The Banished Children of Eve (14 page)

He never stopped at the house after that. He waved as he walked by and shouted a greeting, but he never stood and talked the way he had. In a few weeks Rose knew she was pregnant. She prepared to tell her mother, but just as she was ready, her father was brought home from work; his right hand had been mangled by one of the new kneading machines. Within a week, he was dead from blood poisoning, buried in the Negro cemetery with the other members of the family, and Miriam was so sunk in her grief, Rose didn't have the heart to tell her.

The landlord
stopped by to give his condolences, and Miriam told him that without her husband's income it would be hard to keep up payments on the house, but that she and her mother and daughter would do their best. She asked how much was left to pay before the house was theirs.

“Left to pay?” the landlord asked.

“Yes, before the sum we agreed upon when we moved in is completed and we have finished paying what we owe.”

“Madam, I have the dimmest of recollections of discussing once, many years ago, some sort of arrangement with your late husband, but it never went beyond the realm of words. I will do what I can to arrange a convenient schedule of rent payments to see you through your period of grief, but, please, dismiss the fantasy from your mind, that you have some claim of ownership on this property.”

Miriam trembled with rage. Her lips became pale. “Get out of this house, you white bastard,” she said. She took the landlord to court, but the case was dismissed before trial; afterward, the landlord served them notice to quit the premises. They moved to the city, to basement rooms on Washington Street, near the Negro church; the pastor, the Reverend Mr. Enders, helped them find their quarters. One day Miriam looked at Rose and said, “My God, you're with child,” and she wept.

Maria was growing feeble. She spent all day with her Bible, and after they moved to the city she became confused, sometimes speaking to her dead husband and long-vanished son as if they were in the room. She died quietly in her sleep the month before Rose had her baby. At her funeral, the Reverend Mr. Enders said that Maria was a woman whom all New Yorkers of African descent should take pride in, a woman who had never asked for anything, who had earned everything she had in this life, even her own freedom, and who had never let life's trials shake her faith in Jesus. He said that Maria Montgomery Cooper was a name to be remembered as a source of hope and inspiration.

Rose named her daughter Elizabeth. Rose was sick for over a month after the baby was born, and Miriam had to try to support all three of them with her sewing. They moved to smaller quarters and sold most of the furniture they had brought with them from Greenwich Village. They barely had enough to eat. When the baby was six months old, Rose began to look for work. She found a position in a house on Prince Street as a live-in maid. The woman asked Rose if she was single. Rose said she was. She would be free from Sundays after the afternoon meal until the next morning, the woman said; otherwise, she would be required to be fulfilling her duties. She could eat after the family had been served and was entitled to meat once a week. She would be paid every two months.

Rose lived
in an attic on the fourth floor, a cramped room with sloping walls; cold in the winter, stifling in the summer. She lit the cooking fire in the morning and put it out at night, shoveling out the cinders and washing down the floor. She prepared the meals and pumped the water and drew the baths and swept the rugs and made the beds. In the winter, she rose early to break the ice in the washing bowls. She cleaned out the chamber pots and scrubbed the privy and boiled tubs of water in which to wash an endless traffic of clothing, drapes, and sheets.

The mistress of the house rarely talked to her except to complain about something undone or done incorrectly. The master was a solemn-faced merchant who never acknowledged Rose's existence except once, when his wife was away and Rose was serving him dinner, and he put his hand on her rear and began to rub. She dropped a ladle filled with hot soup into his lap. After that, he never bothered her. On Sunday nights she returned to the room where Miriam and the baby lived. She brought a small basket filled with sugar and pieces of dried fruit and vegetables and portions of meat, leavings carefully salvaged from the meals she had cooked and served. She played with the baby, then went back to work in the morning. The pay Rose received was pitifully small, but with it Miriam and the baby were able to survive.

Miriam saw a noticeable change in her daughter. Rose became frail and haggard-looking and began to stoop like an old woman. On Sunday evening she would just sit there and ignore the baby. She complained of constant headaches and fevers. One night she giggled and took her mother into a corner of the room and said she had a wonderful secret to tell her.

“What is
it?” asked Miriam.

“Mother, the angel Gabriel appeared to me and said he knows where a hoard of gold is buried and will soon reveal its location to me.”

“You were dreaming, child.”

“It was no dream. He was right there in front of me, white wings and a blue robe with gold buttons. I could even see his sandals and the white linen wrapped around his ankles.”

Miriam spoke to the Reverend Mr. Enders. He said the girl was overworked and that Miriam should be sympathetic. In time she would come out of it. She was an intelligent girl who was seeking some solace in her hard situation. Better she saw angels than took to drink. Rose never mentioned the angel again. But she seemed distracted and moody, crying one moment, giggling the next.

It was the Reverend Mr. Enders who brought Miriam the news her daughter had been arrested. Miriam had been waiting on a Sunday afternoon for Rose to appear. There was a knock, and when she opened the door, the Reverend Mr. Enders was standing there. She watched his lips move, his white beard go up and down, saw the crinkles in his brown face around his mournful eyes, but the words didn't seem to make any sense.
Rose has been arrested for theft, arson, and attempted murder. She is being held in chains in the city jail and the possibility of bail has already been ruled out. Her fate is important to every Negro in this city. If a harmless innocent like your daughter isn't safe from persecution, none of us is.

Mr. Enders insisted Miriam gather up her things and take Rose's child to his house. He said that some white men were already talking about
teaching the niggers a lesson and making sure no nigger would try what Rose tried.
They threw some clothes into a basket, and when they reached Mr. Enders's house, he sat Miriam down and explained what had happened. The evening before, when Rose had finished her chores, she had gone to her mistress to collect the last two months' of salary she was owed. The mistress told Rose that she had become aware someone had been stealing from her kitchen, had observed Rose for the past several weeks, and had seen her leave every Sunday afternoon with a basket of food. As a consequence, she felt she owed Rose no pay at all; indeed, it was Rose who owed her, and she had half a mind to bring charges.

“I
stole nothing,” Rose said. “I saved scraps from plates to feed my child.”

“A child? You told me you were single.”

“I am.”

“Then you're a whore as well as a thief, and a liar to boot.”

The mistress ordered Rose off the premises. Rose gathered her things and left. In the middle of the night, the mistress smelled smoke and came downstairs and found the kitchen on fire. She ran out and screamed, “Fire!” The alarm was sounded in time. Her house was saved, and when she told the city watchmen and the fire volunteers what had transpired that day with Rose, they all agreed the girl must be found immediately. They didn't have to look far. One of the volunteers went down into the basement of the house to see if there was any damage to the flooring, and there was Rose, sitting in the dark, her small pile of possessions on her lap.

They brought her before a magistrate the first thing in the morning. A large crowd was gathered in the courtroom.

“Girl,” the magistrate said, “do you know that in seeking revenge against your mistress, you threatened this entire city with destruction?”

Rose's hands and feet were chained. A phalanx of watchmen surrounded her. “They took bread out of my child's mouth and condemned us to starve. They had given up their right to be alive.”

The crowd groaned. “Hang the nigger!” someone shouted. “You would punish all for the supposed sins of one?” the magistrate asked her. “And you would burn a whole city to cover the crime of pilferage?”

Rose said
nothing.

“The charges against you are shocking in their enormity. If you be guilty, hanging is too easy an end.”

Miriam saw Rose once in jail. Her daughter barely spoke, but when the jailer left, Rose giggled. “Gabriel is with me every night,” she said, “but he says that he needn't tell me where the gold is buried because I shan't have any use for it.”

The trial took two days. Rose had no lawyer. The Reverend Mr. Enders asked permission to speak on her behalf. The judge denied it. Mr. Enders started to speak anyway but was dragged from the courtroom. Rose was condemned to be hanged.

“You have admitted this crime,” the judge said. “Your only defense is that your deed was justified by what you allege to have been the poor treatment you received at the hands of your mistress, as if that were sufficient reason to take her life and set fire to the city. You showed no mercy; now you shall receive none. And as you have no remorse for the act, I have no remorse in imposing the sentence it requires.”

The verdict was handed down on a Saturday. The next morning Mr. Enders took Rose's child, Elizabeth, who was now a girl of three, to the Baptist meetinghouse on Mulberry Street, near Chatham Square, and sat in the upper gallery, from which Negroes were allowed to watch the service. In the middle of it he arose and said in his loud, commanding voice, “There is innocent blood about to be spilled in this city! A confused, agitated woman is to be hanged for a crime she didn't commit!” He picked up Elizabeth and presented her to the congregation. “This child is to be made an orphan!” The sexton came up and told him to be quiet. Mr. Enders continued. The sexton reached out to push him into his seat, but two other Negroes intervened. The minister watched from the pulpit. He recognized Mr. Enders and addressed him: “You are a man of God, sir, and should know better. This is the Lord's house. You know what is required!” Mr. Enders shouted, “Mercy! That is what is required and what you refuse to show! You show no mercy toward colored people, and the longer I live among you, the more I believe you are incapable of ever doing so!”

“Sir
,” the minister said, “I order you to be quiet and to cease disturbing the worship of this congregation!”

“Glad on it! By the name of Jesus the just, it ought to be disturbed.”

Born a slave in Virginia, Benjamin Enders had escaped when he was twelve and been raised by Quakers in Ohio. He had been a minister for ten years in New York, tending his small congregation on Albany Street, and never attracting much notice. But he made the case of Rose Harris a crusade. With the child Elizabeth in tow, he haunted the city's officials and paraded through the streets and thundered on corners and on the steps of public buildings. A few of the city's more prosperous Negroes approached him in private and asked him to stop. They said Rose's guilt was beyond question, she had confessed, and besides, why keep poking a hornet's nest and risking everything on this one woman's fate? “Rose is out of her senses,” he told them. “She would confess to setting fire to London if she were asked to. As for hornets, they are forever astir and are as likely to sting you as to sting her, and if you think your modicum of wealth or respectability protects you, think again.”

On the day Rose was executed, a great mass of people gathered beside potter's field, where the city's gallows was located. The day before, another fire had occurred in the house of Rose's mistress. It was in the kitchen, as the first had been; and when the fire laddies pulled down the wall, they found a faulty chimney. Believing that this discovery might have some bearing on the previous incident, the captain of the fire brigade sent for the magistrate who had arraigned Rose. When the magistrate was seen entering the house, the rumor spread that another Negro had been caught setting the fire and that the magistrate had been called to investigate the possibility of a Negro plot to burn the city and free Rose. Fire bells rang throughout the night. Any Negro seen on the streets was detained and questioned. When dawn finally arrived, an ill-rested city streamed to witness the cause of its apprehension being sent to her eternal punishment.

They wrapped
Rose's legs in heavy chains to ensure her neck would break quickly and so spare her the torture of dangling at the end of a rope. The sheriff asked her if she had any last words, and she said in a small voice that carried across the silent crowd, “I am satisfied with my fate. If it wasn't this, it would be something else.” She bounced when the door went from under her feet. The crowd cheered.

Rose's death was Elizabeth's earliest memory. Mr. Enders had taken her by the hand and led her to the front of the crowd. Sometimes the whole thing would come back to mind: the sheriff in his official dress, the blue coat and gold buttons, his fat legs enmeshed in white hose; the chains around Rose's feet; the pressure of Mr. Enders's hand around hers; the bang of the trapdoor and the way her mother's body had gone down and then shot up again. When she was old enough, Elizabeth wrote in the family Bible, next to where her great-grandmother Maria had recorded Rose's birth: “Murdered by the City of New York.”

After Rose's execution, Mr. Enders told his congregation that New York was as much a part of Egypt as Virginia or South Carolina. “The Lord's wrath is coming on this people,” he said, “all of them, in whatever province of Egypt they might dwell. And until that day comes, let us remove ourselves, as Moses did, to Midian's Well, and await the day of His command.” Mr. Enders had no family. Miriam became his housekeeper. Elizabeth was raised in his house. Some of the congregation resisted leaving. They asked what would happen to the old cemetery. “Let the dead bury their dead,” he said. The majority followed him. Quietly, they sold whatever they had. In conjunction with the elders of the congregation, Mr. Enders purchased an expanse of land on the south shore of Staten Island. They built a church. One by one, the families built small houses. They farmed and developed a thriving business as oystermen. They avoided as much as possible any contact with “Egyptians,” as Mr. Enders called whites, and waited patiently for the Day of the Lord's Instruction to arrive in the unincorporated village of Midian's Well.