” said Mary Burton.

  Slaves couldn’t get married in any Christian church, so they had their own ceremonies.

  “I marry my wife here in Hughson’s,” said Quaco, and for the first time, his eyes looked bitter in the yellow light of Hughson’s lanterns. “My wife, she work in the fort. Cookin’, cleanin’. They won’t let me see her on Sunday, won’t let me see her at night; she have to sneak out and go with me in the trees, like the white whores by the fort. My wife! And they own her!”

  Mary Burton put a calming hand on Quaco’s forearm, sipped furtively from Cormac’s glass of porter, glancing through the crowd at the bar to be sure Hughson didn’t see her.

  “In other words,” she said, turning to Cormac, “these poor buggers’re treated like we was treated in the feckin’ Old Country.” She shook her head. “They don’t even have a Catholic church here. Just like the Old Country. It’s against the feckin’ law. So if you’re a Catholic, keep your mouth shut, boy. It’s a Godawful feckin’ crime to be a Catholic priest, and if they find one, they’ll strip him and whip the feckin’ life out of him. God help you if you’re a Catholic African. That’s a double feckin’ crime.”

  She was laughing bitterly through this discourse, and so were the Africans. Then she glanced at the bar and her mood suddenly altered. Sarah Hughson had come around from behind the bar and her swagger made clear that she was the real boss of the tavern. Quaco looked uneasy. Other Africans nodded politely to her, not wishing to trigger her wrath and find themselves barred from Hughson’s. The fiddler played a lament, full of Irish sadness, and Sarah came over to the table.

  “Ach, it’s the mud man,” she said to Cormac, hands on hips. “You look much better than you did when you arrived. And whatever you do, don’t believe a word from Mary the Mouth.” She smiled, showing her crooked teeth. “Bring the new lad a drink, will you, Mary?”

  Mary Burton went to the bar, and Sarah sat down beside Cormac. Quaco, Sandy, and Diamond smiled in welcome but eased away, keeping a respectful distance.

  “So what brings you to New York?”

  “I want to be a printer.”

  “A good trade,” she said. “But you might not find labor. The town’s full of illiterates. Starting with the people that run it.” She turned to Quaco. “How’s your wife, Quaco?”

  He shrugged. “Reg’lar, Miz Hughson.”

  “She’s still over in the fort?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Quaco said, seething again.

  “A beautiful woman she is,” Sarah said to Cormac. “A bosom’d make most women weep in envy.” Then, to Quaco: “Better keep an eye out on her. Those soldier boys can’t be trusted.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mary Burton returned with a porter for Cormac and a small whiskey for Sarah Hughson. Sarah downed hers and got up. So did Quaco. His brow was knitted into a grid.

  “Don’t you go anywhere, Quaco,” Sarah said.

  “I go where I want,” he said, grunting.

  “Don’t go to the fort.”

  “I go where I want.”

  “That’s nothing but trouble,” Sarah Hughson said. “She’s surely fast asleep.”

  Sandy grabbed his arm to hold him back, but Quaco jerked his arm free and headed to the back door. Diamond and Sandy hurried after him (the music pounding now) and the three of them passed into the New York darkness.

  “Jaysus feckin’ Christ,” Mary Burton said.

  “I shouldn’t’ve mentioned his wife,” Sarah said.

  “He thinks the governor and the feckin’ officers and all the men are getting it from his wife,” Mary Burton whispered to Cormac. “And he might be right about the governor.”

  43.

  Sarah moved quickly to the back door, and Mary sat down beside Cormac. She was weary now, her hair loose and tangled from the heat of the room and the long hours of the day. An African fiddler was playing his own instrument, plucking the strings in a percussive way instead of bowing them. The gourds and rattles were out. Africans drummed with fingernails on tabletops, while Mary Burton explained one other truth about the tavern (whispering, covering her mouth, looking at her glass). The Africans didn’t just come here for the drink and the freedom. They were there every night of the week because John Hughson was a fence.

  “If you’re a slave,” she said, “the law is a feckin’ joke. And so most of them are thieves.”

  After dark, she said, they came to Hughson’s with those things they had foraged. Things that could be turned into a form of payment for labor. Pieces of cheap silverware, bearing no engraved stamps. Stray tools. Casks of nails. Leather whips. Stolen liquor, meat, potatoes, and fruit. They stole while their masters were sleeping, or away on business, or assembled in the Christian churches, full of piety and breakfast. “It’s a way to keep some kind of feckin’ pride,” Mary Burton said. “There’s not too many ways to do that under the English flag.”

  Hughson didn’t often give cash to the Africans. And it was not easy for an African to spend money, since he was not supposed to have any. What Hughson gave them was credit in his own tavern.

  “I’d steal meself,” said Mary Burton, and laughed. “But I could hardly fence Hughson’s own things to Hughson himself.”

  Her rebellion, what she did for pride, was a simpler matter. Hughson owned her but could not have her. “As simple as that.” He could not go between her legs or invite anyone else to do the same. “And that’s fine with Sarah.” In the end it was really Sarah’s place, not John’s. She it was who forced poor slow John to sell his house up in Westchester and come down to New York. She it was who had him rent the first small tavern, and then to lease this one, and then to spread the word that the blacks would be welcome. She it was who made certain that at least one white whore lived on the premises, and this year’s whore was Peggy, who arrived one snowy midnight from Newfoundland and never left.

  “That’s Peggy there, Peggy the house whore,” Mary Burton said, and motioned toward a young woman across the room, red-haired, thick-breasted, broad-shouldered, and large. She was smiling and flirting in a mannered way. “A nice woman, in her way, but dumber than feckin’ whale shite.”

  Peggy slept with the Africans too, if they had the money in cash.

  “Sure, the English preachers give off lots of blather about how the blacks and the whites are meant to be separate,” Mary Burton said. “But there’s no holdin’ men from drink. And when there’s drink taken, their feckin’ rods always lead them to women. Every man in this place has offered me good money for a look at me quim. They’ve offered me everything except what they can’t feckin’ give me. Me freedom.”

  The back door opened. Quaco, Sandy, and Diamond returned, herded inside by the shepherdess Sarah. She stood them drinks at the bar. The music was steady and full of rhythms Cormac had never heard before, like the beat of a heart. The back door opened again. “Here’s the African feckin’ Lucifer himself,” Mary Burton said. A large black man bent his head under the door frame. The room hushed, and even the fiddler s
topped for a few beats. “That’s Caesar. The one I’m sure’s put a child in poor, dumb Peggy.” Sarah smiled in welcome. Hughson looked nervous. Peggy averted her eyes shyly and removed a hand from inside a black man’s shirt. Caesar moved slowly and theatrically, performing an image of latent violence. He smiled at Sarah in a thin way and then the talk resumed, muffled, murmurous.

  “He’s a dangerous fecker,” Mary Burton whispered.

  Quaco, Sandy, and Diamond reclaimed their seats. Quaco glanced across the room at Caesar, then looked down at Mary Burton.

  “I think I’ll dance with you, Mary,” he said.

  “You will not, Quaco. You’re a married man.” She laughed. “Besides, I’m working.”

  She went off to retrieve glasses and plates (Quaco shrugging away the rebuff), and Cormac realized how thin her body was, and how long her neck. As she moved, her eyes assumed a distracted look, as if she were seeing something that was not in the room. In spite of her foul, bitter mouth, he thought she was beautiful. He noticed Caesar’s glance at her, and Hughson watching her too, and then Sarah identifying desire in Hughson’s eyes and turning to examine Mary Burton, as if wondering what her husband wanted from this thin, common Irish girl. Or knowing what he wanted but finding it hard to believe. Caesar’s back was to them now, but when Peggy eased beside him at the bar, his large ebony hand wandered casually to her buttocks and caressed them in a possessive way. A sign to all the others. Including the whites.

  For while he was watching the Africans, Cormac’s attention had been diverted from the dozen white men in the place. They were scattered around the long, low room, six of them together in a bunch, others mixing with the Africans. At one point, two African women came in and joined two white men at a table. The women were tall, dressed in American clothes, with bonnets on their heads. One of them had neat scars on both cheeks, arranged in rows, and wore gold hoops in her ears. Tomora’s face moved in Cormac. Full lips. Liquid eyes. Lush body in a shroud on a windless sea.

  “You’ve got lust in your face,” Mary Burton said, sliding down beside him. “Do you want one of them?”

  “No,” Cormac lied.

  “You can have either one for a few shillings,” she said. “Or both. God knows they need the money.”

  The women were drinking rum paid for by the white men. One nodded at Caesar: the obvious ponce. “Whatever they get, he gets half,” Mary Burton said. “He’s got women in some of the other feckin’ taverns too.” Cormac noticed Quaco staring at the African women and mumbling in English to Diamond and Sandy. Cormac couldn’t hear everything he said, but he did hear words about his wife and the fort. The woman with the scars turned and looked at the blue door leading into the house and then at Sarah Hughson, who nodded her approval. “Here she goes,” Mary Burton said. “There’s one room on the top floor that’s always free.” The African woman whispered something to the white man, then went to the blue door. Quaco started getting up, as if to intercept her, but Diamond pulled him back. “Caesar cut your throat, Quaco,” he said. “Beside, the woman got two girl children she need to feed.” Indeed, Caesar was glowering at Quaco through the smoke and music. The scarred woman vanished. Within seconds, one of the two white men (paunchy, mustached) followed her.

  “She’s feeding her children,” Mary Burton said. “Poor soul.”

  She gazed blearily around the room, and Cormac asked her about the other whites. The six men bunched at one small table were soldiers from Fort George, all of them Irish. “Serving His fecking Majesty,” she said with contempt. “Shameless bastards.” The small, precise man at the other table was a dancing master named Holt, who claimed that the Africans were the greatest dancers he’d ever seen. “He won’t even dance with the likes of us,” she said. “But then, he doesn’t like women much.” When Holt bowed before the remaining African woman and took her hand to dance, even Quaco didn’t mind, and Caesar patiently sipped a drink. “The African men think Mister Holt wants to dance with them. In bed.”

  With an African woman on the floor, the music shifted. African rhythms drowned the room. Holt the dancing master tried valiantly to adapt a minuet to the grinding music. The black woman (long-necked, large-breasted, hair piled above her brow) towered over the small white man and caricatured his steps. He smiled, knowing what she was doing, trying to be a good sport. She turned in one quick move and her right breast bumped against Holt’s face. The room exploded in applause. She turned the other way and did it again, with her left breast. That became her dance. Bumping the small white man’s face with her left breast and then her right breast, as he flushed and perspired. She moved in loose steps, her belly thrust forward, using her breasts like weapons. She stared down at Holt with an ambiguous smile. The blacks roared.

  “Whip the man!” Quaco shouted, laughing now. “Whip him down, woman!”

  “Do you want her?” Mary Burton whispered.

  “I want you.”

  She squeezed his thigh in a playful way and got up.

  “I’m too old for you,” she said.

  44.

  In Cormac’s three weeks at Hughson’s, the routine was always the same. Breakfast at half-seven, eggs and rashers and buttered bread, along with coffee that looked (and tasted) like pitch. Dinner at half-five. A nap. A visit to the bar at night. A bath on Friday evening, poured from jugs into a sealed cask by Mary Burton. Each day, he’d pay a visit to Mr. Partridge at the Black Horse, to hear about his search for a shop or to join him in some new examination of a place for the press. The other hours were Cormac’s, and he used them to search for the Earl of Warren. He had learned that a man could walk all of the New York streets in a single day.

  Most of the time he was on his own, wandering in the mornings down to the Battery, where four squat cannon were aimed at the harbor, fearful of the Pope’s imminent arrival on board a Spanish warship. Redcoats drilled in Fort George. Lone women gazed out to sea, where their men had gone but had never come back. The breeze at the island’s tip was heavy with salt, and he could see the green humps of New Jersey and Staten Island and boats in full sail passing through the Narrows. Not once did he see the earl.

  But still he peered at faces, gazed at strangers, and walked. On some days, he wandered up Broadway, past Trinity, to the Common, where boys played games and old men sat on the grass smoking seegars or clay pipes, lost in themselves. If they’d been raised on Mars they could not be farther from home. Cormac felt disconnected from all of them. His own history was of no interest to those he passed. New York, he was learning, was a city of the present tense, an eternal now. Except for a few old Dutchmen, it was not a city of the past. Today ruled.

  Tomorrow might be richer and fatter, the Christian evange-lists told them, but tomorrow also brought certain death, followed by the rewards of Heaven or the punishments of Hell. The various Christian rivers flowed through the streets of New York. Quakers quaking. Congregationalists congregating, Baptists baptizing, Dutch Reformers reforming; Episcopalians pissing on the lot. All asked for money to support the war against evil. Only the proud, haughty Anglicans of Trinity were not present on the street, since they were supported by taxpayer money and had no need to panhandle for God. All other messengers of the Lord were forced to pay taxes to support the Anglicans, just as they did in Ireland. All preachers were dressed in shades of black. From deep, fresh black to gray, faded, disappointed black. All used the same nouns: death, punishment, corruption, Hell, suffering, papist. All proclaimed that they were opposed to (or part of ) something called the Great Awakening, a religious revival spreading south from dark, witch-haunted New England. They spoke, as always, of a vengeful Puritanical God, a God of brutal whims and divine ego, quick to suffer insult and explode in wrath. Cormac thought of him as the God of bad temper. The Celtic gods would laugh him out of the room.

  A few preachers were capable of surprise. One Welshman was a marvelous singer. One Cornishman had a sense of humor. One or two even agreed (under questioning) that black people might have souls. Such
an admission didn’t lead in their logic to any utopian notion that the enslaved souls might be freed. Africans would have to await freedom and redemption after death, when God would sort them out in his Eternal Kingdom.

  Most New Yorkers paid the preachers little heed; they were too busy rushing from one appointment to another, chasing the whims of Mammon. Blacks were not welcome among the small knots of fevered religiosos in the Common, but when each pulverizing sermon ended and the hat was passed, the few Indians who had paused to listen, dressed in wild combinations of buckskin and English jackets, usually broke into laughter. They simply could not be convinced that God was a dead carpenter. During any given lunch hour, there were more preachers than auditors, all demanding that New Yorkers be born again, give up their filthy corruptions, beg for forgiveness, endure punishment, dwell on the certainties of death and the afflictions of Hell. Although Cormac used them as cover, an excuse to stand around watching, he didn’t tarry with them very long. He was certain that the listeners would never include the Earl of Warren.

  Then, on the second Sunday after his arrival, he saw a familiar face among the preachers on the Common. He was gaunt, his clothes dirty and crumpled, his boots muddy. He was holding the Old Testament. Mumbling to those who passed.

  “She’s dead,” said the Rev. Clifford. “She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead….”

  Cormac backed away in horror and slipped into a side street.