Imagining Clara with Treat made me cunning and cruel. I would borrow a spade from Gertrude’s garden, carry a pillow to pull over Treat’s head, so his brains wouldn’t splatter on my one good eye.
But I never visited the major in King George’s boudoir; the major visited me, with a spade in his hand, and for a moment I thought he’d come to crown me before I could crown him.
But he thrust the spade into my arms. “Sir John, you’ll head a battalion of diggers.”
“Diggers? I don’t understand.”
“I’ve put together a parcel of slaves and free blacks to build a redoubt at the foot of King’s. You and the Africans will dig up the lawn. And if you betray me, Sir John, I’ll bury you under the redoubt and rattle your bones at the British.”
“But I’ve never been in charge of a detail of men.”
“The Africans will obey you. I’ve put the fear of God in them, insisted you were as brave as General Arnold’s horse.”
And so I went out to meet the blacks, all twenty of them. They had a leader, Prince Paul, a slave who’d been let go by a master who couldn’t afford to keep him. He lived in Out Ward with a concubine and a flood of nieces and aunts who were under his protection. He’d become a potentate, the king of Little Africa, and was very loyal to His Majesty, King George. Harold was counting on Prince Paul to lead a rebellion against the rebels when the time was ripe, and here he was lending himself to that other George as a digger of ditches.
The Africans were already at work when I found them on the lawn. Paul was a very humble king. He didn’t bark orders at the blacks and stand in the shade while one of his brood hovered over him with a fan made of ostrich feathers. He dug with the others and stood up to his neck in a ditch.
I climbed down to be with him in an ignominious hole that snaked across the lawn like an obscene necklace hanging from College Hall. The prince was no stranger to me. We’d both gone to Parson Smiley’s school. He was the parson’s prodigy, and in a braver world he would have been the president of King’s. He was forty years old, but like most of the coloreds in the colony of New York, he’d had to remain a “boy,” and couldn’t educate himself until Parson Smiley came along. No one else in the colony had thought of schooling slaves and vagabonds like me. And even then, wearing the rags of his master, while Gertrude had dressed me like a little lord, he would recite odes to King George and our mother country. We’d been rivals, but Prince Paul never abused his power as the oldest, tallest, and wisest “boy” in the class. Parson Smiley had instructed us to be as formal and devious and gallant as the courtiers at St. James’s.
He’d also told us about Paul’s tragedy. His father had been burnt to death during the Great Negro Plot of 1741. The little prince was five or six at the time and had seen his own pa set on fire by officers of the Common Council. A hundred black slaves or so had been accused of plotting to burn the town and kill white women and men. I’d call it balderdash, or worse. There’d been suspicious fires, the parson said. And blacks had already rebelled in Charleston. The winter had been harsh. The black population was growing on York Island, was near one in five. And the Divil was doing his own dirty work. Blacks were hung on a gibbet and left to rot. Blacks were burnt. Blacks were stretched on chains ’til their bodies broke. The luckier ones were banished from the colony.
“Prince Paul,” I said from my place in the hole, “dost thou remember me?”
He rubbed the wet earth in his hands. “How could I forget the little grammarian? I couldn’t keep up with you. My learning stopped at the parson’s door. And you’ve had King’s College.”
“But war has leveled us, Paul. We’re both standing in a ditch.”
“A ditch at your college. And you’re the captain of this expedition…shouldn’t be down here, cap’n. You’ll dirty your britches.”
And he shoveled a deeper and wider hole with his men, refugees from Little Africa. But I wouldn’t let Prince Paul leave me behind in a ditch—I dug like the Divil and still couldn’t keep up with Paul’s army of slaves. I lost them as the ditch snaked toward Robinson Street. And then I found Paul resting on a rock above the trenches, smoking a pipe and palavering with his men, who carried long strings of rock candy. The men would play at the strings like puppeteers and jump at each other’s candy with their jaws. I joined them in their sport.
But our play was interrupted. The strings flew into my face, and I was pelted with rock candy. It wasn’t the Africans. It was the little major, Treat, who’d come down from the college with his sword. He hacked away at our candy, tho’ the Africans had done nothing illegal with the strings in their hands.
“Stocking, you’re building a fort, or did you forget? I could throw you all into jail for loitering.”
“Major, the lads were about to build another ditch and stopped for a moment of rest.”
“On whose authority?”
“Yours, Sir. Since you made me master of this detail.”
“Don’t banter with me, boy. Back to work.”
But Paul continued to sit and puff on his pipe, while Treat menaced him with the sword. “America does not recognize colored kings in sailor pants. You’d best move before I carve my initials in your bum.”
I could see in a flash that Paul would never move from his rock, that he’d either kill the major or get killed, and so I bowed like a fop at the Court of St. James’s and said, “Sir, I put him there as my counter. A good counter is worth a dozen men.”
“Then let me hear him count.”
I waited for destruction, but damn if Prince Paul didn’t start counting, as if he’d been born to it. “Nigras and Cap’n John,” he said in that dialect he employed to confound white majors. “Into the ditch.”
We climbed into that fetid earth with our spades, found ourselves immediately invisible, and Paul imitated every drill sergeant who’d once commandeered the Commons across from the old British barracks. “Prepare to shovel—shovel.” We finished the redoubt in three days, and Paul returned to Little Africa with his men and their cotton candy. The lamplighters had to cross a maze of streets with their ladders and oil cans. The carcasses of carriages and horses rotted on Broadway until the sheriff and his constables carted them to some burial ground behind the colored cemetery.
We were a curious island of forts, waiting for the British to appear. Meanwhile, General Washington rounded up women and children and had them delivered to the mainland. The paupers were gone, removed from the almshouse. There were soldiers, militiamen, sailors, pickaninnies, slaves, and prostitutes. The general had decided not to tamper with Holy Ground. No garrison, not even a rebel one, could thrive without a street of brothels. Besides, Washington loved to play cards, and Gertrude had the best game in town.
She couldn’t celebrate the king’s birthday with Washington and his family on the premises. She couldn’t have fireworks and free ale, roast a pig in the garden, and recite “God Save the King.” Sir Harold had to hide in the cellar, or Washington’s aides might grow suspicious and start to question him. But I couldn’t sit idle on June the 4th and turn my back on King George. I drank a dipper of rum, the way Arnold would do before he went into battle. No man could sit on a horse like Benedict Arnold after a dipper of rum.
I clutched a candle and strode into the barricaded streets near midnight. ’T was an unsettling time, since one of His Majesty’s warships, the Asia, sat poised in the East River, at the foot of Wall Street—a ghostly galleon with gun ports lined up like a little sea of sightless eyes. The last British soldiers on York Island had marched aboard a month before Washington arrived. Merchants had continued selling supplies to the Asia until the Sons of Liberty destroyed their shops, stripped them naked, fitted them with feathered caps, like the king’s clowns, and had them parade across Manhattan with candles in their fists to mock George’s birthday. The Asia flourished for a while without the merchants’ wares and would deliver an occasional broadside, knocking off the roofs of taverns and sugarhouses and preventing militiamen from maneuve
ring in a field. But it seemed to fall into a period of complete silence. Its supply barge lay moored near the docks. It no longer delivered broadsides. Not a single lantern was lit. Yet no one dared board the Asia. It was a permanent memorial to the king.
I passed the sentinel boxes where the sheriff’s lads were supposed to watch for thieves. But thieves couldn’t prosper on such a poor island. And the boxes were unmanned. I approached the harbor, saluted His Majesty’s warship with my candle. And that’s when I saw the sheriff, Captain Kidd. Gert had sent him. She was playing cards with Washington and couldn’t come herself.
“Scribbler, it’s past the curfew. And what are you doing with a candle?”
“It’s the king’s birthday,” I said.
“Ah, I didn’t catch that, you cretinous boy. You’re alive and well because Gert wants you alive and well. But there’s a limit to my patience.”
He knocked the candle out of my hand and cuffed me behind the ear. Then he dragged me home to King’s. I must have slept in a miraculous manner. I woke after a week, near the middle of June, with molasses and corn cakes on my bed. Had Clara brought me the corn cakes? I could almost smell the delight of her skin that was like its own molasses and did not require the trenchant sting of perfume. I wondered if she had kept watch over me.
I climbed up to the roof with the spyglass Sir Harold had lent this lad. King’s was the highest point in town, and I was looking for signs of the fleet. The harbor was as smooth and solitary as glass. I would sit in my crow’s nest for hours, eating corncakes that kept arriving on my bed.
And then His Majesty’s ships did appear on the horizon. It was the very end of June. I was on the roof, and I started to sing and dance—and worry about the coming cannonades. I did not want Gert and Clara to be hit, or Washington to tumble from his white horse, his brains bashed in. I would have been mortified. But I was Harold’s homunculus. I belonged to him and the king. And so I kept me good eye screwed into the eyepiece.
I watched a hundred ships sail into the Narrows while I devoured my allotment of corn cakes—the sea itself was like a series of little islands made of wood and cloth, islands flush with drums and fifes and scarlet coats that could have been the Divil’s own dream works. Such phantom ships didn’t have to fire a shot. Sir William Howe could have won his war with drums—and drums alone.
Ten
I DIDN’T HAVE LONG TO REJOICE. SOME YOBS FROM the Manhattan Irregulars had climbed up onto the roof, frightened to death of the British fleet. I could read the terror on their wrinkled faces. They were the walking wounded, like myself, lads who barely survived the Maine woods with Benedict Arnold. They had little love for me, because of my proximity to Arnold as his scribe. And I had a special feud with Corporal Martin Jaggers, whom I had to crown with a rock after he tried to force himself on a farmer’s wife during our march to Boston as Irregulars. Jaggers never recovered from the braining he got. He lived off the slops of George Washington’s kitchen table. But his eyes lit with ferocious fever when he saw me come down from the cupola.
“Signalin’ to His Majesty, I suppose.”
His rotten gang seized the spyglass.
“Tell us about that birthday party you made for the king. It’s worse than treason, considerin’ that you was once a lieutenant and all, with an officer’s sash and a sword betwixt your legs.”
“Acting lieutenant,” I said. “I had that sword but a single night.”
“Pity, Lieutenant John. But you shouldn’t have made yourself conspicuous, not while the Brits are menacin’ our island.”
They kicked me down the stairs, clawed at me, ripped off my clothes, and carried me onto the lawn, where a whole barrel of pine tar was brewing in a caldron that sat above a bonfire. Jaggers himself mixed the tar with a painter’s stick, let some of it bubble right onto his hand.
“’T just ain’t hot enough, boys…Officer John, do you repent? Do you give up your allegiance to Britain’s Satanic Majesty?”
“King and country,” I said. “King and country.”
They tied me to a pole, took paintbrushes out of their britches, dipped the brushes into the caldron, and started slabbering me with tar. I was like a hog that had to be basted on a hot spit. The tar went into my eyelashes, into my hair, into my armpits, into the webs of my fingers, into the fork between my legs, covered my member with a black well. I hollered holy murder. My body was an island of burning skin. The yobs had a mattress they must have stolen from some mansion. They tore into its belly with a knife, reached inside, grabbed clumps of feathers and christened me with them; the hot tar ignited half the feathers until I was nothing but a feathery man on fire. I had to wiggle on the pole to keep the feathers from burning me alive.
The yobs practiced being firemen and pissed on the pieces of flame. I was nearly grateful.
They picked up the pole and drove me down the hill. A mob of mean-looking men had formed, so it seemed, since my head hung upside down and I had to endure my own stinking flesh. I kept falling asleep and waking from the hurt of it all.
Voices kept nagging at me. “Is that King George’s nigger?”
King George had brought his unholy ships back to our shores, and someone had to be sacrificed, someone had to be roasted on a rail. Should have gone mad with pain had I not started to reminisce. I’d maligned Jaggers, slandered him a little. He hadn’t attacked more than one farmer’s wife. He might even have been in love with her. She wore a bonnet, and her eyes were blue. She had blond pigtails that could have belonged on a child. We’d eaten at her farmhouse, the whole rough gang of us, raw recruits. She was half her husband’s age. The farmer looked bewildered the more and more we devoured. He slapped his wife, sent her out to the well. Jaggers whispered to his mates and followed her. I slipped away from the farmhouse, found him in a field, warbling at her in some crazy music that was frightening in its devotion. That’s why I hit him with the rock.
“I won’t hurt you,” I said to the farmer’s wife, feeling so superior to Corporal Jaggers. “I’m not like him.”
Her name was Anne Harding, Mrs. Anne Harding to be exact. She was all of sixteen, and she couldn’t bear to have that farmer lie on top of her.
“Sir,” she said, “please take me with you. I won’t be a bother. And if you don’t take me, I’ll die.”
“I can’t. We’re Irregulars, joining up with General Washington.”
She kept pleading out of that expanse of blue eyes.
“Sir, I’ll follow you into battle. I’ll wash your drawers.”
But I was scared, angry at my own ignorance. I grew up in a brothel, as Clara loved to remind me; I’d slept in the same bed with a whole gallery of nuns. I’d watched them parade with and without their clothes, but I might just as well have been a eunuch. I was frightened to death of this child-woman’s proposal, of her bluntness, of her want. And Jaggers wouldn’t have suffered from my mistake. He would have claimed Anne Harding as his camp wife. But I hoped to hell that she wouldn’t have gone with him.
Now these sons of bitches meant to carry me across the entire village of Manhattan. Folks spat at us.
“He’s the rector of King’s College,” Jaggers shouted. “We caught him signalin’ to the fleet.”
I wondered where the sheriff and his constables were. He could have broken up any mob, but not on the same afternoon that the British were spotted in the bay. I looked for Gertrude and the nuns as I rode through Robinson Street. I looked for Benedict Arnold, but he was practicing his generalship somewhere far from Manhattan. I looked for any mate who would halt this caravan, but no mates were to be had, except for these Irregulars. They dropped me to the ground, and I thought the journey was over, that I could hide under a hill and lick my wounds.
And then the yobs untied me, covered me in a robe that was like a long napkin. They put a paper crown on my head and a candle in my hand, sat me down in a sedan chair, and here I was, king of the harbor.
Jaggers bowed to me and laughed. “Sire, are you pleased with you
r throne?”
They hoisted me onto their shoulders and raced across the Commons to old King George Street that the rebels loved to call Liberty Lane.
“A king on the king’s road,” they shouted, their spittle flying above my head. “A king for a king.”
A little mob of men formed in front of my chair, a ragtag army with muskets and fifes and an aging drummer boy.
“Come meet the tar king, with a soul as black as the Divil.”
They stopped for free beer and rum at a sailor’s tavern on Cherry Street, parking me near the door. The lads pissed on my paper crown, spat in my face, poured beer on my tar and feather coat, handled humble John without a notch of kindness or civility. My skin began to crack with blisters. My throat was parched, but not a single lad offered me a drop of ale. I was the pariah who had to be paraded around, the village idiot in his sedan chair, the effigy of a colored King George who happened to be made of flesh.
I grew delirious. I began to consider Clara and her corn cakes, imagined being married to that missy from Dominica. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t seem to find another abode for us than Gertrude’s convent. I loved my king, but I had no country. I was the renegade sheriff of Robinson Street.
Surly, drunken mechanics arrived from our disused shipyards and attacked me with their tinderboxes; I was nearly blinded from the sparks. One mechanic seized the candle and set my robe on fire. Jaggers rushed out of the tavern and roared, “That’s Majesty’s candle. Give it back.”
Only after the candle was returned to my fist did he douse the robe in a tankard of ale and rip it right off my back. “Mustn’t harm him. He’s precious. The coloreds will worship him, I’m willin’ to wager.”
Eleven
DIRTY, FILTHY JAGGERS HAD FOUR MECHANICS pick up the sedan chair and charge across our old Palisade—the Indian wall of 1745—built by ambitious town fathers to free us forever from the curse of hostile Indians, and we entered Out Ward, home to the public slaughterhouse and tanneries that stank to heaven. Out Ward was where the highborns fought their duels over something they liked to call honor, tho’ this honor was often about a lady or a bill that went unpaid. The gallows was here and a potter’s field, the final home of paupers, convicts, slaves, and Indians who weren’t lucky enough to lie in sacred ground. There were no mansions or gardens or drinking wells. There wasn’t a single cobblestone or paved street. The lamplighter never visited Out Ward; there was no reason for him to come; he had nothing to light in a district without lamps. The shanties and hovels sat in the dark at the mercy of pirates and thieves and drunken armies like the one that was wielding me.
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