Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

I smelled flesh and whiskey and cooked meats, the tallow of candles, hundreds of which bolstered the gas lamps above the huge circular bar. White men with large mustaches served at the bar, peering past its carved decorative lions and gryphons and bunches of grapes. The bar was of a very white marble, as was its rail, as were the decorations in the front of the bar. It was not possible to speak and be easily heard, so we stood in silence. We were not the only group of observers — each onlooker was white, I thought — beneath that vaulted, carved ceiling with its massed, glass-globed lights. Smoke hung between the lights and us, and it eddied and swayed as doors in the walls opened and closed.

Sometimes waiters — again, white men — entered, bearing circular trays of food, or bottles of wine or whiskey. Sometimes one of several black men in excellent suits entered or departed. I could tell that they were armed because their suits were fitted close to the body, and their pistols made a bulge. Once, a door across the room, past the gaming tables at which black men dealt to the gamblers white and black, opened out. One of the armed men came forward, followed by a child. He stopped for her to catch up with him once the door had closed. She took his arm with the gravity of an adult, and they made their way in our direction. She was perhaps eleven or twelve, I thought, with skin the color of new saddle leather. She wore kohl or some dark substance about her eyes, which were wide and striking. She wore rouge upon her lips. Her hair, very long and curly, was done up in a chignon held in place by ivory combs. What breasts she had were displayed in the gown cut square and low at the bosom and which went almost to the floor. Her escort wore a half smile, as if he enjoyed conveying such a striking attraction as this child.

When they passed near to us, in the fug of smoke and skin, in the loud chatter and the tinkle of piano keys, I made my way closer to M and said, “Watch this now.”

He had been watching her, I saw. Who would not?

The escort halted behind a man at the farthest table, where only two men gambled, apparently against one another. No one dealt them hands; it was a matter of direct competition, the earnings of which would be shaved for a payment to the house. A broad-backed fellow in a dove-colored suit turned as his shoulder was tapped. His face was pale and rectangular, expressionless. He had no hair on his head and none I could see on his face. He gleamed in the smoke-cloaked lighting of the room.

The black escort handed over his charge. She curtsied. The bald man stroked her back and bottom. He moved his hand up to the back of her neck and bent her forward; she went where she was pushed — upon her knees, beside him. Instead of stiffening or remonstrating, she placed her little hand upon his thigh, then leaned to place her lips beside her fingers, then straightened on her knees again as her possessor for the evening returned to his cards. The Negro escort turned in our direction and, seeing us absorbed, smiled broadly, nodded his head, and walked toward and then past us.

“She is a night sister? That small child!” M turned away from the sight, but then he turned back.

Sam said, “I have seen it elsewhere. I have seen it in Baltimore.”

Adam said, “People need to live. That’s a way she can live.”

M said, “It is the kind of moment life gives us when it laughs. It is the choosing without choice. A rich meagerness, that.”

Sam was at his notebook again. I noticed M notice.

I said, “She is a kind of slave. She will earn some money and wear a shimmering gown. But she’s enslaved. Imagine this in South Carolina, in Georgia, or in Florida.”

“Down there,” Adam said, “she works in the fields.”

“As a slave?” M asked.

Adam snorted derisively, then remembered himself. He simply said, “Is she black?”

Outside, as we departed, Sam pointed out a great pile of turds.

“Wild street hog,” M said.

“Or politician,” I suggested.

Adam took us, then, farther along the alley instead of back to the avenue. It crossed another alley, which ran, at right angles, between the buildings for the length of the block. It was lighted by the lights within the flats that looked out, from right and left, upon each other. The smell of sewage was high and harsh and everywhere, for at our feet was the ditch into which the privies poured. Children keened here, and men shouted inarticulately, in either their pleasure or their rage.

A woman cried, “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.” I heard no one reply. “I can’t,” she wailed. “Lord and Jesus O’mighty, I cannot.” Then she was still, and I heard Sam hiss, as if struck, for she began again: “I can’t. I can’t. Oh, please to Jesus, no, I can’t.”

“You may hear her all over town,” I whispered to M, “and she will be white as well as black. But here,” I said, “she preponderates.”

“It is the universal affliction of the Negro,” he said. “I understand.”

“The woman who cannot,” I said, “may soon be setting fire to her infant and herself. Or drowning them both in the river. Or slitting the baby’s throat and then her own. It is the despair. Could one envision one’s child, the baby girl, in that room of carnivores? You are the father to girls.”

“What are their names, sir?”

“I am not the subject of reports,” M said.

“Of course not,” Sam said, “and I beg your pardon.”

“There are carnivores and then there are carnivores, young journalist.”

“Oh, I can’t,” she cried.

Adam said to me, “We stay?”

“It’s difficult for you,” I said. “Of course. I regret it. No. Let’s move on.”

But Sam and M were halted at an opened window and were staring in. Adam and I walked back to them. In the grimy light of the alley, and even in the dim light that ran at us in waves of odor — spoiled food, dirty flesh — it was difficult to see. I leaned over Sam’s shoulder while Adam remained behind us. A very small child, perhaps an infant, was screaming and screaming as its parents stood above it where it lay in a blanket in a box. The man of the household, naked except for his shoes, grimly held before him, as if he had struck something out of sight and was prepared to strike it again, a black iron skillet. The woman was lifting the child. When she touched the baby’s face, she recoiled and held her hand up: bloody from a wound on the child.

“Rat bite,” Adam said.

It had been this woman we had heard, for she cried it again: “I can’t no more. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t!”

Adam walked away as I turned to address him, and I followed. He was weeping. I said, “Go home.”

He shook his head. “I made the arrangement, Mist Bartelmy. I gave you my word.”

“Poor man. Can I break our compact for you?”

Adam shook his head. “But it is painful, sir,” he said. I clasped his shoulder and he said, “It is painful to me.”

I led him off, down the alley, and soon they followed us, and we came out near Eleventh Avenue, hard by a railroad depot. “We could dive back in,” I said.

“I’ve enough,” Sam told me. “I’m full of misery for the night.”

M said, “Yet we have barely touched upon it. They must live there. I know what you have in mind, Billy, but I would remind you that the poor of the Europeans live in proximity to rats.”

“It is the children whom I had in mind,” I said. “I meant them, if I may be forgiven, as a lesson of sorts, you are right. The Europeans, for the most part, have chosen to come to New York.”

“So have the blacks.”

“But what if they cannot choose? What if they are enslaved?”

“What’s that about lessons?” Adam said. Then he covered his mouth. “I beg you gentlemen’s pardon,” he said through his fingers.