Citizen Tom Paine

by Howard Fast

  At last, Paine discharged him; it was better to be alone. A few days later, Derrick returned, crawled up to a window where Paine was sitting, and let go with a large-bore musket, buckshot-loaded. He was drunk enough to miss the old man, but he shattered the window and filled the wall beyond with shot.

  On his part, Paine was sorry that Derrick had missed. Better to have gone that way, quickly and painlessly, than to linger on here in an empty house. In the village, Derrick boasted about his feat until they were forced to arrest him, but Paine would not press any charges.

  The old man feared the occasional trips he had to make into the village of New Rochelle. Not a mother had neglected to tell her child that Paine and the devil were in league, and when the thin-faced, bent old man came shuffling into town, he would attract as many children of all ages as the pied piper. It did not matter that he tried to be good to them, that he never chased them from his orchards, that he sometimes filled his pockets with candy in an attempt to bribe them away from their torments; that was to no avail, for what other game presented such fascinating possibilities as baiting old Tom Paine? Throw enough mud, rocks, and sticks at him and you could get him to lose his temper, and then you could lead him a merry chase. And there were wonderful rhymes you could sing as you danced out of reach, such as:

  “Benedict Arnold and Simon Girty,

  They were false to flag and country,

  But compared to Paine they weren’t bad,

  He played false with Washington and Gad.”

  or

  “Make a revolution, blood and flame,

  I’m the one who does it, my name is Paine.

  I should have gone to the guillotine,

  Too bad I didn’t—I’m just too mean.”

  And never a grown-up to reprimand you, but only to say, “Give it to him, give it to him,” as they smoked their pipes and looked on.

  In New Rochelle, there was no hope of an old comrade coming to his aid. This was Tory country during the war, and fiercely anti-Jefferson now, as most of Westchester County was. The villagers had not fought in the war; their neutrality swayed the comfortable way, and they gave all the aid they could to the British and to the Tory counterrevolutionaries called Rogers’ Rangers. That they had not forgotten the war was proven to Paine when he came into town to vote in the 1806 election.

  The election supervisors were a small Tory clique, and when they saw Paine shuffling into town on registration day, the crowd of children buzzing at his heels, they looked at each other and nodded and smiled. Paine walked more proudly than usual; everything else gone, he could still cast a vote for principles he believed in. A mild function, an anonymous function, crosses on a piece of paper, but nevertheless the representation that he had made the guiding function of his life.

  Standing on line, he closed his ears to the coarse remarks flung at him, and when finally his turn came said strongly:

  “Thomas Paine, sir!”

  “And what do you want here?”

  “This is the board of elections, isn’t it? I’m here to register.”

  They smiled at each other, and told him, “Only citizens vote.”

  Paine shook his head. “I am Thomas Paine,” he repeated, his twisted eyes wrinkled querulously.

  “So we are given to understand. However, you are not a citizen of the United States of America.”

  The old man shook his head, bewilderment making him cringe into his years. Everyone laughed at the thought that this trembling old man was the murderous revolutionist, the diabolical antichrist. See how dirty he is, snuff stains all over his shirt, his stockings wrinkled and down at the knees, his hands shaking so! Patiently, the chief supervisor explained to him:

  “We do not register foreigners, only citizens. You have no right to vote and you are holding up the line.”

  Reaching back into his memory for quiet legal arguments, for reason in a thing so obvious, for some clarification of this horrible mistake, the old man said haltingly, “But Congress gave citizenship to all soldiers of the revolution—”

  “You were never a soldier of the revolution,” the supervisor smiled.

  “But I am Paine, Thomas Paine, don’t you understand?”

  “I will thank you to go, and make no further disturbance.”

  “But I must vote—I must vote. Don’t you understand that I must vote. It is my right.”

  The crowd roared with laughter, and the supervisor, still patient, pointed out, “Neither Gouverneur Morris nor General Washington considered you an American citizen. Are we to go over their heads? Really, sir—”

  “I won’t stand such injustice!” the old man cried shrilly. “I’ll prosecute you!”

  “Call the constable,” the supervisor said, his patience gone now. “We still have room in jail for an old rascal.”

  “Jail—not jail,” the old man whispered, broken now. “Not jail any more.”

  And with that, he turned away and shuffled back along the street, the children dancing about him once more.

  He had enough of New Rochelle—let the farm go to the devil. There was nothing left, nothing at all, and the only thing he wanted now was to die. Let it come quickly; let it be over with; this world was a strange place that he did not know at all, and he was a frightened, sick old man.

  He went back to New York, and life prolonged itself, and he moved from one miserable lodging house to another. He drank too much; he took too much snuff, and about his appearance he cared nothing at all. A dirty old man, an unshaven old man—what did it matter? He had not even enough spirit left to shake a stick at the ever-present, tormenting children.

  He sometimes asked himself, plaintively, “Is this God’s revenge?” He, for whom values had always been firm as iron, found them shifting and relaxing now. “Have I done wrong to believe in Him in an unbelieving world? Have I done wrong in saying that His name must not be profaned, that He is the top of all man’s aspirations?”

  Sometimes, briefly, a spark of the old Paine appeared, as when a man called Fraser forged a recantation of the so-called heresies in The Age of Reason. Then the old man challenged him and brought him to law. Paine might decay and die, but recant?—and on the one work for which he had suffered most, his plea for a gentle, reasonable worship of the Almighty. Never that, not even from this dirty old man who had only one thing left, his name. Fraser was not much among Paine’s enemies; he confessed and pleaded for mercy, and the old man said,

  “… write no more concerning Thomas Paine. I am satisfied with your acknowledgment—try something more worthy of a man.”

  But the sparks were fewer now. A stroke felled him again, and he lay on the broken ruin of a whisky bottle until he was found.

  He was dying, and he knew it, and it occurred to him that he would not lie anywhere but in some nameless field of beggars. To Willett Hicks, a liberal Quaker preacher, he said, “Let me lie in the Quaker burial-ground,” adding plaintively, “I have never done anything unbecoming of a Quaker. They will do what they want with me when I am dead; they’ll deny me a little bit of ground.”

  Hicks said he didn’t think it was possible. One man might be sympathetic to Paine, but refer the matter to a committee, and it was doomed to failure.

  “Just one small favor after I am dead,” Paine pleaded. “My father was a good Quaker, and so was my mother. I never asked anything of the Quakers until now. In the name of charity—”

  Hicks said he would try, but it turned out as he had anticipated. The Quakers denied Paine burial, and so did various other sects whom Hicks sounded out. When Madame Bonneville came to visit him, Paine complained to her:

  “They deny me even a little bit of ground. They will strew my bones all over, like rubbish.”

  He was not a bad old man, Madame Bonneville thought, for all his faults and such stubborn insanity as not wanting to come down from his room to see the great Bonaparte. Why didn’t they leave him alone and stop tormenting him?

  “You will be buried on your own farm,” she sai
d.

  “It’s good earth,” he reflected, trying to gather his thoughts. “American earth—that would be all right. But the land will be sold; they’ll dig up my bones and sell them.”

  “The land won’t be sold,” Madame Bonneville told him, thinking that anything you told an old man who was dying to comfort him was a blessing.

  There was nothing but pain now—in his side where it had become infected during his stay in the Luxembourg, in his head, everywhere. A man dies so slowly. Madame Bonneville got him a nurse, but the nurse was a deeply religious woman and let it be known all about that Tom Paine was living his last hours. Thus began a pilgrimage; for what a splendid thing it would be to hear Paine denounce The Age of Reason on his deathbed!

  One and all they came, Catholics, Methodists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Quakers, Presbyterians—they had not read his book, yet they came to fight the book and the devil.

  “Renounce it! Renounce God and goodness and hope, for you are dying! Renounce mankind!”

  Ministers, priests, pastors, fathers, nuns—they crept into his room, aided by the nurse, who had been divinely placed in this holy position. The old warrior was dying, and what had they or anyone to fear! The horns of the angels had pealed over Concord and Lexington, but here was only the rustle of stiff, black garments. If he called weakly for aid, his comrades could not hear him, for they were dead or far away, crossing the mountains and the plains, driving their oxen and their covered wagons, going to make the land and the world that was the dream, the handwork, and the suffering of Tom Paine. The ones in black crouched over him; they darkened and pushed away the little sunlight. They screamed, “Recant!” Ladies came to do their bit of good, dressed in proper ebony. Even the doctor, bending low, prodded him, “Mr. Paine, do you hear me? There is still time, there is still hope. Do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?”

  “Do you wish to believe?”

  “Do you recant?”

  “Do you renounce?”

  “You are a dirty old man, you are all alone. Give up, give up!”

  If there was a moment of peace, as there was bound to be, early in the morning and late at night, the nurse read in ringing tones from the Bible. This was a crusade; come, all ye faithful!

  And then he no longer heard their voices, their prodding, their torments, their pleas that he should be weak, he whose strength was the strength of storied heroes, of the gods of old. He had peace; he had his comrades by his side; he stood among the men of good will, those who came before him and those who came after him.

  Such was the funeral procession which accompanied his body to the farm at New Rochelle: Madame Bonneville, her children, two Negroes, and the Quaker preacher, Willett Hicks, those seven and no more. But it was enough; it was the whole world.

  At one point during their journey up to Westchester, the driver stopped the coach to rest the horses, and a bystander called out to Hicks:

  “Whose funeral?”

  “Tom Paine’s.”

  “Well,” the stranger grinned, “if there is such a business as purgatory, he’ll get his share before the devil lets go of him.”

  “On that score,” Hicks mused, “I would sooner take my chance with Tom Paine than with any man in New York.”

  A few of the townsfolk had gathered to watch the burial. They snickered at the few words Hicks said over the grave. The coachman was grateful for the fine June day; he didn’t often get a ride out into the country. Hicks asked Madame Bonneville whether there was any provision in the will for a tombstone, and she said, yes, she would have it put up as soon as it could be cut. She also intended to plant some willows and cypresses around the grave, it looked so bare. She showed Hicks the slip of paper upon which Paine had written his own epitaph:

  “Thomas Paine, Author of Common Sense.”

  “That’s enough,” Hicks said. “That’s enough for any man. How old was he?”

  “Seventy-two, I think.”

  It was the eighth of June, 1809.

  But it was not enough for the good people of New Rochelle that he had been buried in unhallowed ground. They invaded the farm and ripped the branches from the trees Madame Bonneville had planted, and sold them for souvenirs. They hacked pieces off the tombstone; they pulled up the few flowers that had grown.

  Ten years later, a man named William Cobbett had a scheme. He dug up Paine’s bones and took them to England, intending to exhibit them in various cities. But the British government refused to permit this last, crowning infamy, and the bones disappeared somewhere in England.

  So today, no one knows where Paine lies, and that, perhaps, is best, for the world was his village.

  THE END

  A Biography of Howard Fast

  Howard Fast (1914-2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast's commitment to championing social justice in his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his lively cinematic style.

  Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast's mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London's The Iron Heel, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.

  Fast began his writing career early, leaving high school to finish his first novel, Two Valleys (1933). His next novels, including Conceived in Liberty (1939) and Citizen Tom Paine (1943), explored the American Revolution and the progressive values that Fast saw as essential to the American experiment. In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party, an alliance that came to define—and often encumber—much of his career. His novels during this period advocated freedom against tyranny, bigotry, and oppression by exploring essential moments in American history, as in The American (1946). During this time Fast also started a family of his own. He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and the couple had two children.

  Congressional action against the Communist Party began in 1948, and in 1950, Fast, an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because he refused to provide the names of other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Fast was issued a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. While in prison, he was inspired to write Spartacus (1951), his iconic retelling of a slave revolt during the Roman Empire, and did much of his research for the book during his incarceration. Fast's appearance before Congress also earned him a blacklisting by all major publishers, so he started his own press, Blue Heron, in order to release Spartacus. Other novels published by Blue Heron, including Silas Timberman (1954), directly addressed the persecution of Communists and others during the ongoing Red Scare. Fast continued to associate with the Communist Party until the horrors of Stalin's purges of dissidents and political enemies came to light in the mid-1950s. He left the Party in 1956.

  Fast's career changed course in 1960, when he began publishing suspense-mysteries under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. He published nineteen books as Cunningham, including the seven-book Masao Masuto mystery series. Also, Spartacus was made into a major film in 1960, breaking the Hollywood blacklist once and for all. The success of Spartacus inspired large publishers to pay renewed attention to Fast's books, and in 1961 he published April Morning, a novel about the battle of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution. The book became a national bestseller and remains a staple of many literature classes. From 1960 onward Fast produced books at an astonishing pace—almost one book per year—while also contributing to screen adaptat
ions of many of his books. His later works included the autobiography Being Red (1990) and the New York Times bestseller The Immigrants (1977).

  Fast died in 2003 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

  Fast on a farm in upstate New York during the summer of 1917. Growing up, Fast often spent the summers in the Catskill Mountains with his aunt and uncle from Hunter, New York. These vacations provided a much-needed escape from the poverty and squalor of the Lower East Side's Jewish ghetto, as well as the bigotry his family encountered after they eventually relocated to an Irish and Italian neighborhood in upper Manhattan. However, the beauty and tranquility Fast encountered upstate were often marred by the hostility shown toward him by his aunt and uncle. "They treated us the way Oliver Twist was treated in the orphanage," Fast later recalled. Nevertheless, he "fell in love with the area" and continued to go there until he was in his twenties.

  Fast (left) with his older brother, Jerome, in 1935. In his memoir Being Red, Fast wrote that he and his brother "had no childhood." As a result of their mother's death in 1923 and their father's absenteeism, both boys had to fend for themselves early on. At age eleven, alongside his thirteen-year-old brother, Fast began selling copies of a local newspaper called the Bronx Home News. Other odd jobs would follow to make ends meet in violent, Depression-era New York City. Although he resented the hardscrabble nature of his upbringing, Fast acknowledged that the experience helped form a lifelong attachment to his brother. "My brother was like a rock," he wrote, "and without him I surely would have perished."