by Peter Quinn
Today it is still possible to stand where she once stood. But Mount Pitt has been shaved away. It is now nothing more than a small rise in Pitt Street as it proceeds from Delancey to Grand. If you look to the east, you may catch a glimpse of the river, but the landscape my grandmother saw on a late summer’s day in 1776 has disappeared as completely as Rechtauk or Werpoes. The street makers have torn down the past. They have left nothing in their way.
All that is left to connect us to the past is the imagination. With it, we may try to banish the dirt and the confusion that surrounds us as we stand on the busy corner of a street not very different from the streets all around it. In our minds we may recreate a vanished dignity and grace. We may dismiss the ugly, peeling facades of these immigrant barracks. We may raise again the hillocks and dig the vales. We may envision a sole farmhouse built of stone in the Dutch fashion where now there is only crowded shabbiness.
If we wish, we may take out a small map and draw upon it. We may mark Indian villages. We may pencil in the forest and the ponds. We may imagine the route of the stout settler as he set out into the woods, an apostle of civilization in a continent of savagery. We may close our eyes tightly against the ramshackle buildings all about and transpose ourselves to the top of Mount Pitt. A young woman stands next to us. Together we look across open fields to the heights of Brooklyn, where the smoke of cannons and muskets lifts above the trees. In the, river, the oarsmen of Massachusetts strain to row boats top-heavy with retreating American soldiers to the safety of the Manhattan shore.
Alas, we may try. But be careful of the Hebrew who will come out of the door we are standing in front of and demand we stand aside and not block the way of those who wish to enter his store Or if it is a Sunday, prepare to withstand the mob pouring out of the church behind us, a communion of foreign drudges swarming to the plethora of whiskey dispensers that line the street.
He put down his pen. He read what he had written. Once. Twice. There was no time for editing or rewriting. Rain struck the window, first softly, then harshly. It had been raining intermittently all day. In the late afternoon there had been a crashing thunderstorm—rare for the cold beginning of April, but a suitable orchestration for the second anniversary of the surrender of Fort Sumter. The rain would keep the audience small this evening. And the topic of war, even the Revolution, was no longer as popular as it had once been.
The rain grew louder. Ward gathered his papers, inserted what he had written at the back, carefully numbering each page. He stood and went to the window to draw the curtain. He stared at the darkness. Two years before, in the spring the war began, he had glanced out this window as two washerwomen brought the laundry out to the yard behind the kitchen. Both of them were large women, hips and bosoms swollen from years of childbearing; hair drawn back in buns, faces and arms red and flushed from the hot water they had been working over. Each of them carried a tub of wash, the steam rising out of the clothes up into their faces so that they had their heads angled to the side, and the veins and muscles in their necks stood out.
Ward had almost turned away. It was a scene he had witnessed many times before. But some instinct had told him to stay. He watched them as they worked. Unaware they were being observed, the women giggled and laughed. He couldn’t hear precisely what they were saying, but he could catch the rise and fall of their Irish voices. They strung the wash out on the wire, pressed clothespins at the end of each piece. When they had it done, each picked up a pole of about seven feet in length and, catching the wash line in the small notches at the ends of the poles, lifted the wash into the April sky, bracing one pole against the yard wall, the other against the house. They handled the poles easily, picking them up and lifting the line in one motion, wielding them like weapons, not gracefully but with assurance and purpose, each acting in concert.
He kept watching. He was filled with the sense that he was gazing down Godlike on more than some insignificant, isolated moment in a familiar routine. He was above history. He was seeing the process of history, the past, present, and future, all as one simultaneous event. The women stood and talked for a moment with the wash flapping above their heads, their faces still red. They bent over, picked up the empty tubs, held them by one handle, the other handle touching the ground. Shields, Ward thought. First they used their poles like the poissardes of revolutionary Paris waiting to march on Versailles. Now they have taken up their shields and moved further back in history, a tribe of viragoes readying for the hunt. In a moment they shall get down upon their hands and knees and yap and snarl at each other like animals.
Here was the unchangeable nexus of history, one age linked to the next by this human chain of brutes, the levée en masse of barbarism that burns libraries and smashes marble statuary, that beats down the thinker and tears out the heart of the philosopher, and consumes it.
Once the Republic had been an Athens. The poorest of freemen had been independent and strong. The progeny of a common ancestry, they shared with the gentry an instinct for patient industry, a sound practical sense, and an ancient love of constitutional freedom that set them apart from other races. Gentry and yeomanry alike had left their farms to secure their liberties against the mercenaries of the British king. But Athens was only a moment. The men who created the Republic had not understood this. Wise in many things, they didn’t understand the barbarian, even when he raised his head in France and turned the theories of self-government into the carmagnole, a drunken orgy of bloodlust and retribution. They thought the savage had been banished to the periphery. They tore down his crude village of wattles and mud, and raised their temples and markets in its place.
From his Godlike prominence, Ward could see the truth: Athens cannot outlast the barbarians. No frontier can withstand their infiltration. They are forever. The spirit of Rechtauk and Werpoes, of superstition, of brute ignorance, of savagery, is amongst us, growing stronger. The barbarians surround us, and we have become dependent on them; and when they raise their hands to destroy us, how shall we defend ourselves?
The rain struck hard against the window. Ward picked up the book that he had spent the afternoon reading: The Races of the Old World, by Charles Loring Brace, the founder and director of the Children’s Aid Society. New York’s noblest soul, living his life among ghastly want and depravity, faces festering with diseases of the body and soul, creatures cast out from everything but God’s mercy. Brace had been leading the effort to ship the offspring of this human refuse to the West, to spread the compost festering in the city’s lower wards across the prairies and mountains, where, someday, its noxiousness diluted and rendered harmless by the strength of American soil, it might nurture a thing less fearsome and repulsive than the rank corruption so rife in this city. But now even Brace had come to understand. The blindfold of noble sentiment had loosened and slipped, one eye opened finally, free of what Carlyle had called “the gossamer gauze of sentimentality.” Brace saw the true face of what he had pitied and tried to reform.
Ward opened the book to where he had left a leather marker. The paragraph he wanted was underlined: “The Negro skull, though less than the European, is within one inch as large as the Persian and the Armenian, and three square larger than the Hindoo and the Egyptian. The difference between the average English and Irish skull is nine cubic inches, and only four between the average African and the Irish.”
Cubic inches. Brain size. The iron judgment of measurement. This wasn’t the prurient delusion of the phrenologist, a theory for fools, a superstition of bumps. This was truth. Science. The mob was a race. The race was a mob, its conduct no more variable than that of an insect or a fish. Bedford did not understand that. He refused. He clung to his faith in progress. His investment in it was stronger than Brace’s. It involved not philanthropy but profit. For Bedford to carry on in his work it was necessary that he believe trade would transform the world. The barbarian would be converted into a loyal purchaser of cloth, paper, glass, iron, whatever the merchant had to offer. The savage would li
e down with the stockbroker. The gospel of commerce depended on the ability of all men to buy and sell the banausic trinkets of civilization. It could not entertain the notion that the barbarian’s wish was deeper and more primitive, that in the very act of possessing what he wanted, the barbarian would destroy all those who created it.
Ward put his face closer to the window and peered down into the darkness. Below, the lights from the kitchen flared across the yard. The wash line swung in and out of the darkness. He understood what progress was: Progress was luck. The luck of those who lived in the interstices, in the brief moments of light between the coming and going of the barbarian, the convulsive agents of dissolution and destruction. History, the evangelists of progress preached, was a journey from one place to another, a steady sojourn from the savannas of savagery to the highlands of civilization and contentment, the air getting purer the higher one goes, the sunlight becoming perpetual. But they had forgotten the lesson the traveler learns when he climbs to the mast of a ship. Seeing another ship approaching over the curve of the horizon, he comprehends the cyclical nature of his journey, the destiny of all who travel the earth’s straight lines, inch by inch circling back to where they began.
There was a knock at the door. “Come in,” Ward said. Another of the maids. Face a mass of freckles, wisps of red hair sticking out from underneath her cap.
“Beggin’ ya pardon, but Mister Bedford told me to inform ya dat da coach will be at da dour in a minute, sir.”
“Yes, Bridget, I shall be down in a moment.” He put the papers into a cardboard folder and tied it with a red ribbon. He still needed a flourish for the ending. One or two lines. Perhaps he would think of something in the coach. The maid was still at his door. “I shall be down shortly. You needn’t wait.” He smiled at her.
“Margaret, sir.”
“What?”
“Me name’s Margaret. You called me Bridget.”
“Margaret, yes. Go ahead. Tell the coachman I’m on my way.”
IV
THE HOUSE WAS QUIET. Bedford went into the library. A coal fire made the room stuffy, the way he liked it. As in so many other things, Sarah liked the English style of living, in this case rooms with a slight chill to them. Bedford loved the heat. Even with the furnace on, he had the servants put coal in the grates of most of the rooms. Sarah had complained, “It is unnatural to live in such a temperature.”
“Comfort is unnatural,” he told her in reply. “It is an achievement, a victory over nature. The denizens of Shantytown live in a natural way. Their bodies are cooled by the winds that blow through the ill-fitted boards that serve as the walls of their homes. Unable to afford coal, they sit and stare at an empty grate. And so, they fall sick and die, naturally. God save us from nature.”
Bedford had a special contempt for nature, the obsession of so many of Sarah’s English friends as they went west or north into the American continent. Nature as the Prince of Wales had seen it on his trip to the United States, through the windows of a railway car, roast beef and whiskey on the damask-clothed table before him; nature as Mr. Olmsted had contrived it in his Central Park, undulating lawns and picturesque rocks, a plaything for city dwellers, its naturalness the unnatural creation of crews of sweating, mud-splattered Paddies set to work on a project vaster than the Pyramids.
He picked up the Tribune, went into the hallway and up the stairs. He stopped on the first landing and opened the paper to check the gold prices. Steady. That told him all he needed to know about the war: no movement anywhere. Hooker wasn’t stirring, nor Lee. When they did, gold would move: up with a Union defeat, down with a victory. He put the paper underneath his arm and went up the stairs to his room. Another point of difference with Ward, whose resemblance to Greeley didn’t go beyond the physical. “Mr. Greeley is absurd, and his paper is the gospel of fools,” Ward said. Bedford spent little time on the fine points of that gospel, but he felt a bond with Greeley, enjoyed the pervasiveness of the vision that filled his paper, the country on the move, the unfolding of a people across a continent, wild land yielding new wealth, the glories of a second Eden, idle and improvident tribes and classes disappearing, a new race appearing, nobler and happier, moving steadily forward, every man capable of forging his own success, nature itself chained and tamed, and put to some productive purpose.
Greeley made money. The Tribune was read in Washington, in the Army, on the frontier. It was carried by trains and steamboats, its circulation expanding, new presses being added, facts, statistics, and opinions made into a commodity as valuable as coal or cotton, the demand continually rising. Greeley had come east to grow up with his country, walking along the banks of the Erie Canal, against the rush of westward traffic, away from the hard-scrabble existence of his father’s Pennsylvania farm. In ten years, he was editor and publisher of the Tribune, and a rich man. Charles Bedford, a boy in the village of East Hampton, walked behind his father’s plow in the scorched, sandy soil of Long Island. Sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, in the long, empty space between the morning and evening church services, he loitered in the office of the New York–Montauk stagecoach. The men sat in chairs by the wall. Taciturn men, faces like old leather, cracked and brittle from lifetimes in the sun and salt air, they worshiped the God of the Old Covenant, God the Punisher, His displeasure made continually manifest in the weather: one year too much sun, the next too much rain, great gales from the north, hurricanes from the south; crops ruined, boats overturned, steeples blown down, trees uprooted, men drowned. Judgment Day eternally hovered above them in the Atlantic sky. When they talked, it was foremost about the weather, their animals, their aches and pains, the price of everything. A boy of sixteen, Charles sat on the bench by the window. He turned the pages of the Tribune. He heard the thunder in the distance. Squalls moving up the coast. The air was electric. His mind raced as he read of the uprisings in Europe, the fall of kings and dynasties, the news from California, gold, changes everywhere, the roar of great winds, the rush of water as it reshaped the shoreline, nations disappearing, new ones being built, and gold, big nuggets of it, there for the taking, wealth in unlimited supply.
The contagion spread slowly at first, almost unnoticed. East Hampton was accustomed to its sons going to sea and being away for years at a time. This time it was different. The boys left pell-mell, with the cows unmilked, the kindling unbundled, the horse untethered. No forwarding address. No sign they would ever return. Coming out of the stage office, standing next to his father in the cool April dusk, Charles realized he was infected. The heat radiated from his loins. He put his hands in his pockets so that his father wouldn’t see them shake. He felt the same desire as when the girl-longing seized him, the obsessive imaginings that sent him to the dark recesses of the barn, where he unbuttoned his trousers and took his secret pleasure. It could not be resisted. And although as he walked next to his father back to church he couldn’t remember a solitary sentence from the Tribune, the single-word message couldn’t stop reverberating in his head: West!
From the pulpit, the minister prayed for the young people of the village. Most of them are damned, he said. But it was not too late for the community to undergo the awakening that had occurred when Lyman Beecher had preached from this same spot and helped their ancestors turn away from sin. Charles watched his feet. They tapped slowly, almost imperceptibly, beyond his control, to the lyric that repeated itself incessantly in his head: Oh! Susanna, oh, don’t you cry for me; I come from Alabama, wid my banjo on my knee.
In July of 1849, Charles and two friends signed on a fishing smack bound for New York City with a cargo of porgies and blues. He didn’t tell his parents. He rose in the darkness. When he closed the door behind him, he knew it was forever. He met his friends in the small wood outside the village. The three of them would go together, first west, down the coast of Long Island. When they earned enough money, they would book passage around the Horn to California.
Charles had never experienced heat of the kind that hit him the morni
ng they tied up at South Street. It consumed the entire atmosphere, left men and animals struggling to breathe. This wasn’t the heat felt in East Hampton, where relief came as soon as you stepped out of the sun into the shade, or sat in the dunes by the ocean and felt the ocean wind in your face. Here there was no wind, only a deathly stillness. And the sun was not a blazing whiteness that filled the sky, but a red disk that lurked behind clouds of smoke and dust, its presence seemingly unconnected to the choking heat.
They landed on a Sunday. They took their wages and walked away from the river. The city was dead. Shutters closed. Doors locked. They thought it was because of the Sabbath. They found a building marked LODGINGS on the corner of Gold Street. A good omen, they thought. The proprietor looked out a small hole in the door before he opened it. He rented them the attic, a room with sloping ceilings and unspeakable heat. They paid for two nights and said they intended to find work in the morning, when the city reopened. The proprietor laughed. “Reopen?” he said. “Boys, this city ain’t closed on account of the worship of God. It’s shut up because of the cholera. The Paddies have infected the whole place. Keep pouring off boats, piling on top of each other, breeding like rats in a granary, and spreading sickness wherever they go. They live like animals, and I don’t ever open my door to them. This place is for Americans and them that knows how to conduct themselves like civilized men. That’s why you’re safe here.”
In the morning, the streets were still empty and quiet, but the docks bustled with life. Ships came in and out. Cargo was landed. Immigrants disembarked. Men shouted and sweated beneath the blanket of unremitting heat. The three boys were hired to haul paving blocks out of the hold of a ship and toss them onto a wagon. They worked next to big, unfriendly Irishmen who spoke English with such heavy accents that the boys were barely able to understand them. For two weeks they labored like horses, rising early, walking to the docks, working all day, coming back to their room with bread and milk they bought in a corner grocery. Their clothes were soaked with sweat, their lives sustained by the thought of California. They were exhausted, drained, and then, at the beginning of the third week, Bill, the youngest of them, started to vomit violently. He held his stomach and cried out in pain. Charles went downstairs and brought up a pail of water from the pump in the backyard. In the meantime, Bill had lost control of his bowels. His pants and mattress were awash in diarrhea. By morning his face was dark and pinched, his feet and hands cold and blue. He babbled incoherently.