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- Herausgeber: Myriad Editions
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
'A riveting love story across the challenges of race and poverty… Huf's delicate blend of passion and compassion is compelling, impressive and never sentimental.' —Andrea StuartA forbidden relationship. A love affair forged in secrecy. A couple facing betrayal at every turn...Henry O'Toole sails to America in 1848 to escape poverty and famine in Ireland, only to find anti-Irish prejudice awaiting him. Determined never to starve again, he changes his surname to Taylor and heads south to Virginia, seeking work as a travelling blacksmith on the prosperous plantations.Sarah is a slave. Torn from her family and sold to Jubilee Plantation, she must navigate the hierarchy of her fellow slaves, the whims of her white masters, and now the attentions of the mysterious blacksmith.Fellow slave Maple oversees the big house with bitterness and bile, and knows that a white man's attention spells trouble. Given to her half-sister as a wedding present by their white father, she is set on being reunited with her husband and daughter, at any cost.Based on the true story of the author's great-great-grandparents, and brilliantly reimagined, this is an epic tale of love and courage, desperation and determination.
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Advance praise forA More Perfect Union
‘Amidst hunger, deprivation and the whimsical cruelties of slavery, two people dare to steal happiness. This graceful, assured debut novel creates an unusual slave narrative that starts in potato-famine Ireland and deftly weaves a touching American love story. The deceptively easy prose bristles with danger and possibility and I loved the at once thrilling and gentle pace of the novel. Tammye Huf is a wonderful storyteller.’
– Marina Salandy-Brown
‘A riveting love story across the challenges of race and poverty… Huf’s delicate blend of passion and compassion is compelling, impressive and never sentimental.’
– Andrea Stuart
‘A gripping and moving tale of romance. Tammye Huf shows meticulous care for details of setting and nuances of character and motive that make remarkable events deeply plausible.’
– Barbara Lalla
‘A resonant and topical love story, intricately plotted and compellingly told, and a visceral exploration of what it means to be deprived of one’s freedom. The stories of Henry, an Irish immigrant escaping the Great Famine, and Sarah, who is sold into slavery on a southern plantation, poignantly illustrate the dehumanising experience of being deprived of choice, in small ways as well as large, on a daily basis.’
– Umi Sinha
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For my family
Contents
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July 1848
Chapter 1
Henry
Two dead men walking up the road. That’s what we look like, Da and me trudging out to the work gang in rags and tatters. Da hitches his threadbare trousers up. With nothing left to cling to, they’ve taken to sliding down every few steps. The string I use to tie mine still holds.
The deep pit we pass is one of ours. We dig ditches one week that we fill in the next, or build roads to nowhere, earning just enough to keep us alive. The English answer to the Irish starving.
Da and me walk three miles over dirt roads running through green hills, but when we get to the relief works station there’s a grumbling crowd of surly men.
The relief works man, over from England, holds out his hands for quiet, but no one settles down, so he shouts over the noise, ‘In light of the fact that your harvest will be ready in a matter of weeks, the decision has been taken to suspend the relief works programme. You should all go home and wait for the harvest.’
‘Those bastards don’t know what they’re doing,’ Da says.
‘You can’t cut off the work gangs before the harvest comes in,’ a man behind me says. ‘People’ve still got to eat.’
I grunt in agreement.
‘That’s the English for you,’ Paddy Murphy says, from beside Da. ‘They’re sending us home to watch plants grow.’4
The grumbles turn into shouts as the landlord’s bailiff comes riding up.
He trots his horse right into the middle of the group and the men quiet down. ‘I need five men for a job.’
He’s barely got the words out before I say, ‘I’ll do it.’
It takes less than five seconds for him to get workers together. From the fifty men clamouring to do whatever it is he needs done, he picks Paddy, Killian, Liam, Seamus and me.
Da tugs at my arm. ‘Let me go for you, Henry. You don’t know what he wants you to do.’ A heavy tiredness pulls at him, bending his back and pitching his body to the right where he struggles to hold his shovel. Five years ago, when he broke his arm, I watched him split kindling one handed with a single swing.
‘No, Da,’ I tell him. ‘You go on home.’
‘Aye,’ says Paddy beside us. ‘You’ll want to make a start with your waiting for the harvest.’
The five of us follow the bailiff to the Doyle’s place, and I get a prickling in my gut. John Doyle died in the spring leaving Mary to struggle alone with her four little ones.
From a burlap sack tied to the back of his saddle, the bailiff takes out poles and clubs and hands them to us.
‘You can’t mean for us to be tumbling Mary’s home,’ I say.
‘She’s not paid her rent,’ he says. ‘She’s been warned.’
‘Don’t the landlords have enough?’ Paddy says. ‘They have to go after widows and orphans now too?’ He throws his club in the dirt, his flaming red hair matching his fiery temperament.
‘They’re not orphans, they have their mother,’ the bailiff says. ‘Now, either you tumble it, or I’ll get five others.’
Tumbling is what the landlords do to us when we can’t pay the rent. Our houses are knocked together into a tumbled heap, stone on stone, so that the tenants can’t sneak back in again once they’re out. It’s happening more and more, so that 5now there’re hundreds of tumbled homes sprinkled around the countryside.
All five of us are shuffling our feet and feeling wrong about it. But if we don’t do it, it won’t save her. He’ll have another eviction gang here in the time it takes to ride out and come back again. This hut is coming down today, no mistake. We might as well get the money for it.
‘Are they still in there?’ I ask.
‘Of course they’re in there, Henry. Where else are they going to be?’ says Paddy. He turns to the bailiff. ‘The Devil take you,’ he says, but he picks up his club. ‘We’ll not knock it down on their heads.’
‘So, get them out,’ the bailiff says.
None of us moves to do it.
He scowls down at the five of us from on top of his horse’s back. ‘The troublemaker can do it,’ he says.
‘Me?’ Paddy blusters, gesticulating with his arms. ‘What do I tell her then? That even though she’s a poor, starving widow with four children to look after, her landlord isn’t rich enough yet and he needs to boot her out of her little hut here so he can sleep at night? Is that what you want me to go in there and say?’ Paddy throws his club back into the dirt.
The bailiff runs his hand over his face. We can all see he’s regretting having chosen Paddy to come along. ‘The black-haired troublemaker can do it. And if you don’t stop throwing your club about, you’re off this gang and they’ll do the job without you.’
Killian, Liam and Seamus all have black hair too, but I’m the only other one who spoke out, which would make me the black-haired troublemaker.
‘Off you go then, Henry,’ Paddy says to me. ‘You’ll think of something to say.’
Mary’s hut is rocks and dirt walls. There’re no windows and I have to duck to get through the door. Inside it’s dark and damp and there’s a lingering scent of piss and shit from 6poor John who couldn’t get up in the end to relieve himself. I guess there’s only so much you can scrub out of a dirt floor.
Huddled in a pile of rags on the ground, Mary sits with her four children. The hunger’s hit her bad. Her arms are bone-thin and her skin hangs about her face with no padding to fill it out.
‘There’s an eviction gang here, Mary.’
She doesn’t move or even look at me. She just stares at the wall of her hut.
‘You have to go now.’
She doesn’t seem to recognise me or hear what I’m saying.
‘The bailiff’s here and everything.’
She blinks a few times and lays her hand on her wee one’s head. ‘No,’ she says to the wall.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘But you haven’t paid your rent. They won’t let you stay.’
She sighs and settles further into the cluster of rags that serves as their bed. ‘No.’
The bailiff yells into the squat doorway, ‘Get them out, or we’ll tumble it on their heads.’
I hold out my hand to her. ‘Come on, Mary. You don’t want your children getting hurt.’
‘What difference does it make if we die in here today, or out there in two weeks?’ she says. ‘You know we won’t survive with John gone and no place to live.’
‘We look after each other here,’ I say. ‘You know that. You’ll be alright.’
I’m lying to a widow so I can tumble her home. This is what Da wanted to spare me. There was a time when we used to help each other. Now we just survive.
‘You can stay with us,’ I say, surprising myself.
We don’t have room for them, or food for them, and ever since Dermot and Emily died Ma’s been in a bad way. I’ve no idea how she’ll react when I show up with these five. I hold out my hand to her again, and she takes it.7
We all come out and I breathe in deeply, clearing my nose of the stench of her hut. The air has a pre-harvest crispness to it that tastes cool and sweet against my tongue.
The bailiff’s off his horse, standing back to one side of the hut, and Mary and her children stand a ways off to the other side and watch us hack at her home. We wedge poles in the crevices between the stones, shifting and pushing until the walls crumble and the roof falls in.
Then the five of us pocket our wages. When the paying’s done, I wave Mary and her children over to me.
‘Let’s go then,’ I say.
‘What are you doing with them?’ the bailiff asks.
‘I’m taking them home with me.’ My stomach gives a little flip worrying about Ma.
‘You can’t do that,’ he says. ‘They’ve been evicted.’
Liam, Seamus and Killian slip away, but Paddy steps up to the bailiff waving his freckled arms. ‘Well, it’s nought to do with you, is it?’ he says. ‘You’ve already knocked their home to bits. Your work here is done.’
‘The law says you can’t take them in,’ the bailiff says. ‘If you do, you’ll get evicted too. They have to get clear off Lord Edwards’s land.’
‘All of it?’ exclaims Paddy. ‘That greedy English bastard owns the whole damn hill. And the next.’
‘It’s the law.’
‘English law.’
‘You watch your mouth there, laddie.’
‘You watch my arse.’ Paddy pulls his breeches down and we all get a good look at his scrawny white backside as he dashes away.
I tell Mary and her children to come on and we trudge off.
‘It’s not worth it,’ the bailiff calls after me. ‘It’ll be your place next.’
I can’t take them home. Instead, I take them to Father Michael. I don’t know what he’ll do with them, but at least 8they can stay in the church while he thinks it through. Nobody’ll tumble a church.
Father Michael used to be round and jolly. Now he’s saggy and solemn. He comes out to meet us in the churchyard like he’s walking in a funeral procession. I guess the last few years have put him in the habit.
‘The bailiff says I can’t take them to mine, so I brought them to you,’ I tell him.
He nods. He knows what I’ve been a part of, but I don’t think he judges me for it. He just looks sad and broken. ‘I’ll try to find a place for them at the poor house,’ he says.
Mary looks stricken. ‘They’ll take my children.’
The poor house separates the men and the women and the children. I’m ashamed to look at her. For the thousandth time, I curse the English landlords for taking our healthy crops, our barley, wheat and rye, and shipping them away to sell. Lining their pockets while we starve. And I curse the rot that’s come like a plague out of the Old Testament to blacken our potatoes and famine us. I stop just short of cursing God for letting it happen.
Father Michael says our blessings are coming, and that it’s easier for a camel to get through a needle than for a rich man to get to Heaven. But no matter how much Bible he throws at us, I want to be rich. I want a warm house with glass in the windows, and a door with a knocker on it. And I want to eat my fill every day and never again feel this gnawing in my belly. People say it’s the disease and the hunger that’s killing us, but I say it’s the being poor.
Father Michael leads Mary and her children into the church.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say to her retreating back.
When I walk home through the valley where whirling fog clings to the land, I pass eight more tumbled homes scattered among the grasses and the heather. I knew every single tenant. If this keeps up, none of us will be left.9
Coming up the path to our hut, I pass our potato patch, mercifully full of green stalks and leaves. Beth’s perched on the grey rock wall waiting for me.
‘What’s for supper?’ I ask.
‘Roast lamb,’ she says with a smile.
It’s a game we play. The Indian corn they shipped in for us to buy with our work-gang wages is bland and hard as rocks, no matter how long you boil it. Beth and I pretend we’re eating lamb or beef or some other impossible food. We tell each other our stomachs ache from overstuffing. It’s childish, for sure, but somehow it helps.
We eat our gruel around the rough plank table Da made years ago. Then we push the table aside and Ma, Da, me, Maggie and Beth all stretch out on the dirt floor waiting for sleep and morning.
We smell it when we wake. The stench of rot has climbed up out of the ground overnight and shoved its unwelcome way into our hut. Da looks at me. There’s a panic in his eyes that shoots right through me. We hurry outside, already knowing. The smell in the air is worse as we rush, panting, to the rim of our plot, sucking in stinking lungfuls.
Every leaf that was lush and green yesterday is spotted brown. Every stalk, wilting and blackening.
I sink to the ground and dig. Scratching at the dark soil, my thumb plunges into a potato, easily breaking through the skin to the sludge inside, so rotten it’s liquid. The foul stench catches in my nose making me gag. I pull my thumb back, wiping it clean in the dirt. Da is grey as the fog. The pain clenching my gut is more than hunger. It’s fear for the days and months to come. It’s knowing we have to leave, or we’ll all be starved dead by winter’s end.10
October 1848
Chapter 2
Sarah
Most of the afternoon, the slaver’s got us in the yard for showing. Singing, dancing, playing cards. Mister Maddox is as sly as they come. He’s got the white folks thinking we’re the cheerfullest bunch of slaves money can buy. Even shaved a man bald to hide his grey hair and sell him for younger.
When it’s time for the auction, he chains us up again and shuts us in a room behind the Planter’s Hotel, pulling us out one by one. The woman with the missing tooth. The tall man with the wide chest. The man with the notch in his ear. The man that tried to run. The woman with the long neck. Isaac.
The chain round my ankles digs at where my copper skin’s been rubbed clean away, but that ain’t nothing to the fear snaking in the pit of my belly. When the slaver tells me to get up, I don’t want to move, but I do. I seen him do things on the march from Charlottesville to Fredericksburg, chained to the man in front of me and the woman behind, so I jump up soon as he calls my name. A jet-black boy won’t look me in the face as he unhooks me from an iron ring in the floor. I take small shuffling steps ’cause of the ankle shackles, but I take them quick ’cause I see the look the slaver’s giving me.
Mister Maddox is a lizard of a man, all waxy skin and beady eyes. The few greasy hairs he’s got growing out the top of his head look like pig whiskers. I flinch when he reaches 14for me. He unfastens my chains and the shackles slip from my wrists and my bleeding ankles.
He sets me beside the hotel wall, and I grab on to the wood siding. The white paint flakes off as I worry the slats with my fingers. It’s almost my turn on the block. The sticky heat of summer’s eased off and it’ll be a spell before the biting cold of winter comes. There’s not one speck of white in the whole blue sky. From behind yellow-green leaves I can hear a dove coo.
I shut my eyes and breathe out long and slow.
Above the noise of the crowd, the voice of the auctioneer calls out. ‘I have seven hundred. Do I hear seven-fifty for this fine specimen? Strong as an ox and docile as a lamb.’
It’s Isaac he’s talking about, up there on the block. My brother. The auctioneer tells him to take off his shirt and show the people his muscles. I hate the auction man. I hate Mister Maddox. I hate them all. The bidding gets up to nine hundred dollars.
I don’t notice how I’m humming till Mister Maddox says, ‘Sing something cheerful or shut the hell up.’
It’s a Jesus-help-me church song I’m humming that Momma sometimes sings. I sink down to the ground, pull my legs up to my chest and lay my head on my knees. Momma. She’s got to be crawling out of her skin with worrying about us. Before this happened, she’d have sworn up and down that Master’d never sell us. Guess you never know.
The auctioneer shouts out, ‘Sold!’ and I look up.
Mister Maddox’s got hold of Isaac by the arm. He pulls him down from the auction block and hands him over to a red-faced fat man with three chins. Isaac hangs his head as the fat man slips a rope round his neck.
‘Isaac,’ I call out. His eyes snap over to me. I touch the wooden carving I wear on a string round my neck and Isaac nods at me. He says my name and something else I can’t make out.15
‘Come on, boy. Don’t dawdle. I didn’t buy you to dawdle.’ The fat man tugs on the rope and Isaac stumbles after, led away like an old cow.
My whole chest squeezes in tight. I want to scream out, but I know better than that. The tears creep down my cheeks and I rock back and forth, my arms hugging at my knees. Mister Maddox reaches down and jerks me to my feet.
‘Wipe your face and perk up, girl. I won’t have you driving down your price looking like that.’
My stomach knots and my hands tremble, but I do like he says. The tears come back again.
‘Look here,’ he says, quiet in my ear. ‘If you want to stay a house slave, you better cut out all that crying. No one wants to hear you blubbering all day long.’
I nod and he waits for me to stop, but I can’t.
Nostrils flaring, he says, ‘You’re going to cost me money, girl. I’ll be damned if I let you get yourself sold as a field slave.’
I cringe from him, but I also wipe my face and stretch my mouth to a smile, trying to look like I won’t be no trouble to nobody. I don’t know what he paid for me, but I know Master George wouldn’t let me go for no field slave price. And I know field slave work would break me in two.
I can tell my smile don’t sit right ’cause Mister Maddox looks me up and down, scratching his chin-stubble and frowning. He pulls at my clothes and pushes at my breasts till he’s got me just about popping out of the top of my dress. I want to slap his hands away. Instead, I blink back my tears before they spill out and he sees them. He looks me over again and nods, and then he pulls me to the block and orders me up.
The auction block is as high as a table with just one step for climbing up. I grip the rough edges with both hands to keep me steady as I struggle on.
Beside me, the auctioneer points with his cane, calling me a prime house girl. He makes me turn in a circle while he boasts about how quick I clean, and how I never been a 16day sick, which is a bold-faced lie. He don’t say a thing about knowing the healing herbs. Guess white folks don’t care about that. Guess quick-cleaning-slave-who-don’t-get-sick is about all they need to hear.
Then they start in with the money.
There’s near on twenty men crowded round, but only four of them that’s bidding. Right in front of me stands a raggedy man with caterpillar eyebrows who looks like the liquor got hold of him. He’s staring at what Mister Maddox done to my breasts. He don’t put his eyes nowhere but there, and I’m some kind of glad he ain’t bidding. It gets up to seven hundred and they start to slowing down. Then the raggedy man says seven hundred and ten and my heart takes a panic jump right up to my throat. I start praying, not him, Lord, not him. Someone else bids and it all starts up again, but this time that man is hollering out prices with the rest of them. Ain’t no secret what he’s after me for.
A dark-haired woman in a fancy blue dress comes out of a dry goods store across the street and walks right on over to the crowd of men. She links arms with a man in a brown suit who’s bidding off to the right of the auction block I’m perched on.
‘A man like that shouldn’t be allowed to keep slaves,’ she mutters when the raggedy man outbids him again. ‘It’s shameful.’ She wrinkles up her high forehead and stares at me with small, close eyes.
The auction’s up to seven hundred and ninety.
‘I have seven-ninety. Do I hear eight hundred?’ The auctioneer looks round the crowd of men, but not a one speaks up. ‘Going once to the man in the red vest.’
I look over, and it’s the raggedy man he means. My whole body goes to ice. I’ve seen his kind. No-account men who can barely afford to feed their slaves, working them half to death in the day and never letting them alone in the night.
‘Going twice,’ the auctioneer shouts. ‘Last chance, gentlemen.’17
Some of the men shake their heads. The auctioneer takes off his hat and fans himself with it.
I clasp my hands and get to praying something fierce, just begging God not to let that man take me.
‘Sold.’
I can’t hardly breathe.
Mister Maddox pulls me down and I trip over my own feet, smashing my knees and elbows on the ground. Behind me, the men laugh. I bite the inside of my mouth to keep from howling and pick myself up. As Mister Maddox leads me off to the side, I tremble so hard I have to fist my hands in my skirts.
The raggedy man comes up to take me, but Mister Maddox keeps hold of my arm.
‘She’s yours when you’ve paid for her.’
My new master looks me over and licks his lips. He will own my days and my nights, and every drop of blood and every bead of sweat. The eagerness I see in him to explore what all that could mean for the two of us terrifies me.
An official man with a money pouch steps up to take the payment.
‘I got six hundred and fifty with me now,’ my new master says to the money pouch man. ‘I’ll get you the rest next week.’
‘Hell and tarnation, Jeb, you know that’s not how this works,’ the man says. ‘This is the third time you’ve bid for a slave you can’t afford to buy.’
Jeb looks at my breasts and sets his jaw. ‘I can afford her,’ he says. ‘You let me take her back home tonight and I’ll have the money to you tomorrow.’
The official man spits on the ground between them. ‘I’m not fool enough to let you take a slave you haven’t paid for.’ Tucking the money pouch into his vest, he steps back through the auction crowd to the brown-suit man, whose arm’s still linked with the blue-dress woman. They talk a spell and then he leads them to where Mister Maddox has me by the arm.18
‘This gentleman had the last bid at seven hundred and eighty,’ the official tells the slaver. ‘Since Jeb can’t pay, that’s the price you get.’
Mister Maddox nods, throwing evil looks at Jeb.
The woman lowers her eyebrows, making her forehead even higher and her eyes even smaller. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ she says.
Jeb’s red face turns redder. He hunches his shoulders and strikes off for the tavern.
The woman’s husband counts out seven hundred and eighty dollars, and I am his.
Chapter 3
Henry
My first look at America stabs me with homesickness. There’re no craggy cliffs, no green hills. New York is a grey, dirty city, crowded and noisy. But it’s full of busy industry. Of loading and unloading ships. Of flush-faced and well-fed people.
The captain of the ship is the first down the gangplank. His shoes make a hollow echo as he walks, like knocking on a door. We’re a sorry looking lot, filthy and flea-bitten, spilling into the city like rats out of a hole.
When I step on to the street, the ground feels wrong after six weeks at sea. My legs want to fold up under me like a new foal’s. I don’t trust them to move, so I stand there on the dock with the crowd jostling around me, blinking in the light. I fill my lungs with air that reeks of dead fish, but it’s a damn sight better than the stale rot I’ve been breathing for over a month down in the hold.
New York is the busiest place I’ve ever seen, but, even with all these people around me, I feel alone for the first time in my life. When the harvest failed, Ma lay down and never got up again, which took the fight right out of Da. They were both gone within days of each other. Maggie, Beth and me were left to keep starving or get out while we were still breathing. We took our chance on a coffin ship, which lived up to its name in the weeks we spent cramped and miserable in the airless hold. The typhus took Maggie a week after we 20set sail from County Cork, and Beth passed only days ago from God knows what. Take your pick. The shitting sickness, the coughing sickness, or the killing fever. A good third of the passengers wasted away during the crossing. Maggie and Beth were tossed overboard like the rest, with not even a priest to bless them.
I thrust my hand in my pocket and wrap my fingers around a small rock I keep there. The piece of home I took with me the day we set sail. I rub the rock, flicking it between my fingers as I follow the heaving mass of immigrants up South Street.
The herd is headed to the Five Points, the Irish quarters, as they called it on the ship. We pass grand homes and squat shops and horse-drawn carriages near about as big as our hut back home, but what I notice most as we walk are the signs. Irish Need Not Apply. They hang next to every posting for a job.
After a while, the cobbled road gives way to dirt, and the dirt to mud. With every step the mud gets thicker until the sludge squelches over my bare feet. It’s up to my ankles by the time we reach a five-way crossing. The Five Points. There’s a tavern and a butcher and a brothel, it looks like. This place smells of unwashed bodies and of waste and decay. There’re Irishmen here alright. Huddled in doorways and standing in the streets. But not just Irishmen. A man as dark as coal sits on a stoop, his bright white eyes track us as we walk. Another man stands behind him, the colour of peat. I can’t help but stare.
Someone puts his hand on my arm and calls my name. I’m wound so tight I spin round with my fist back ready for whoever it is. But I hesitate, as my brain catches up with my body, realising he knows my name. Then I see who’s got my arm. Ennis Flanagan. He left Cork a year before I did with his wife and their two little ones.
He hugs me like we’re brothers. ‘Henry O’Toole. Jesus, Mary and Holy Saint Joseph, it’s Henry bloody O’Toole.’21
I hug him back, happier than I can say to see a familiar face. ‘Ennis Flanagan.’
‘Wait till the Missus sees you. And you won’t recognise the boys. Growing like weeds and tough as teeth.’
‘All of you made it, then?’ I ask. ‘All four?’
‘Aye. Luck of the Irish, we had. And Saint Christopher protecting us besides.’
I mean to hide my bitter jealousy, but he notices my silence and possibly the clenching in my jaw. He understands what I’m not saying and claps me on my back.
‘Where’re you staying?’ he asks.
I shrug. ‘Nowhere yet.’
He pulls me around and leads me towards a shabby ally. ‘You can come back with us then.’
‘Have you got room for a fifth?’
‘Fifth? We’re ten to a room, you daft bastard. You’ll be lucky eleven.’
Ennis works at a window factory. He got the job when an accident killed two men and injured ten more. The Swedes and Poles and Germans threw up a fuss, so they let the Irish and the Negros in, paying half of what the other men got. But it’s a job.
I can’t find any work at all.
After the first week, the Dead Rabbits approach me offering a spot on their fire brigade. ‘What you do,’ they tell me, ‘is you set the fire yourself, see. So, when you’re the first gang on the scene putting it out, you get the fire brigade money.’
I tell them setting fires to put them out is even more daft than digging ditches to fill them in again. And anyways, what kind of man makes his living by burning people’s houses down?
By the second week, I see how things are with the gangs here, and I realise it might have been a mistake to turn the Dead Rabbits down. I avoid them as best I can, because, although I don’t think they see me as an enemy, it’s clear I’m 22not a friend. And I still can’t get a job. Folks hiring take one look at me and know I’m Irish. I don’t stand a chance. It’s not my black hair or blue eyes that give me away. It’s the hungry, half-starved look of me, and the rags I wear and no shoes on my feet. It’s only the Irish fresh off the ships who walk around like that.
By my third week, I’m sick to death of having doors slammed in my face. And when a rival gang, the Plug Uglies, recruits two of the men sleeping in our eleven-person room, the Dead Rabbits decide I’ve offended them by association. When I go to look for work, I get hostile stares from men holding clubs and flashing butcher knives. I take to sneaking out before sunrise and slipping back in cloaked by the dark, avoiding all the gangs, which is pretty hard to do in the Five Points.
Every day it’s the same. No Irish.
I get up early, picking my way through the bodies still sleeping, and I traipse through New York determined that this will be the day that I find something. When I come up empty again, I’ve no stomach for going back. I walk downtown and sit at the harbour feeling in my pocket for my Ireland stone.
I stay there hunched on a barrel, sitting right through the evening and into the night. When I get up to go it’s a ways past midnight.
I’ve only walked a few blocks when I hear a scuffle in an ally. I peek in to see two ruffians beating and kicking a man on the ground.
‘Stop, you!’ I call out.
One of the two digs in the man’s pockets and they take off running. The gentleman on the ground is in a bad way. They took a boot to his face and who knows where else. When he breathes, I hear liquid in his lungs and when he tries to talk there’s blood. I can’t be here. There’s no helping him. If I stay, I could be blamed.23
I stand to go, but I hold off from leaving. I think how easy a man could find a job with that white cotton shirt and those leather shoes.
Before I know what I’m doing, I take off his shoes and I go for his trousers. He stops breathing while I’m pulling at his jacket. When I have it all, I bundle the clothes in my arms and run.
Huddled by the Hudson River, I scrub the blood from his shirt with river water and change into his clothes. I kick my old things into the water, watching as they float and then sink.
At first light, I walk up and down the city looking for anyone hiring. There’s a blacksmith with a sign warning: No Irish Need Apply. I march right into the shop and, flattening my vowels in the American way, I ask for the job.
He looks me up and down and asks my name.
I say a silent apology to every O’Toole who came before me and hope they understand.
‘Henry Taylor,’ I tell him without a flinch.
‘You have any blacksmithing experience?’
‘Some,’ I lie.
He tells me to put on an apron and stoke the fire, and by God I do.
Later that night, lying in my new quarters above the shop, my hand goes for the rock in my right pocket, but it’s not there. Then I remember. I left it in my old trousers. My piece of home is lost somewhere in the Hudson River.
Chapter 4
Sarah
Sitting on the back lip of the carriage, my chest squeezes tight. I never did have much, but I always had Momma and Isaac beside me. I watch the ground move under my dangling feet. The road stretches out as we keep clip-clopping on, taking me farther and farther from everything I know. The knot in my belly’s so big, it’s like I swallowed a stone. I pray for Momma back at Summerville and for Isaac wherever he’s headed. I finger the carved wood hanging at my neck that my brother made me and think how, from here on out, I’m on my own.
A burly, mahogany man sits hunched up next to me. Every time the carriage jolts, our chains jingle. The noise has got my nerves on edge, and I’m as jumpy as an alley cat. But the mahogany man, he sits rock still, breathing hard and blinking back tears. Mine slide down my dusty face.
Up in the carriage, I hear our new master and missus talking and laughing. Sitting to the front, a clay-red slave drives the horses trotting us on.
When the sun’s tucked down low on the horizon and the shadows stretch out long, we turn in under a wooden gateway and ride up a wide drive. I sit calm as I can, but inside I feel like a hive of bees, ’cause I know whatever’s coming is just about here.
The driver stops the horses in front of a white house, smaller than the Big House at the Summerville Plantation, 25but more cared for. Even the porch steps’ve got fresh paint. Up front, the driver hops out of his seat and lowers the carriage steps. Our new master climbs down and holds out a hand to steady his wife.
‘Red, go get the overseer,’ he says to the driver. He pulls his wife’s hand through his elbow and leads her up the steps to the wide front porch, past the thick columns propping up the portico, and then on into the house.
When the overseer comes, pink-faced and puffing from the walk, he takes off our chains and tells us to get down from the back of the buggy. We rub our wrists while he looks us over, inspecting us.
The driver, Red, tips me a sympathetic nod before he leads off the horses and carriage.
‘You pick cotton before?’ the overseer asks the man beside me.
‘Yes, sir.’
He nods, like he was expecting that. ‘Good.’
I look down at my feet as he turns to me. I never picked a day in my life and I don’t care to start now. The master paid a house slave price for me and I hope he don’t like to be wasting his money, but I don’t know how things work here and I ain’t fixing to find out the wrong way.
The overseer looks back at the field slave beside me. ‘Now, if you work hard and get them fields picked, you’ll be fine. You hear?’ He lays his hand over the whip coiled at his right hip. ‘But if you go breaking the rules and acting up, you’ll get to know me.’ He takes up his whip and tap, tap, taps at the man’s chest. ‘And I’ll tell you right now, boy, you do not want to get to know me.’
‘No, sir.’
The overseer nods and puts his whip back on his hip. ‘Now, you can call me sir, or you can call me Master Mulch. You hear me?’
‘Yes, sir, Master Mulch.’26
‘That’s fine, boy, that’s just fine.’ He takes a step back and looks him up and down. ‘What name did they give you?’
‘I’s called Jim, Master Mulch, sir.’
The overseer tips his chin up and shouts out, ‘Red!’ When the coach driver comes jogging on back, he tells him, ‘Show Jim where he’ll sleep and eat, and make sure he finds his way to the fields on time in the morning.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Red says, but he hesitates, looking between me and Master Mulch. ‘You want me to go get Maple for this one?’ he asks.
The overseer slits his eyes at him. ‘I want you to go do like I said.’
Red looks back at me and then up at the house.
‘Go on, now, get,’ Master Mulch barks, and Red leads Jim away.
Master Mulch runs his eyes over me from head to toe and every part in between till my skin starts to crawling. ‘Well,’ he says, at last. ‘You don’t have the look of a field slave.’ He takes my hands and rubs his thumbs all over my palms.
I know I can’t pull them away, so I look up to the house instead.
‘Don’t have the hands neither,’ he says. He grips my arms and starts feeling at them like he’s feeling on a horse for the muscle. He squeezes on my shoulders and down my back, but he pulls away when the master comes out with a stout woman behind him.
She has the same high forehead and close-set, small eyes as the missus. Her dark hair’s pulled into the same tight bun, but her lips are fuller, and they pinch when she looks at me.
‘Ah, Ralph. There you are,’ my new master says peering down at us. ‘I take it you’ve already sent the new field hand down.’
‘Yes, sir, Mister Johnson. You want this one for the cotton?’
‘No, no. She’s not right for picking. Anyone can see she’s for the house.’27
‘Well, then.’ Master Mulch taps twice on my backside, and pushes me towards the steps. ‘You best get on in there.’
I scoot away from him up the front porch, as fast as I can get.
‘Maple, see what you can do with Sarah here,’ Master says to the woman behind him. ‘My dear wife wants her for Thomas, but I’m sure you can get more use out of her than that.’
Master strolls down the steps whistling while Maple motions me over with a flick of her finger and leads me inside. The entrance is long and wide with paintings hung all along the walls. When I follow her to the stairway, one of the dark wood floorboards squeaks under my foot. The woman glares back at me.
‘Sorry, ma’am,’ I say, and I hop quick off the noisy board.
She pinches her lips and raises her eyebrows. I can see the nastiness and the hardness in her and I hope she ain’t fixing to aim it at me.
‘Miss Martha wants you sleeping on the floor in Master Thomas’s room,’ she says. ‘He’s been waking up the whole house with his night frights and it’s going to be your job to keep him quiet. In the morning you come on down and find me in the kitchen house, and I’ll get you to work helping with breakfast and give you your chores for the day.’
I blink at her, piecing together the meaning behind her words. She said Miss Martha and Master Thomas, not your missus and your young master. She said in the morning I’ll find her in the kitchen house making breakfast. Here I am thinking she’s a cousin or a spinster aunt, but she’s a slave.
I swallow the ‘yes, ma’am’ sitting ready on my tongue, and instead ask, ‘What’s wrong with Master Thomas?’
‘Thrown from a horse,’ she says. ‘Don’t know why anyone would put a six-year-old boy on a horse in the first place, but they did, and now he screams the house down almost every night thinking about it.’28
‘What’s Miss Martha want me to do with him?’
‘Get him back to sleep. And you’ll be calling her Missus. It’s Master and Missus here. I call her Miss Martha because I’ve been calling her that since she was little.’
I look again at her high forehead and small, close-set eyes. ‘She grew up with you?’
She nods. ‘I was twelve when she was born. I been taking care of her all her life. Couldn’t do without me when she got married, so her daddy gave me as a wedding gift.’ She spits out the word ‘daddy’ in a puff of bitterness and I know why she looks like the missus. And I know why she looks so angry. Their daddy gave his older daughter to his white daughter as her slave.
Maple must have come from a long line of slave mothers and slave-owner fathers to wind up so light she could pass for white. Looking like she does, it would be so much easier to run. I wonder if she’s tried.
‘I guess they don’t got the railroad up here,’ I say, trying to ask without asking. It’s not enough to know about the underground railroad helping runaway slaves, you’ve got to find them too.
Maple squints at me with her daddy’s eyes and purses her momma’s lips tight. ‘You best get that thought right out of your head before someone comes along and beats it out. Everything you do gets paid for one way or the other. If you ain’t the one paying, you can sure bet someone else is.’
