by Peter Quinn
Foster staggered, and Eliza took him by his arm. “I have it,” he said to Eliza. He tapped the side of his head with his forefinger. He found what he was looking for in Jim Ryan’s: a new moment in the history of the American stage. A Play by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Musical Direction by Stephen Collins Foster. And a Cast of Real Negroes Singing Real Negro Songs and Dancing Real Negro Dances. He would do for the stage what he had done for the popular song. “Susanna, don’t you cry.”
Eliza said, “I’ll see you back to the hotel once I’m done here.”
He sat for a minute until he saw Carrie Drew, another neighbor from the New England Hotel, and tried to talk to her. A thick-browed, cretinous-looking stagehand shushed him. He walked away and held the curtains for support again. He could see the faces of the audience in the first few rows. They watched solemnly as Eliza and her husband pledged their love. They laughed at the antics and language of Topsy. He knew that when the time came for Uncle Tom to die, they would weep—less violently than at the death of sweet, white, innocent Eva, but weep nonetheless—as innumerable audiences had wept at the suffering and death of Uncle. Toms played by Daddy Rice or one of his many counterparts, every black countenance in the play, field niggers and house niggers alike, a true pale face underneath. Except Eliza. When she came off the stage, she kissed Foster on the cheek, and he saw the powder that was spread on her face to lighten her tan skin, the Negro equivalent of blackface. He didn’t say anything more to her. He kept listening to the music from Jim Ryan’s that was in his head. A thing no respectable audience of white people was prepared to hear, no matter how sympathetic to the cause of anti-slavery. He could sense the aspirations of the people in the seats: Give us black people devoid of any blackness, a spiritual and cultural cipher, black people in whiteface. Here is the trademark of the black race that we will accept: orphans devoid of history or memory, free at last to seek the values, traditions, history, culture, morals, religion, customs, ambitions, and presumptions of Anglo-Saxons, the lowest and darkest beginning their long evolution into the full stature of the highest blankness. Otherwise, let us have our mad and merry minstrels, everything about them, der big lips and dem big words and all dat clowning to remind us of the impossible gap between the black species and the white. There was a story in circulation that in an attempt to save money, the Christy Minstrel Show had hired real Negroes for the chorus, but they had been required to spread the burnt cork on their faces, big red ovals around their lips, until they resembled the true nigger, an innovation that was soon stopped when the white men in blackface refused to countenance such a seditious assault on the art of Ethiopian Impersonation.
Foster didn’t stay to let Eliza take him home. He borrowed a dollar from Carrie Drew and went to Mike Manning’s. The next morning he didn’t remember much beyond having danced with a whore at Jim Ryan’s.
The stagehand called Eliza back in for the gunfight with the slave-catchers. She went through the scene perfectly, her lines flowing on cue, without her having to think about them. When it was over, she sat by the back wall. No Foster to bother her tonight. She waited until it was time for Little Eva’s death. Two stagehands sat on the rafters behind the proscenium, ready to crank their winches and lift Eva from her bed into heaven.
The extraction hadn’t been exactly a death. No chorus in the background, no guy-wire ascension, just a plop in the pail that Mrs. Dumas held under the sheet. A noise, not a face. Would Mulcahey have objected? She couldn’t be sure. Once, in the bar of the hotel, he had raised the issue of marriage.
“There’s no law against it, at least not in New York, and as far as the world knows, it could be a Cuban-Irish nuptial, not one that would be celebrated by the city’s hoi polloi but neither would it call for tar and feathering.”
“We could live on Roosevelt Street,” Eliza had said, “along with the Paddy women and their nigger husbands.”
The Irish around it called it “Loose Belt Street,” the black men impregnating their Irish women at a prodigal rate. It was a street shunned by other Irish and blacks, an amalgamationist community of the lowest order, denizens and employees of the dives and dance halls of the Five Points living in some of the city’s most decrepit and squalid rookeries.
“That’s not the only street in New York.”
“It’s the only one where colored people and Paddies aren’t at each other’s throats. And a lovely place it is, too, Jack. A garden spot for children. We could have a son just like Squirt who’d one day, perhaps, earn the right to clean up after white men in blackface, or maybe a daughter who could inherit my role as Eliza.”
She had wanted him to say that they would figure out the details later, that he wanted to be with her, that there were places in the world where the races intermarried and their offspring weren’t treated as lepers, places where skin color was overlooked, and together they’d find them. She had wanted to say, Go ahead, Jack, put down the drink and wipe away the grin, say you love me in this room full of white men, show them I’m not just the mistress who you’ll one day leave behind, but your woman, Jack, for good or for bad, your wife.
But she hadn’t.
Mulcahey’s mood turned grim. He ordered another drink. “This is no place for arguing such matters,” he said.
What place, then, Jack?
“We have plenty of time to work out the details.”
We have this one moment in this one place. We have nothing more.
“You’ve got the ceremony over, and you’re already worrying about kids. Slow down, Eliza, one step at a time.”
The next step in time is Mrs. Dumas’s, Jack.
When she was a girl, Eliza’s aunt had explained to her the secrets of the female’s body, told her everything in detail, and even explained the workings of the man’s body. In every drop of semen, her aunt said, is a perfectly formed person so small it can’t be seen by the naked eye. It had everything but a face and sexual organs. The mother created those after she received the seed, her dreams and thoughts determining which sex the child would be. When the time comes, her aunt told her, you must be very careful to think beautiful thoughts and to dream only of boys if you want a boy and of girls if you want a girl. Don’t be careless the way Tiny Tom Butler’s mother was, watching kittens being drowned shortly before he was born and thereby causing her baby to be marked as a dwarf. Happened all the time, women witnessing events that deformed their unborn children.
The painted doll in her arms: What sex was it? It never stopped smiling. Supposed to be a boy. Did Mrs. Dumas see a smile on a perfectly formed little man as he fell into her pail?
Above the stage, the winches bearing Eva heavenward squeaked slightly as they began to turn.
“Eva,” the actor playing her father cried. “Oh, Eva, tell us what you see! What is it?”
The winches creaked louder. Eva’s mattress left the bed. She raised herself and pointed to the rafters, “Oh! Love … joy … peace!” She fell back. The chorus of darkies hummed. There were sobs from the audience. Eliza had read the book. Mrs. Stowe knew little about black people. They were, Mrs. Stowe insisted, kinder, better, more intelligent—more human—than most of the country was ready to admit, but even in her eyes they were still a lesser breed, creatures whose greatest asset was the Anglo-Saxon blood they had been forced to absorb. But Mrs. Stowe did know about the death of a child. It wasn’t something she learned about through reading or conversation. Here was the central event of the play, the mystical chord that resounded through the audience. Slavery and the black man remained an abstraction for most, a white man in burnt cork serving as a summation. But the dead child was everywhere, in the past, the present, the future, cholera, scarlet fever, typhoid, a continual slaughter of the innocents.
The thought consoled Eliza. No such grief lay ahead. Her mother had watched four of her babies die. Each born, cherished, raised to the age of three or four, then ravaged by fever and diarrhea until death came as a kind of mercy. It sucked the life out of her mother, death by de
ath, each of them laid in the graveyard next to the church, on the hill overlooking the sea, the wind tearing at her mother’s hair, her father showing no emotion, his face as expressionless as brown clay.
Topsy was lying on the floor. She cried, “Oh, Miss Eva! Oh, Miss Eva! I wish I’s dead, too—I do.” She looked up as Eva ascended into the rafters. Her blackface glistened in the glare of the stage lights. From her position behind the stage, Eliza watched Topsy as she kicked her legs into the air. A white imitation of black grief. She could be the real-life mother of the black doll Eliza carried in her arms.
The previous actress who played Topsy had been far more emotive, screaming, yelling, throwing herself to the ground. During one of her performances, a stagehand standing next to Eliza had asked her half-distractedly, “Do all darkies act like that? Or is it only the southern ones?”
Eliza said nothing. Darkie grief was grief, as well in the North as in the South. She knew that for sure. Eliza had never seen Cuba or New Orleans or even Baltimore, never been closer to Dixie than the southern shore of Staten Island, where she had been raised. Midian’s Well is what its inhabitants called their collection of houses, or rather what their preacher, Benjamin Enders, named it when he led them out of New York City. He had been their pastor in the Church of Zion on Albany Street, not far from Trinity Church, the congregation drawn from the black waiters, porters, and seamen of lower Manhattan. They left en masse in 1815, almost the entire congregation, over thirty families and a smattering of single men and women. The year when Eliza’s grandmother Rose Harris was hanged for arson and attempted murder. She had been a member of the Church of Zion. The Reverend Mr. Enders had assaulted the city fathers with his pleas and cries to spare her life. None of it had done any good. She was hanged. The Sunday afterward he rose in the pulpit and told them that, whether slave or free, black men had no hope of finding either peace or freedom in Pharaoh’s land. They must do what Moses had done when, as a young man, he slew Pharaoh’s servant: flee Egypt and dwell in the land of Midian, by a well, until God brought the rod of His judgment down upon the evildoers.
Eliza’s grandmother Rose Harris was descended from a slave who arrived in New Amsterdam in 1639, imported from the West Indies as part of the household of Willem Kieft, Governor of New Netherland, and advertised in the colony’s newspaper as Male negro, 15 or 16 years. Skilled as a carpenter. Cato (Kieft’s). New Amsterdam traded its slaves at the foot of the East River and by the town’s protective palisade, which became known as Wall Street, and when Kieft was recalled after provoking a bitter war with the Hackensack Indians, he sold Cato to a tea merchant named Vandervort. The English seized New Netherland in 1664. They changed the colony’s name to New York and reaffirmed the institution of slavery. Vandervort rented Cato’s services as a carpenter to Dutch and English alike. Cato’s work was admired and sought after.
The following year, Cato fathered a daughter by one of Vandervort’s indentured servants, a Scottish girl named Mary Munro. Cato and Mary Munro both died in the typhoid epidemic that struck the city in 1670. Their daughter, Elizabeth, was sold at age fifteen to a family named Pruit. Female negro, 15 years. Seamstress. Betty (Pruit’s). She was raped by Elias Pruit several weeks after he purchased her. She bore him a son, whom she named
Elias, but Pruit forbade her to call him by this name, and when she persisted, he struck her with his fist and broke her nose. Pruit sold Betty and her son, whom he renamed Cuffee, to the Holcombs, who owned a large farm on the city’s outskirts. Betty served them as a cook and seamstress, and in 1682 was allowed to share quarters over the stable with Caesar, a slave who served as chief groom. They had no children of their own. Betty was pregnant several times but never let Caesar or the Holcombs know. She visited a slave woman named Obie, who was rumored to be a witch. Obie gave her a vile-tasting potion to drink and told her to stand on the small hill behind the Holcomb farm when the moon was full.
“You must curse the name of Jesus three times,” Obie told her.
“I can’t do such a thing,” Betty said. “I’m a Christian.”
“Then you will have the baby.”
“There is no other way?”
“No.”
Betty did as she was told. The miscarriages came soon afterward. But she grew despondent about the way she had used the name of God, and when Caesar was kicked by a horse and bled to death, she saw that as her punishment. In 1692, Cuffee, her son, was sold by the Holcombs to Andreas Kortrecht, a lumber merchant. Male negro, age approximately 20 years. Laborer. Cuffee (Holcomb’s). Betty became silent and withdrawn. She disappeared in December of the year Cuffee was sold. When her body was found in the frozen marshes of the East River, the death was ruled an accidental drowning.
Cuffee spent the rest of his life with Kortrecht. He became the overseer of the lumber operations and lived in a small house on the North River with Nina, a mulatto woman from Barbados who served as the cook in the Kortrechts’ home. Cuffee lived to be seventy. He died in 1740. He had two sons. The older one was bought by an Albany merchant. After several years in that city he was allowed to purchase his freedom, and he moved to Canada at the end of the Seven Years’ War. The younger, Plato, was made an assistant to his father and became manager when Cuffee died.
Plato kept to himself. He was noted for his silences. A grim, sober, hardworking Negro, Plato lived in his father’s house. He had a daughter, Maria, by a woman who died in childbirth; the baby was raised by Nina, Plato’s mother. Times were hard. The weather was as fierce as anyone could remember. The city was frozen in ice for three months. Competition from Philadelphia and Baltimore hurt New York’s position as a grain entrepôt for the British Empire. Exports fell. Mills closed. Men lost their jobs. In a city where one fifth of the population was slaves, the whites grumbled about how the niggers ate better than they did and were taken better care of. With a hostile Spanish Empire to the south and a French one to the north, they also worried about a Catholic alliance that would crush their colony and claim all of North America for the papists.
The fears grew. In 1739, four black slaves and an Irish Catholic indentured servant successfully fled New York and reached Florida, where they were feted by the Spanish. The slaveholding Spanish even issued a proclamation offering “Freedom to all Negroes, and other slaves, that shall Desert from the English colonies.” A few months later, outside Charleston, South Carolina, there was a slave rebellion along the Stono River. It was put down quickly and brutally, but its aftershocks reverberated north and south. In New York, there was a feeling of dread, of expectation, a sense some horrid secret was about to unfold. Plato left the house where he lived with his daughter and mother. He moved into a fishing shack that protruded over the river. He spoke only when he had to and kept his contact with whites to what was required by business.
The city’s fears came to a head in March 1741, when Fort George, at its southern tip, burned to the ground. The smoldering ruins wrapped the city in a pall of smoke. More fires followed. Suddenly the city began to apprehend the outlines of a plot to destroy New York’s defenses and welcome a Spanish fleet into the harbor, a Negro plot that involved an untold number of slaves. The roundups began. Across the river, in Hackensack, two slaves were caught in the act of setting fire to a barn. They were tortured and then burned at the stake, and although they admitted no motive beyond hatred of their master, the implication was clear: There was a conspiracy afoot that involved not only illiterate, ignorant slaves but some central mastermind, some evil genius in the pay of the papists.
The city had faced a slave revolt years before, in 1712, when Adrian Beekman and other prominent New Yorkers had been murdered in their beds by their slaves. Retribution had come quickly. Fourteen slaves hanged. Two roasted over a slow fire. Nineteen whipped and chained in a public place, where they were left to die. In 1741, the lesson was still green: Act swiftly, with no mercy. More slaves were arrested, mostly young men with a history of troublemaking. It wasn’t until the city had spent another week
in anxious anticipation of some new outrage that Tom Kramer, the owner of a lumber business on the East River, began to talk about Plato. Such an unusual Negro, living alone, so quiet and unfriendly, an air of arrogance about him. Even knew how to read and write, strange skills for a slave. Kortrecht offered no protest when Plato was arrested. In jail, Plato was whipped and kicked. Three of his ribs were broken. Christopher Bancker and Philip Vandervort, two prominent members of the colonial government, came to his cell at night and pleaded with him to save himself by confessing. He said nothing. He was put on trial with two other slaves. They were quickly convicted and sentenced to be burned at the stake. Plato died silently, offering no response to the final call for a confession. The other two broke. They named names and gave dates. They talked so fast that their interrogators had trouble keeping up. When they were finished, they too were burned.
The Negro Plot took on a life of its own. A number of whites were implicated, one an Irish servant girl, Peggy Kerry, another a teacher accused of being a Catholic priest. Irish troops in the city’s garrison fell under suspicion. In the end, four whites and seventeen blacks were hanged; thirteen blacks were burned at the stake. Kortrecht sold Plato’s mother and his child. Female negro, age approximately 60 years. Cook and nursemaid. Nina (Kortrecht’s). Female negro, age approximately 9 years. Skilled in all domestic tasks. Maria (Kortrecht’s). Note: Owner prefers to sell these girls as a pair.
In the great Bible that Eliza’s father kept by his bed there was a brief list of names entered on the back flyleaf. Brown faded ink on thick yellowed paper. At the top was the first entry, written by Maria herself in 1801, when she was a woman in her seventies: “Maria Montgomery, b. 1731, daughter of Plato and Maria, baptized in the freedom of the Lord Jesus Christ, 10th day of April, A.D. 1743. Purchased her earthly freedom, 24th day of December, A.D. 1753. Married to James Cooper the following day, 25th of December, A.D. 1753, the birthday of our Savior.”