“They know he has come for them,” he said. “They have wait a long time.”
“They waited for him? How could they know he was on the Fury?”
“They just know he is to come. It is foretold.”
“Who is he?”
Quaco sipped his porter.
“Babalawo.”
A word Cormac didn’t know. An African word.
Babalawo.
52.
That Tuesday, Cormac waited for Mary Burton on a bench at the north end of the Common. She was more than an hour late, her eyes jittery, the ends of her hair unkempt and loose. She was carrying an Old Testament.
“Can you read me some of these words?” she said abruptly. “I’m stuck with this ‘begat.’ And someone begat someone who begat someone else, all of these begatters.”
“Who gave you this?”
“Nobody,” she said. “I stole it from one of the preachers. He was lyin’ on the ground, shakin’ and rollin’, looking like a mad dog, his eyes up in his head. So I lifted it and watched him rollin’ for a while, figuring he was more in want of a doctor than a book, and then I went off with it. The next day I took it to Trinity, and they didn’t want me, certain they were that I was a papist, but I said no, I was no papist, I was a fine Protestant from the Church of Ireland and wanted to worship God and the King of England, but I couldn’t do it ’less I learnt to read. So the preacher, fella name of Wrightson, he starts to read it, and that’s when I start hearing ‘begat’ until it was coming out of his arse.”
Cormac laughed. “Did you say ‘feck’ to him?”
“No, but I came close.”
“And he let you into the classes.”
“Aye, after paying a visit to the Hughsons, and shamin’ both of them. I get an hour each mornin’ now. I learnt the letters first, and then on to the fecking begatters….”
“It gets better,” Cormac said, holding the book, riffling its pages. “You’ll love the story of Joseph and his brothers and the coat of many colors.”
“Will you read it to me?” she said, taking the book back into her hands.
“No, I want you to read it to me.”
She was quiet then for a long while as they watched passing couples, and occasional teams of redcoats, and carriages carrying rich people to the houses down beyond Wall Street. She held the book in her hands as if it were made of gold.
“I have to tell you something,” she said.
He waited, suddenly afraid that she would inform him that she was going to beget their child.
“There’s something going on at Hughson’s,” she said. “The Africans and the Irish together. They’re talkin’ about a risin’. About strikin’ at the English. About killing people…”
She stared at the ground. A cool wind blew in from the North River.
“Stay away from them,” she said. “Stay away from Hughson’s. They’re all a-headin’ for the gallows.”
She turned to the hill above the Common, where dead leaves were swirling in the fresh river wind.
“Stay away,” she said. “Stay away.”
Kongo was working in the Fly Market, a few blocks south of the Slave Market. He was the property of a housepainter named Wilson. But Cormac was so busy that autumn that he didn’t see much of the man Quaco had called a babalawo. He was just pleased to know that Kongo was alive. He stayed away from Hughson’s and the rumors of revolt, hoping that Kongo was not involved but knowing that no rising could go forward without him. He did run into Kongo in the streets as the African carried a stepladder and paint jars to a job, wearing a canvas girdle round his waist, from which hung his brushes. If Wilson, his owner, was with him (thin, solemn, red-faced, lonesome), they exchanged only nods. If Kongo was alone, they embraced and talked, for Kongo was adding new English words every day.
“Don’t go Hughson’s,” he whispered during one chance encounter. “Danger thar.”
The warning didn’t surprise Cormac. Once a week now, he met Mary Burton in the fields and woods to the north of the Common, to listen to her faltering attempts to read (each week they were better), to make love in a desperate way among the leaves and the grass, until it grew too cold and they could be too easily observed among the skeletal black trees. Then they would simply talk, flattened against a tree, warming each other against winter, and sometimes she talked about what she wanted more than anything else.
“I want to walk out the door,” she said. “At any hour of the day or night, and without making up a lie or askin’ permission from no one, and just walk around the town. Without sayin’ I’m a-runnin’ an errand. Just free. Free. To be free to live with a free man, maybe you. To have him come in the door and put the rod to me, ’cause he loves me, and loves me juicy quim. No sneakin’ around. Just close the door and have it, on the floor, on a table, in a bed.” She turned her wounded eyes to him. “Do you see, Cormac? Do you see why I can’t do six more years at Hughson’s as a slave? I don’t want to have Sarah making me scrub sheets all sticky with spend or boarders’ drawers stained with shite. I don’t want to end up like poor Peggy, taking the Africans’ money to give them two minutes up me cunt.”
“Yes, I see.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
“I want to have us in a bath again,” she said.
“As do I.”
“But not at Hughson’s,” she said in a cold voice. “They’re talking a lot of fecking trouble.”
53.
At home in the shop on Cortlandt Street, Cormac’s mind was jittery with warnings about the coming trouble. Something was surely in the air, some kind of trouble, as ominous as the warning of Mary Morrigan, and those issued long ago to the Hebrews, and Mr. Partridge began providing the American context. He was talking almost without cease about a new war and how it was wrecking the economy of New York. Britain was fighting Spain again, this time over Jenkins’s ear. Who was Jenkins? And why (Cormac asked) should anyone care about his ear? The story was splendid. The Spaniards had stopped a British ship in Spanish waters, one of those royal ships whose sole business was hijacking Spanish gold from the Americas. One of the English officers gave the Spanish captain some lip and they cut off his ear. War!
“But it’s hurting New York, lad!” he said. “You can see it everywhere around us!”
He reminded Cormac that the fort was emptying, the redcoats marching to the ships each day, bound for the West Indies and Florida to do battle with the Spaniards. That was why the waterfront was such a lonesome place these past weeks. Mr. Partridge insisted that the war wasn’t about poor Jenkins’s ear at all; it was about sugar, tobacco, and Florida.
“The English have Jamaica, and they want Cuba and Hispaniola and Florida so they can bring in another two hundred thousand slaves to make themselves even richer!” he shouted. “They can’t imagine the Spanish will come this far north. They are idiots!”
But as Mr. Partridge ranted, Cormac understood the warnings. The soldiers were going. Now was the time for revolt.
In the following days, the outrage of Mr. Partridge was mixed with a kind of joy. He sizzled with happiness. Together, they worked all one night making broadsides at their own expense, headlined “We will win!” All sorts of patriotic nonsense (as Mr. Partridge described it), expressing immense anger over the fate of Mr. Jenkins’s ear, using a medical engraving of an ear repeated fifty times as a border. He attacked the Spanish affront to justice and the law, and urged all the King’s loyal subjects to support the noble British war, wherever it might go. Mr. Partridge was merry as he set type. But he had motives other than patriotism.