Paradise Alley (22 page)

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He liked to leave for work early in the morning. It was cooler, in the summer, and there were fewer white people on the street, and some days he might make it all the way up to the Colored Orphans' Asylum without hearing something that would make him want to turn, and put his hand on his knife. Sometimes he could walk the whole way without being called a nigger to his face.

They called him Billy Dove, for all the places he had been, but he always came back.
My Billy Dove, one day you will sail off and go far away from me.
He had shipped to London and to Le Havre, to Barcelona and Marseilles, and the Golden Horn.
But he had always come back.

It was over three miles from Paradise Alley to the Asylum, at Forty-third and Fifth, and he could do it in an hour most mornings. Leaving before dawn, legging it up there with the broad, rolling, seaman's stride he had even after so many years on land. Early in the morning he could still get some sense of the world outside the City, could catch a sudden whiff of trees or grass—or the sea—coming from somewhere. Enough, in the warm weather anyway, to remind him of mornings back in Charleston—the smell of red camellias, and azalea blossoms, down by the docks along the Cooper.

Not today. He could see that as soon as he had reached Broadway.
The streets were filled with men—unusual for so early on a Monday morning. Many of them looked as if they had never gone home from the night before—staggering down the avenue boisterous and loud, and yellow-eyed with drink.

“Must be the heat. Heat always brings out the vermin,” he muttered.

Thinking of the cockroaches that came wobbling out of every crack and hole of his home, when the heat got this bad, no matter how much he or Ruth or the children stomped at them with their bare feet, or thrashed at them with the birch broom.
That is what I have given you to live among. These roaches.

A smothering, yellow cloud of heat had already lowered itself over the City. It was worse even than Charleston sometimes, the way the heat could descend on this City.
Worse even than the Guinea coast—

He was sweating freely, the perspiration running down from under his shapeless, broad-brimmed hat, pricking him under his burlap shirt. He tried to stay out of the path of the lurching white men, to avoid their gaze at all costs. Yet before he could get to Fourteenth Street, he had been pushed bluntly off the sidewalk a dozen times. The leering, hateful faces pushing up into his.

“There you go, nigger!”

“Hey, contraband! What makes you think you can come up here t'take a white man's job?”

He pivoted away, saying nothing, leaving them reeling behind him. They were not in earnest yet—not quite yet.
Up all night drinking on a Sunday.
There was something going on, he realized—and he walked still faster, even more anxious to get up to the Asylum, to get his money and get back again.

“Shoulda gone already,” he said to himself. “Shoulda gone a long time ago—”

Feeling ashamed of how he had argued against Ruth, when she had said the same thing the afternoon before. When they had first heard that Johnny Dolan was back in town.

Go where? And to what purpose?
Only to be hunted down by him—run to ground like a wounded animal.

No, it had made sense to stay. At least it had before they were forced to leave Seneca Village and move down here to the Fourth Ward. They had had a home, friends, a whole village around them
then, to keep them safe from the blackbirders and anything else. He had still had his hopes of gaining a position in a shipyard, somewhere.

And after that—after the whole village had been knocked down and plowed under overnight, so that not even a board of it showed anymore—after that he had been worn out with running, and was no longer sure in which direction to go.

They called him Billy Dove for all the places he had been, but he had always come back. Until he hadn't.

He walked as fast as he could now, nearly running as he crossed over to the Fifth Avenue. He would run—but he knew that the sight of a black man running anywhere would only draw a cop, then a crowd that would take up the chase. At best he would be grabbed, beaten, thrown into jail before he could get out a word of explanation—at best. There were the streetcars and the omnibuses, but as a black man he wasn't allowed on most of the lines, and anyway, they were bulging with more men and gang
b'hoys
just looking for trouble.

At that very moment, one of the yellow omnibuses passed him and a bottle flew out. Just missing him, smashing on the curb—the sour, acid whiskey splattering over his shoes. The sound of raucous laughter trailed back down the avenue, but he kept walking. Head down, hands in his pocket. Turning around the next corner just in case they decided to leap down from the omnibus and come after him, disappointed with the response he had given them—

“One hour,” he repeated to himself.

An hour to the Asylum with its boys in their plain, thick wool pants and shirts. The girls, whirling about like so many dazed butterflies in their long, flowered skirts and padded Chinaman's smocks. The thought of them always made him smile. Running their hoops along the blue-slated, fenced-in back courtyard. Their faces always so grave, so serious.

It wasn't a bad place—the clothes warm, the beds good; the food often better than what he had to give his own children at home. The place was kept heated in the winter, and well-scrubbed all year 'round. The old white ladies who ran it were very serious but kind enough. There was time for games and lessons, and for learning work that they could make a living at, once they were outside.

But the faces of the children were still so serious. They knew
where they were, regardless. Most of them not even really orphans, which only seemed to make it worse. Waiting, and wondering when they might be returned—

An hour, each way. Maybe.
A few minutes' talk and dickering for his wages in between. He debated briefly with himself whether or not to tell the old ladies he was going away.

No—no sense to that.
The grave, erect, grey-haired women who ran the Asylum might take that as some reason to withhold his money, in order to assure his return. You could never tell with white people. Better to claim a sickness in the family, promise to be back before noon. He thought he could look desperate and harried enough for
that.

Two hours, then, there and back—two and a half at the outside. Then all they had to do was pack up and go. Ruth would have it ready, he knew, he could rely on her for such things. Of course even then it would take them at least another half hour, maybe even an hour to make it to the ferry at Fulton, or Desbrosses Street. To get across the wide, slow rivers that surrounded this infernal island.

Lucky to be gone by noon.
If things hadn't blown already.

He gave up, today, the wide detour he liked to take over to the East Side docks, when it was early and he had time.
Not that it was anything but to torture himself with, anyway.
He liked to walk by all the great shipyards there—Smith & Dimon's, and Brown & Bell's; Jacob Westervelt's and William Webb's. Watching them work on the sleek new China clippers, and the steam frigates, on the men-of-war and the cheese-box ironclads that looked too clumsy and low to ever stay afloat at sea. Watching the shipwrights at their lathes, fitting and caulking their timbers—white oak and white pine from upstate; Long Island locust and New England chestnut; live oak and pitch pine from Georgia. Watching the sailmakers and the ropemakers, the carpenters and the ironmongers pounding at their armor and boilers. The whole busy hive of the shipyards, hard at work at their many tasks, until he could stand it no more and had to walk away.

My failing. Beware my failing.

He knew if he went there he would find himself drawn irresistibly to a Water Street tavern, where anything might happen. And he knew that if he walked along the docks with his head down, ruminating over
the fine new ships and his own luck, someone might throw an eel down at his feet. And then he would look up and see the pale, grinning, expectant white faces—

They called him Billy Dove, for all the places he had been, but he always came back. His master had given him the name, as a sign of affection from the days he had first hired him out as a ship's carpenter.

“My Billy Dove,” he liked to say, a little sadly, a little theatrically, when he had been at it for a while.

“One day you will sail off and go far away from me.”

He had shipped to London and to Le Havre, to Barcelona and Marseilles, and all the way through the Aegean to the Golden Horn. But he had always come back to the fat thumb of land where the Cooper and the Ashley met to form the Atlantic Ocean. He had always come back to Charleston.

He saw no reason not to. He was sure of himself, and good at the work he did between voyages, building ships in the small boatyard along the Cooper. He had yet to find a port where a black man might feel more at home. He was even pretty sure that his master would let him buy his own freedom if he wanted—as grateful to him as he was for all the money Billy had made him.

Yet when he thought about it, there was something that repelled him about the notion of spending his money to buy his freedom—to buy his own self. There were many things he had begun to think about. The long lines of men and women, shuffling through the old slave market in their shackles. The empty lot off Meeting Street, where the Emmanuel Church had stood. The heavy stillness of the town itself, behind the Spanish moss that hung everywhere, like smoke, as if to mask some nameless yet immanent menace.

He had begun to notice how everything—everything of any worth—was done by hired-out slaves, or freed Negroes. It was they who shod the horses in the blacksmith shops, and put the wheels back on wagons. They etched the glass in the porches of the great houses along North Market and Wentworth Streets, hammered out the silver and brass in their dining rooms, carved the furniture in the parlors. Or they sewed the white sails, and planed and fitted the white fish skeletons of ships as he did, every day, down in the boatyard.

He knew he could buy his own freedom, and live like the other
freedmen in a little house up on the Neck. That he could save up enough money to buy a watch, a waistcoat, a wife—even black slaves of his own, if he should care to.

But at night he would go and sit under the windows of the prison, and listen to the colored men inside singing their mournful songs. He would walk past the site of Emmanuel Church—before the white mob had burned it, thirty years ago, after Denmark Vesey's rising. Vesey had been a freedman, and a sailor, too, but they had hung him in the prison yard, and burned the church where he had worshiped. Now there was nothing in its place but a jungle of camellias, and yellow magnolias, and azalea blossoms.

He could not trust it. Things grew too fast in this place—the constant growth and rot and regeneration covering everything that had come before. After a time it deceived one about how things were, and how they had always been.

From then on he had looked for anything he could take from the shipyards. A scrap of wood, an awl. A lathe, a hammer. He told the other hired slaves he was taking these things to sell down in Ropemaker's Lane, so he could buy some ribbons for his sweetheart, and they let him do as he pleased so long as they did not get blamed for it by the overseer.

He worked on the boat in any spare moments he could steal, keeping it hidden under a canvas in a far corner of the yard. It was just big enough to carry himself but he built it as he had been taught to build, so that it would be strong and supple enough to breach the open sea. The mast he planed thin from a green upcountry pine, so that it would bend enough to withstand the winds of the hurricane season that was almost upon him. The sails he sewed from burlap bags, and the joints and the timbers he fitted and finished and chinked with tar until he could not fit a cat's whisker between them.