by Joel Rose
He has made peace with his fate. If asked, he would not have said he was innocent. He would have said he was guilty.
But he considers murder too strong a word for what he has done.
What he has done, Tommy Coleman, is kill, and if he had to do it all over, he would have killed again, just the same.
18
The Tombs
The Tombs is an unholy place. One drafty corridor links to another drafty corridor. One drafty cell abuts another drafty cell. The stink and unhealth of the swamp rises from beneath the foundation. The mortar is mildewed from moisture, foul from mold.
In the spring of 1842, the author Charles Dickens, on tour of the United States for a book he was writing, American Notes for General Circulation, requested specifically to visit the prison.
As High Constable Jacob Hays watched from his desk, the great man, the most popular writer in America despite him being an Englishman, was escorted through the Tombs’ corridors, at one point inquiring of his guide, a jailer named Trencher, “Pray, my good man, from where does the name Tombs derive?”
“Well, it’s the cant name,” came the reply from the blue-suited keeper, meaning the argot used by beggars and thieves.
“I know it is,” Hays heard the novelist snap, obviously impatient with those he perceived as simpletons. “But why?”
“S-some suicides happened here, when it was first built,” the beleaguered guard ventured. “I-I expect it come about from that.”
Hays rose from his desk then and came over to where the author stood.
“Forgive me, sir, for the interruption, but this is not from where the sobriquet comes. If you will, the House of Detention became known as the Tombs because a number of years ago the whole of this city was taken over with an Egyptology phenomenon.”
With Trencher looking on gratefully, Hays introduced himself and went on with his account.
A writer from Hoboken, he explained, H. L. Stevens, had set out for Arabia, returning with a manuscript entitled Stevens’ Travels, which became a sensation for the publishing house owned by Mr. George Palmer Putnam. The author made drawings to accompany his text, and one of these depicted an ancient mausoleum deep in the desert. The idea of this romantic crypt whetted the public’s collective imagination, the city fathers deciding in a moment of inspiration that the newly planned prison must be a replica of this Saharan vault.
THE FIRST MAN ever executed in the Tombs had been none other than Tommy Coleman’s brother, Edward Coleman. Hays saw him hanged in the prison courtyard on the morning of January 12, 1839, shortly after the building’s completion; his offense, the murder of his wife, a hot corn girl.
Hot corn girls walked the streets, selling their wares out of cedar-wood buckets hanging by a strap from around their necks. Barefoot, known for their striking beauty, dressed in calico dresses and plaid shawls, these young ladies and girls came out of the poorest neighborhoods, especially the Five Points, their song familiar in one version or another to every city dweller:
Corn! Hot corn!
Get your nice sweet hot corn!
Here’s your lily white hot sweet corn!
Your lily white hot corn!
Your nice hot sweet corn!
Smoking hot!
Smoking hot!
Smoking hot jist from the pot …
Sports, picturing themselves blades, trailed the hot corn girls on their routes, vying for their attention, entranced by their cry. Competition among the girls was intense—as it was among their admirers. More than one pitched battle erupted over the favors of a hot corn girl, more than one deadly duel.
Edward Coleman pursued, and eventually conquered, a girl so fetching, so beautiful, that she had come to be known above all others as “the Pretty Hot Corn Girl.”
Years earlier the city gnostics had undertaken to fill in the old freshwater Collect. Employing poor labor and public works, the brilliant ideapots ventured to have the surrounding hills shoveled down west of the pond near Broadway. After draining off the water, they planned to use the earth and bedrock from this excavation as a base foundation.
In addition a large open sewer was dug. Originating at Pearl Street, it ran through Centre Street to Canal and then followed an original streambed to the Hudson River on the west side. It was hoped this sewer would effectively keep dry the newly drained surrounding property, and thus appreciably add to the stock of usable acreage.
Local politicians congratulated themselves and anointed the project a success as multitudes of the rich clamored to build houses on the landfill, and for a time, everything was quite lovely. Hays had one single roundsman seeing to the security of the entire neighborhood, and at the southern end Paradise Square, on a balmy summer evening, was just that—paradise.
But then disaster struck. The underground springs that had once fed the Collect proved to be improperly capped, and the landfill had been mixed in large part with common garbage. The lovely new homes began to sink into the soft ground, springing doors and windows, and cracking façades. Water seeped into foundations and filled basements. Noxious vapors and fetid odors began to rise from below, cholera and yellow fever seeping upward.
All at once the rich moved out and the poor moved in, mostly penniless Irish immigrants of the lowest class and freed Negroes. The neighborhood came to be known as the Five Points, renowned as the worst slum in the world, according to what Dickens was saying, surpassing even London’s fabled Seven Dials for its misery.
Tommy Coleman’s brother, Edward Coleman, pictured himself a fierce, rough cove. His was the Forty Thieves, one of the first truly large criminal gangs to roam and terrorize New York’s streets. Under his clever leadership, the gang established themselves in and around Rosanna Peers’ greengrocery on Anthony Street, behind the Tombs, in the heart of the Five Points slum.
Outside Mrs. Peers’ grocery, on racks and in bins, were displayed piles of decaying vegetables. These were touched by no one, especially the tomatoes, which were regarded as poison.
Inside, in the back room, congregated Coleman’s ruffians: thugs, thieves, holdup artists, soaplocks, pickpockets, political sluggers, and no-gooders; one and all, at an instant, armed and ready to follow their leader’s command, to rise and roam, primed to terrorize the local streets, especially after indulging in the fiery liquor served up by Mrs. Peers at a price unequaled by the nearby, more established drinking emporiums, saloons, groggeries, and assorted buckets of blood.
To give him his due, vicious and intense, Edward Coleman’s acknowledged talent was indeed to lead and organize this hoary crew of cutthroats. In a city chockablock with rapscallions and street toughs, his was the first gang with designated leadership and disciplined members. In a weak moment, Old Hays might even have admitted to guarded admiration for the man’s skills. After all, under Coleman’s tutelage, his gang’s membership in general substantiated over time a more honorable lot than the average jaded politico or two-shilling heeler walking the city’s ward streets.
But as pretty as the Pretty Hot Corn Girl was, marriage to a man the likes of Tommy’s brother proved to be too great a hurdle for her to overcome. Three weeks after the ceremony at Our Lady of Contrition, in a fit of alcohol-fueled rage, Edward Coleman murdered his wife, and for this senseless act was sentenced to pay the big price.
Eager not only to witness the dramatic end of the Forty Thieves gangleader, but also to view the new Tombs penal facility for the first time, so many city dignitaries and men-about-town came out to attend the event, it took the condemned man more than twenty minutes to shake all the hands extended him by well-wishers.
Finally, he took his place beneath the gibbet and the hemp necklace was looped around his neck, the counterweight poised in position.
Outside the prison walls hordes of his base underlings, including his adoring fourteen-year-old brother Tommy, not admitted due to warden’s orders for fear of disruption or worse (jailbreak), cheered and shouted his name.
At a signal the weight dropped, the
scientific intent being that the condemned would be jerked by the neck into the air, what had come to be known as “the jerk to Jesus,” there to dangle unto death.
But on this morning, in front of Old Hays’ eyes, the rope snapped with a frightening twang.
Loud voices rose from the crowd, “Will of God! Will of God!” as Edward Coleman, smiling broadly, stood stock-still, unfazed. The frayed rope still looped about his neck, he winked at Hays.
Vocal supporters gruffly began to shout, “The Almighty has intervened!” demanding that he be spared.
Refusing to hear anything of it, Monmouth Hart, warden of the Tombs and one of the most ardent admirers and customers of the murdered Pretty Hot Corn Girl, interceded, and with Hays standing at the gibbet edge watching, calmly instructed the hangman to restring the murderer and try again.
This time all went as planned to hip-hip-hoorays and loud hoorahs from the solid citizenry in attendance, Edward Coleman’s body swinging from the crossbeam in front of Old Hays for a full fifteen minutes before Coroner Archer came forth and gave the sign for it to be cut down.
19
The Sister of the
Pretty Hot Corn Girl
When Tommy Coleman married the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl, over a thousand members of the Five Points gangs attended the wedding, and there was much shouting and loud singing among these roughs, toughs, and bruisers of her anthem in chorus with the laughing, drunken Irish hordes tramping through the streets.
TOMMY COLEMAN had run into his future wife, the sister of his dead brother’s murdered wife, one night after not seeing her since his brother’s hanging. She came in off the street into Murderers’ Mansion, One-Lung Charlie Mudd’s bucket of blood on Little Water Street.
The last time Tommy had seen her she was being escorted through the Tombs’ front gate by sheriff ’s deputies to stand near the gibbet, close enough to touch the naked wood. She had come to Tommy’s brother’s hanging for one reason, and one reason only: she wanted to see the man who had murdered her sister pay the big price and swing for what he had done.
That night everybody in the Mansion knew her, knew who she was, what had happened, her and her family’s torment. The girls from the neighborhood admired her for her strength and wherewithal, and bravery, the way she wore her air of tragedy, and she was so pretty, just like her sister, they longed to be like her; and the men, in awe of her beauty, felt the stirrings of wanton lust if nothing else.
She was known by sight on the street and whispered about. Not only because she was the sister of the city’s most famous hot corn girl, but also because she stood squarely on her own two feet, and had aligned herself with none other than Ruby Pearl, the rough-and-tumble leader of the Bowery Butcher Boys, and she, it was gossiped, if not said out loud (certainly not to her face), was in way over her head.
Not only because she was Irish Catholic and Ruby Pearl Protestant, him a prideful, east-of-Bowery, native true-blue American, her a potato-eating Irish lass from “the P’ernts,” but also because she was only sixteen and he a hardened eleven years her senior, and Protestants didn’t come a-social-calling in that neighborhood from where she was from, especially right there in the heart of the Fourth Ward, and old Ruby Pearl, he could be a very bad fellow, if not the worst. Very rowdy he was, and tough on women of all ages, save maybe his own mother.
When she sashayed into Charlie Mudd’s and Tommy glanced up, he had been cavorting there with his boyos, Tweeter Toohey, Pugsy O’Pugh, Boffo the Skinned Knuckle, and the rest of their lot. Her face flushed, full of rage, her dressed in gingham, her hot corn bucket slung over her shoulder like a weapon, her breath coming fast, he saw her, her excitement and anger transmitted to every patron imbibing in the Mansion, everyone laughing and singing and carrying on, and Tommy knew right there and then in his heart of hearts, this bleak mort was destined to be his bleak mort, none other.
Tommy Coleman did not deceive himself. He had no self-delusions what he was getting into. He had heard the talk. He knew to whom she belonged, and what her feelings had to be toward him personal, given her deceased sister and his executed brother. There had never been love lost between them, even when things were going good with their respective siblings. He didn’t give a flying fig. He knew what he wanted, what he had to have. He knew no matter what had preceded, anything was possible in America.
So he sat there, biding his time at the knife-scarred table, having patience, waiting for something fateful to happen, biting his lip to blood as she stormed around Charlie Mudd’s emporium so angered and full of herself, beautiful and barefoot, the strap of her cedar bucket crossing her bosom.
There was a commotion and into the Mansion stalked Ruby Pearl himself, surveying the drunks for her. What she’d been waiting for, judging from the look on her face. She marched across the room, stood in front of him, rage sparking off her, and you better believe every citizen in One-Lung Mudd’s Mansion knew old Ruby, big as he was, strong as an ox, tough as a sheep shank, was in trouble.
Ruby Pearl was not known for an abundance of brains so he might not have known he was in dire straits yet, leastways that was the only way Tommy could ken it. Which, you have to figure, is why Butcher Pearl said so casually to her in front of all these citizens, “Why you make me follow you in here, you damn mort? Why you coming in here? Why you ain’t out working still?”
“Am I in?” she shot back without fear. She had that God-given ability, young as she was, that enables a woman to put an edge in her voice that sets a man off.
Ought to have made Ruby Pearl be more aware, but not knowing the whims and subtleties of the female gender, having worked the whole of his life in slaughterhouses and market butcher stalls, Ruby Pearl only heard what he thought—affront and disrespect—and he hauled off to strike her.
Tommy was on his feet, crossing the sawdusted floor fast, coming to her defense.
Except the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl didn’t need (or want) any strong-arm protection offered up by the likes of Tommy Coleman.
She despised Tommy Coleman.
She caught Ruby Pearl’s big arm in midair, before he could strike her, and she just sneered up at him like he was nothing, lower than a worm, a mesomorph, holding him fiercely, digging her fingers into the flesh and muscle and tendon in the seam of his thick wrist, the electric ganglionic nerve, smelling on him the overpowering smell of dead animals, her crazy smile, if you can call it that, a smile, God, could you believe it? In his cell Tommy grinned to himself as he remembered how beautiful she was!
Tommy was left to standing and staring. There was nothing for him to do, just look on and grin, Ruby Pearl dispatched just like that. Everything taken care of by this beautiful girl, neat as a pin.
Nevertheless, Tommy felt like he needed to make his presence known, and then he was of a mind to have a word with old Ruby. After all, he, Tommy, had got up and crossed the room this far, might as well go all the way.
Butcher Boy Ruby Pearl, wobbled from beer and oysters, toughest of the tough, roughest of the rough, whirled, rubbing his wrist where his bleak mort had pinched him, or whatever she’d done, and turned on Tommy, now focused in on this nemesis, glaring at him as a man glares at another when it is understood between them that their manhood is at stake.
Ruby Pearl knew Tommy Coleman, knew him all too well, knew how crazed and dangerous he was; loathed him. Loathed Tommy as Tommy loathed him.
“Pearl,” Tommy spoke.
“Step back, Coleman,” Ruby countered, “before I punch your parking railing through your face.”
“Don’t you know that’s no way to treat a lady, boyo?”
“I ain’t no b’hoyo of yours. Don’t call me no b’hoyo, b’hoyo! I’m Ruby Pearl, Bowery Butcher B’hoy. Mr. Pearl to the likes of you, Coleman.” And advancing on the Sister of the Pretty Hot Corn Girl, he growled mightily, “Go back to the street, you. Make money, and leave me to deal with the likes of this nickey. I don’t want you to see what I’m gonna do to him.”
“Meaning what?” Ruby Pearl was not a man to step down lightly. “I’m here to see my mort. On her invitation. This is a free nation if you know it or not, you little Irish runty pig.”
Ruby was over six feet two inches tall and weighed more than two hundred and twenty pounds, with the torso of a side of beef. He grew up on the street. But sometimes the biggest and the strongest, the slyest and the most adept, cannot win. Looking around him, Ruby knew when he was put down and could not persevere. Even against a straw-weight lad a foot inferior, a hundred pounds lighter than he.
Tommy’s gang, Tweeter, Pugsy, Boffo, a dozen others, their hands on their slungshots and daggers, surrounded him.
“You’ll get yours, Coleman,” Ruby growled, looking from one to the other. “I’ll be back one day to dispatch you to hell, or I’ll meet you on the streets and grind you into the paving stones then. You know that, don’t you, wee one, when you don’t got your life preservers around.”
“I’m not scared, mate,” Tommy told him.
“Neither am I,” retorted he.
All in attendance at Mudd’s Mansion that night, every single one, pressed forward one step to witness what was to transpire.
“One last thing, Mr. Pearl. From now on, stay away,” Tommy warned, spitting on the floor between Ruby’s feet for punctuation. “This here mort is not your mort no more.”
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Pearl said. “Now you’re telling me stay away from what’s mine.”
“I don’t like no man who hits no woman.”