Pete Hamill - Forever

Carlito said nothing. He shrugged as if the idea were too far in the remote future.

“Go home,” Bantu said. “Go find my family. See who lives, who died.”

He told about how he’d been captured with a net when he was fifteen by a search party from another tribe, how he was turned over to Arabs and herded in shackles to a fort on the coast, how English traders came to change cowrie shells and rum and guns for the Africans penned in the fort.

“I don’t want to kill people,” he said. “Just find my sisters, my boy brother, and say prayers for my father, and then bring them here, all the people that’s alive.”

None of them wanted to return forever to Africa. They didn’t want to live in a land where human beings were trapped like animals and then sold to others. Africa was a bitter memory. They wanted to live out their lives in America.

“This, my country,” Bantu said, digging hands into the loamy earth that made the floor of the shack. “This.”

One night, Cormac asked the men to vote for their leader. He had recruited them, but that didn’t make him their leader for all the days of their lives. In this army, this revolutionary army, they should choose. After all, they called themselves the black patrol and Cormac was white. The blacks should make the choice. They seemed surprised at this suggestion from Cormac, and asked for time to discuss it. He felt certain they would choose Bantu. Instead, after huddling together outside the shack for about ten minutes, they returned to face Cormac.

“We all the leader,” Silver said. “You die, Bantu the leader. Bantu die, Aaron the leader. Aaron die, Carlito the leader. Carlito die—”

“Then we fucked,” Bantu said, and laughed. “Then some god the leader.”

They all laughed then and hugged one another. But Bantu slowly grew somber.

“We better die together,” he said.

For weeks, scavengers worked the mounds of ruined houses. Redcoats did the work for the first few weeks, finding pewter and scorched paintings and clothes for men and women and saddles and bottles of wine in cellars. All were taken to Fort George, where they could be awarded to friends, or passed through merchants to the empty slavers that were still heading for Africa. The later scavengers were Americans, including some loyal to the Crown, searching for remnants of their lives, or secret rebels looking for hunks of old iron, gnarled candelabra, anything that could be melted down to make ammunition. Sometimes at night, as scavengers worked the cold piles, they could hear the uilleann pipes, mournful and defiant.

The English authorities did not clear the site of the most destructive fire in the history of their colonies. They left the steeple of Trinity lying on its side. They did not replace the ruined houses. They left the rubble as a kind of monument. One that said, Here is what your Revolution brings you: destruction and rubble. Choose sides now.

The rich were gone, but the poor now gathered on the fringes of the ruined streets in tents made of old sailcloth, the place soon named Canvastown. They killed off the pigs and ate them. They stole apples and potatoes from abandoned farms and kept pots simmering on fires through the cold nights. On his forays into town, sometimes dressed as a peddler, sometimes hobbled by age, Cormac saw that the town was filling with predators. Sharpers from London bargained for goods that could be sold in Jamaica or Charleston or even back in England. Slavers offered good prices for Swedish ingots, chintz, Italian glass, brass kettles, knives and axes and guns. There was no money in Africa, other than cowrie shells; things were the currency of slavery. Men and women from Canvastown stole to supply the market, while the better-off families, their fortunes shrinking, sold off their own small treasures to the slavers, who could turn things into purchased humans.

The gray weather added to the sullen sense of corruption. Snow fell, blanketing the town, then melted, turned black, then fell again. The tents of Canvastown sagged under the weight of snow, and sometimes collapsed, and people were found frozen on the streets. Lone chimneys rose toward Heaven from the white mounds of the ruined town like the masts of ghost ships.

They received news in whispered conversations, in messages delivered by old men and Africans and a few women. Washington was losing every battle, off in New Jersey and in Pennsylvania, but he was not defeated. As long as he remained alive, the Revolution lived. The English were working hard to control Manhattan, which was the headquarters of the entire enterprise. They were mapping the island. In the spring, when the frost went out of the trees, they would begin clearing the island of its ambush lanes. The Americans continued refining their own operations. They had a system of couriers now, taking information to Washington’s small and battered army. They exercised their own rough justice against informers. A dirk in the heart. A rope tied around a neck.

The black patrol destroyed seventeen bridges. It fired two more warehouses. One night, Bantu and Aaron waited patiently in the darkness on South Street and killed a London slave merchant who was to leave at dawn for Newport. Bantu placed a cowrie shell in the dead man’s mouth.

They moved when instinct told them to move. One night, while Cormac and Bantu, Aaron and Silver packed their things for a shift to a new place, the English arrived, passing through the tangled paths of the swamp as if they had a map. A soldier from Leeds cut Carlito’s throat where he stood watch. Then an officer bellowed at the shack.

“Hallo, in there,” he said. “We know you’re there, and it’s best you surrender.”

Bantu snuffed the candle with his fingers. They listened tensely to the officer’s voice.

“You’re to walk out with your hands above your heads. You are to lie facedown on the ground. Any sign of a weapon will be a sign of hostility, and you’ll be killed.”

Cormac and Bantu glanced at each other, Aaron and Silver inhaled and then sighed.

Then they rushed out the door, firing guns, Cormac wielding the sword. The redcoats were surprised. Two fell dead. Then another, and the black patrol drove a wedge into their line. For a long moment, men screamed and cursed and shouted. Jesus Christ, Cormac thought, there must be a hundred of them. He slashed and swung and pivoted and slashed again. Men cried in pain.

He saw Bantu’s chest explode. He saw the front of Aaron’s face vanish. He turned for Silver, and then his own head exploded in high white pain. His face fell into the wet earth. He could hear the howl of a wolf. Then he was gone.

He woke up in a windowless cell in the Bridewell prison. Packed tightly with other men, who told him that almost eight hundred of them were now jailed on three floors. His head was splitting with pain, the back of his skull soft to his touch. The sword, he thought. They have my father’s sword. He wanted to cry for its loss but didn’t. He told himself: You will live through this. He told himself: Someday you will find the sword again. Now, he told himself, you must live.

He gazed around at faces filthy and faces haggard, then sat very still with his back against the rough wall. Oh, Bantu, you American warrior. Oh, Silver. Oh, Aaron. I will see you in the Other-world. Carlito: If you have escaped, I will see you in New York.

He began to examine his cage, taught by some of the others. The Bridewell stood beside the four-story poorhouse, which was flanked on its other side by the old town jail. All windows were barred but were open to the cold. Down below street level was a basement used as a dungeon for torture or executions. But men died on all the other floors of the Bridewell, stinking of shit and sickness, hunger and fever and British corruption. Smallpox took many of them, and cholera too (for nobody there was allowed to wash), and many starved. The rations were meager, bits of gristly pork, pieces of biscuit, some rice, peas, butter, a day’s normal food stretched over three, and some days no food at all. There were no blacks in this jail; they were being kept in a place called the Old Sugar Factory. But Cormac saw men laid here upon the floor at night, crushed against one another, trying to keep warm; and in the morning they counted the corpses, always one, but sometimes two or three, which were hauled away and dumped in the Negroes Burial Ground, four or five to a single grave, a burial intended to be an insult. And Cormac thought: Mr. Partridge, in his own sad grave, has plenty of republican company now.