Pete Hamill - Forever

“Don’t talk to any of that lot,” Mr. Partridge said. “It wouldn’t suit you to get a clap the first day in America.”

He waved them away as if they were flies, and they passed through the lower part of Wall Street. Women revealed themselves among the milling crowds. Hatlesss women with rain-slick hair. Swaggering women and big-hipped women, coarse and fleshy women. And a few younger women flashing eyes at them, wearing paint on their faces. Cormac looked at one of them and she smiled in an available way. He averted his gaze (certain his face was flushed) and saw women pale as ghosts in upstairs windows, and women moving down the jammed side streets, stepping out of small houses made of yellow bricks, or backing out of shops. Their high-heeled shoes lifted the rims of their skirts above the mud.

Mr. Partridge grunted and paused, short of breath, but still refused Cormac’s offer to carry his heavy bag, with its books and papers and secrets. And while he paused, Cormac now noticed how many Africans there were in the streets. “They’re a fifth of the population, lad,” Mr. Partridge explained. “A fifth, out of eleven thousand souls.” Most of the Africans were young, like those on the ship and those who worked around the stage of the Slave Market, but some were older, shouting in good English, and a few were very old, squatting against walls, their hands open for alms. They were dressed like all the other workingmen, in rough muslin shirts, some with vests over the shirts, most with caps or hats because of the rain, all in heavy work boots. Two Africans maneuvered a load of cut lumber, removing it from a cart, while a horse shuddered and a white man gave orders in English. The Africans might have been a fifth of the people, but after you grew used to them (their like did not work in Belfast) they didn’t stand out; they seemed part of the hurly-burly of the street. Cormac wondered if Kongo would become just another one of them.

There were black women too. They didn’t resemble Tomora. Most were in the company of white women, carrying their bundles from the shops, or packages of meat from the market. The African women held umbrellas over the heads of their white mistresses, unless their hands were filled with packages, and then the white women gripped their own umbrellas, shifting to keep the packages dry. White or black, there were fewer women than men. At least on Wall Street. But the African women seemed more casual in their movements than the black men, as if they had settled for living out their lives here on this continent far from home. Cormac wondered what they were thinking on this jammed New York street, and in what language they dreamed.

As they walked, Mr. Partridge tried to fill Cormac with the lore of the place, but the younger man was too busy seeing it before him to listen to what it was. They stopped again, at the corner of Broad Street and Wall. Mr. Partridge leaned his bag on a stone marker, holding it in place with his body. He struggled for breath. That immense steeple up ahead, he told Cormac, is Trinity Church. It rises one hundred and seventy-five feet into the air. Cormac was astonished. This was the tallest structure he’d ever seen. Mr. Partridge didn’t see it as architecture, and hissed: “It’s just another attempt by the bloody Church of England to impose itself on people who’re not in the least bit interested.”

Across the street, that three-story building was the City Hall. “Look quickly,” he said. “It’s sure to get bigger and grander in the blink of an eye.” He told Cormac that the Dutch had governed themselves from a tavern, but the Crown, in its majesty, preferred arcaded bricks. “Security!” Mr. Partridge said. “Order!” He laughed. “That’s what they mean by God and King!” Gazing at the City Hall, Cormac remembered the plain weathered bricks of Belfast.

On their side of the street, a small crowd of men was gathered in the rain, cupping lit cigars or smoking clay pipes, talking in low tones, observing each new arrival at the City Hall. The arrivals were tall, well-dressed men with cold faces and the manners of command. A few emerged from horse-drawn carriages. Most arrived from side streets to the north. Cormac thought: If the Earl of Warren is in this town, he’s certain to come here.

“Look at those faces,” Mr. Partridge said. “Enough to make you a revolutionist.”

Then he sighed and so did Cormac. They were now too exhausted to do almost anything at all beyond finding the solace of a land-bound bed. They turned into Broad Street. Mr. Partridge paused at the entrance to the Black Horse, where he would stay until he found a shop for his press. They agreed to meet the next morning (after a good night’s sleep) and every day after that (if necessary), and then he pointed Cormac down the wide, crowded avenue toward Stone Street.

“And don’t eat anything sold in the street,” he shouted in farewell. “That’ll kill you faster than the voyage.”

Broad Street was unpaved, widening out as it moved away from Wall Street, with a shimmer of harbor light at its distant end. It was filled with even more human beings than Wall Street. As the rain eased into a fine mist, dozens of motionless carts and wagons were engulfed by customers, shouting and bargaining with the peddlers. Many peddlers were women with coarse, thick, plain faces, selling eels and venison, oysters and fowl, limes from the Caribbean and vegetables from Brooklyn. Cormac’s stomach coiled with hunger. Two soldiers on horseback rode by at a trot, splashing gluey mud around them, and some of the women yelled insults at their scarlet backs. Then there was a great surge and shouts, and Cormac was pushed aside, and suddenly a giant sow thumped in among them in a whirl of mud and fury, followed by six piglets and a large man shouting in what Cormac learned later was Dutch, and more men coming behind him. It was the biggest pig Cormac had ever seen, and probably the smartest, for it dodged and slithered and ran, eluding the men. It would not easily become bacon. The women shouted and cursed the pursuing men, clearly rooting for the sow. Cormac looked up the sloping street from which the sow had charged and saw more pigs, calmer, burying their snouts in mounds of garbage while a few young boys watched over them. He was too hungry to watch the end of the pursuit race, but like the peddler women, he was surely on the side of the pigs.

His new clothes were soaked now, as he searched for Stone Street. No street was marked with a sign. Three Africans were coming up Broad Street, one after the other, with poles braced across their backs, carrying immense pails of fresh water.

“Excuse me,” Cormac said. “I’m looking for Stone Street.”

“Two block,” one of the black men said in a breathless voice. “Can’t miss.”

“Thank you,” Cormac said. The African nodded in a surprised way and they moved on. Cormac passed more shops, a bank, a tobacconist, a button maker, and more carts, and finally reached Stone Street. The cobblestoned street sloped down toward the wooden stockade walls of Fort George. On the ramparts, he could see the shiny peaked caps of soldiers, slashes of scarlet, the points of bayonets, and a British flag dripping and limp from the rain. It was as Mr. Partridge had described it to him, the place where the governor lived, the center of colonial power in the province, cut off from the people as if its inhabitants feared them. But it told Cormac that he was truly here. He had crossed the fierce Atlantic and was here in New York.

At the bottom of the street on the left stood an old Dutch brewery converted into a warehouse, and across the street was the tavern run by John Hughson.

The house was three stories high with sloping eaves and a chimney at the back. There was a careless quality to it. Dark blue paint was peeling on the front door, showing a coat of pale blue underneath. The window frames were crooked. One wall sagged, as if it had been built before the earth below it had settled. A half-dozen loose slates were askew on the roof. On each side of the doorstep, patches of earth made for flowers were slick and bald and muddy. Pausing there, facing the tarnished brass knocker, Cormac remembered the straight true lines of their house in Ireland and flowers bursting from spring earth. All now ash.