The Blackest Bird (11 page)

J
ohn Colt, in his cell on the Tombs’ death row, his face thickly lathered by his manservant, Dillback, reclines in a fine leather patent chair of his brother’s invention.

Outside, in the prison courtyard, carpenters construct the gallows, what they call the “picture frame.” The basic structure is already complete, the carpenters preparing to test the progress of their work.

John does his very best to ignore the commotion without.

Sam Colt has designed the reclining chair for his youngest brother’s comfort during this, his final confinement. The Colonel has sent the chair over, along with John’s writing desk, his personal library, and custom-made green velvet curtains to give the cell some semblance of warmth and privacy. Lovely fresh flowers stand in a crystal vase on the table.

Eventually John’s annoyance peaks. Dillback is poised over him with a razor. John abruptly pushes him away, leaps to his feet, and hurries to the high iron-barred window.

Standing on his cot in order to be able to see, he peers out, sees the gallows, the workmen in caps and coveralls. He watches as the carpenters attach a heavy sandbag to the thick rope dangling from the
crossarm. A counterweight, tethered at the opposite end, comes running down, jerking the sandbag aloft.

A single image occupies John’s head. He pictures himself in the prison courtyard, alone, underneath the gibbet. He sees himself fitted with the hemp necklace, sees his neck jerked sharply at the end of the rope.

He remembers the words of Samuel Johnson, author of the
Dictionary
of the English Language
, subject of the Boswell biography. “The prospect of being hanged,” wrote Johnson, “focuses a man’s mind wonderfully.”

Young John stares out glassy-eyed for some time before Dillback takes him by the arm and leads him back, firmly insisting the lad down into his chair for the resumption of his toilet.

Colt sits but refuses to recline. Head in hands, his eyes closed, a horrible chill runs through him. His jaw quivers. He hugs himself.

The manservant gently pushes him into a more workable position, refreshes the shaving soap with horn-handled, boar-bristled brush, and begins again to meticulously scrape whiskers from chin, cheek, jowl.

T
he door from the Hall of Justice opens and Tommy Coleman is led in. As young as he is, the accused is already as hardened a cove as there is in local environs. He is aware as all eyes turn on him. He heeds not a single soul.

Following his arrest, his hearing has just ended. Across the Bridge of Sighs he comes, escorted by two prison guards, one of whom tap-tap-taps his keys like castanets against the iron handrails.

The Tombs is arranged in four tiers with catwalks skirting each. Each catwalk is connected to the next by stairs, a bridge spanning the two sides of each gallery. On each bridge a guard sits idly reading or dozing. On the ground floor an iron Franklin stove sits idly, ready to heat the whole; diffuse light filters down from a skylight above the fourth tier.

Next to the cold stove, High Constable Jacob Hays sits. As he is led to his cell, Tommy Coleman, the unrepentant youth, feels Hays’ eyes boring in on him. He chooses not to meet them, staring down at his feet instead.

He is escorted to a cell on the first tier. A key is fitted to the lock by
a harelipped keeper, and the door, reminiscent of that fronting a furnace, replete with small grated window, swings open.

“Step inside, hardbody,” the jailer says, removing the boy’s leg irons and wrist shackles before prodding him inside. “That’s a good young feller.”

The door clangs shut, the lock reengaged. The keeper smirks and is gone. His flat footfalls slap the granite cobblestones of the cell block.

It is late October yet warm, Indian summer. Still the prison floors are chilled and damp. Tommy gives his cell the once-over. Stone floor, stone walls, iron-barred window and door. A wooden slops bucket in the corner reeks of human waste. He knows all too well, from the experience of his brother Edward before him, that this is death row, and no rabbit-sucker was meant to leave this place alive.

He has made peace with his fate. If asked, he would not have said he was innocent. He would have said he was guilty.

But he considers murder too strong a word for what he has done.

What he has done, Tommy Coleman, is kill, and if he had to do it all over, he would have killed again, just the same.

T
he Tombs is an unholy place. One drafty corridor links to another drafty corridor. One drafty cell abuts another drafty cell. The stink and unhealth of the swamp rises from beneath the foundation. The mortar is mildewed from moisture, foul from mold.

In the spring of 1842, the author Charles Dickens, on tour of the United States for a book he was writing,
American Notes for General
Circulation
, requested specifically to visit the prison.

As High Constable Jacob Hays watched from his desk, the great man, the most popular writer in America despite him being an Englishman, was escorted through the Tombs’ corridors, at one point inquiring of his guide, a jailer named Trencher, “Pray, my good man, from where does the name Tombs derive?”

“Well, it’s the cant name,” came the reply from the blue-suited keeper, meaning the argot used by beggars and thieves.

“I know it is,” Hays heard the novelist snap, obviously impatient with those he perceived as simpletons. “But why?”

“S-some suicides happened here, when it was first built,” the beleaguered guard ventured. “I-I expect it come about from that.”

Hays rose from his desk then and came over to where the author stood.

“Forgive me, sir, for the interruption, but this is not from where the sobriquet comes. If you will, the House of Detention became known as the Tombs because a number of years ago the whole of this city was taken over with an Egyptology phenomenon.”

With Trencher looking on gratefully, Hays introduced himself and went on with his account.

A writer from Hoboken, he explained, H. L. Stevens, had set out for Arabia, returning with a manuscript entitled
Stevens’ Travels
, which became a sensation for the publishing house owned by Mr. George Palmer Putnam. The author made drawings to accompany his text, and one of these depicted an ancient mausoleum deep in the desert. The idea of this romantic crypt whetted the public’s collective imagination, the city fathers deciding in a moment of inspiration that the newly planned prison must be a replica of this Saharan vault.

T
HE FIRST MAN
ever executed in the Tombs had been none other than Tommy Coleman’s brother, Edward Coleman. Hays saw him hanged in the prison courtyard on the morning of January 12, 1839, shortly after the building’s completion; his offense, the murder of his wife, a hot corn girl.

Hot corn girls walked the streets, selling their wares out of cedar-wood buckets hanging by a strap from around their necks. Barefoot, known for their striking beauty, dressed in calico dresses and plaid shawls, these young ladies and girls came out of the poorest neighborhoods, especially the Five Points, their song familiar in one version or another to every city dweller:

Sports, picturing themselves blades, trailed the hot corn girls on their routes, vying for their attention, entranced by their cry. Competition among the girls was intense—as it was among their admirers. More than one pitched battle erupted over the favors of a hot corn girl, more than one deadly duel.

Edward Coleman pursued, and eventually conquered, a girl so fetching, so beautiful, that she had come to be known above all others as “the Pretty Hot Corn Girl.”

Years earlier the city gnostics had undertaken to fill in the old freshwater Collect. Employing poor labor and public works, the brilliant ideapots ventured to have the surrounding hills shoveled down west of the pond near Broadway. After draining off the water, they planned to use the earth and bedrock from this excavation as a base foundation.

In addition a large open sewer was dug. Originating at Pearl Street, it ran through Centre Street to Canal and then followed an original streambed to the Hudson River on the west side. It was hoped this sewer would effectively keep dry the newly drained surrounding property, and thus appreciably add to the stock of usable acreage.

Local politicians congratulated themselves and anointed the project a success as multitudes of the rich clamored to build houses on the landfill, and for a time, everything was quite lovely. Hays had one single roundsman seeing to the security of the entire neighborhood, and at the southern end Paradise Square, on a balmy summer evening, was just that—
paradise
.

But then disaster struck. The underground springs that had once fed the Collect proved to be improperly capped, and the landfill had been mixed in large part with common garbage. The lovely new homes began to sink into the soft ground, springing doors and windows, and cracking façades. Water seeped into foundations and filled basements. Noxious vapors and fetid odors began to rise from below, cholera and yellow fever seeping upward.

All at once the rich moved out and the poor moved in, mostly penniless Irish immigrants of the lowest class and freed Negroes. The neighborhood came to be known as the Five Points, renowned as the worst slum in the world, according to what Dickens was saying, surpassing even London’s fabled Seven Dials for its misery.

Tommy Coleman’s brother, Edward Coleman, pictured himself a fierce, rough cove. His was the Forty Thieves, one of the first truly large criminal gangs to roam and terrorize New York’s streets. Under his clever leadership, the gang established themselves in and around Rosanna Peers’ greengrocery on Anthony Street, behind the Tombs, in the heart of the Five Points slum.

Outside Mrs. Peers’ grocery, on racks and in bins, were displayed piles of decaying vegetables. These were touched by no one, especially the tomatoes, which were regarded as poison.

Inside, in the back room, congregated Coleman’s ruffians: thugs, thieves, holdup artists, soaplocks, pickpockets, political sluggers, and no-gooders; one and all, at an instant, armed and ready to follow their leader’s command, to rise and roam, primed to terrorize the local streets, especially after indulging in the fiery liquor served up by Mrs. Peers at a price unequaled by the nearby, more established drinking emporiums, saloons, groggeries, and assorted buckets of blood.

To give him his due, vicious and intense, Edward Coleman’s acknowledged talent was indeed to lead and organize this hoary crew of cutthroats. In a city chockablock with rapscallions and street toughs, his was the first gang with designated leadership and disciplined members. In a weak moment, Old Hays might even have
admitted to guarded admiration for the man’s skills. After all, under Coleman’s tutelage, his gang’s membership in general substantiated over time a more honorable lot than the average jaded politico or two-shilling heeler walking the city’s ward streets.

But as pretty as the Pretty Hot Corn Girl was, marriage to a man the likes of Tommy’s brother proved to be too great a hurdle for her to overcome. Three weeks after the ceremony at Our Lady of Contrition, in a fit of alcohol-fueled rage, Edward Coleman murdered his wife, and for this senseless act was sentenced to pay the big price.

Eager not only to witness the dramatic end of the Forty Thieves gangleader, but also to view the new Tombs penal facility for the first time, so many city dignitaries and men-about-town came out to attend the event, it took the condemned man more than twenty minutes to shake all the hands extended him by well-wishers.

Finally, he took his place beneath the gibbet and the hemp necklace was looped around his neck, the counterweight poised in position.

Outside the prison walls hordes of his base underlings, including his adoring fourteen-year-old brother Tommy, not admitted due to warden’s orders for fear of disruption or worse (jailbreak), cheered and shouted his name.

At a signal the weight dropped, the scientific intent being that the condemned would be jerked by the neck into the air, what had come to be known as “the jerk to Jesus,” there to dangle unto death.

But on this morning, in front of Old Hays’ eyes, the rope snapped with a frightening twang.

Loud voices rose from the crowd, “Will of God! Will of God!” as Edward Coleman, smiling broadly, stood stock-still, unfazed. The frayed rope still looped about his neck, he winked at Hays.

Vocal supporters gruffly began to shout, “The Almighty has intervened!” demanding that he be spared.

Refusing to hear anything of it, Monmouth Hart, warden of the Tombs and one of the most ardent admirers and customers of the murdered Pretty Hot Corn Girl, interceded, and with Hays standing
at the gibbet edge watching, calmly instructed the hangman to restring the murderer and try again.

This time all went as planned to hip-hip-hoorays and loud hoorahs from the solid citizenry in attendance, Edward Coleman’s body swinging from the crossbeam in front of Old Hays for a full fifteen minutes before Coroner Archer came forth and gave the sign for it to be cut down.