Pete Hamill - Forever

A huge black man suddenly detached himself from a group of agents. He was about six-foot-two with muscles rippling under his denim vest. A leather whip was curled in his huge hand. Cormac heard some of the stevedores call his name. Quaco.

He stood alone in front of the unruly Irish. He didn’t say a word but simply glared, and they hushed. Cormac knew why. They were cowed, beaten, beyond humiliation, with the rain falling steadily on their heads and shoulders and hopes.

Then a man on horseback arrived at the edge of the crowd and leaped down. He tethered the horse to a rough-hewn post in front of a meat shop. Quaco looked hard at him. He was about forty, his gray hair pasted to his skull by the rain, his broad shoulders pushing from beneath a coarse mechanic’s shirt. His eyes were wide and frantic as he pushed through the crowd to the huddled emigrants. He was calling a name. Caroline Heaney? Caroline Heaney? Has any of yiz seen Caroline Heaney? Heads shook slowly, as if concealing a secret. Heaney? Caroline Heaney? He turned to the Fury, peered at wet faces, and then walked hard to the man under the umbrella, the man checking off names. Quaco eased around to the side, as the new arrival whispered to the man with the Irish list. He was given a negative shake of the head and a jerk of a hand in the direction of the ship. There Mr. Blifil stood alone at the foot of the gangplank, holding a sheaf of his own papers in one hand, an umbrella in the other. The man went to him. Caroline Heaney. Mr. Blifil flipped a few pages, paused, said something, and looked away. The man fell to the flagstones, writhing, weeping, cursing. His fists hammered at the earth. Oh, my God; God damn you: Oh, my Caroline, oh, my sweet Caroline, I never should have wrote you, oh, Caroline, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Some of the women broke past Quaco and bent over the man and held him and whispered to him (no doubt about the fate of Caroline and how she was now in Heaven, or the Otherworld), while the rain drummed harder on the roof of the Slave Market. Quaco did not intervene, even when an agent barked something at him and pointed at the disturbance of the grieving man. Quaco waited and watched until the grief ebbed and the man stood up and walked off to the place where his horse was tethered. Two English soldiers in rain-stained scarlet jackets were watching from their place in front of a cooper’s shop. One of them laughed. Cormac wished he could unsheathe his sword.

At last nine Africans were brought up on deck, with Kongo in the lead, all that was left of the original thirteen men and one woman. For a few defiant minutes, they stood shoulder to shoulder in a line, facing the American shore. The place of the enemy. The place of their captors. Behind them, Captain Thompson slipped into his cabin, presumably to wash his hands. The Africans wore only breechclouts. Their bodies were thin but not frail, and in the rain their skin was as glossy as wet coal. Their hands and feet were shackled, the hands tightly, the feet more loosely. With gestures and scowls, the boss beckoned them forward, his lieutenants tensed, as if ready to drag them ashore. Quaco watched from a distance. Kongo obviously calculated the odds of escape, and they were too long. Then he led the way down the plank, walking with small hobbled steps, but somehow managing to look like a victor.

The Africans stood very still on the flagstones along the edge of the pier. The boss agent said something and pointed to the stage of the Slave Market. The slave with the umbrella translated for his boss. But Kongo didn’t move. Quaco watched more intently. The biggest of the private guards nudged Kongo sharply with the musket. Still Kongo refused to move. Then the guard hammered him on the back with the butt of the long gun. Kongo bent from the blow but did not go down.

Cormac rushed in.

“Wait,” he shouted. “Don’t do that!”

“And who are you?” the boss snarled, examining Cormac’s young face and new clothes.

“I know this man. He’s a good man and proud. Treat him well. Treat him like a man.”

“I’ll bust ’is fecking head, I will. If that suits you, sir.”

“And then what? Can a man with a broken head be sold?” One of the laughing English soldiers suddenly appeared, no longer laughing. His lip curled and he was annoyed by the rain that was soaking his scarlet coat to the color of old blood.

“What’s all this?”

“Nothing,” Cormac said, afraid now of an arrest, a request for papers. “Just trying to protect someone’s property.”

“Well, get on with it. We need no trouble here.”

With a shrug and a turn of the head, Cormac urged Kongo to go along. The African looked at Cormac with that familiar mixture of anger and suspicion, then glanced around at the crowd. Quaco was staring at both of them. He was detached from the Africans, charged only with controlling the Irish. But he nodded at Kongo. A moment of contact, with something else built into it: a promise, a hope for a better moment. Kongo took a deep breath and led the way to the stage of the market. Walking like a captured king.

Then Mr. Partridge returned from his tasks, his face wet, his eyes angry. From a distance, he had seen Cormac’s small intervention. He pulled his beaver hat lower on his brow.

“Are you mad?” he whispered, taking Cormac’s elbow and leading him away.

Cormac looked back at Kongo as he moved up the steps leading to the tin-roofed stage. He was branded, as they all were, as Tomora had been, with a flared cross on the shoulder blades. A consignment of merchandise.

“They could have arrested you, you young fool,” Mr. Partridge said.

“I suppose.”

“Suppose? Sup- pose? That’s their business. Their merchandise! They are shameless monsters, the lot of them. But that’s why they’re here. To peddle humans for money. Confronting them physically is foolish bravado.”

A clipped English voice started announcing the imminent auction. The words were tossed and fractured by the rain. Cormac saw nobody who resembled the Earl of Warren. But when he gazed at the gray turbulent sky, a lone raven was making wide, slow circles above the town of New York.

Then it was all settled on the quay at the foot of Wall Street. The huge crate was safely stored in Van Zandt’s warehouse. Mr. Partridge shouldered his heavy bag, refused Cormac’s offer to carry it for him, grabbed two smaller satchels in each hand, and they set off together into the town.

They walked up the slope of Wall Street, heading west, and the crowds filled Cormac with a sense of the marvelous. Here were all the nations of the earth, their languages drifting through the soggy air, or cleaving passages between the nouns and verbs of English. He didn’t yet know French from German or Spanish from Dutch, but Mr. Partridge kept saying, Listen, listen to them, lad while telling him the names of the languages. The faces seemed to fit the words themselves, and their smooth or jarring rhythms: lean or fat, dark or fair. Cormac felt that he had entered the main street of Babel.

New York was an English town, of course, and had been one since 1673, the second time the English took it from the Dutch at gunpoint (Mr. Partridge said), the way they’d taken Ireland from the Irish. As they moved past the meat market, where great slabs of beef were loosely covered with burlap and tradesmen in blood-stained aprons shouted in London accents, the words on the walls were all in English. The signs above shops spoke English too. As did the quick, furtive men in rain-soaked coats and beaver hats calling to them from doorways: Room to let, sir? Place to stay? Good big meal after a long journey? A nice entertaining bit of fluff?