by Peter Quinn
It was the Reverend Mr. Enders who brought Miriam the news her daughter had been arrested. Miriam had been waiting on a Sunday afternoon for Rose to appear. There was a knock, and when she opened the door, the Reverend Mr. Enders was standing there. She watched his lips move, his white beard go up and down, saw the crinkles in his brown face around his mournful eyes, but the words didn’t seem to make any sense. Rose has been arrested for theft, arson, and attempted murder. She is being held in chains in the city jail and the possibility of bail has already been ruled out. Her fate is important to every Negro in this city. If a harmless innocent like your daughter isn’t safe from persecution, none of us is.
Mr. Enders insisted Miriam gather up her things and take Rose’s child to his house. He said that some white men were already talking about teaching the niggers a lesson and making sure no nigger would try what Rose tried. They threw some clothes into a basket, and when they reached Mr. Enders’s house, he sat Miriam down and explained what had happened. The evening before, when Rose had finished her chores, she had gone to her mistress to collect the last two months’ of salary she was owed. The mistress told Rose that she had become aware someone had been stealing from her kitchen, had observed Rose for the past several weeks, and had seen her leave every Sunday afternoon with a basket of food. As a consequence, she felt she owed Rose no pay at all; indeed, it was Rose who owed her, and she had half a mind to bring charges.
“I stole nothing,” Rose said. “I saved scraps from plates to feed my child.”
“A child? You told me you were single.”
“I am.”
“Then you’re a whore as well as a thief, and a liar to boot.”
The mistress ordered Rose off the premises. Rose gathered her things and left. In the middle of the night, the mistress smelled smoke and came downstairs and found the kitchen on fire. She ran out and screamed, “Fire!” The alarm was sounded in time. Her house was saved, and when she told the city watchmen and the fire volunteers what had transpired that day with Rose, they all agreed the girl must be found immediately. They didn’t have to look far. One of the volunteers went down into the basement of the house to see if there was any damage to the flooring, and there was Rose, sitting in the dark, her small pile of possessions on her lap.
They brought her before a magistrate the first thing in the morning. A large crowd was gathered in the courtroom.
“Girl,” the magistrate said, “do you know that in seeking revenge against your mistress, you threatened this entire city with destruction?”
Rose’s hands and feet were chained. A phalanx of watchmen surrounded her. “They took bread out of my child’s mouth and condemned us to starve. They had given up their right to be alive.”
The crowd groaned. “Hang the nigger!” someone shouted. “You would punish all for the supposed sins of one?” the magistrate asked her. “And you would burn a whole city to cover the crime of pilferage?”
Rose said nothing.
“The charges against you are shocking in their enormity. If you be guilty, hanging is too easy an end.”
Miriam saw Rose once in jail. Her daughter barely spoke, but when the jailer left, Rose giggled. “Gabriel is with me every night,” she said, “but he says that he needn’t tell me where the gold is buried because I shan’t have any use for it.”
The trial took two days. Rose had no lawyer. The Reverend Mr. Enders asked permission to speak on her behalf. The judge denied it. Mr. Enders started to speak anyway but was dragged from the courtroom. Rose was condemned to be hanged.
“You have admitted this crime,” the judge said. “Your only defense is that your deed was justified by what you allege to have been the poor treatment you received at the hands of your mistress, as if that were sufficient reason to take her life and set fire to the city. You showed no mercy; now you shall receive none. And as you have no remorse for the act, I have no remorse in imposing the sentence it requires.”
The verdict was handed down on a Saturday. The next morning Mr. Enders took Rose’s child, Elizabeth, who was now a girl of three, to the Baptist meetinghouse on Mulberry Street, near Chatham Square, and sat in the upper gallery, from which Negroes were allowed to watch the service. In the middle of it he arose and said in his loud, commanding voice, “There is innocent blood about to be spilled in this city! A confused, agitated woman is to be hanged for a crime she didn’t commit!” He picked up Elizabeth and presented her to the congregation. “This child is to be made an orphan!” The sexton came up and told him to be quiet. Mr. Enders continued. The sexton reached out to push him into his seat, but two other Negroes intervened. The minister watched from the pulpit. He recognized Mr. Enders and addressed him: “You are a man of God, sir, and should know better. This is the Lord’s house. You know what is required!” Mr. Enders shouted, “Mercy! That is what is required and what you refuse to show! You show no mercy toward colored people, and the longer I live among you, the more I believe you are incapable of ever doing so!”
“Sir,” the minister said, “I order you to be quiet and to cease disturbing the worship of this congregation!”
“Glad on it! By the name of Jesus the just, it ought to be disturbed.”
Born a slave in Virginia, Benjamin Enders had escaped when he was twelve and been raised by Quakers in Ohio. He had been a minister for ten years in New York, tending his small congregation on Albany Street, and never attracting much notice. But he made the case of Rose Harris a crusade. With the child Elizabeth in tow, he haunted the city’s officials and paraded through the streets and thundered on corners and on the steps of public buildings. A few of the city’s more prosperous Negroes approached him in private and asked him to stop. They said Rose’s guilt was beyond question, she had confessed, and besides, why keep poking a hornet’s nest and risking everything on this one woman’s fate? “Rose is out of her senses,” he told them. “She would confess to setting fire to London if she were asked to. As for hornets, they are forever astir and are as likely to sting you as to sting her, and if you think your modicum of wealth or respectability protects you, think again.”
On the day Rose was executed, a great mass of people gathered beside potter’s field, where the city’s gallows was located. The day before, another fire had occurred in the house of Rose’s mistress. It was in the kitchen, as the first had been; and when the fire laddies pulled down the wall, they found a faulty chimney. Believing that this discovery might have some bearing on the previous incident, the captain of the fire brigade sent for the magistrate who had arraigned Rose. When the magistrate was seen entering the house, the rumor spread that another Negro had been caught setting the fire and that the magistrate had been called to investigate the possibility of a Negro plot to burn the city and free Rose. Fire bells rang throughout the night. Any Negro seen on the streets was detained and questioned. When dawn finally arrived, an ill-rested city streamed to witness the cause of its apprehension being sent to her eternal punishment.
They wrapped Rose’s legs in heavy chains to ensure her neck would break quickly and so spare her the torture of dangling at the end of a rope. The sheriff asked her if she had any last words, and she said in a small voice that carried across the silent crowd, “I am satisfied with my fate. If it wasn’t this, it would be something else.” She bounced when the door went from under her feet. The crowd cheered.
Rose’s death was Elizabeth’s earliest memory. Mr. Enders had taken her by the hand and led her to the front of the crowd. Sometimes the whole thing would come back to mind: the sheriff in his official dress, the blue coat and gold buttons, his fat legs enmeshed in white hose; the chains around Rose’s feet; the pressure of Mr. Enders’s hand around hers; the bang of the trapdoor and the way her mother’s body had gone down and then shot up again. When she was old enough, Elizabeth wrote in the family Bible, next to where her great-grandmother Maria had recorded Rose’s birth: “Murdered by the City of New York.”
After Rose’s execution, Mr. Enders told his congrega
tion that New York was as much a part of Egypt as Virginia or South Carolina. “The Lord’s wrath is coming on this people,” he said, “all of them, in whatever province of Egypt they might dwell. And until that day comes, let us remove ourselves, as Moses did, to Midian’s Well, and await the day of His command.” Mr. Enders had no family. Miriam became his housekeeper. Elizabeth was raised in his house. Some of the congregation resisted leaving. They asked what would happen to the old cemetery. “Let the dead bury their dead,” he said. The majority followed him. Quietly, they sold whatever they had. In conjunction with the elders of the congregation, Mr. Enders purchased an expanse of land on the south shore of Staten Island. They built a church. One by one, the families built small houses. They farmed and developed a thriving business as oystermen. They avoided as much as possible any contact with “Egyptians,” as Mr. Enders called whites, and waited patiently for the Day of the Lord’s Instruction to arrive in the unincorporated village of Midian’s Well.
Eliza was born there in 1840. She was called Maria Rose after her great-great-grandmother and her grandmother. She was the only child of Elizabeth’s to survive. The four other names were entered in the Bible in her mother’s small, neat script, the dates of their short lives inscribed underneath. Only her name was without a second date. Maria Rose Pryor / Born this 20th of January, the year of our Lord 1840–
Perhaps by now her father had already entered a date, chosen one at random or used the day she disappeared into the city. A few times, in those first days after she left Midian’s Well, she went in the early mornings down to the market at Catherine Street and stood in the shadows, watching the men from the village unload their oysters. Occasionally, her father was among them. The oystermen had as little contact with the white merchants as possible. One man handled the money. The rest did the unloading. Then they sailed off into the mist, a small company of black men in broad-brimmed hats, their eyes turned skyward as if they were expecting a messenger from heaven to descend. They stopped coming sometime in 1857, after the financial panic. She asked the merchants in the market about them. Nobody knew. Maybe they had all gone to Canada. Mr. Enders had talked about it. Or Africa. Maybe one of the recolonization societies had learned about Midian’s Well and decided to finance transporting the entire community back to Africa.
Men and women in blackface were on the move all around Eliza. The final scene. A compact version of Mrs. Stowe’s happy ending: All the darkies gather behind George Harris, Eliza’s husband. Uncle Tom is dead. Eliza and George have left Canada or Europe, and now, in the finale, they stand on the deck of a simulated ship. Everyone is reunited, slave sons and slave mothers, slave brothers and slave sisters.
Regan, the chief stagehand, walked by Eliza. He clapped his hands. “Let’s move it,” he said. Eliza slipped the shawl over her head. It saved her the trouble of putting gray powder in her hair. George had slipped on a gray wig. He was played by Tad Bigelow. This was Bigelow’s last night in the play. He had landed a part in a play at Laura Keene’s Theatre—Our American Cousin. It was a comedy. He tugged on the ends of the billowing wig and ran his hands over it, pressing it to his head. His face was a light brown, shoe polish mixed with wax. He pressed a large white mustache onto his upper lip. He extended his lower lip and exhaled. The mustache lifted toward his nose. “Damn thing,” he said. He turned around and faced Eliza. “Can you do something with this?” Eliza wet her forefinger, gently lifted the mustache, and ran the finger underneath. She put the mustache back and pressed it with her thumb. Bigelow extended his lower lip again and blew. The mustache stayed in place. “Sweet girl,” he said, and patted her face. “I wish I could take you with me.” He looked a little bit like a lion.
“Our Negro American Cousin?” Eliza said. “Somehow I don’t think Miss Keene would welcome such a change.”
Bigelow laughed. “I guess not.” He turned around and faced the curtain. Eliza stood behind him, and the rest of the darkies behind her. Next to Bigelow was a captain’s wheel, and above them all was a sail. He rested one hand on the wheel. Regan raised his arm and then brought it down quickly. The stagehands pulled on their ropes, and the curtain rolled up smoothly.
Bigelow pointed off in the distance over the heads of the audience. “There it is, at last,” he said in a loud voice. “Africa!” Eliza came forward and stood next to him. A second-rate actor, she thought. When he wished to indicate sincerity, he raised his voice. The mark of bad preaching and bad acting. Stamp of a born amateur. Maybe he would be better at comedy.
“O sweet land of my ancestors.” His voice went higher. “My soul thirsts for thee, and it is with the oppressed, enslaved African race that I wish to cast in my lot. Indeed, should I wish anything, it would be that this skin be two shades darker, rather than one lighter.” He raised one of his gloved hands to his face and ran a line down the side, careful to keep his finger an imperceptible distance from his cheek.
“The desire of my soul is for an African nationality.” His voice rose another notch. “I wanted a people that could have a tangible, separate existence! Some pointed me to Haiti. But what is Haiti? A stream cannot rise above its fountain. The race that formed the character of the Haitians was a worn-out, effeminate one. Its people will be centuries in rising to anything.”
In the balcony, the ushers were already cracking the doors open in anticipation of the play’s ending. Eliza kept her eyes on Bigelow. The first man she had ever given herself to was a Haitian sailor. He came up to her outside the old A. T. Stewart department store on Chambers Street as she was looking in a window. A beautiful coal-black face, strong, intense, with a thin, carefully trimmed mustache. He followed her to where she lived. Returned a week later. Took her to a restaurant on William Street. It was filled with white people, and most of them seemed to know him and nobody stared at them when they ate. She had her first glass of wine with him. He made love to her in the bare, small room where he lived. It was spring. The air was warm and she could hear the traffic as it moved through the streets. A musical sound.
They lived together for a month. She loved the clean sparseness of the room. They had a wooden chest for their clothes. On a nail above the chest, the sailor hung a pair of rosary beads: black pellets and a silver crucifix. One morning she woke and he was sitting on the bed stroking her hair. He was dressed and there was a canvas bag at his feet.
“I am leaving,” he said.
“Leaving?”
“Going to sea.”
She sat up. “And what about me?”
“What about you?”
“Where am I to go? How am I to pay the rent?”
He put a five-dollar gold piece in her hand. “Stay here,” he said. “I have talked to the landlady, and she will allow it.”
Eliza tried to clear her head of sleep. “But I thought I could go with you, that we might be married and find a place to live, a home, someplace you would always come back to.”
“Go with me to sea?” He laughed, and Eliza saw again how good-looking he was and she felt a hollow ache inside herself.
“I will find a place, and someday I will take you there,” he said.
“Haiti?” she asked.
“You would be freer there, but hungrier, too. And Haiti likes foreigners even less than this place does.”
“Where, then?”
“Child, I don’t now. I’m still looking. There are places where the free colored man is welcomed but only so long as he is few in number and usually without a wife and family. The colored in any number makes the white man nervous. For the time being, you are safe here, at least in this part of the city. Stay to yourself. It will only be until I return.”
When he left, she stared at the empty space on the wall where his rosary beads had been. She knew he was gone forever.
“Oh, not Haiti!” Bigelow’s voice had risen to a scream. “But Africa!” Eliza took his arm. He would probably be just as bad at comedy as at tragedy. “On the shores of Africa I see a republic formed of picked men, who, by en
ergy and self-educating force, have, in many cases, individually, raised themselves above a condition of slavery. Having gone through a preparatory stage of feebleness, this republic has, at last, become an acknowledged nation on the face of the earth. And here it is we shall go. Here it is we shall find ourselves a people!”
The theatre rocked with applause. So long, George. Goodbye, Eliza. Farewell, Cato, Betty, Cuffee, Nina, Plato, Maria, Miriam, Rose, Elizabeth, nine generations of Negroes who somehow managed in their struggles and travails to establish no claim to any part of the American continent. When your descendants have all been freed and returned to Africa, we’ll have our burnt-cork actors to remind us of you!
The doors behind the balcony were fully opened. The light from the hallway beyond streamed in. The night a few weeks before, when Mulcahey had brought up the subject of marriage, he could see that he had upset her. He tried to comfort her. He was always that way with her, gentle and reassuring, and she loved this about him. For all his talking and pretending, for all his drinking and theatrics, he was kind.
“Look, Eliza,” he said, “when the war ends, maybe we can move to Cuba. The races live together down there just fine, that’s what I’m told. You want to rush everything. Go slow, Eliza. It ought to come naturally to a southern girl. Trouble is, you’re trying too hard to fit into this city. Everybody here wants what they want now.”
The darkies in the background linked arms. Eliza continued to stare at Bigelow. The sweat was rolling down his cheek onto his collar. The wax he mixed with the shoe polish stopped the color from streaking. “Our nation,” he cried, “shall roll the tide of civilization and Christianity along its shores, and plant there mighty republics, that, growing with the rapidity of tropical vegetation, shall be for all coming ages.”
The entire cast took a step forward. She let go of Bigelow’s arm. He stepped closer to the audience. “We want a country, a nation, of our own. Our African race has peculiarities yet to be unfolded in the light of civilization and Christianity, which, if not the same with those of the Anglo-Saxon, may prove to be, morally, of even a higher type.”