The
New York City draft riot was the worst civic disturbance America
has ever experienced. Set off by the first military draft in our
history, it raged up and down the length of Manhattan for five,
terrifying days in July, 1863. Before it was over, it had come
close to destroying the city, causing untold millions in property
damage and leaving at least 119 people dead.
The
riot is the natural climax to my novel, for it was incited mostly
by Irish-Americans, and suppressed by the same, and Paradise
Alley is above all the story of the Irish in America—of
the first, great wave of emigration that came in the wake of the
potato famine.
The
famine has become a cliché now, something that sounds almost
quaint to our ears, in the way that many terrible things do with
the passing of enough time. But it was in fact a very real, human
catastrophe, one that killed more than a million-and-a-half people,
and fractured Irish society forever. In the late 1840s, Ireland’s
roads were filled with human scarecrows, searching desperately,
anywhere, for food; many of them lying down to die right by the
roadside, their mouths green from eating grass.
Another
million—the lucky ones—managed to emigrate. "Lucky"
is a qualified term here, for emigration meant trusting your fate
to cut-rate "coffin ships," that were long on cholera
and typhus, and short on food, water, competent crews, and seaworthy
timbers. Almost all who managed to make it across the Atlantic
were then flung headfirst into a world that was even more turbulent,
terrifying, and downright confusing. That is, the New York of
the nineteenth century.
New
York was "the Empire City of the West," a vibrant, bustling
place, well on its way to becoming the busiest port in the world—bursting
with commerce, invention, money. It was, at the same time,
an almost unbelievably filthy, crowded, malodorous place. The
city’s sewers were so clogged that, when it rained, the gutters
were filled with butcher’s offal, and it was not uncommon
to see little boys playing in pools of blood. Tens of thousands
of its citizens worked as prostitutes, or "nightwalkers,"
or were members of the city’s many street gangs, the Plug
Uglies and the Dead Rabbits, and the Whyos, who were as exotically
turned out and as casually violent as the cast of Clockwork
Orange.
Or,
to let Herbert Willis Robinson, a hack journalist who is one of
the narrators of Paradise Alley tell it:
"This
is the way we live now, in the City of Smash and Burn, Sulphur
and Blood. Nearly one million souls, packed down into the tail
end of Manhattan island. Some few thousand more scattered among
the villages of Haarlem and Bloomingdale, the rambling shantytowns
around the central park they have finally laid out above Fifty-ninth
Street. A city where herds of pigs still run loose in the streets.
Where stagecoach drivers race and whip each other along the avenues,
and steam ferries race and collide and explode in the harbor.
The population double what it was twenty years ago, and double
again what it was twenty years before that. And every year, the
City getting denser, louder, filthier; more noisome, more impossible
to traverse.
"Presiding
over it all is our upstanding Republican mayor, fuming regularly
and ineffectually over each iniquity like some Italian volcano.
Just beneath him sit our unspeakable aldermen and councilmen,
better known as The Forty Thieves. Would that it were so. In fact,
there are eighty-two. (Only New York would take it upon itself
to support a legislature of bicameral crooks.)
"And
beneath them a whole vast, imponderable hive of crooked street
commissioners and demagogues, dead-horse contractors and confidence
men, hoisters and divers, shoulder-hitters and fancy men, wardheelers
and kirkbuzzers and harlots. And all of them with a profit motive,
all of them with an angle and a game, and an eye on the main chance.
So many with their hands out, so much corruption that even if
you wanted to clean it all out you could never do it, you could
never even get past the first, most inconsequential layers of
dirt.
"In
short, it is a great town in which to be a newspaperman."
By
the time of the Civil War, the disparities of wealth in the city
have grown enormous. The war provides those who are quick, and
cunning, and unscrupulous enough the chance to grow phenomenally
wealthy—"the sybarites of shoddy" as they are called,
selling uniforms that fall apart in the rain, boots that fall
apart in the mud, muskets that don’t fire. At the same time,
the people who will actually do most of the fighting—the
poor and middle-class, the new immigrants—find themselves
worse off than ever. Going to war means leaving one’s family
to the city’s vastly inadequate relief system; inflation
sends the cost of every necessity—meat, bread, coffee, salt,
milk, coal, shelter—soaring beyond their reach.
When
a mandatory draft is instituted, along with a provision that allows
anyone to buy a "substitute" for three hundred dollars,
New York reaches a boiling point. The price is easily affordable
for a rich man—yet, some two years wages for most of the
city’s workingmen. When the first names are pulled from the
draft box, New York’s Irish strike out in a blind and merciless
paroxysm of violence, attacking the police, and the homes of wealthy
Republicans and abolitionists. Worst of all, though, they take
out their rage upon the city’s small, African-American population,
blaming them for the war and committing vicious and shameless
atrocities against any black man—or woman, or child—they
can find.
Caught
in this maelstrom is Ruth, the main heroine of the novel. Living
in a slum down by Paradise Alley, on the Lower East Side near
the river, she is an Irish woman, married to a black man named
Billy Dove. On the eve of the riot, as she senses the tension
soaring in the city all around her. She has also learned that
her psychotic, common-law former husband, a criminal and boxer
known as Dangerous Johnny Dolan, has returned to the city. It
was Dolan who enabled her to escape from Ireland, but after he
committed a particularly ghastly crime in New York, she managed
to have him shanghaied to California.
Now,
years later, he is back, looking to wreak his revenge upon her,
and to recover his "cabinet of wonders"— a collection
of trinkets that Dolan brought over from Ireland and is convinced
is worth a fortune. Ruth has never managed to throw it away, and
now she waits in dread for Johnny, or the riot, to find her:
"He
is coming
"Ruth leaned out the door as far as she dared, peering down
Paradise Alley to the west and the south. Past the other narrow
brick and wood houses along Cherry Street, leaning against each
other for support. The gray mounds of ashes and bones, oyster
shells and cabbage leaves and dead cats, growing higher every
day since the street cleaners had gone out on strike.
"Fire
bells were already ringing off in the Sixth Ward, somewhere near
the Five Points. The air thick with dust and ash and dried horse
droppings, the sulfurous emissions of the gas works along the
river, and the rendering plants and the hide-curing plants. It
was not yet six in the morning but she could feel the thin linen
of her dress sticking to the soft of her back.
"The
good Lord, in all His Mercy, must be readyin’ us for Hell—'
"She
searched the horizon for any sign of relief. Their weather came
from the west, the black, fecund clouds riding in over the Hudson.
That was how she expected him to come, too—fierce and implacable
as a summer storm. His rage breaking over them all.
"He
is coming—
"But there was no storm just yet. The sky was still a dull,
jaundiced color, the blue tattered and wearing away at the edges.
She ventured a step out into the street, looking hard, all the
way downtown—past the myriad church steeples and the block-shaped
warehouses, the dense thicket of masts around lower Manhattan.
"There
was nothing out of the ordinary. Just the usual, shapeless forms
lying motionless in the doorways. A ragged child with a stick,
a few dogs. A fruit peddler with his bright yellow barrow. His
wares, scavenged from the barges over on the West Side, already
pungent and overripe.
"Nothing
coming. But then, it wasn’t likely he would come from the
west anyway—
"With
a muted cry she swung around, then ducked back into her house—bolting
the door behind her while she fought for breath. The idea that
he could have been coming up behind her the whole time. She remembered
how quickly he could move. She could feel his hands on her, could
see the yellow dog’s bile rising in his eyes. That merciless
anger, concentrated solely upon her—
"He
is coming
"He
had come—all the way back from California. It was a fearsome,
unimaginable distance. But then, what was that to a man who had
gone as far as he had already? A friend of Tom’s, a stevedore,
had seen him on the docks. Coming down the gangplank with that
peculiar, scuttling, crablike walk of his, fierce and singleminded
as ever. Moving fast, much faster than you thought at first, so
that Tom’s friend had quickly lost him in the crowd waiting
by the foot of the gangplank. Already disappeared off into the
vastness of the City—
"Which
meant—what? The mercy of a few days? While he found himself
a room in the sailors’ houses along Water Street, began to
work his way relentlessly through the bars and blind pigs, sniffing
out any news. Sniffing out them.
"Or
maybe not even that. Maybe he had hit it right off—had found,
in the first public house he tried, a garrulous drunk who would
tell him, for the price of a camphor-soaked whiskey, where he
might find a certain mixed-race couple, living down along Paradise
Alley—
"No.
Ruth calmed herself by sheer force of will. Picking up a broom,
she made her hands distract her. Sweeping her way scrupulously
around the hearth, under the wobbly-legged table even though she
knew there was no need, they would never live here again after
this morning.
"It
wasn’t likely that he could be so lucky. He had never had
much luck, after all—not even with herself—and his own
face would work against him. He couldn’t go out too bold.
They would remember him still, after what had happened with Old
Man Noe. Men would remember him, would remember that, and keep
their distance. Maybe even turn him, for the reward—
"They
still had time. A little, anyway. She and Billy had talked it
out, deep into the night. Time enough for Billy to go up to his
job at the Colored Orphans’ Asylum on the Fifth Avenue today,
and collect his back wages. Then they would have something to
start on, at least, to see them through up to Boston, or Canada.
"Why
aren’t we in Canada already? We should be there—
"She
swept faster, in her anger and frustration, kicking up the fine,
black grit that crept inexorably through the windows and over
the transom, covering the whole City over, everyday. They had
talked about leaving, all these years, but somehow they had never
actually gone. They told themselves there would be risks if they
ran, perhaps even worse risks. A white woman and a black man,
with their five mixed-race children, moving through one small
town after another, with no real money to sustain them. They would
be leaving tracks for him like they were written in the sky—
"So
where were they to run now?
"Ruth
forced the question from her mind. It didn’t matter now,
they had no choice. All it required was a few more hours of grace,
then they would be gone. Over to Hoboken on the Chambers Street
Ferry, then a schooner up to Halifax, or Montreal. Or even if
they didn’t have enough money for that, they could just set
out at random, across the countryside, head west or north—
"There
was a low, rumbling sound. She risked looking out a window, wanting
to see if it were storming after all. But the sound went on and
on—one continuous, unending roll of noise—and she realized
it must be something manmade. The sound of hundreds, even thousands
of feet, and voices, moving relentlessly, indivisibly uptown.
"Something
had been brewing in the City all weekend, she knew. There were
little things she had picked up, when she poked her head out to
throw the washing water in the gutter. The way women usually learned
the news in this town. Something in the snatches of talk from
the men in their taverns, and the brayings of drunks on streetcorners.
Something in the agitation of horses, the thinning of traffic,
the urgency of a policeman’s voice. In the unhappy silence
of the other women on the block like her—listening and waiting
"The
men were unhappy, and when men were unhappy no one could rest
easy. Something about the draft, but whatever it was, she knew
it would be bad for people like them. Maybe, at least, it would
delay him—
"A
couple hours grace, that’s all we need. Surely that is possible.
"She
tried to think, to make sure there was nothing she had forgotten.
Her memory had never been very good since her time with Johnny
Dolan. She would leave the beans, or the corn bread over the fire
until they burned. She would forget to run an errand, to get something
important, unless she carefully thought out everything on her
way to work in the morning, or while trying to fall asleep in
her bed at night. Sometimes she thought he had knocked it out
of her, beaten it right out of her brains—
"What
needed to be done, then? She forced herself to concentrate. Everything
else was already tied up and waiting by the back door—their
bolt hole—where it could be easily tossed into the barrow
just outside.
"There
was little enough. Her kitchen wares, the two other dresses she
owned, and the ribbons she wore in her hair on special days. Billy’s
one suit, and his shirts and his overalls. His seaman’s kit,
and his tools, still as meticulously wrapped and oiled as when
he had first purchased them. The framed daguerreotype she had
finally persuaded Billy to have made of the whole family. All
of them in their best clothes, standing solemnly around Billy
where he sat in a broad, cushioned chair. A little stand in the
picture parlor tucked carefully behind his close-cropped hair
to make sure he held his head steady, the rest of them clustered
all around him in various, shimmering shades of light. Hers the
only fully white face, looking bleak and blanched, nearly invisible
next to the rest of them.
"That
was all. Everything they had to show for thirteen years in this
cramped little house. All that remained was that thing. His magic
box. She paused over it with her broom in hand, as if considering
whether to just sweep the whole thing out the door, out of their
lives. The strange pile of gewgaws and odds and ends that Johnny
Dolan had put their immortal souls in danger in order to have.
"It
lay in a far corner of the front room now, like some malevolent
old dog. She threw over the black cloth that still covered it.
Underneath lay the whole collection of shiny odds and ends that
had fascinated him so, and that she had not been able to so much
as look at since he had gone. The broken sword and the blackamoor’s
ear, the miniature engine and the giant’s eye and the pictures
of lovers, and a thousand other wonders. All of them once glued
and arranged so perfectly within the box—now mostly jumbled
together in a heap at the bottom.
"Yet
still it shone. Deep down, through the depths of all that junk,
still glinted dozens of tiny mirrors. In the yellow morning light,
she caught a dusty, broken reflection of her own face. Squinting—peering
ignorantly back through all the wonders, looking impossibly old
and distorted.
"She
threw the cover back down over the box and returned to her sweeping.
She wasn’t sure why she had never got rid of it, sold it
off long ago to the street sweepers for whatever pennies it would
bring. Was it to remind herself of her sin—of all her sins?
"Or
was it the last hold Johnny Dolan still had on her? Some lingering
hope that if she kept it, the box might appease him even after
all they had done to him.
"If
he returned. When he returned—
"She
thought she would leave it. It might at least slow him down for
a few more hours while he brooded, and wondered over it like he
always used to. Maybe even make him forget about them altogether.
"Or
would it simply be another track for him to follow?
"She
had to stop then—crouching down, nearly doubled over in her
own front room. To think of him again.
"Of
course he would come back Of course he would, after the trick
we played him—
He
is coming."
© Copyright HarperCollins 2002
