Pete Hamill - Forever

Mary Burton was hidden away somewhere, protected by agents of the grand jury, but she must not have given them Cormac’s name. His proof of this theory was simple: Nobody came knocking on the print shop door at midnight. Cormac could not find Kongo, but he was sure he was alive because even the reaction didn’t stop the fires. Flames destroyed the sumptuous home of Captain Peter Warren, no relative of the earl but the brother-in-law of James De Lancey, who was the most powerful politician in town and chief justice of the New York colony. De Lancey was enraged and as a member of the grand jury swore brutal reprisals. “He’s making this personal now,” Mr. Partridge said, “and that means more deaths, more hangings.” Then Van Zandt’s warehouse erupted in flame. Cormac sensed Kongo’s plan: to create fear and uncertainty while the rebels waited for the arrival of the Spanish frigates.

From the first day after the fire at the fort, the constables and redcoats started rounding up the Africans and the Irish and packing them into the new Bridewell prison. After three days, it was bursting. An abandoned warehouse on Water Street was seized by the army and used for more prisoners. Then several run-down private houses were filled with Africans. Shopkeepers complained that they could not operate their businesses because so many slaves and Irishmen had been imprisoned. De Lancey snarled, “You’ll have no businesses at all if we don’t smash this rabble now.”

A few men were released because, as Mr. Partridge explained, they were not on Mary’s lists. But many prisoners were threatened and beaten, and dozens were tortured. “If you torture a man badly enough,” Mr. Partridge said, “he’ll say whatever is necessary to stop the torture, even if it means lying.” Mr. Partridge refused to allow Cormac to go out on the streets—“Every young Irishman is a suspect”—and now delivered his work himself, shuffling along, trying to look old. Cormac slept with the sword in his hands.

But they didn’t come for him. Mary Burton, the great accuser, was also his guardian. He tried to imagine her at that moment, and how she felt after giving names, and what she thought about before sleep came. Was she truly carrying a child? Was it his child? Had she arranged with the grand jury to be allowed to vanish, with a new name and new papers and some money to give her a start? Did she understand that now she would never be free? Dark avengers would track her down. If she had a child, its name would be stained by her betrayal. Perhaps she didn’t care. Perhaps she wanted to die. Perhaps she was not with child at all. Perhaps she simply wanted to erase every humiliation she had ever endured. Perhaps. Mary Burton was a perhaps.

On a Friday in April, Quaco’s friend Diamond was led to a spot of ground on the Common, sentenced to die for starting the fire at the fort. Cormac insisted to Mr. Partridge that he must be there, saying, “I know this man,” and Mr. Partridge argued, cautioned, sighed, and wished him Godspeed. The Grand Inquisitor had made his ruling: Fire must be repaid with fire. Almost every white person in town came to watch this burning at the stake, except the haughty merchants and the grand jurors who had passed the sentence. And in the crowd, Cormac saw a familiar face, now hollow-eyed, grizzled, filthy, his clothes grafted together from various shades and textures of black. The Rev. Clifford.

“The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away,” he chanted in a singsong voice. “What comes, goes. What goes, comes. All ends in death and fire. All ends in the flames of Hell. All sinners must burn… and we are all sinners.”

Cormac eased away from him, as if he carried some terrible contamination. So did others in the crowd. Cormac stared at the scene, trying to record every detail without being seen to write notes. A rough, freshly skinned post had been driven into the earth, with a pile of dry kindling and split logs at its foot. A man wearing a hood and a black woolen suit watched patiently while a clean-shaven clergyman in black read from a Bible. He was a more grave, more solemn echo of the Rev. Clifford, clean, clear-eyed, well-dressed, but delivering a more hopeful version of the same message. We are all sinners. Repent, all of ye, repent.

But on this late morning, his last on earth, Diamond was impenitent. He walked to the stake with his head high, his face composed, and a look of contempt in his eyes. Some turned away from his scalding look as he was tied to the post. Others cheered when the hooded man ignited the kindling. “Off to hell, you savage!” a plummy voice bellowed, while others laughed. Cormac saw the Rev. Clifford speaking directly to the sky, his words lost in the general chatter.

But then there was silence, even from the Rev. Clifford, as the flames gathered strength, and Diamond writhed and his mouth opened against his will and they could smell a sickening odor and the flames rose around the African’s head. Then Diamond screamed. He screamed and he screamed and he screamed. A woman fainted. And the screaming went on. The flames crackled and sparked and roared. And finally Diamond was burned into silence. His smoking body didn’t move. The flames kept burning, poisoning the air with the odor of ruined flesh. Some black flakes of his charred skin floated above the pyre.

And then the Rev. Clifford began to laugh. A wild, high-pitched cackle of a laugh. Laced with pleasure. With satisfaction. With death. A heavyset man shoved him rudely, as if to force him into solemnity, but Clifford fell to his knees, laughing and laughing, and rolled to his side and drew up his legs and plunged his clenched hands between his thighs until the laughter turned to tears.

Cormac felt nauseated. At what was done to Diamond. At the sight of the Rev. Clifford. He turned away, fighting off a surge of vomit. He needed clean air and there was no clean air. Others trudged away in silence, stained by the odor of burning human flesh and burning human fat and burning human blood. But as he walked south toward Cortlandt Street, Cormac noticed that some men had not had enough. Their nostrils flared, their eyes glittered, they formed angry clusters on the Common and shouted for more hangings, more burnings, more death. That night, they gathered together as the first of the mobs.

Mr. Partridge was alarmed, for he had been moving among the fear ful men who ran the town and were prepared to unleash the mobs. “You’re in mortal danger, lad,” he whispered. “They want every African, except the ones they own. They want every Irishman.” Cormac offered to leave, to keep Mr. Partridge out of danger. He could go to Boston or Philadelphia, or find refuge for a while in the northern forests. When this had settled down, he could return. Mr. Partridge shook his head in a vehement no.

“It might come to that, and soon,” he said, “but we’ve got work to do first.”

Together they began packing the best books and most important documents. His precious books made by William Caslon. Swift and Pope, a copy of Don Quixote in Spanish, books by Plato and Machiavelli on forming republics, sheaves of slave trading invoices. “These must be saved first,” he said. “We must hide them, in case the mobs come here.” Some went into a wide worn leather bag. He opened the storage space beneath the printing press and shoved the bag into the darkness. “Let me think about where they’ll be safe for a year or two.”

As they packed, mobs were sweeping the town. For three nights, Cormac searched for Kongo and saw white mobs beating blacks with clubs or kicking them into meat. One African, accused of stealing, had both hands chopped off at the wrist without charges being presented to the grand jury. An African woman suspected of sympathy for the rebels had her clothes torn from her body on Beaver Street and was tossed from man to man until she was sent raving through the streets, naked and alone and wailing. The decent whites closed their shutters and locked their doors: seeing nothing, hearing nothing. Cormac saw that the white men in the mobs were crazy now: muscles and faces distorted, tendons stretched like cables in their necks, hair wild. They were armed with pistols, muskets, and certainty. All of them were drinking something: rum, gin, whiskey. “Instant courage,” Mr. Partridge sneered. “To keep the shite from their trousers.” At night, their torches lurched through the streets, and there weren’t enough redcoats to control them. They shouted back and forth, one mob to another, claiming the right to certain streets, reporting on their quarries, their instant trials, instant judgments, and instant punishments. “One Irishman tarred and feathered, one nigger with his balls cut off!” When a black man was spotted, they roared like valiant warriors, although there were four of them for each black man, and they ran in pursuit like hounds after a fox.