The Blackest Bird

by Joel Rose

  “I asked Colonel Colt if his brother John knew Mary Rogers. If John had ever mentioned her in context with the name Edgar Poe.”

  Olga put down her fork. “What did he say?”

  “At first he did not even answer. Then he said, ‘The segar girl? No. Never.’”

  Olga asked, “Papa, do you think we shall ever know what befell her, what befell Mary Rogers?”

  He now too put down his utensils. He declared to his daughter it was his honest conviction that with an open mind the individual has opportunity to learn, to discover. “With a closed mind? What is there?” He spoke rhetorically. “Nothing. Olga, when first I joined the constabulary, I was oft reminded on the first day Europeans set foot on this island, seven men lost their lives. Two red, five white. Since that day the killing has not stopped. Death and violence is the mere tapestry of life in this city. I accept this, Olga. You must as well.”

  SOMETIMES DURING THE winter months it became so cold on lower Broadway that the ice forming in outhouses could not be broken, and the roaring fire in a fireplace was no guarantee that in the next room a penman’s ink might not freeze in its well.

  The Lord’s Day, the second Sunday in December, was the day set aside for the funeral of Tommy Coleman. As it dawned, blue and crisp, the harsh wind roaring down the Hudson from the north country, howled its last, and by midmorning a new breeze, rising off the saline tidal river, billowing from the southern reaches across the harbor, gently insured it being the balmiest and most transcendent of December days.

  Old Hays set forth from his home on Lispenard Street. In front of him the sun shone down on the sidewalk. Above him the sky transformed, and the warmth carried on the southern currents erased any hint of chill from the air. The ink in the well of the lowly priest Father Patrick O’Malley, scheduled to hold forth at Tommy Coleman’s funeral, finally thawed, assuring he would, praise to the Almighty, now be able to set about his Sabbath work of composition.

  Meanwhile, at the funeral home on Mott Street, an Irish wake of phenomenal proportion was concluding. As Hays arrived, four of Tommy’s boyos stood sentries at the door in honor of their downed leader.

  How young they were! Yet already they displayed the countenance of their elders. Hardened, inured, their rag caps pulled low on sloping brows, sure sign of studied stupidity. Greasy hair hanging, ragged at the edges under their grimy caps. Flat noses, mouths mere cruel slashes, crooked, downcast lines of insolence. Chins? Hays found them skimpy and weak. And necks? Ha! Scrawny and black with necklaces of dirt. The dirt rising like a vapor, extending and staining behind the fleshy, unwashed ears. As young as they were, the cauliflower ear was not remarkable among this set, and when they talked it was out of the side of their mouths with more than a modicum of “dims” and “does.”

  Inside the oft-used funeral parlor, whiskey flowed, and had flowed over the last week.

  Through the window Hays could see Tommy’s ma and da presiding over the mourners.

  Both Coleman faces were red with drink and heat. Both their handsome heads, crowned with snowy white manes of silken hair, were abob with grateful acknowledgments of stricken sympathy and heartfelt good intent.

  How many people attended this wake? Of mourners and curiosity seekers, gang members, adjutants, and well-intentioned neighbors? Family and friends? Pushy newspaper flacks, publicity seekers, and the semiliterate? Of louts and prigs? Good people and the compassionate? The plain? The simple? Those who knew Tommy Coleman and were personally devastated? The callous and devoid?

  As far as Hays could tell, thousands, if there was one. All come to pay their respects in their own personal way to the too-soon-taken-from-their-midst young gangster.

  They stood in line, waited their turn to enter.

  Hays would not venture who came out of legitimacy and who out of perversion.

  Eventually, after everyone was suitably rip-roaring drunk, the mourners carried the closed casket (Tommy’s face said in whispers to have been literally shot off in the fracas with the police and militia below the Morningside Heights) from the wake site to a basement resort happily owned by Petey O’Malley, nephew to the funeral home proprietor, Seamus O’Malley, and the curate, Patrick O’Malley, then one block to the church, Our Lady of Contrition, directly south of the Mulberry Bend on the north beat of Paradise Square, later the coffin to be heaved a-shoulder by Tommy’s favored companions and compatriots to be paraded through the streets more than a few blocks away via gala fete, muscled up through the Bend and on to the consecrated ground of the holy cemetery.

  The pallbearers were indeed a well-soused yet still upright crew in mourning coats and black stove hats, culled from the ranks of the fraternal Irish gangs, one from each brotherhood in a symbolic gesture on the occasion, in the face of tragedy, of newly found unity and good trust.

  The streets surrounding Paradise Square all along the parade route were teeming with curiosity seekers. But only those calling themselves “blood relatives” and “honest folk” could be welcomed into the chapel proper.

  Many more “close acquaintances” and “well-wishers” clotted the narrow streets starting south from Canal. The crowd swarmed the park and hundreds infested the roofs and windows and outer stairways of the buildings surrounding the church.

  At one point the rickety wooden outer stairway providing access to upper stories and roof, tacked precipitously to the face of Sweeney’s Feed Warehouse & Distillery, groaned and creaked before loudly cracking, like a cannon shot, then crashing outright, sending some seventy-odd viewers to the sidewalk and street below.

  Rubberneckers, giddy with joy and horror, seeing and hearing the commotion, ran will-I, nill-I, but even they, this dissolute mass of onlookers, became quiet when the bells finally tolled, signaling the start of the funeral mass proper, the sanctuary of the church so very well filled to the apse, the high constable relegated to standing uncomfortably in the rear behind the holy water.

  Prayers were said, and on the pulpit from inside Our Lady of Contrition the priest, Father O’Malley, began his eulogy in voice loud enough to be heard by those nearly gathered right there in the chapel and through open door outside in the street, while for the benefit of those farther away the prelate’s words repeated and amplified by another, the crier, yet one more relative of the O’Malley clan, this one a third cousin, thin and pinch-faced, in shabby but soulful black robes, his voice of incongruous, ponderous deep timbre, blaring nothing but a misheard semblance of what his eponymous kin was saying to those poor shattered and shuttered inside, to those out there in the street, feet dangling from the tin rooftop cornices or bearing witness from the surrounding tenement windows, straining if only to listen from tanneries and ash houses, and comprehend all God’s mysteries.

  “Many tombstone of a miller reads: ‘Killed in his mill!’” intoned Father O’Malley from the pulpit. “The same may right be said of our young son and brother, Tommy Coleman.”

  With the high constable watching from the back of the church, the father, he who Hays knew had baptized infant Tommy and had known him personally through his short and misspent life, looked up, as if scrutinizing the assembled, gauging their reaction (not a dry eye in the house), and pressed on.

  “Killed in his mill? What mill had he? This was a boy of seventeen, nay, eighteen years. He had no mill! He had nothing. Absolutely nothing. So I’ll answer this inquiry myself. What mill had he, he was! I warn you one and all, and I repeat: Stay away from evil!

  “I knew the lad well, and said the same to him often. Our dearly departed, enough is enough! Stay away from the evil that infests our streets and our minds. Save yourself!”

  As Hays shifted his weight uneasily, this steadfast, earnest man of God looked over his overflowing, overzealous audience and congregation and continued.

  “What’s more to be said?” he inquired.

  Hays waited with the rest of the assembled for the answer.

  “What more indeed? … Nothing. Not a thing. Take not another breath. Noth
ing more need be spoken. But speak we must. Cry out we must.

  “He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword,” continued Father O’Malley. “It is our own stark reality, and so be it for what it is.”

  The accepted code of conduct being, Shoot twenty poor citizens of the Points in the scragg and expect twenty bullets in your own boke in reprisal.

  But the priest was not finished yet.

  “Young as he was, we all looked up to Tommy Coleman,” the father continued with his oration. “That is to say, young as he was, we all looked up to him at the same time we all looked down upon him. He was a boy. How old was he? I ask again. Eighteen? Then he died. A shame. A real shame. A mere mite. Yet how many more immutable movers of men have we known more astute than he? Our Tommy’s was a rare gift. To be admired, to be mined, to be put to use. But not to be killed. To be killed is a sin. Crime does not pay!” Father O’Malley intoned loudly, his voice quivering now with even more charged melodrama.

  “Listen to me, one and all, inside and out, all about. All who can hear me, I implore you, pay attention! I beg you, pay attention! Humanity needs you! Pay attention! Do not waste yourselves! Pay attention! America needs you. Pay attention! New York City needs you. Pay attention! Your family, your friends, your brothers, your sisters, your children, they all need you. Pay attention!

  “We all need you. Strangers, admirers, confess! Brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, pay attention! We need you. Heed the warning issued here today. Study the example extolled so clearly for us all this day. Mourn your loss, one and all, and repeat after me: Crime does not pay!”

  Credit must be given where credit is due, Old Hays noted to himself. Father O’Malley was, if nothing else, persistent. The priest fixed with a hardened blue eye his congregation.

  Then all those massed in Our Lady of Contrition, and all those gathered outside on the sidewalks and on the cobblestones, and all those perched on the rickety fire escapes, and all those pressed together, shoulder to shoulder, in the alleys, breathing tannery fumes and privy stench, all those crowded stomach to rump, shoulder to maw, took up the chant.

  “Crime does not pay!” went the reverberate through the holy building, through the streets.

  From windowsill to lamppost, from tenement flagging to tree limb, wherever citizenry hung within earshot, scarred and unscarred, Irish-American or the most recent greenhorn immigrant from Kerry, scathed or unscathed, he or she, child or man, boy or girl, they reached deep and repeated, crescendo and bravado, pure and deeply felt: “Crime does not pay!”

  “Crime does not pay!”

  “Crime does not pay!”

  What joy to the ear!

  Who could deny?

  “Crime does not pay!”

  IN THE OUTSIDE BREEZE many Irish pennants and Stars and Stripes flew. Pretty young girls marched out from the church in solemn file. Tommy’s grieving ma exited the building, staggering under the support of two burly boys, holding her weight up at the armpits. Her eyes red as her nose, her cheeks as red as her eyes. Hot tears streaming, splattering on the board sidewalk.

  Her life mate, Tommy’s old white-haired da, Timo Coleman, needed, nor accepted, assistance. He was of the task and mind rather to stumble along on his own steam. He managed to stand tall, or at the least as tall as his frame allowed him. Diminutive at an inch south of five feet, he stared straight on, his eyes as blue as the clear blue sky overhead. Unruffled by the commotion surrounding him, with his every step he stepped lively, spry in black suit, emerald green neck stock, his hair as white as new potato shavings, his face every bit as red as blood, most especially the outsized and lavishly veined proboscis.

  Somewhere in front of Hays, a brass band started up. A slow procession began tramping through the streets, their sad song sung, what Hays had heard Da Timo Coleman proclaim his favorite at the O’Malley family funeral home, “Whiskey, You’re the Divil.”

  45

  Aftermath to Obsequies

  Out of respect for the deceased, all pallbearers at the funeral of Tommy Coleman wore red satin stripes down their pantaloon seams, as did all brethren Irish gangsters.

  The idea derived after one of the most powerful and admired Five Points gangs, the Roach Guards, had taken to wearing a blue stripe down their trouser legs, and the red stripe, in imitation of this, or some misconstrued homage.

  The high constable watched the funeral procession snake through the winding streets, until onlookers could be heard beginning to whisper in hushed voices.

  Hays could now make out, still blocks away, what he took to be the muffled upraised voices and grumbling of the native-born bands approaching out of the Bowery from the east.

  Across Paradise Square, the Irish gangs, the Chichesters, the Plug Uglies, the Dead Rabbits, the Shirt-tails, the Forty Little Thieves, among others, grew quiet to better listen.

  Hays hurried to a vantage point. Where he stood, above Mulberry, he watched while the Bowery gangsters, a remarkable thousand and a half strong, neared the heart of the Points and hesitated at Cross Street, ready to meet their adversary gathered in front of them, fifteen hundred belligerent Irish coves.

  In recent years a system of police had been suggested by certain political factotums and civilian factioneers, featuring multiple station houses, one to a ward, which might in time of crisis work together in consort, but although Hays found it a fundamentally sound idea, the proposal had been defeated by those fearing a standing army controlled by local government.

  Instead, the United States Twenty-seventh Regiment had been repeatedly relied upon of late by local government to quell riots and suppress unrest. Stationed near the Narrows in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, and led by a newly appointed Captain Robert E. Lee, the troops, what was being called a National Guard, with the knowledge that Tommy Coleman’s funeral would afford an occasion for unrestrained racial unrest and belligerence, were put on the ready, but not yet officially pressed into action by Mayor Morris.

  By this Sunday afternoon, every Bowery gangster had come boiling out of his hole. The Butcher Boys, the Atlantic Guard, the American Guard, the True-Blue Americans, were all in full assemblage, all in club costume and colors. Something beautiful to behold, they stood at attention, dressed in their spotless undershirts and taut suspenders, gazing down upon Paradise Square.

  The day remained crisp; the sky blue. If Hays had been asked, he would have said the sun surely seemed to be smiling down on the remains of Tommy Coleman’s stand-in. A breeze wafted off the East River, another gentled off the Hudson. The trees in the square had lost their leaves. Their brittle remains crunched underfoot.

  As Hays watched, having dispatched Balboa to go for the standing reinforcements, the Irish gangsters doffed their funeral attire as quickly as they could, stripping down to their own undershirts and suspenders so as not to spoil their special mourning clothes, with which they took pride.

  Suddenly bullies were in hand, slungshots at the ready.

  The two forces faced each other on Bayard Street.

  The brass band stopped its playing.

  The black-dressed women ceased their mournful wail.

  Past Hays, fearful civilians scurried to seek higher ground on Cross Street from where they might watch the battle unencumbered, uninvolved, safe.

  Below, as the grieving watched, the Bowery b’hoyos took up a cadence rhythmically slapping their truncheons and neddies into their meaty butcher palms, one, two, one, two, in anticipation of battle charge.

  AFTER HER SON WAS KILLED, Mother Coleman had received word at her airless basement apartment from High Constable Jacob Hays to report to the Dead House behind City Hall to identify her boy’s body.

  When she arrived, however, Hays abruptly refused to allow Mrs. Coleman to view her son. Speaking softly, he took her hand in his and told her the boy’s body was in no condition to be seen. It would be too difficult, he said, for a grieving mother to view such carnage under such circumstance.

  Instead, like Phebe Rogers before her, Mrs. Cole
man identified her child, passed on to a better place, by his clothing. By no means was it lost on Old Hays that Tommy Coleman had escaped death row in his striped prison taupe, and any clothes he might have been wearing on the night he was said to have been killed would have been borrowed or stolen, and certainly not his to be identified.

  Still, he allowed Mother Coleman to bawl. “Yes, these are his,” tears staining her creased fat red cheeks. “God rest his miserable soul.”

  Even as this charade played out, Old Hays was still half waiting against his better judgment for Sergeant McArdel to reappear his post. When he did not, McArdel’s evident betrayal weighing heavier by the minute hand, the high constable nevertheless took the initiative among his men to speak to them about that Sunday night’s ambush reportedly by the Watch and local constabulary beneath the Morningside Heights.

  “Who among you was there?” he asked, too aware he had been reduced to being unable to trust any single one of them.

  As he more than suspected, no one raised his hand.

  “Who among you knows by whom or how information regarding the ghouls was relayed?”

  No one offered to this either.

  He inquired did anyone know the whereabouts of Sergeant McArdel.

  No one did.

  Sitting at his desk in the Tombs earlier that day of Mrs. Coleman’s visit to the Dead House, the high constable had had the opportunity to read in the New York Herald the results of the Great Census of 1842, conducted by the Five Points House of Industry. Identified in the survey were 3,435 Irish families living in the Five Points. Next in number were the Italians with 416 families recorded. Of the English? Only 73.

  Hays was not surprised. According to the report, punctuating Paradise Square and its immediate environs were 270 saloons, with several times that number of dance halls, diving bells, blind tigers, buckets of blood, shanghai palaces, houses of prostitution, suicide halls, sporting houses, and greengrocers selling more fermented wet goods of local confection than vegetables or fresh fruits.