The Banished Children of Eve (15 page)

Eliza was
born there in 1840. She was called Maria Rose after her great-great-grandmother and her grandmother. She was the only child of Elizabeth's to survive. The four other names were entered in the Bible in her mother's small, neat script, the dates of their short lives inscribed underneath. Only her name was without a second date.
Maria Rose Pryor / Born this 20th of January, the year of our Lord 1840–

Perhaps by now her father had already entered a date, chosen one at random or used the day she disappeared into the city. A few times, in those first days after she left Midian's Well, she went in the early mornings down to the market at Catherine Street and stood in the shadows, watching the men from the village unload their oysters. Occasionally, her father was among them. The oystermen had as little contact with the white merchants as possible. One man handled the money. The rest did the unloading. Then they sailed off into the mist, a small company of black men in broad-brimmed hats, their eyes turned skyward as if they were expecting a messenger from heaven to descend. They stopped coming sometime in 1857, after the financial panic. She asked the merchants in the market about them. Nobody knew. Maybe they had all gone to Canada. Mr. Enders had talked about it. Or Africa. Maybe one of the recolonization societies had learned about Midian's Well and decided to finance transporting the entire community back to Africa.

Men and women in blackface were on the move all around Eliza. The final scene. A compact version of Mrs. Stowe's happy ending: All the darkies gather behind George Harris, Eliza's husband. Uncle Tom is dead. Eliza and George have left Canada or Europe, and now, in the finale, they stand on the deck of a simulated ship. Everyone is reunited, slave sons and slave mothers, slave brothers and slave sisters.

Regan, the chief stagehand, walked by Eliza. He clapped his hands. “Let's move it,” he said. Eliza slipped the shawl over her head. It saved her the trouble of putting gray powder in her hair. George had slipped on a gray wig. He was played by Tad Bigelow. This was Bigelow's last night in the play. He had landed a part in a play at Laura Keene's Theatre—
Our American Cousin.
It was a comedy. He tugged on the ends of the billowing wig and ran his hands over it, pressing it to his head. His face was a light brown, shoe polish mixed with wax. He pressed a large white mustache onto his upper lip. He extended his lower lip and exhaled. The mustache lifted toward his nose. “Damn thing,” he said. He turned around and faced Eliza. “Can you do something with this?” Eliza wet her forefinger, gently lifted the mustache, and ran the finger underneath. She put the mustache back and pressed it with her thumb. Bigelow extended his lower lip again and blew. The mustache stayed in place. “Sweet girl,” he said, and patted her face. “I wish I could take you with me.” He looked a little bit like a lion.

“Our
Negro American Cousin?”
Eliza said. “Somehow I don't think Miss Keene would welcome such a change.”

Bigelow laughed. “I guess not.” He turned around and faced the curtain. Eliza stood behind him, and the rest of the darkies behind her. Next to Bigelow was a captain's wheel, and above them all was a sail. He rested one hand on the wheel. Regan raised his arm and then brought it down quickly. The stagehands pulled on their ropes, and the curtain rolled up smoothly.

Bigelow pointed off in the distance over the heads of the audience. “There it is, at last,” he said in a loud voice. “Africa!” Eliza came forward and stood next to him. A second-rate actor, she thought. When he wished to indicate sincerity, he raised his voice. The mark of bad preaching and bad acting. Stamp of a born amateur. Maybe he would be better at comedy.

“O sweet land of my ancestors.” His voice went higher. “My soul thirsts for thee, and it is with the oppressed, enslaved African race that I wish to cast in my lot. Indeed, should I wish anything, it would be that this skin be two shades darker, rather than one lighter.” He raised one of his gloved hands to his face and ran a line down the side, careful to keep his finger an imperceptible distance from his cheek.

“The
desire of my soul is for an African
nationality.
” His voice rose another notch. “I wanted a people that could have a tangible, separate existence! Some pointed me to Haiti. But what is Haiti? A stream cannot rise above its fountain. The race that formed the character of the Haitians was a worn-out, effeminate one. Its people will be centuries in rising to anything.”

In the balcony, the ushers were already cracking the doors open in anticipation of the play's ending. Eliza kept her eyes on Bigelow. The first man she had ever given herself to was a Haitian sailor. He came up to her outside the old A. T. Stewart department store on Chambers Street as she was looking in a window. A beautiful coal-black face, strong, intense, with a thin, carefully trimmed mustache. He followed her to where she lived. Returned a week later. Took her to a restaurant on William Street. It was filled with white people, and most of them seemed to know him and nobody stared at them when they ate. She had her first glass of wine with him. He made love to her in the bare, small room where he lived. It was spring. The air was warm and she could hear the traffic as it moved through the streets. A musical sound.

They lived together for a month. She loved the clean sparseness of the room. They had a wooden chest for their clothes. On a nail above the chest, the sailor hung a pair of rosary beads: black pellets and a silver crucifix. One morning she woke and he was sitting on the bed stroking her hair. He was dressed and there was a canvas bag at his feet.

“I am leaving,” he said.

“Leaving?”

“Going to sea.”

She sat up. “And what about me?”

“What about you?”

“Where am I to go? How am I to pay the rent?”

He put a five-dollar gold piece in her hand. “Stay here,” he said. “I have talked to the landlady, and she will allow it.”

Eliza tried
to clear her head of sleep. “But I thought I could go with you, that we might be married and find a place to live, a home, someplace you would always come back to.”

“Go with me to sea?” He laughed, and Eliza saw again how good-looking he was and she felt a hollow ache inside herself.

“I will find a place, and someday I will take you there,” he said.

“Haiti?” she asked.

“You would be freer there, but hungrier, too. And Haiti likes foreigners even less than this place does.”

“Where, then?”

“Child, I don't now. I'm still looking. There are places where the free colored man is welcomed but only so long as he is few in number and usually without a wife and family. The colored in any number makes the white man nervous. For the time being, you are safe here, at least in this part of the city. Stay to yourself. It will only be until I return.”

When he left, she stared at the empty space on the wall where his rosary beads had been. She knew he was gone forever.

“Oh, not Haiti!” Bigelow's voice had risen to a scream. “But Africa!” Eliza took his arm. He would probably be just as bad at comedy as at tragedy. “On the shores of Africa I see a republic formed of picked men, who, by energy and self-educating force, have, in many cases, individually, raised themselves above a condition of slavery. Having gone through a preparatory stage of feebleness, this republic has, at last, become an acknowledged nation on the face of the earth. And here it is we shall go. Here it is we shall find ourselves a people!”

The theatre rocked with applause. So long, George. Goodbye, Eliza. Farewell, Cato, Betty, Cuffee, Nina, Plato, Maria, Miriam, Rose, Elizabeth, nine generations of Negroes who somehow managed in their struggles and travails to establish no claim to any part of the American continent. When your descendants have all been freed and returned to Africa, we'll have our burnt-cork actors to remind us of you!

The doors behind the balcony were fully opened. The light from the hallway beyond streamed in. The night a few weeks before, when Mulcahey had brought up the subject of marriage, he could see that he had upset her. He tried to comfort her. He was always that way with her, gentle and reassuring, and she loved this about him. For all his talking and pretending, for all his drinking and theatrics, he was kind.

“Look
, Eliza,” he said, “when the war ends, maybe we can move to Cuba. The races live together down there just fine, that's what I'm told. You want to rush everything. Go slow, Eliza. It ought to come naturally to a southern girl. Trouble is, you're trying too hard to fit into this city. Everybody here wants what they want
now.
”

The darkies in the background linked arms. Eliza continued to stare at Bigelow. The sweat was rolling down his cheek onto his collar. The wax he mixed with the shoe polish stopped the color from streaking.
“Our nation,”
he cried, “shall roll the tide of civilization and Christianity along its shores, and plant there mighty republics, that, growing with the rapidity of tropical vegetation, shall be for all coming ages.”

The entire cast took a step forward. She let go of Bigelow's arm. He stepped closer to the audience. “We want a country, a nation, of our own. Our African race has peculiarities yet to be unfolded in the light of civilization and Christianity, which, if not the same with those of the Anglo-Saxon, may prove to be, morally, of even a higher type.”

More applause.

“To the Anglo-Saxon race has been entrusted the destinies of the world, during its pioneer period of struggle and conflict.”

Applause again.

“To that mission its stern, inflexible, energetic elements have been well suited. But as a Christian, lo, I look for another era to arise. On its borders I trust we stand, and the throes that now convulse the nations are, to my hope, but the birth pangs of an hour of universal peace and brotherhood.”

The darkies began to hum and move their feet as if they were marching.

“We go
to
Liberia!
” Bigelow shouted.

Eliza heard real passion in his voice. Bigelow was free at last. Tomorrow he would be rid of George, the wax and shoe polish, and in a part that might win him some attention.

The darkies stopped their humming and said in chorus, “We go not to an Elysium of romance, but to a field of work!”

“To work
hard!
” Bigelow said.

“With both hands!” the chorus answered.

“Against all difficulties and discouragements!”

“Until we conquer or we die!”

Bigelow lowered his voice and threw open his arms. “This is what we go for. And
we
shall not be disappointed.”

“Drop it,” Regan yelled. The curtain rolled down. Bigelow called over to Regan, “Bring it up twice, no more, I'm not going to stand here all night.” Uncle Tom and the other members of the cast came on stage. The curtain came up. They bowed. The applause continued. Bigelow walked into the wings and returned with Bruno, the slave-hunting hound. There was a burst of laughter from the audience. He looked down and saw that Bruno had Eliza's doll in its mouth. He tried to pull it loose, but the dog held on and snarled. He bowed his head as if to signal the dog's victory, and the audience laughed again, their applause unabated.

Den I
walks up and
down Broadway wid my Susanna.

And de white folks will take me to be Santa Anna

Hey get along, get along Jose,

Hey get along Jim, along Joe!

A refrain Dunne couldn't get rid of. Over and over it ran through his mind. A deckhand on the ferry from Brooklyn whistled the tune, and the words floated up from nowhere. Couldn't remember where or when he learned them, but there was no getting free.

Hey get along, get along Josey,

Hey get along Jim, along Joe.

Get along
is right, Dunne thought. It was his third time around the block, and he knew he made an odd sight: a lone figure in the northern reaches of the city taking a stroll around the outside of a half-finished church, picking his way across a row of broken planks, the local version of a sidewalk, in a rain as heavy as horse piss.

Anyone gazing out a window had to wonder,
What's that jack up to? Been circling the block several times. Check and see the door is locked. Get a good look at him, height, dress, make a note for the Metropolitans.

The shade on Capshaw's front window, the one next to the door, was still pulled down. In his note, Capshaw had given Dunne a signal to wait for:
When the shade in the window nearest the door is raised, then and only then will you know it's safe. Be there at four.

It was
half past that now.

Dunne halted in front of Capshaw's stoop. A solemn row of houses, but nothing more than another of Capshaw's swindles. Started as a dry-goods clerk, selling the stuff he lifted, until he decided to go into the fencing business and graduated to richer stock than pants and shirts. One of the first to learn that Archbishop Hughes—“Dagger John,” as the Yankees called him—planned to build America's largest church up in the wilderness. Tipped off by a fellow True American in the architect's office, Capshaw bought all the land he could around where the Paddies were set to build their church. He told the old farmer who owned the adjacent lots that the city wanted to use the land for a hospital to treat victims of cholera. The old man practically wept with gratitude at Capshaw's kindness in taking the property off his hands.