The Banished Children of Eve (45 page)

“You a stupid little creature for sure.”

Eliza put down her rag. Mrs. Blanchard was speaking in a loud voice, and although no one else seemed to take notice of her words, Eliza was embarrassed.

“What you leave home fer? What you think you gonna find here?”

A scarlet city, the Reverend Mr. Enders
called it. City of whores. An abomination in the eyes of God. The dwelling place of the Egyptians. From atop a hill on the other side of Staten Island where Eliza and her friends went to gather blueberries, they could see the distant outline of the city, a wall of masts around it, slender steeples rising above them. The sun blazed down on the red brick, not scarlet at all but ocher, the color of earth in spring. She sat as the others went on gathering. The wind that came off the sea was soft and fragrant. Overhead, a flock of blackbirds lifted out of the trees and flew toward the city.

“I wasn't happy where I was,” Eliza said.

“Happy?” Mrs. Blanchard said. “Girl, you more stupid den I thought. Happy? You wasn't happy? O Lord, you got lots to learn.” She put a raggedy shawl over her shoulders and began walking to the street. After a few steps she stopped and turned. Eliza hadn't moved from the stall.

“Where you gonna stay?”

“I'll find a place,” Eliza said.

“I don't doubts that! And pretty soon dey pull you outta de river like some fish!” She shook her head. “Come wid me, child, I puts you up for de night, ‘cause it look like dat what de Lord sent you to me fer.”

They stood in the street. After a few minutes, a two-wheeled cart came whipping around the corner. It pulled to a stop in front of them. Mrs. Blanchard gestured to Eliza to get on and climbed up after her. They sat with their backs to the driver, their feet dangling over the rear. Mrs. Blanchard reached up and opened her hand. “Mister Flynn,” she said, “here my two pennies, and two fer de girl here.” The driver turned around and grabbed the pennies. The cart reeked of horse manure, which was splattered everywhere on the floor and rails. Eliza tried to find something to hang on to that wasn't smeared with it. Neither Flynn nor Mrs. Blanchard seemed to care. Flynn brought his whip down on the horse with a loud crack, and the
cart jerked into motion. Flynn threaded his way through the narrow streets, whipping the horse constantly, cursing at the drivers of other coaches and wagons and carts. When they came to an avenue lined with imposing buildings, he turned right and they raced for a block before they were caught in another maze of traffic and pedestrians, a hopeless tangle of vehicles. They crept past a band playing on the balcony of a building hung with banners, and a park with a fountain, and buildings that looked as if Saint Paul could have preached beneath their columns. This was a city more like the one Eliza had imagined; noisier, dirtier, and more chaotic certainly, but massive and imposing, exciting, women in beautiful dresses, men in fine clothing, more people and movement than she thought could exist in one place.

They kept moving slowly up the avenue, and finally, after they passed a second park, the congestion dissolved and Flynn beat the horse until the cart raced along. He swung left and went down a street of towering' houses that had doorways framed by columns and immense windows; endless acres of brown granite. He turned onto another avenue, went up it several blocks, then left again up a street of stables and small brick houses. Eliza could see the North River and the Jersey cliffs in the distance. The driver made another left, and after traveling past rows of iron-shuttered warehouses, they came to a hilly terrain that was occupied by wooden shanties. Some stood alone; others leaned against each other. The cart halted. Mrs. Blanchard got off and slapped Eliza on the knee. Eliza hopped off, and without a word Flynn moved on.

A mud lane led from the avenue up a slight rise. Mrs. Blanchard walked ahead of Eliza. People sat in the doorways of their shanties, and children clad only in short shirts, boys and girls alike, ran around the yards. As at Midian's Well, here everyone was black, but this was a shabby place, the people sullen, the shacks they lived in looking as if they were ready to collapse. Mrs. Blanchard acknowledged only a few of those she passed, but everyone's eyes followed Eliza. At the top of the lane was Mrs.

Blanchard's shanty. Outside, it was as decrepit as the others, but inside, it was exceedingly neat, a table and chairs in one corner, a bed in another, a cast-iron stove in a third.

Eliza slept on the floor. The next morning, when it was still pitch-dark, she and Mrs. Blanchard repeated, in reverse, the trip they had made the night before. The cart stopped. They got on. Mrs. Blanchard paid the pennies, and they rode to the market. Then they went to the docks, where Mrs. Blanchard haggled with fishermen on their boats over the price of their catch. The two women carried the wooden boxes back to the stall. Eliza worked all day beside Mrs. Blanchard, and when it came time to leave, the older woman said, “Where you goin' tonight?”

“With you.”

“Dat a question?”

“I have no place else to go.”

“Go home.”

“I can't.”

By now the Reverend Mr. Enders and her father
would have gone down to the dock and talked to the shopkeeper, suffered his rudeness in order to find out what had happened to her. When they were finished, they would have gone back to Midian's Well, walking in silence, uncomprehending of how any child of God could choose to live among such evildoers, and certain of her damnation.

“I don't run no orphanage.”

“I'll do whatever work you say.”

“Can't pay you nothin'. You can have a place to sleep, and food, and I'll pay for Flynn to bring us back and forth, and since you ain't got no clothes but what's on you, I'll see what de ragman got to sell. But I can't do better den dat.”

Eliza settled into the work. She told herself she could learn as much about the city from working as she could from watching and listening. Mrs. Blanchard was merciless to her while they were in the stall, screaming and cursing, her voice a regular part of the market's noise. But the abuse stopped as soon as they got on the cart. At night Mrs. Blanchard hardly spoke, and if she did it was never in a harsh way. She cooked their food and stood by the door to smoke her pipe.

Eliza once asked her where she was from.

“Don't matter where. What matters is we survive, child. Remember dat.”

Coming home one night
they passed a church. A wedding party was just coming out, the bride in a dress of white silk with delicate satin flowers rimming the bodice, the groom in a black suit, both of them smiling and shaking hands with the guests. Eliza couldn't stop talking about it. She said that she would have a ceremony like that one day, and a dress just like the bride's.

Mrs. Blanchard interrupted her. “Quiet, child,” she said. “I can't stand listenin' to such nonsense. Sometime I wonder what country you growed up in. Ain't nothin' like that fer colored people, not here, not anywheres I ever heard of.”

Twice a week, before it got dark, Mrs. Blanchard and Eliza took a canvas sheet down to the river and collected firewood. They laid the wood on the sheet and hauled it home. North of them, white people did their own scavenging.

“Stays away from dem,” Mrs. Blanchard said. “Dey all Irish from de shanties in de hills over dere. Lowest of de low. Times was never very good for colored people in dis town, at least not so long as I been here, but dey never so bad until de Irish people come, and sometimes it seems dere no end to their comin'. My husband, Robert, Mister Blanchard, he was as light as you, child, and he was born in dis town, and his pappy before him. He worked servin' tables from de time he was a little boy, but when de Irishmen come, dey take most of dem jobs away from de colored, and dey kill a colored person if he get in dere way.”

The Irish shanties covered the hills to the north. Flynn, the cartman who transported Mrs. Blanchard and Eliza to and from the Fulton Market, lived there. So did the city's ragpickers, cinder gatherers, and shit haulers—an army of casual laborers.

At dusk one evening, as Mrs. Blanchard and Eliza were dragging home a sheetful of wood, a group of children on a hill above the railroad tracks threw rocks at them. Mrs. Blanchard took a stick and went after them, and they ran
away. When she came back, she sat by the side of the tracks and smoked her pipe. “A few years back,” she said, “colored people wasn't allowed on de omnibuses at all, and even if dey pay dere fare on de horsecars dey had to stand on de outside platform; and den Miss Jennings and Reverend Pennington, dey refused to be treated like dat anymore. Dey said if dey pay dere fare, same as de whites, dey should get de same treatment. And dey went to court and de judge say dey is right, colored should ride like everybody else. Some colored got so excited, like it was de day of de Lord's return, and my Robert says dat it meant colored people goin' start be treated like men instead of dogs. He really believed dat. We was livin' on Minetta Lane back den, and Robert was workin' down in Old Tom's, waitin' tables, and right away he started ridin' de Broadway omnibus to work. I worried so much, yeah, I told him de white man ain't goin' let de colored raise his head without tryin' to knock it off. I told him, Don't you ride in dat omnibus. But he don't listen, and de second week he doin' it, sure enough, two of dese big Irishmen gets on and dey demand Robert's seat, and when he won't give it, dey pick him up and throw him off de back onto de pavin' stones. He broke his arm and three of his ribs and was never de same after dat. He never really got better. And den he died and I moved up here.”

In the second month Eliza was working with Mrs. Blanchard, business fell off for the entire market. There had been a crash on Wall Street, which was only a few blocks way, though at first, except for a greater crush of traffic than usual on Broadway, it was an event that made no impact on the fish and produce sellers. But as brokerage houses closed and businesses failed and unemployment grew, the market people quickly felt the effect.

One day Flynn the cartman pulled, up at the bottom of the lane in the early-morning darkness and said to them, “I think maybe ye be better off stayin' where ye are. Dere's been fightin' down on da Five Points, a regular ruction among the gangs, and I'm told it's spilled over da Bowery and Broadway, and da Dead Rabbits is drivin' da Bowery Boys right into da river. It don't concern colored people, but once things get
started there's no tellin', and if I was you I'd stay outta da city today, I would.”

Mrs. Blanchard thanked him for the advice but said she wanted to go anyway. Flynn took them down the West Side. They rode past Castle Garden, then circled up the East Side to avoid coming near Broadway or the Bowery. Mrs. Blanchard took the fish-cleaning knife from its sheath and laid it in her lap. She sang in a loud voice as they went. Eliza was frightened, but for the first time she understood the theatricality of Mrs. Blanchard's temper, the act she put on in front of white people to keep them at a distance and off balance. Somehow, in the face of their hostility, she had gotten a stall for herself in the market, something no other colored person had done, and kept the white people from taking it away from her. Eliza stopped regarding her as a changeable old woman, perhaps half-mad, and saw the strength she had, the cunning she employed against the world, the mixture of courage and intelligence. They went to and from work that day without being bothered.

By the time winter came, business in the market was half what it had been. The weather was cold and bitter. The morgue wagon made frequent visits to both the Irish and Negro shanty-towns to pick up the dead, most of them children. The shore was stripped bare of firewood. Eliza and Mrs. Blanchard followed their neighbors up to where Forty-second Street crossed the railroad tracks on its way to the ferry. To the north they could see a wild tract of land stripped bare of trees, a terrain of squat, barren hills and gray-black rocks covered with an endless jumble of indistinguishable wooden shanties, some of them with roofs made of straw and mud; the domain of the shanty Irish.

They waited along the south side of the badly rutted street, and kept moving to stay warm. The traffic came up from the ferry, the horses laboring to gain momentum, the heavily laden coal and lumber wagons rocking crazily as they bounced over the ruined roadway and the railway tracks, often spilling a small part of their load. If the pickings were small, there was usually a fight over them, a wild melee between the Irish and Negroes that lasted only a few seconds. The rest of the time the two
groups ignored each other.

On one gray Sunday when Mrs. Blanchard was sick with a fever and stayed in bed, Eliza went up to the street with the people from the neighboring shanties. The roadbed was covered with ice; the wind off the river was a sharp, penetrating shiv. A small crowd of Irish loitered on the other side of the street. From the ferry came a coal wagon jolting its way over the jagged, icebound surface. When it reached the slight grade at the tracks, the driver drew the horses to a stop. He started again. The wagon skidded sideways. He whipped the horses. The wagon suddenly jolted forward and swayed wildly as it careened over the track bed. The driver leapt off. The wagon went on for a few more yards before it pitched over and crashed onto its side, taking both horses with it.

From both sides of the street, people came running. The driver was brushing off his clothes and limping toward the wagon. He looked up and saw them coming. He raised his whip. “Get outta here, you dogs,” he said.

Eliza ran to the other side of the wagon. She took off her shawl, put it on the ground, and used her hands to shovel coal into it. The driver hit an Irish boy with his whip. He tried to push people away. But from the north side of the street, down the icy, debris-strewn embankment, poured an army of shanty Irish, children and adults bundled in blankets, shawls, patchwork coats. From the south came a steady flow of shanty Negroes, some of them carrying tubs and cans. The driver turned and fled. The crowd covered the wagon. When the coal was almost gone, a man with a red beard walked over to the prostrate horses and clubbed them unconscious. Another set to carving them up. A black man drew a knife and started to hack away at a haunch. The red-bearded man kicked the Negro in the side and waved his club at him.