Paradise Alley (60 page)

And afterward, when she had at last gotten him back into the house, he had talked to her for a long time. And she had held on to him, and let him cry in his shame—and could not help but wonder, with all the genuine sorrow she felt for him, if this was what her son would become. If this was what her Milton would come to, crying for his pride at the doorstep of a whore.

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They sat in the cellar of the precinct house, trying to listen for the tumult outside. The children huddled up against the walls, tucked up into themselves, arms wrapped around their knees. The basement was not big enough for them, as small as they were, and their every breath was labored in the close, hot space.

At least they had got here.
That wild child, the white boy with blood on his face, had been good to his word. It had seemed like a game to him, Billy was not sure right to the end but that he wouldn't betray them to the mob. But he had done what he'd said he would, leading them stealthily up back-alley lots, behind fences and new houses. Having them duck down behind privvies and into unfinished foundations. The boy even going on ahead, sticking his head out to make sure it was clear whenever they had to cross a street.

The mob had gone streaming blindly past them, bent on the destruction of the asylum. The children moving fast, the older ones carrying the youngest on their backs. Dropping immediately to the ground when they were told; waiting silently in the newly dug basements, knee-deep in standing water.

At last they had reached Fifty-first Street. There they had to bolt out into the open, and go east for a few queasy blocks to where the Twentieth Precinct house was, in the Third Avenue. A pair of big, grim cops were standing guard out in front, tapping their nightsticks
in their hands, revolvers tucked conspicuously into their belts. Billy told the orphans to run, and they did; he grinned as he saw the cops' jaws drop, watching two hundred and thirty-seven black children sprint toward them. All they could do was to stand aside and fling open the doors, letting them run on into the station house.

They made it,
Billy thought, almost unable to believe it still.
We made it.
What he owed to the children and the Asylum settled now. He was already planning how he would get back downtown, back to his own family. Maybe they could even give him a pistol, though he doubted that.

If nothing else, he would go himself, now, with just his own two hands—

As soon as they were inside, though, his feeling of triumph had evaporated. The precinct house was empty. It was filled with the usual cop odors of tobacco and boiled beef and potatoes, all right. A layer of lye poured ineffectually over the still-pungent jail smells of sweat and vomit, and blood.

But there was not another man left in the whole building. No one at all, save for the two sergeants standing guard out front. The regular complement of Metropolitans already ordered downtown, to fight the riot.

“It's just me an' Sergeant McCluskey left, ma'am,” the other sergeant, a man named Murphy, had told the Misses. “We're tryin' to put on a big show out front, but you know it won't fool 'em forever.”

“Sergeant, we have over two hundred children in our charge. What can we do?” Miss Shotwell had asked him, standing erect and dignified as ever—a slight tremor rising in her voice despite herself.

“The mob's liable to burn the place to the ground, ma'am, they
can't
stay here—”

“They can't
not
stay here,” Billy had spoken up then. He had never talked in such a way to a New York City policeman in his life, and Sergeant Murphy had looked him over coolly, as if deciding whether to knock him to the floor with his nightstick then and there.

“They can't run no more,” he had continued anyway. “They don't have a chance out there.”

He turned toward Miss Shotwell, as if he were addressing his words only to her. She looked at him intently as he spoke, her jaws
pressed together so tightly that she might have been trying to break a walnut in them. Then she nodded slowly.

“Very well, then. They will have to stay.”

Sergeant Murphy had shrugged, helpless.

“We'll do what we can, ma'am—but I can't say what that'll be, the two of us against a mob.”

His tone was sharp, and not a little bitter. They all knew, the officers might be allowed to leave a bunch of hardheaded Negroes and orphans to their fate, but they could never abandon a couple of Yankee ladies.

And just what good would two men be against a mob—against a mob of the size and ferocity Billy had seen clogging the Asylum yard? Even their guns would be no good, would probably just enrage them—

“You'd better get 'em below to the basement, then,” Sergeant Murphy told them, gesturing toward the stairs. “No use in advertisin' 'em, at least.”

They had been in the cellar ever since. Like the basement in every station house, it was one long, open room. There were a few cells in the back, but most of it was an empty floor, where in the winter the most destitute families in the City could come and sleep, if they did not prefer to freeze on the street.

Now it was hotter than an oven and pitch-dark, save for a single candle the Yankee ladies kept lit. The green shades pulled down over the windows. Throughout the night and the morning, they had all tended to the children as best they could—waiting until it was dark, then taking them out to the necessary behind the station house in groups of two or three, hoping that no one would notice them. The sergeants, meanwhile, had brought them down water, and what little bread and meat they could find around the precinct house.

Some of the younger children had begun to whimper from the heat, and their hunger, but most of them remained still. Sitting huddled up against the wall, their small, solemn faces glistening with sweat. Looking up, attentive, when any adult went by.
Nothing like an orphan to understand the gravity of a situation.
Billy noticed Tad, half-hidden under the station-house stairs—the boy who had gone back for his little tin horse, whatever it meant to him. He smiled at him, and Tad smiled back, still fondling his horse.

But the whole time he was thinking,
He had to get back.

It had been over twenty-four hours since he had told Ruth he would return with the money. He had stopped even asking for the time anymore, it seemed so pointless. Wondering what his wife must think had happened to him, if she assumed he was lying dead drunk, in an alley or a barroom somewhere. Or if she thought worse, with the riot sweeping back and forth over the town.

Never mind what they think of me, I know that I am safe. What about them?

He tried to tell himself that at least that lunatic, Johnny Dolan, could not possibly have found them through all this. But he knew that he could not count on any such thing. If the mobs downtown were anything like the one he had seen in the Asylum yard, it would be all the easier for a man to go in where he liked, do what he wanted.

He knew, too, that if Dolan came, the boy, Milton, would fight for his mother as long as there was a breath left in him. And that Dolan would kill him, too, as easily as he might kill a dog. It had been a long time, but Billy knew enough of the man. The way Ruth's face had looked, how he had battered her about, a woman—

He had to get back.

Upstairs, he could hear the precinct telegraph clatter to life from time to time, tapping out dispatches. One of the sergeants would come down every so often to tell them what they knew. In this way they learned that the orphans' asylum had been looted, and hacked apart, and burned to the ground, Sergeant McCluskey conveying it as gently and apologetically as he could.

Miss Murray had made a small, sad groan at the noise, thinking of the wide, handsome house. Miss Shotwell, by contrast, had sounded defiant, a touch of iron in her voice still.

“We have the children out safe, that is what matters!”

Do we?

After they had given the children what breakfast they could, Billy had stepped out into the alleyway behind the precinct house. Looking up and down the narrow alley before he did, then stripping the rough, itchy shirt over his head. He soaked it thoroughly under the pump there, ringing it out until it was no more than a hard, roped knot in his hands, then soaking it again.
His hands.
He flexed them out, under the water now, splashing some up over his face and chest.

Could these same hands have ever done what they once did? Build a boat? And what could they still do now?

He thought of that bottle of peach brandy suddenly, back in the cool closet in the asylum, and laughed to himself.
He should have finished it, after all—
hoping at least that the mob had burned the place to the ground before any of them got to sample some. It occurred to him, too, that there was probably some whiskey, somewhere, around this deserted Paddy station house—but he made himself put the thought out of his mind.

No.
He could not be drunk now. They had to do something about the children. And he had to get back.

He had almost struck out for his home the night before, during the thunderstorm. Telling himself that he could move like a shadow through the City, a dark black man on a dark night, shielded by the rain. He had even thought he might get that strange white boy to help him, tell him some secret way—but sometime between when they had arrived at the station and when they had all been herded down to the basement, the child had slipped away again, as easily as he had come. Off no doubt to some other part of the vast game he had created for himself, in the midst of this riot.

Even without him, though, it would be easy enough. All he had to do was tell the Misses that he was going to the outhouse, then just run off. Padding down the streets through the cool, invigorating rain.

But how could he abandon all these children—to a pair of helpless old white ladies, Old Bert and Yolanda, the police sergeants? He thought, too, about what would happen if he did not make it—bushwacked and disposed of somewhere between the precinct house and Paradise Alley. He would be of no help to anyone then, here or there, it would be as if he had simply disappeared into the night.

He had stayed.
But for how long? How long could they hold out here—or before they were discovered by the mob?

When the morning had passed with still no sign of relief or the riot abating, Miss Murray had gone out to find help. Cleverly letting her hair down first and covering her head with a black shawl—anything to make herself seem more like some Irish widow. They opened the front door to let her out—and Billy could hear the sound of the riot, like breakers against the shore, a regular rising and falling, the sort of
sound he had once found so reassuring. There was the smell of things burning, too—so strong it seemed as if it must be coming from the next block.

Yet he knew that Miss Murray had the easier task, even walking out into all that. Unless she was hit by some stray shot or lunatic, she would be all right—a grey-haired white woman with a shawl over her head. It was the rest of them who would face the worst, and they knew it. Sergeant Murphy had even come downstairs and shown him where the gun case was in the precinct basement.

“If they get in, go ahead an' smash the glass, take what you want. You can give one to the old feller, too—” He had hooked a thumb toward grizzled Old Bert, waiting patiently in the far corner. “Hell, give 'em out to the women an' kiddies, if it comes to that.”

The sergeant paused, sounding almost apologetic, his voice low in the stuffy room.

“I saw what they done to the draft office—”

Yet the mob had not come. And more hours had been lost—hours when he should have been moving, back to his family. Instead he was here, in this trap.

Going from one trap to the next. The Orphans' Asylum to this basement. Back to—home.

It had always been like that. Doing everything he could, taking his life in his hands to get out of one place—only to find it just as bad, if not worse, in the next.
Is that the lot of a black man in this world—or is it me?

No. He had seen something else—the village, up there in what was now the central park. Small and circumscribed and incomplete as it was, ringed in by its enemies. Just two lanes, two churches, a few little houses, but a
place—
a black place, for black people, and whatever whites wanted to join them.