Pete Hamill - Forever

An enraged British voice: What are. Who is. Stop now.

Then Cormac jerked at the barrels and they came tumbling down with a great bumping clatter, filling the width of the alley, and Cormac ran too.

He made a wide circle to the north, crossing Broadway, and found Mr. Partridge in the crowd.

“Where did you go?” he said. “I’ve been worried sick.”

“First I was looking for you. Then I wanted a better view.”

Mr. Partridge gestured toward the burning fort.

“This could be a right disaster.”

Buckets were being passed from man to man. A portly constable named Michaels burst into the crowd, announcing another fire to the east, on the near end of Pearl Street. He asked for help and men followed him away from the glow of the burning fort. Suddenly four ferocious detonations split the air and rocked the ground, one immediately followed by the next, as the ammunition in the fort exploded. Cormac was knocked to his back. Mr. Partridge hit the wall of a house and slid down to a sitting position. Behind them, splintered windowpanes fell upon the streets. Missiles of stone and broken timber hurtled through the air. Cormac got up and hauled Mr. Partridge to his feet. Women were screaming and men shouting, and everybody was running, including Cormac and Mr. Partridge. They ran directly into Peter Zenger. He was thin, harried, trembling with excitement.

“Is zis your boy, Partridge?” Zenger said, his reedy voice thick with a German accent.

“My man, sir.”

“Can he zet type?”

“Yes.”

“Can I borrow him tonight? I have a man out zick und—”

“It’s up to him.”

“I’d be glad to help, Mister Zenger.”

“Gut. Go to my zhop now. I’ll be along in a vile.”

All night, Cormac worked for Peter Zenger. His first newspaper job. Setting type for the Weekly Journal . Correcting Zenger’s mangled English copy. Writing two brief stories himself. The reports kept coming in, gathered by Zenger himself or delivered by citizens exploding with gossip and outrage. Reports of Irishmen laughing, Africans running away from the fires (for there were four fires now, including the fort and the mansion). Quaco and his wife were among those who ran, but Cormac wrote nothing about them. As the night went on and on, there were scarier reports: Some of the Irish and the Africans were seen with guns. Did you see zem mit guns? No, but I heard—Zank you very much. Cormac knew it was a rising, and he wanted to be part of it. But they had not asked him to join, had not assigned him a part to play. He set type. He absorbed information.

Around five in the morning, there was good news for the English, if bad for the rebels. The wind had shifted. It began blowing out toward the harbor, away from the houses of Broadway and the larger town. The third fire, nine blocks away from the fort, had destroyed a warehouse. The owner was dead. Rumor said that an African had caved in his head with a frying pan. Through the night, Zenger understood what was happening.

“Zey vant to burn New York to the ground!” he said. “It’s der Irishers und der blacks against der vites!”

Cormac forced himself not to laugh, and kept working without comment until all the forms were locked up. Zenger thanked him and paid him two shillings. His eyes were sore and bleary, but he did not go home. He walked through the ash-gritty air to Hughson’s. No lights were burning. He knocked at the back door. Nobody came to open it. He knocked again. An upstairs window opened a few inches.

“Yes, what is it?”

“I need to talk to Mary.”

“Good luck.”

“Is she asleep?”

“No,” Sarah Hughson said. “She’s flown.”

And closed the window hard.

He stood there for a long moment, then moved toward the waterfront, hoping to come around far from the fire and make his way down Broadway to Cortlandt Street. He could see a boat moving north on the river, with masked men lying low on the deck, but there were no ships of the Spanish fleet. His mind filled with dark possibilities.

She’s flown.

She’s flown.

When he woke up, the city had changed forever. Until that night, the well-fed, respectable whites had convinced themselves that slaves loved being slaves. That they were happy and secure and accepted their inferiority. The Africans and the Irish both knew they were nothing (or so the theory went) and therefore were happy to have food to eat and a roof above their humble, worthless heads. Now, on the morning after, the English knew better.

The fire was out at last, the king’s fort a settling, smoking pile of glistening charcoal. Only one wall of the governor’s mansion remained standing. Cormac moved through the crowd gazing at the ruins, hoping to see Mary Burton staring in satisfaction or anger. She wasn’t among the gathering audience. But as he moved, he heard the same words dripping from angry tongues: Africans, Irish, Catholics, traitors. There were more questions than answers. Is the Spanish fleet coming? Will New York be taken and the papists installed in Trinity? Will all the whites be murdered? Someone suggested in a reasonable way that an African laborer using solder on a pipe might have accidentally set off the blaze in Fort George. He was laughed at by some and lacerated with words by others. You bloody fool, can’t you see what this is? Even a few women shook fists at him, calling him a traitor to God, King, Anglicanism, and the white race. The man backed away and then drifted out of the crowd.

In the shop on Cortlandt Street, Mr. Partridge had other news: Two Africans were under arrest for stealing silverware. Caesar and Prince. They’d buried it under floorboards in Hughson’s Tavern on Stone Street. “A true pair of master criminals!” Mr. Partridge exclaimed. “And Hughson no better! Idiots! Fools!” And that discovery of the stolen goods led to a fresh theory, one with its own banal logic: The fire at the fort was set to cover the crime. That was all. “Not a revolt, but a burglary!” said Mr. Partridge. And it seemed certain that one of the thieves, Caesar, had fathered a child with a white woman. “It’s a fever out there, lad!” More seriously, he whispered, a much wider conspiracy was being exposed.

“They have an informer,” he said. “Some Irish wench. They’ve promised her money and freedom, and she can’t stop talking.”

Cormac’s stomach flopped.

Mary Burton.

Turned informer.

Talking her way to freedom.

That afternoon the reaction began. A grand jury was convened, complete (Mr. Partridge observed) with a Grand Inquisitor named Daniel Horsmanden. The eminent jurors now had a secret list of names. And the authorities vowed to quash this treasonous revolt as swiftly as possible. Working in the print shop, often alone, Cormac tried to absorb the rush of news. The Hughsons were arrested and swiftly condemned, with Mary Burton the chief witness against them. Hughson blubbered, said a man who’d been inside the jury room, while Sarah shouted her innocence. Three more fires broke out, and the hysteria increased. Within hours, Caesar and Prince were hanged on the ridge overlooking the Collect Pond, their bodies dumped in unmarked graves in the African cemetery on Duane Street. Cormac didn’t see this happen; the event was carried into the shop by Mr. Partridge. “Stay away from these insane crowds,” Mr. Partridge warned Cormac. “They’ll be searching every face for proof of allegiance.”

English flags blossomed on many buildings, some of them sewn together overnight, serving now as declarations of loyalty to the Crown. Another fire broke out. Then Hughson was hanged, sobbing, protesting, claiming his innocence, demanding a fair hearing. As soon as his neck was snapped by the rope, young Sandy was placed above the drop. He showed no emotion. His last word before death was “Freedom!” The authorities left the two corpses dangling for days, as a warning to Africans and Irishmen. Cormac came around two days later. Hughson’s body had turned black, while the African’s body had turned white. Some of the more fanatical citizens saw this as a dark omen.