Andersonville (28 page)

Willie drifted up into the Eighteenth Ward where he heard that pickings were easier, and so they proved to be. The system there was exceedingly simple, much more to Willie’s liking and understanding than the devious split-second-timing incursions of the Daybreak Boys among docks and shipping. A man who called himself Paddy Delaney (he was built much as Willie was built, although he was not as large as Willie; and yet he was older, and more experienced) was Willie Collins’s immediate superior. Take the corner of Twenty-ninth and Madison: that was all Willie had to do. Take the northeast corner—that was as good as any; and Saxey would have the northwest corner, and Cuban Cookie the southwest, and Skibbereen Mahone the southeast. If a well-dressed man approached in darkness— Well, take him and go through him. If there were two men together, as often happened, one of the other kiddies could step over from yonder corner.

They, and the roughs who worked with them, were known as the Honeymoon Gang—a satirical tribute to their cruelty. If a pedestrian strolling through the fog appeared to be well clad, and then, on close and violent examination, proved no fit subject for profitable keel-hauling, the Honeymooners would batter him to ribbons merely for the sport of the thing. Willie took to this stand-up-and-slam-a-man-down simplicity with gusto. The second week of his operations he was lucky enough to observe a lone gentleman in an opera cloak leaving a nearby cathouse from in front of which his untipped hackman had long since driven away in dudgeon. Willie put his hand over the stranger’s bearded lips, carried him into a blind areaway and throttled him into insensibility. The man turned out to be a wealthy coffee merchant from Latin America; Willie could not know that; he knew only that he acquired over six hundred dollars in banknotes, to say nothing of jewelry. The newspapers cried that Juan Santa Maria Lopez, Esq., a visiting exporter, had been half-killed and was now under the care of surgeons at his lodgings, and had lost a fortune in jewelry to the roughs who attacked him. Juan Santa Maria Lopez affirmed that there were at least five men in the band who fell upon him.

I don’t know who the other man was. Paddy Delaney sat with a cocked pistol in his hand. But let us be after seeing the sparks and the fawneys, you dirty buzzers, or I’ll pop the bladder of one of you.

Saxey, Skibbereen and Cuban Cookie were loud in their protestations of ignorance of the affair, but it was not easy for Willie to lie with aplomb. Soon all four of them were arrayed against him, and that was too many, for Delaney and Skibbereen both approached him in size. He handed over a silk handkerchief containing the baubles, and gave up three dollars in currency which he swore by heaven and earth was all the money the foreigner had had upon him. In delight over emeralds Delaney did not press him further; but awarded Willie only a tenth share in the later proceeds as punishment. Willie never told about the six hundred dollars; in his mutton-headed musings he thought that he had out-smarted Patrick Delaney. He did not know that Delaney divvied up only a fraction of the money received for the jewelry. . . . The Honeymoon Gang waxed rich, then poorer as more police crowded that neighborhood in response to the agony of citizens. Some months later they were driven down into the Bowery by the intrepid Captain Walling and his Strong Arm Squad. It was merry while it lasted.

His giant’s stature began to tell on Willie Collins, to make him a marked man. If a shorn and bleeding sheep complained to the authorities that he had been pounded by a robber of enormous height and girth, the police (or such of them as could be persuaded by bribery) went seeking Willie. Thus he was charged with crimes he did not commit . . . he had committed many . . . he did not know how many men he had killed before he entered wartime captivity, he supposed a dozen or so. Several times he was imprisoned; once he escaped, once he bought his way to freedom, the other times he served the brief terms to which he was sentenced. He thought of leaving New York but New York was home, he did not know where else to go. The body which had once been his bonanza was now a positive handicap. At rare intervals fortune sent a rich weakling into his grasp, and then he made sure that no evidence would be given against him. . . . Willie flaunted new duds in Barney Bright’s Joy Mill where, according to the gilded sign outside, the mill ground out Joy, Joy, Nothing But Joy—and a little mayhem and venereal disease along with the Joy.

He lived—bellowing, pompous, frightening, thick-headed. He leaned on the rail of an excursion craft off Bedloe’s Island and poked his shoulders and his whiskey bottle through the bunting in order to watch Albert Hicks, the high seas murderer, as Hicks fell through an open air gallows trap and struggled in strangulation. And if they ever come to hang me, howled Willie Collins, they’ll have to hang me twice! A well-fleshed woman cooed beside him and wiggled her hip against him; she wore red gloves and red stockings; faith, and she wore little bells on her garters, the bells tinkled when she moved. Willie lived . . . he lived eventually with the Bowery Boys, he had fought alongside them when they raided the Dead Rabbits at the election polls back in 1856, but it did no good: Fernando Wood was reëlected anyway. But it was a fine fight. And again he had contended against the Dead Rabbits in the historic Bayard Street riot of the following summer; and could you guess the man he met there, slugging in the ranks of the Dead Rabbits with a paving stone in one hand and a shoemaker’s awl in the other? Patrick Delaney it was, the erstwhile Honeymooner. They grappled in long anticipated rivalry . . . sure, and Willie was confident that Delaney died beneath the stamping of his brass-heeled boots. Willie lived!

For a fact Paddy Delaney did not die. The next time the monsters met, it was on Rebel soil with Rebel guards rimmed beyond them. It might have been that the two roughs were rocked in the same cradle in a Dublin slum, if anyone ever bothered to rock babies in Dublin slums: they embraced like grizzly bears, they wept and swore their loyalty, they drank what smuggled liquor was available and brayed for more. Ah, and I thought I had kilt you surely that day at the Bowery and Bayard. . . . Willie darling, it’s me that was certain I was kilt; and months it took me to regain my strength, with half my ribs stove in.

Willie came to the sad pass of Confederate prison life through a series of misadventures. He emerged from another type of prison in New York after the war had begun. A turmoil of alternate patriotic demonstration and felonious interference was ruling the town. It was hard for Willie to turn a dollar or even a dime. Though they had a wary respect for Collins’s proficiency the ruling gangsters held him to be bad luck and would have none of his services. He eked out an existence in Mulberry Bend, preying on the same sort of stumbling drunks and drugged seamen he had preyed on when he was a boy. In his late twenties Willie looked to be at least forty. The skin of his face and neck bore the coarse-seamed texture of middle age, there were stray shreds of glint in his ginger-colored beard, his hair-line receded. Soon he heard that he was being sought by the police again—something about a Norwegian cook who had been squeezed to death in a cellar, and the Norwegian ship’s master had friends among the new Metropolitan Police. There was nothing for Willie to do but enlist, which he did quickly, and then deserted just as quickly, bounty money sewn in his drawers. In this way he went from regiment to regiment. It had never occurred to him that he might be sent into combat, but that was what happened after he joined the Eighty-eighth Pennsylvania, before he’d found opportunity to take his usual French Leave.

He had done well enough at Belle Isle but here at Andersonville he was doing even better. There were vastly more prisoners to provide the luxuries of existence both directly and indirectly. Day after day fresh drafts were pushed into the stockade: there were riches to be had, a plethora. For indeed there were no police to bother! Once more Willie was marked, towering above the rest, but his marking was as great a benefit to him here as it had been a handicap in the city streets. By April he needed not to stir hand or foot if he did not choose to move; he grew fat; but it would take a long while for his grotesque thews to become so wadded in corpulence that they would not serve him. He kept his own band well under control—not too many of them, but whittled down to comfortable size. There were a round dozen sluggers, also the cooks and housekeepers—two of these latter were homosexuals whose affection some of his men enjoyed, but Willie himself did not crave such peculiar ecstasies, his laughter burst at the very idea. There was Lipsky the tailor, and a few other scrofulous hangers-on who served for one purpose or another. Collins’s Raiders were not the largest band in the stockade but they were feared above all others.

Collins’s Raiders, Delaney’s Raiders, Sarsfield’s Raiders, Curtis’s Raiders. The name of Terence Sullivan was an imprecation; the names of Heenan and Pete Bradley and Dick Allen conjured obscenities; you shuddered as well when you thought of the Staleybridge Chicken or the Harlem Infant, for these creatures had been pugilists and brought their nasty experience like weapons into the stockade.

The population swelled steadily through March, train whistles bleated at the station, the columns of rag-pickers toiled through the ravine to the North Gate; they had picked enough rags in Virginia, now they could pick them in Georgia. Stray infantry skirmish here, stray cavalry encounter there—the gaping blue-clad flat-hatted seamen from an unhappy sloop, the battery men gathered in by the Rebs when they were still limbering up to flee: all appeared. All had a certain small wealth in their pockets or on their backs or in the very clothes which dressed them. The raiders took what they wished, and were seldom disappointed. Their victims lost anything from their buttons to their lives.

A hopeless teeming disorder was apparent in this polluted rectangle from the very first. In tag-end days of February the initial thefts were committed under cover of darkness or behind tumbled wafers of clay and pine-roots: you knew that something bad was happening, it had happened at Belle Isle and Danville, it had happened to some degree in all the Virginia prisons, you didn’t see it happening often, it happened out of sight, it was treacherous and to be feared.

What was the need of waiting for night? At first Willie Collins and those like him had a notion that guards might shoot. They recalled the death of Tomcat O’Connor, they saw no reason to die jumping as he had died. But one morning John Sarsfield himself, with his minions, was standing near the North Gate when a small detachment of Westerners (they included pickets gobbled up by a swift Confederate movement in northwest Georgia) found themselves staring at Andersonville for the first time. These people had not been robbed of their blankets. As did many folks from the West, they wore blanket rolls in Confederate fashion, they carried no knapsacks. The blanket rolls seemed bulky to Sarsfield’s practiced gaze. He shouldered forward and wrenched the roll away from the nearest prisoner. The man hallooed, Sarsfield knocked him flat, the balance of the fresh fish leaped toward Sarsfield, Sarsfield’s Raiders swatted, stabbed, kicked. This fight was over in less than a minute. Six of the Westerners lay on the ground and the rest had fallen back into the watching throng—several others shy of their blanket rolls, as was the first man. All of the new-come prisoners were bleeding, two were unconscious. Sarsfield’s Raiders were the richer by eleven blanket rolls filled with combs, socks, extra shoes, Bibles (these could be bartered), gilt melanotypes, housewives, knives, eating utensils and name-it-if-you-like. The guards on the parapet stations had not fired a shot; they watched idly or in downright amusement; they said, Look at them Yanks a-fighting like a lot of dogs, just look.

Willie Collins and Pat Delaney lifted a leaf from Sarsfield’s book. Sarsfield was intelligent; it was said that he had read law, had served three years in the army, had been wounded, his wound had healed, he had been promoted First Sergeant and later commissioned; his commission had arrived but he had not been mustered when he was captured. Hence he’d landed here with the enlisted men. Folks said that a bright fellow like Sarsfield had known all along that the guards would not fire. Or perhaps he had made a private agreement with the guards; and now guards might profit from each robbery occurring before their eyes and under the muzzles of their unfired muskets. No longer could the vice be relegated to darkness. It was here in daylight, stalking; it was an animal grown tall as the Methodist Church steeple back home, it was Force and Force only, it could and would maul you to a wet bloody rag if you lifted your fist in protest, or sometimes even if you lifted your voice.

A twenty-year-old named John L. Ransom, Ninth Michigan Cavalry, wrote in his diary: Colonel Persons commands the prison, and rides in and talks with the men. Is quite sociable, and says we are all to be exchanged in a few weeks. He was informed that such talk would not go down any longer. We have been fooled enough, and pay no attention to what they tell us.

John Ransom wrote in a sodden notebook that said
Pickell & Co., Commission Merchants. Chicago. Ills.,
on the cover in faded gilt letters. Get almost enough to eat, such as it is, but don’t get it regularly; sometimes in the morning, and sometimes in the afternoon. Six hundred more prisoners came last night. . . . We have no shelter of any kind whatever. Eighteen or twenty die per day. Cold and damp nights. The dews wet things through completely, and by morning all nearly chilled. Wood getting scarce. On the outside it is a regular wilderness of pines . . . can just see the cars go by, which is the only sign of civilization in sight. Rebels all the while at work making the prison stronger. Very poor meal, and not so much today as formerly. . . . Prevailing conversation is food and exchange. A good deal of fighting going on among us. . . . Prison gradually filling up with forlorn looking creatures.

Johnny Ransom had a broken stub of pencil, and he chewed the pencil and made it smaller and found difficulty in writing with it; but he was determined to write a diary. Well, well, my birthday came six days ago, and how old do you think I am? Let me see. Appearances would seem to indicate that I am thirty or thereabouts, but as I was born on the twentieth day of March, 1843, I must now be just twenty-one years of age, this being the year 1864. Of age and six days over. I thought that when a man became of age, he generally became free and his own master as well. If this ain’t a burlesque on that old time-honored custom, then carry me out—but not feet foremost. . . . The pine which we use in cooking is pitch pine, and a black smoke arises from it; consequently we are black as negroes. Prison gradually filling from day to day, and situation rather more unhealthy. . . . It is a sad sight to see men die so fast. New prisoners die the quickest. . . . It’s a sickly dirty place. Seems as if the sun was not over a mile high, and has a particular grudge against us.