The Banished Children of Eve (5 page)

Manning was back in his position behind the bar. He fired round after round of whiskey at
the hordes in front of him. From outside a shout went up. A group of urchins ran down the street. “The boolys is coming!” they cried. “The booly dogs is here!”

The bar began to empty. The sidewalk was crammed with people. They were quiet and sullen until a column of police turned off the Bowery and headed down Catherine Street, then they erupted into hoots and catcalls.

Manning went to the rear of the bar and lugged out a large, flat piece of wood. “Give me a hand,” he said to Dunne as he dragged it through the front door. He tried to fit it across the window but couldn't get it to stay in place. Dunne hadn't moved. Manning rapped on the window and yelled at him, “Please, man, give me a hand! They'll wreck everythin' once they get started, won't matter who it belongs to!” His voice was muffled by the glass. It had a faraway tone. “For God's sake, man, please!”

Dunne stepped outside. He grabbed the end of the panel and helped lift it into place. Manning twisted two snap bolts to secure it. The column of police had halted outside Brooks Brothers. The head clerk rushed out and talked animatedly to the policeman in charge.

“Ach,” Manning said. “We're in for it now. Not even John Morrissey can stop it.”

Many of the men were armed with sticks, bottles, paving stones, or baling hooks, which they held at their sides out of view of the police. The children continued to frolic in the street, running up to the Metropolitans, taunting them, and then running away. The chief policeman went on talking with the Brooks Brothers clerk, seemingly unperturbed by the size and mood of the mob.

Manning pointed to the corner of Cherry Street, where another column of police had appeared. “It's gonna be another Bull Run!” he cried. “It'll be ruin for us all!” He went back to the entrance of the saloon. “You better warn Morrissey!” He slammed the door shut behind him and pulled down a tattered green shade.

The two columns of
police merged into one solid body of four ranks, ten men to a rank. Each Metropolitan held his locust stick in front of him. After a few minutes, the chief policeman gave the order for them to move forward. Men lifted their weapons and waved them at the police. There was a collective roar, and the crowd surged into the street. Dunne felt himself being dragged along. “Bloody peelers!” the man beside him yelled. The police halted a distance away. Dunne turned and pushed his way toward the rear of the crowd. He was almost free when an arm came around his neck, a bulky band of hardened muscle that pulled so tight he felt as if he might black out. He tried to reach into his inner pocket to grab the iron claw, but before he could, the arm released him and he was shoved so hard he lost his balance and slammed into the side of a building. When he got up, he was surrounded by dockworkers. The one who had held him around the neck, a hulking, clean-shaven man in a cloth cap, stuck his finger to the tip of Dunne's nose. In his other hand he held a baling hook.

“You're a newspaperman, ain't ya? Come down here to spy!”

“Stick him!” a voice in the crowd yelled. “Stick him in the balls!”

“I'm no newspaperman,” Dunne said.

“Oh no?” the man said. “Then what are you? A bloody informer in the pay of the master informer, the chief Republican nigger-lover, Robert Noonan?”

Dunne slipped his hand into the interior pocket of his pants and gripped the iron claw. He marked the spot in the middle of the man's forehead where he would land it. “All I'm doing is trying to make a living, that's the only reason I'm here, as a drummer for Alton's Distillers, been trying to sell Manning on our stuff for weeks now.”

“A lyin' shit is what you
are. Manning ain't never sold any-thin' but his own horse piss.”

“Don't stop me from trying to sell him ours, does it?”

“I seen him in Manning's before today,” another man said. “He's telling the truth about that.”

From down by the river came a swelling wave of shouting. A boy ran up. “The men is stormin' the pier!” he yelled. “They're gonna get the niggers! Come on!”

“Go try to sell that old stinkbug whatever piss it is that you're peddling,” the ringleader said. “Couldn't be worse than the piss he already pours.” He turned away and pushed his way through the crowd.

At the bottom of Catherine Street, a mass of men pressed close around the cast-iron façade of the pier. Those in front clambered up onto the grates that covered the entrance. They rocked them back and forth until the hinges groaned with their weight. More men climbed on and shook the metalwork.

“Get the niggers! Get the niggers!” the crowd shouted as encouragement to the scores of men hanging from the gates. Several boys scampered to the top. Just as they reached it, the hinges surrendered and ripped loose with a loud crack. Men jumped free as the gates crashed down. The mob pressed ahead. Those on the ground jumped to their feet to avoid being trampled. To the right of the pier, a band of about twelve black men bolted out from behind a metal door. They stayed as close together as they could, running in a pack across South Street and up Catherine, toward the phalanx of police.

The dockworkers in the rear of the crowd that had surged onto the pier saw what was happening. “The niggers are getting away!” a woman screamed. The dockworkers ran to block the black men's path, their sticks and baling hooks poised above their heads. “Get the thievin' sons of bitches, the boss's darlin's!” a white-haired crone wailed from the second floor of a building on the east side of Catherine. The flying wedge of blacks had gone only a dozen yards when the dockworkers cut them off. Dunne found himself between the two groups.

The black man at the
front of the wedge was short and sturdy. He wore a canvas duster over his overalls that came down to his ankles. He reached into the pocket and pulled out a revolver. He pointed it at Dunne. Dunne put his hands in the air. He heard the scrape of hobnails on the paving stones behind him.

“Put it away, nigger.” It was the ringleader's voice. “It ain't gonna do you no good. Your days of takin' the bread outta the mouths of workingmen is over.”

“Get out of the way, Paddy bastard,” the black man said. “I'm givin' you fair warning.”

The scuff of heavy boots drew closer. The black man fired twice. Dunne threw himself against the wall. The ringleader and another man lay on the ground, writhing and screaming. Suddenly, the police charged down Catherine, flailing with their sticks. The front row of the mob offered resistance, tossing stones and bottles, hitting back with their baling hooks, but soon they broke and scattered into alleyways and buildings.

The Metropolitans formed a cordon around the blacks and the two wounded men, a ring that also caught Dunne and several dockworkers. A sergeant of police disarmed the black man. He had the wounded men carried away.

The old woman leaned out the window across the street. She pointed at the sergeant. “May God and His Holy Mother damn you to hell, Frankie O'Donnell! May They turn Their backs on you at the hour of your death! May They close Their ears to your pleas for water as the flames of hell devour your flesh!”

Sergeant O'Donnell walked about as if he didn't hear her. Finally, when she didn't stop, he told two policemen, “Go over there and get that witch out of that window.” They ran toward her building.

“You bloody whore, O'Donnell! Selling your own into slavery, defending niggers while Irish women and children go without bread, you and the likes of you, the Noonans of this world! You're not worth my spit!” She let go a shower of it on the two policemen who were forcing open the downstairs door.

She shook her fist. “God's curse on ye all!” The two policemen suddenly appeared behind her
and pulled her away from the window.

O'Donnell ordered the police to take the blacks back to the Bowery. Two of the dockworkers refused to give their names, so he had them handcuffed and sent along with the blacks. He looked Dunne up and down. He had a scowl on his face.

“Do I know you?” he said.

“Not likely,” Dunne said. “I'm a Brooklyn man.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Took the ferry over last night to go to a minstrel show, and you know how things are, Sergeant, one thing led to another and I ended up staying the night. Just coming to the ferry when I got caught in these proceedings.”

O'Donnell squinted as he studied Dunne's face. “We ever met?”

“Not that I remember.”

Dunne had been arrested only twice. First time, he was thirteen. Had flown the Orphan Asylum the year before. Was pinched for trying to lift some rat-nose's watch while standing next to him on the Broadway coach. Just a silly kid. He would have been sent back to the Asylum and been out again in a month if the Children's Aid Society hadn't gotten custody and shipped him west. Next time was on the day after the great battle in Paradise Square, the Dead Rabbits and the Plug Uglies in alliance against the Bowery Boys, the Paddies versus the True Americans for control of the East Side, the last stand of the rat-noses before the Irish sent them packing and claimed dominion. July 1857. A great day it was until the militia arrived, sealed off the streets, and the Metropolitans went door-to-door, dragging out suspects. He couldn't remember the face of the policeman who had found him in Tom Cahill's cellar, pulled him by his hair up the stairs. Perhaps O'Donnell had been the man.

“What's your line of business?” O'Donnell said.

“I sell tombstones at the Green-Wood Cemetery. Maybe you've family there, maybe that's where we've met.”

“None of mine is buried in Brooklyn, thank you.”

On the northwest corner
of South and Catherine streets, a small mob had formed again. They screamed curses at the contingent of police that had stayed with O'Donnell. One of them threw a rock that fell far short and clattered across the paving stones. The policemen looked at one another uneasily. They were visibly anxious to rejoin the main body of men back on the Bowery.

O'Donnell said, “Maybe the best thing is for you to come along with us.”

“O Jesus, Sergeant,” Dunne said. “I'll be in trouble enough for missin' work, never mind if I'm arrested for nothin' more than the misfortune of walkin' in on a riot.”

Another rock hit the pavement. It struck closer than the one before. A policeman called O'Donnell's attention to the crowd that was gathering on the rooftops of the buildings across the street.

“Goddamn it,” O'Donnell shouted, “I ordered them roofs cleared and occupied.” O'Donnell turned to Dunne. “Get out of my sight,” he said. “If I see you again, I'll have you clubbed senseless. No questions, no conversations, just a good crack across the head.” He marched the men toward the Bowery.

Dunne walked straight toward the Catherine Street ferry-house. He stopped at the corner of South Street. Some boys had taken a bed sheet, laid it over the puddles of blood left by the men who had been shot, and then nailed it to a long stick. They scrambled up and down the street, waving it like a flag. From the rooftops that the police had failed to secure, a choir of women shouted encouragement. The boys followed O'Donnell's men up the street, running as close as they could without being grabbed. One of them ran ahead and fluttered the bloody sheet in front of O'Donnell's face. “Come on, you peelers!” he yelled. “Come on and show us how brave you are! Nigger-loving sons of bitches! Murderers of your own people!” O'Donnell lunged at the boy, who darted out of his grasp.

O'Donnell halted his men outside Brooks Brothers. A platoon of police came down from the Bowery to join him. O'Donnell paced back and
forth in front of them. He never took his eyes off the crowd.

On South Street, from the direction of the Governors Island ferry, came another flock of street urchins. They ran at breakneck speed. One of them collided with Dunne and went sprawling. He clambered to his feet. The soldiers is comin'!” he yelled. “A whole pack of 'em!” He ran off, shouting his news.

Dunne saw them in the distance, a column of blue coats, bayonets fixed, campaign caps slouched forward over their eyes. The crowds that had filled South Street instantly parted to let them through, and the soldiers moved with an easy gait, muskets bobbing on their shoulders, seemingly oblivious to the uproar around them. Even at a distance it was obvious to Dunne that these weren't militia, skittish civilians whose uniforms couldn't masquerade their fear. These were real soldiers, part of the Governors Island garrison, many of them wounded veterans of two years of war. Dunne could see that once the column reached the intersection of Catherine and South, the mob would be caught in a vise, the police to the north, the soldiers to the west, a rout in the making. He hurried across the street toward the ferry-house. Three short blasts of a steam whistle warned him the ferry was about to depart. He ran through the ferry-house, his steps echoing through the emptiness of the cavernous interior. The boat was pulling out, already a few feet from the docking ramp, and Dunne took the distance at a leap. He caught on to the gate at the stern of the boat, and a deckhand grabbed hold of him and helped him aboard.

“Can't blame ya a bit for riskin' your neck to get out of there,” the deckhand said. “A daft enough city when the sun is shining and the world is spinning in proper order, never mind when they're wagin' war in the streets.” He took Dunne's fare. “I've never figured it out: Is it the people make the place crazy, or is it the place makes the people crazy? A little of both, I suppose.”

A heavy rain began to fall. Dunne hurried toward the cabin. The deckhand followed him inside. “Me, I thank God I was born and reared in Brooklyn,” the deckhand said. “Only a river between us, but might as well be an ocean. Ain't two more different races on the face of this earth than Brooklyn people and Yorkers. We know how to behave, that's the gist of it, not regardin' lyin', cheatin', and stealin' as the normal way. Tell ya this, as long as we got this river between us, the good people
of Brooklyn has some protection, but it ever dried up, we'd be done for. The Yorkers would have the place overrun by noon of the first day.”