Pete Hamill - Forever

“The great horse is gone,” Kongo said, as if reading the younger man’s mind. “I sent him back. Now you must go on foot. As must I.”

“We can go together, Kongo.”

“No, I must go home now. There’s a ship that will take me to Africa. Leaving from Boston, and I must go there. A privateer.” He smiled. “It’s all arranged. In this country, money makes everything possible.”

Cormac said, trying to sound casual, “What is happening in the city?”

Kongo breathed deeply.

“The rebellion is crushed. The Spaniards didn’t come to the harbor. The English burned or hanged eighteen Africans and four Irish. They enjoy killing when they think their God has given a blessing…. But it was not a failure, just a defeat.” He said this in a tone edged with doubt but empty of bitterness. “It will live in the minds of all who saw it, and victory will come later.” He stared directly at Cormac. “Here. In all places.”

“Was Mary Burton the informer?”

“Yes.” He sighed. “The major one, but not the only one.”

“Where is she?”

“Gone. But she is being tracked.”

“Don’t kill her,” Cormac said.

Kongo shook his head as if the trackers had no choice.

“She wanted to be free,” Cormac said. “Like you and all your people. She might be carrying a child and wanted the child to be free too.”

“Yah, and she caused much death.”

With that, he embraced Cormac and kissed his brow. “Remember: To live—you must live,” he said. “I will see you again. That I promise.”

He turned and walked quickly into the darkness, to follow the forest trails to the sea trails that would take him home.

They waited in the dark with the ridge of forest at their backs and Kip’s Bay before them. Cormac moved among them, his own face as black as theirs, skin stained with ink. He nodded at Bantu, who was stocky and muscled and cradling a smoothbore musket.

“Maybe they don’t come,” Bantu said, speaking English with an Ashanti accent.

“They’ll come,” Cormac said.

“Good,” Bantu said. “I kill them and be happy.”

They squatted together for a while, listening for sounds, staring at the dull waters of the East River. All around them in the cool September night there were other soldiers, thousands of them, it was said, being very still, not smoking, all waiting. But here they only cared for one another: the black patrol. Six of them including Cormac, who had recruited them in the months before the beginning of the war. Here beside him was Bantu. Over to the right were Silver and Aaron, lean and black as night, deadly with short swords and long-bore rifles. Below him on the slope, screened by dense shrubs, were Big Michael and Carlito. Cormac went from man to man, whispering the words that had brought them there, the most important of which was “freedom.”

“We have to smash them here,” he whispered to Carlito. “After Brooklyn, we have to hurt them, let them know they will pay a terrible price.”

“Donde están?” Carlito said in Spanish that had been driven into him like nails on the sugar plantations of Cuba. “Where are they?”

“Out there,” Cormac said. “Brooklyn.”

The disaster in Brooklyn haunted all of them. Cormac hadn’t fought in Brooklyn; he could not leave Manhattan, even for a cause greater than himself. So while the armies faced each other on the fields of Brooklyn, the black patrol had moved through the lower city, setting small fires as diversions, hoping to panic the English, to draw redcoats away from the field of battle. Their work did Washington no good. The battle of Brooklyn was, by all reports, a rout. Soldiers broke and ran. Fifteen hundred Americans were killed, blown apart by artillery, shredded by rifle fire and bayonets, and more than two thousand captured. The redcoats swept the field, and Washington led the survivors down to the river and into boats to fight again on another day in Manhattan.

“We will beat them here,” Carlito said. “Then we go back to Brooklyn.”

“First we must beat them here, ’mano. ”

Silver and Aaron dozed against the trunk of a giant oak tree, swords in hand, rifles on their laps. They smiled when they saw Cormac. All glanced at the river.

“They must be praying,” Silver said in Yoruba.

“Or toasting the King,” Cormac said.

Aaron smiled. “Foog the King.”

“And all his foogin’ court,” Silver said, and laughed.

Alone, alert to sounds in the forest and echoes from the river, Cormac closed his eyes and leaned back against a tree. They had been waiting now for two days for the force that Washington was certain would come to this cove along the river. He remembered the first time he saw Washington, bending under a lintel to enter a smoky room on Beaver Street, full of conspirators. He was even larger than Cormac had imagined from the descriptions of others; in every room he ever entered, Washington was the tallest man. Six-foot-four at least, with broad shoulders, the large ass of a horseman, huge hands, large booted feet. His skin was pockmarked. His cold blue eyes had an odd Oriental cast, the eyelids slanting upward. His nose was hawked, long, the taut skin rosy from the sun, the nostrils quivering as if trying to sniff out the person who would betray him, betray them all. While Cormac picked up that thought, asking himself: Which of them, in this room packed with men, was Mary Burton?

Now, remembering that first sight of Washington on the eve of the war, hearing again his laconic words about the coming struggle, the need for all of them to take arms and if necessary sacrifice their lives in order to be free, he wondered if Mary Burton was still alive. In those months in 1741, she had given her names to the inquisitors, adding new ones as she went along, and then had vanished. He had never heard from her again. She would now be fifty-one, ancient in these colonies of the young. Across the decades, as he had eased back into New York and returned to the print shop, he hoped he would find one morning a crudely written note from her, telling him she was alive, telling him about the child. He placed several blind advertisements in newspapers. Mary, please write, C. But immediately thought the effort was useless, since she could barely read and almost surely didn’t care about anyone in New York. There were no replies. She was gone. As Kongo was gone. As Quaco and his woman were gone.

And I am here, he thought, obeying the command to live by taking lives, killing strangers. He looked like the same seventeen-year-old who had learned the printing trade in a shop on Cortlandt Street. The same young man who had buried Mr. Partridge after the cholera took him in 1753, while he raved about the coming republic of America. The same young man who had sold the print shop to a competitor and gone to work at the John Street Theater to be instructed in the use of masks and dyes and the postures of disguise. In the mirror he was that same young man. The one who last saw Kongo in a cave in Inwood, and learned across the years that the words he spoke to Cormac there were true. He was alive and young while everyone else his age was old or dead.

“They come,” Bantu said.

They arrived at dawn in eighty-four six-oared longboats, each carrying a dozen men. The English wore red and the Hessians wore blue. The guns of the frigates roared. All around them, the earth exploded with fire and metal. Cormac heard a young voice screaming in the dark: “Oh, Ma, oh, Ma, help me, Ma.”