The Banished Children of Eve

by Peter Quinn

  The Irish shanties covered the hills to the north. Flynn, the cartman who transported Mrs. Blanchard and Eliza to and from the Fulton Market, lived there. So did the city’s ragpickers, cinder gatherers, and shit haulers—an army of casual laborers.

  At dusk one evening, as Mrs. Blanchard and Eliza were dragging home a sheetful of wood, a group of children on a hill above the railroad tracks threw rocks at them. Mrs. Blanchard took a stick and went after them, and they ran away. When she came back, she sat by the side of the tracks and smoked her pipe. “A few years back,” she said, “colored people wasn’t allowed on de omnibuses at all, and even if dey pay dere fare on de horsecars dey had to stand on de outside platform; and den Miss Jennings and Reverend Pennington, dey refused to be treated like dat anymore. Dey said if dey pay dere fare, same as de whites, dey should get de same treatment. And dey went to court and de judge say dey is right, colored should ride like everybody else. Some colored got so excited, like it was de day of de Lord’s return, and my Robert says dat it meant colored people goin’ start be treated like men instead of dogs. He really believed dat. We was livin’ on Minetta Lane back den, and Robert was workin’ down in Old Tom’s, waitin’ tables, and right away he started ridin’ de Broadway omnibus to work. I worried so much, yeah, I told him de white man ain’t goin’ let de colored raise his head without tryin’ to knock it off. I told him, Don’t you ride in dat omnibus. But he don’t listen, and de second week he doin’ it, sure enough, two of dese big Irishmen gets on and dey demand Robert’s seat, and when he won’t give it, dey pick him up and throw him off de back onto de pavin’ stones. He broke his arm and three of his ribs and was never de same after dat. He never really got better. And den he died and I moved up here.”

  In the second month Eliza was working with Mrs. Blanchard, business fell off for the entire market. There had been a crash on Wall Street, which was only a few blocks way, though at first, except for a greater crush of traffic than usual on Broadway, it was an event that made no impact on the fish and produce sellers. But as brokerage houses closed and businesses failed and unemployment grew, the market people quickly felt the effect.

  One day Flynn the cartman pulled, up at the bottom of the lane in the early-morning darkness and said to them, “I think maybe ye be better off stayin’ where ye are. Dere’s been fightin’ down on da Five Points, a regular ruction among the gangs, and I’m told it’s spilled over da Bowery and Broadway, and da Dead Rabbits is drivin’ da Bowery Boys right into da river. It don’t concern colored people, but once things get started there’s no tellin’, and if I was you I’d stay outta da city today, I would.”

  Mrs. Blanchard thanked him for the advice but said she wanted to go anyway. Flynn took them down the West Side. They rode past Castle Garden, then circled up the East Side to avoid coming near Broadway or the Bowery. Mrs. Blanchard took the fish-cleaning knife from its sheath and laid it in her lap. She sang in a loud voice as they went. Eliza was frightened, but for the first time she understood the theatricality of Mrs. Blanchard’s temper, the act she put on in front of white people to keep them at a distance and off balance. Somehow, in the face of their hostility, she had gotten a stall for herself in the market, something no other colored person had done, and kept the white people from taking it away from her. Eliza stopped regarding her as a changeable old woman, perhaps half-mad, and saw the strength she had, the cunning she employed against the world, the mixture of courage and intelligence. They went to and from work that day without being bothered.

  By the time winter came, business in the market was half what it had been. The weather was cold and bitter. The morgue wagon made frequent visits to both the Irish and Negro shanty-towns to pick up the dead, most of them children. The shore was stripped bare of firewood. Eliza and Mrs. Blanchard followed their neighbors up to where Forty-second Street crossed the railroad tracks on its way to the ferry. To the north they could see a wild tract of land stripped bare of trees, a terrain of squat, barren hills and gray-black rocks covered with an endless jumble of indistinguishable wooden shanties, some of them with roofs made of straw and mud; the domain of the shanty Irish.

  They waited along the south side of the badly rutted street, and kept moving to stay warm. The traffic came up from the ferry, the horses laboring to gain momentum, the heavily laden coal and lumber wagons rocking crazily as they bounced over the ruined roadway and the railway tracks, often spilling a small part of their load. If the pickings were small, there was usually a fight over them, a wild melee between the Irish and Negroes that lasted only a few seconds. The rest of the time the two groups ignored each other.

  On one gray Sunday when Mrs. Blanchard was sick with a fever and stayed in bed, Eliza went up to the street with the people from the neighboring shanties. The roadbed was covered with ice; the wind off the river was a sharp, penetrating shiv. A small crowd of Irish loitered on the other side of the street. From the ferry came a coal wagon jolting its way over the jagged, icebound surface. When it reached the slight grade at the tracks, the driver drew the horses to a stop. He started again. The wagon skidded sideways. He whipped the horses. The wagon suddenly jolted forward and swayed wildly as it careened over the track bed. The driver leapt off. The wagon went on for a few more yards before it pitched over and crashed onto its side, taking both horses with it.

  From both sides of the street, people came running. The driver was brushing off his clothes and limping toward the wagon. He looked up and saw them coming. He raised his whip. “Get outta here, you dogs,” he said.

  Eliza ran to the other side of the wagon. She took off her shawl, put it on the ground, and used her hands to shovel coal into it. The driver hit an Irish boy with his whip. He tried to push people away. But from the north side of the street, down the icy, debris-strewn embankment, poured an army of shanty Irish, children and adults bundled in blankets, shawls, patchwork coats. From the south came a steady flow of shanty Negroes, some of them carrying tubs and cans. The driver turned and fled. The crowd covered the wagon. When the coal was almost gone, a man with a red beard walked over to the prostrate horses and clubbed them unconscious. Another set to carving them up. A black man drew a knife and started to hack away at a haunch. The red-bearded man kicked the Negro in the side and waved his club at him.

  “Get your hands off, ye nigger thief,” the Irishman shouted.

  “Paddy shit,” the black man said. He cut the air with his knife. A handful of black men ran to help him. More Irish came running with clubs and staves in their hands. They stared at one another, waiting to see who would begin the fight. Steam rose from the horses’ entrails as they spread in a puddle on the pavement.

  From down by the ferry came the shout of voices. The driver was returning with a small band of ferrymen and railroad police. Two of the coppers had their revolvers drawn, and as they drew nearer and the crowd didn’t disperse, one of them fired a shot into the air. People scurried up the embankments. Eliza had her shawl filled with coal and slung over her shoulder like a sack. When she reached the top of the embankment, she turned to see if the railroad police were in pursuit. They had formed a broken circle around the wagon. One of them fired another warning shot. On the other embankment, an Irish girl of about twelve was carrying a small boy on her back; she ran up the incline with a steady, graceful gait. The boy’s arms were around her neck. He had no legs. At the top of the rise, the girl turned and saw Eliza staring at her. “Niggers go to hell!” she yelled.

  Mrs. Blanchard’s fever didn’t break. She was violently ill. Eliza gave her tea and tried to keep her in bed. Mrs. Blanchard insisted on dressing and going to work. She only got halfway down the lane before she had to turn back. Eliza went alone. It continued like that for a week. Sometimes Mrs. Blanchard seemed to be getting better—the fever would almost disappear and she would take some small nourishment—but she was soon sick again. She became so weak that Eliza felt she should stay with her. Mrs. Blanchard wouldn’t hear of it. “White people take my stall first chanc
e dey get,” she said. “Dat for absolute certain.”

  In the late afternoon, when Eliza came back from work, she saw from the bottom of the lane that the door to the shanty was open. She ran up to the shack. Inside was a shambles, the few pieces of furniture smashed, the stove overturned, the bed ripped apart. The floorboards had been torn away and the earth underneath dug up. There was no sign of Mrs. Blanchard.

  A voice from behind Eliza said, “Come away, girl.” An elderly man from one of the shanties down the lane was standing outside. He beckoned to her.

  “What happened?” Eliza said. “Where’s Mrs. Blanchard?”

  “She’s with us. Now come, girl.” He waved his hand impatiently, gesturing for her to come with him.

  She followed him to his shanty. His wife sat at a small table by the door with a Bible opened in front of her. There was a sagging double bed in the corner near the stove, and on it a body covered by a sheet. The old man went over and lifted a corner of the sheet. Mrs. Blanchard lay there with her knees drawn up near her stomach. She seemed smaller, as if death had already shriveled her.

  “My wife went up about midmorning to see how Mrs. Blanchard was faring,” the man said. “Knocked and knocked but weren’t no answer, so she come and got me. I banged and called her name but got no answer either. I busted the door in. Didn’t take much. Figured maybe she was dying and might need help. I was right, except she was no longer dying, she was dead. Once people heard the shouting and saw the door being busted, some of them come to find out what’s happened, and as soon as they see Mrs. Blanchard is dead, there’s a few grumbling about how she mostly kept to herself and they start wondering about what she done with all that money she took in down there at the fish market.”

  “By the time she bought her supplies of fish and paid the rent on that stall, there was hardly anything left,” Eliza said.

  “I’m sure that’s the truth, but people believe what they want to believe and don’t let the truth stand in their way. I told them to hush. ‘Respect the dead,’ I said. But I could see what was going to come about. These are hungry people, and the hungry don’t know no laws, not even the laws of God, so I said to my wife, ‘Helen,’ I said, ‘let’s take this woman to where she can rest in peace,’ and Helen and me took a sheet and we wrapped the body in it and carried it here, just the two of us, no one else lent a hand. Weren’t in the door a minute before we heard them ripping her place apart. You saw what they did. Don’t know if she hid money away or not, but if she did, it ain’t there anymore.”

  The old man left Eliza with his wife. He said he was going to walk to a police station and see about getting Mrs. Blanchard’s body taken away. He told his wife not to light a fire. “Keep the room cold,” he said.

  He was gone over two hours. When he returned, he was shivering. “The police said if no one killed her, they ain’t interested.” His wife lit a small fire in the stove, and he pulled up a chair right next to it. “They said they’d notify the morgue, and the wagon should be by in the morning. ‘Leave it at the bottom of the lane,’ they said, ‘because the wagon ain’t going to go a-hunting all through Niggertown.’”

  “What time will they be by?” Eliza asked.

  “Didn’t give no time. ‘Tomorrow’ is all they said.”

  Eliza helped them move the body to near the door, the coldest place in the room. She slept on the floor, beside the couple’s bed. Just past dawn the old man and Eliza carried the body to where the lane met the avenue. There was no sun. It was bitter cold. After an hour, the old man said his feet were numb. He went back up the lane. Eliza walked back and forth, trying to stay warm. A skinny dog, its ribs clearly visible, skulked nearby, its snout raised in the air. Eliza threw rocks at it, and it went away. In the late morning the old man came back and told Eliza to go to the shanty to get warm. They spent the afternoon taking turns guarding the body. They were both standing in the dusk, about to carry Mrs. Blanchard’s corpse back to the shanty, when they saw a wagon approaching. It stopped across the avenue and circled around to where they were standing. Two men in heavy coats with fur hats that had flaps to cover their ears got down. One went to the back of the wagon, which was enclosed in canvas, and brought out a stretcher. They took the sheet off Mrs. Blanchard and put her corpse on the stretcher.

  “Who wants to sign?” the driver asked. He waved a sheet of paper. Eliza took it. Her hand was so numb she could barely hold the pencil.

  “Been waiting all day,” the old man said.

  “Oh yeah?” the driver said. “Well, we’ve been working all day.” The two men bent over to pick up the stretcher.

  “Count your blessings,” said the other attendant. “This could be summer.” They opened the flap at the back of the wagon. There were eight slots, four on each side. The soles of seven pairs of feet faced them; six of the pairs looked as if they belonged to children. The two men slipped Mrs. Blanchard’s small body into the bottom slot on the right. Her feet, too, looked like those of a child.

  “Where does she go now?” Eliza asked.

  “If she’s lucky, heaven.” The driver brushed past her and jumped up onto the wagon.

  “I mean, what they do with the body?”

  The other attendant mounted the wagon. “Don’t worry, she’ll go to potter’s field. Ain’t exactly the Marble Cemetery, but earth is earth, and she’ll be in a place where the rent collectors never go.”

  The driver snapped the reins, and the wagon moved away.

  On the second day after Mrs. Blanchard’s death, Eliza stood in the pre-dawn darkness waving for Flynn the carter to stop as he came down the avenue. She told him Mrs. Blanchard had died, and he took off his hat. “May her soul rest in peace,” he said, “and perpetual light shine upon her.” Eliza gave him her two pennies, and he said nothing more. Once arrived at the market, Eliza found that Mrs. Blanchard’s fish stall had simply vanished; the stall next to it had expanded into her space. There were boxes of salted fish piled up in the corner. On top of one were the remnants of Mrs. Blanchard’s possessions: a soiled blanket, some knives and trays, pieces of rope. The scale was gone. Eliza left without taking anything. The other sellers ignored her, simply pretended Eliza wasn’t there, looking away when she went by.

  Eliza walked up to Catherine Street. This was the market where the men of Midian’s Well brought their oysters. She asked after them and was told they had stopped coming a few months before.

  In the evening she went back with Flynn to the shantytown. She didn’t know where else to go. Her small store of possessions had been taken when Mrs. Blanchard’s shanty had been ransacked. The old man and his wife said Eliza could stay with them until she made permanent arrangements somewhere else. There was no letup in the cold, and Mrs. Blanchard’s shanty was torn apart by the people on the lane and used for firewood. The next week there was a great snowfall, and when it melted there was no trace left of the shanty.

  The old man worked as a barber on the North River piers. He carried a wooden crate that served as a chair. When the weather permitted, he set up shop in the open air by the paddle-boats, offering the immigrants a quick cut before they left for Albany and the West. If it rained, he stood under the protruding roof of the ticket shed, but the desk clerk charged him half a dollar for that privilege, which meant he had to service ten customers before he turned a profit.

  He told Eliza that he had owned a shop of his own on Canal Street, but that the rise in rents and the arrival of the Italian tonsorial palaces, fifteen barbers in a room of gilt and mirrors, had forced him out of business. “I used to have some of the best customers in the city,” he said. “They all came to my place, the important people did. I cut Governor Bouck’s hair. He had a mane like President Jackson’s, and there were even some who used to mistake him for Jackson. And Governor Young, too, I cut his hair. Both Bouck and him worked in the Treasury on Wall Street after they left Albany. You’ll never see a politician die poor, that’s for sure. And I cut Jack Diamond’s hair, the dancer, there was never
anybody tipped as good as him.”

  Eliza helped the old man’s wife with her seamstress work. Mondays they walked to Sixth Avenue and took the horsecar down to Houston Street. They picked up two bundles of shirt pieces, paid a deposit, and spent the rest of the week sewing on sleeves and buttons. They worked all day. Saturdays they brought the finished work back and waited in a long line of women, mostly immigrants, until the piece master had inspected every shirt and haggled over a final price. There were children everywhere, playing in the street and in the alleyway, a legion of laborers set loose for a few hours of play until the next consignment of garments was received. Sometimes, after they had been paid, Eliza stayed downtown by herself. She walked to St. John’s Park and sat on a bench facing the church, its great spire rising out of the uniform horizon of imposing homes. Of all the places in the city that she had seen, this was the one that most approximated her vision of what she had hoped to find in New York, the quiet dignity of the church and the homes surrounding the park, the men and women in their tailored clothes, servants walking with the children, a place of substance and permanence, and in the distance the weak echo of traffic and crowds, the reminder of the excitement that was nearby.

  After sitting for a while, Eliza liked to walk east to Broadway and then down to A. T. Stewart’s Marble Palace on Chambers Street. Most times she stood looking at the windows. Once she went in. There were rows of counters behind which were stacked dresses, skirts, shawls, and bonnets. There were floor-length mirrors at intervals around the room, and clerks roamed the aisles, tall, thin men in well-cut clothes constantly inquiring if they might be of help. Eliza saw one of them coming toward her. She turned and left.

  One Saturday in early June she studied a window filled with blouses that were blazingly white. There were flowers stitched on the bodice and blue ribbons drawn through the cuffs. Each one must have taken hours to make, but the racks behind the window were filled with boxes of them. It was in that window that she first saw the face of the Haitian sailor, his image standing next to hers, his smile losing nothing in its reflection. She walked away when he talked to her. He followed her. When she boarded a Broadway coach, he did too. He sat next to her. She stared at her feet. He talked incessantly. She refused to tell him her name or where she lived. He said that she could be as silent as she wished or walk anywhere she wanted because he wasn’t going to leave her until he knew where she lived. In the end she talked with him. They walked west from Broadway to the lane. She pointed out the shanty where she lived. He put his arm around her waist and kissed her on her mouth. He said he would come back in a few days to see her.