Paradise Alley (33 page)

The police push them up to the third floor. Once there, though, they barricade themselves in the drill room, where most of the carbines are kept. We can hear them in there, hurrying to unpack the guns, and even Carpenter hesitates now, unsure of what to do. If they get the carbines working, they will have us easily outgunned—could burst out and turn the whole tide of the battle.

“We have to have the door down!” the inspector orders.

But that is when we smell the smoke, rising slowly up through the musty, gap-planked floors of the Armory. Some accident—or some fool—has set the place on fire. The flames are already racing along the second floor, eating up the dusty old crates and pilings—moving relentlessly toward powder and ball. Carpenter orders his men out and they go, as fast as they can run.

“Fire! Fire in the hole! Get out while you can save yourselves!”

Behind the door we can hear them laughing and cursing at us still.

“Damn your eyes! What kind of fools d'ye take us for?”

We are just able to make it out before the first explosion. There is a muffled thud, then a tower of flames shoots right through the Armory and fifty feet in the air. A shower of balls and bullets comes ripping through the once-sturdy brick walls, sending even the mob screaming for cover, and peeking out from behind the warehouse across the street, I steal a glimpse of hell. The floor under the drill room has given way, and now the men inside hurtle down into the flames, shrieking and burning as they fall.

A few of them manage, somehow, to stumble out the door. They are on fire, or badly charred—some of them still blindly clutching the carbines in their hands. Carpenter walks up to the stoop and shoots them as they emerge, one after another, as easily as he might shoot rabid dogs.

“At least this saves us having to haul the guns back,” he says, casually holstering his pistol again. Then he leads us back down to headquarters, the Armory still burning behind us. Not a soul daring to stand in our way now. The men marching along jubilantly, bellowing out a new song now as they go.

Thy banner makes tyranny tremble

When un-der the red, white, and blue—

I would like to say that I am capable of maintaining a certain objectivity, a certain professionalism in the wake of all this. Instead I must admit that I am jubilant. They have crushed the men who wrecked my City, and I find myself even singing along with them, as they swing back downtown:

When un-der the red, white and blue—

•
38
•

Evening.

She could hear the vesper bell ringing at St. Patrick's—the sound of it reassuring after so many restless and frightening noises throughout the day.

Yet it was almost worse, with Billy still not home—

She gazed at their children, where they were slumped around the kitchen. It was impossible, now, to hide from them that something was going on. By the afternoon they had become so pent up, so wild with frustration that she had let them out on the street, provided they did not stray from the very front of the house.

But even there, they had noticed it. The emptiness of the street. The sound of distant, muffled shouts and explosions, the smell of smoke. Before long their play had grown listless, and they had retreated, back inside.

They sat there now, slumped silently in their chairs, Mana on her lap and Elijiah by her feet. Their eyes closed, even Milton dozing with them.
Her emblems of Billy.
His color or his face, stamped on all of them, at least a little. And her own self blotted out, she was contented to see, submerged beneath his.

No, he must be alive still. He has the brains to stay out of their way—at least when he's not drinking.

All day long, the news had been bad. One neighbor after another
had darted out furtively across the street, making sure to let her know it. Mrs. McGillicuddy, in particular, bringing her the news of the fighting in this block or that one, another story of a colored lynching, always with a half smirk on her doughy, red face.

There was nothing about the Colored Orphans' Asylum—but still she could not help thinking the worst. The thought of it all but overwhelmed her.
All his beauty gone, just like that.
She remembered the first time she had spied him, walking tall and straight, back through the fields to the coloreds' village. His work clothes old and frayed but his face glistening and high-boned in the sun.
The most beautiful man she had ever laid eyes on—

She was still living up in Pigtown with Johnny Dolan then, near what was now Fifty-ninth Street and the Fifth Avenue. It was just a boil of a village then, a hollow of shanties made out of wood and bricks scavenged from demolitions, and caulked with mud and grease. The men went out to work in the morning on the construction sites, or in the fat houses and the bone boilers, the butchers and leather dressers a few blocks away. Staggering back in the evening after a stop at their stills, bone-tired and drunk, and mean.

She was already working for the ragpickers then, in their rookeries over by the East River, and at the end of the day she could barely stand to go home at all. She would stop when she got to the lip of the hollow, then strike out across the rutted and barren fields. Not really caring where she was going. Hiking up her skirts to cross over the crude, fallen stone walls and fences, thinking,
How far they have fallen. Don't even know to put up a proper stone wall—

That was how she had found the Nigger Village. She had never come across it before, though she knew every other inch of the scraggly woods and meadows up to Haarlem, and she had found many things on her walks. More hidden Irish shantytowns, and neat little German villages. A chapel and a school for young ladies, run by the Sisters of Charity up in McGown's Pass. A crazy-quilt of gardens and goat pens and pretty little fields, all put up behind an elaborate brick wall by some eccentric German burgher from Moenchengladbach, who announced himself with a sign that read,
Jupiterville, Jupiter Zeuss K. Hesser, Prop.—
though she did not know that yet, being still unable to
read, and could only run her hands wonderingly over the fine, chiseled letters.

Then one day she had come over a small ridge near the Bloomingdale Road, a mile or so to the north and west of Pigtown, and there it was, unfolding before her like a vision. A whole, long trail of
them,
walking together two by two. The women first, then the men walking after. Most of them without shoes, but dressed completely in white, down to the sashes tied around their waists, and the scarves the women wore over their heads. Chanting some sort of hymn that she did not know and did not understand, following the man whom she assumed must be some sort of nigger priest. He held a shiny brass cross out ahead of him—the embroidered yellow mantle he wore over his shoulders the only break in their all-white raiment.

But their skin.
She could not keep her eyes off it. That was the real color. They were no two of them the exact same hue; some tan, some coffee-colored, some almost yellow, or an off-red, or even nearly as white as herself.

But more of them were a true, deep blue-black. Their color standing out all the more brilliantly against the clean, white linen pants, and shirts and dresses.

She had seen people with such skin before, in the streets downtown—mostly sailors, in their tars' white jackets and striped trousers, speaking some foreign tongue.
But here! And so many together!
There were dozens of them, walking so close to where she lived, so eminently reachable and human. She moved in a trance after the procession, once they had passed. Desperate to see them, to study every detail of them. The way their faces looked, and their hair, the bare feet—to see and know every difference in them.

And I wanted to jump up then. I wanted to dance and laugh then, just to see them. Just to see there were people like that in the world—anyone, anyone so different from all the shite I knew.

She was left standing in the road, still gaping after them, as the priest led the procession on into the village. It was no more than a few dozen simple plank houses, built around a pair of dirt roads, with a church at the head of each one. Poor enough, she knew, maybe even as poor as Pigtown. Yet its houses looked like real houses, and the land around
them was divided into neat little gardens, and cultivated fields, where squash and wheat and spindly stalks of corn were growing, so that it seemed to her they could be marching into Paradise itself.

She wanted to follow right then and there, to walk down the road after them, but she could not bring herself to do so. She started, then retreated—started again and then went back, until she was doing a virtual jig in the road. Unsure of what she would say to them, what she
could
say to them, or what they would do.

It was then that she had seen
him,
coming across the fields. Wearing his blue work shirt and pants, a shapeless straw field hat on his head.
And his skin.
His skin, too, was as black as coal, tinctured with only the lightest sheen of red. Hands thrust deep in his pockets, head down as if he were studying the ground.

And yet, she could tell, still watching—still aware of everything around him. His head coming up just a little, almost imperceptibly with every sound he heard. His stride not straight, but weaving a little. His feet still adroit nonetheless, still nimble, barely seeming to touch down on the swampy earth, as if he were having a dance with himself.

The whole village, moving through the fields to dance at the crossroads. The women with ribbons in their hair, and the men carrying fiddles, and jars, walking softly so as not to awaken the priggish priest—

He was, she was sure, the most handsome man she had ever seen—and she could not help but run then. Even though she was mortified by the noise she made, crashing through the thin underbrush, the old leaves, like some animal in distress. Hiding herself among the scrawny trees, covering her face and head with her arms but still unable to keep from looking at him, from dropping her hands and looking at his face, his beautiful head. Until he had passed on into the Nigger Village, having given no sign whatsoever that he had heard
her.

She had lingered constantly around the village after that. Crawling through the bushes on her hands and knees. Feeling the brambles scratching her legs, the smell of dirt and the crumbling leaves in her nostrils. At first, before they knew who she was, they would set the dogs on her. They were swift, quiet animals, trained to be on you
almost before you knew they were there, and she had all she could do to get away from them—hearing their panting, the padding of their paws in the underbrush just behind her.

Once they got used to her, though—once they had ascertained she was not the sheriff, or a blackbirder skulking up there in the woods—they left her alone. Assuming that she was just another white woman, like all the rest of the white folk from the City, men and women and children, who liked to dally around the Nigger Village,
Seneca Village,
as she came to find out they called it. Come to gawk at a whole town full of black people—or for something more.

She would creep almost right up to where they were working in the fields, crouching down, crawling through the bushes on her hands and knees. Watching them march into one of the two clapboard churches on Sunday morning. Wanting to ask if they knew
him,
and what he was like, but not only that. Wanting to ask them, as well, how they came to be here, to be tending these little plots of land, unbothered by the rest of the world. Wanting to know how it was that they came to be left the hell
alone.

After that she usually saw him in the evenings, on his way home. He gave Pigtown a broad berth, she noticed, swinging all the way over to the rail tracks in the Fourth Avenue. That was where she would pick him up most nights, coming back from her job with the ragpickers. She would follow him up along the half-constructed, mostly deserted streets. Making sure to keep her distance until he turned to the west, up around Sixty-fifth Street or so, then plunged into the scrubby woods and fields that led to Seneca Village.

He walked much faster, once he was among the trees. Moving almost furtively, his strides lengthening so that she could barely keep up. But even then she followed him, running after him as fast as she could, just so she could get a closer look at him. Embarrassed and ashamed of her need, more ashamed to be crashing through the underbrush so clumsily.

She would lose track of him sometimes, he moved so quickly. One evening, at dusk, she was even sure that he had gone off the path, into a deep thicket of trees and bushes. She could not imagine why he would, but on an impulse she went after him anyway, into the thickets.

Once she was in there, she thought that she must be mistaken. She
floundered about in the curls of briar, and the vines and groves of ailanthus trees, unable even to find her way back to the path in the growing darkness. Until at last she pushed past another bush—and found herself face-to-face with him. Looking just as surprised as she was herself—his left hand held up, as if to ward something away. His right hand still at his waist, holding something.

A knife,
she saw. Yet she still felt no concern, alone with him there—only embarrassment. Blindly making to push past him, further into the thicket, but he stayed in her path.

“You don't want to go that way,” he told her, looking down, as if he were ashamed of something himself. She could make out, then, the sound of men's voices coming from behind him now, the smell of sugar burning. His breath smelled familiar, but somehow not as bad—not as sour or sickening as Johnny Dolan's did, when he had been at the creature.

She stepped back, looking at him, his eyes impenetrable in the nearly total darkness now. Then she had turned and run back toward Pigtown.

After that she tried to look for him in the mornings—to see where else it might be that he went during the day, and what he did with himself. Thinking over their encounter in the thicket. Telling herself,
He did it to protect me, for no gain of his own. He did it just to help me—

One morning in the late spring, she got up even earlier than she usually did, and slipped out of the shack she shared with Johnny Dolan. She got dressed in the darkness, leaving Dolan still snoring—then ran out, barefoot, across the muddy yards and the high spring grass around Pigtown. Letting the dogs howl as she passed, not caring who might see her but just glad to feel herself running.