Bradford and Phoebe Strong’s COMFORT, five-year-old, pool price $255
Price McGrady’s TIPPERARY BIRDCATCHER, three-year-old, pool price $180
Abner Swett’s ZIGZAG MASTER, four-year-old, pool price $60
By the time Quinn and Gordon focused on the betting the Warrior was up to $1,100. Quinn bid $1,150 and was topped by a Negro woman with a fistful of money who bid $1,175. Quinn went to $1,200, the Negro woman to $1,225, Quinn to $1,250 and quiet. And so Quinn took the ticket, knowing it was madness to spend so much money. But spending it on behalf of Maud reduced the madness substantially. Also, the total for his pool was $3,805. So if he won, as he intuited, he would triple his money.
“I’m glad you didn’t fight me,” he told Gordon.
“I wasn’t tempted.”
“There’ll be other chances,” said Quinn.
They observed the presence of five-hundredand thousand-dollar bills in hands of newcomers bidding feverishly on the next pool. The two men observed the selling of this last pool before the first heat and noted Maud’s Warrior moving into favored position, the pool now bringing $ 1,050 on the Warrior, and only $990 on Royal Traveler, the other horses standing more or less the same; and then the pair walked back toward their party, observing the jockeys sitting in wire baskets to be weighed, the horses in the paddock circle waiting to enter the track, and on to the gallery to see the first horse already on the track with jockey up and stewards leading the parade past all connoisseurs and ignoramuses in residency on the subject of horseflesh. The buzz of the crowd was growing in volume, the judges alert in their elevated viewing stands on either side of the finish line, the track a mix of sandy loam and clay, sere and pale now from the long drought. It was blazing noon on this inaugural racing morning of August third, and the five thousand all looked out from their privileged galleries, out from the less-privileged standing area below, and still more looked on from perches in trees or atop tall wagons parked on the periphery of the mile-long track, sandy scrub pines visible in all directions beyond the sea of grass planted in the center of the track’s oval.
Looking down from his perch between Maud and Magdalena, Quinn saw the Negro woman he had outbid standing with a group of Negro men and women in their own preserve along the rail’s final edge, the woman with an unobstructed view of the race. She and her male companion had been the lone Negroes in the betting enclosure, and Quinn now sought to define her from a distance. Her ample self was singular, to begin with; her aggressive presence here a fact that set her apart from the four million slaves and the half-million free Negroes in this divided Union. How does she come to be here when war rages around the heads of her enslaved kith and kin? Why are any of us here, for that matter? Quinn would take bets that the prevailing evaluation would be that she was a madam. She well may be. Quinn knew such madams in New York, drank in their establishments, knew their girls. But Quinn knew also that the woman could be a gambler on the order of Joshua, an entrepreneur who saw her chances and understood them. She could be the inheritor of a fortune left by a guilty white man, or a queen of industry in the great Negro netherworld so little understood by white entrepreneurs. Or was she a mathematical wizard who had discovered the investment market? Well, Quinn had a good time trying to place her in the cosmos, and knew he’d be wrong no matter what he decided, just as no man alive looking at Joshua could imagine his achievement in money and survival skills. Was the woman a sculptress from the Caribbees? A sorceress from Sierra Leone?
Joshua’s father, known as Cinque, had been stolen by slavers from Sierra Leone, but offshore from Puerto Rico he led a revolt of slaves on board the ship, killed the captain and mate as other crewmen fled in small boats, then with one sailor’s help sailed eight weeks toward America and freedom, landing in starving condition at Virginia, where the sailor had vengefully steered them, and there Cinque and other surviving slaves were charged with murder. But instead of trial, and because of his physical value, Cinque was sold to a planter with a reputation for curbing arrogance. In time Cinque found a woman, sired Joshua, and after an escape attempt was hanged by his feet and whipped until he bled to death through his face, leaving a legacy of rebellion and unavengeable suffering for the three-year-old Joshua to discover.
When his own time came for rebellion, Joshua, who had educated himself in stealth, had no need of murder. He fled from master in the night and made his way north to New York, where he gravitated to the first cluster of Negroes he found, that being at the Five Points, the pestilential neighborhood dominated by the Irish, but where Negroes and Italians, in smaller numbers, also lived and worked in the underworld that that neighborhood was, where every stranger was a mark, and where no human life was safe from the ravagements of the street and river gangs: the Daybreak Boys, the Short Tails, the Patsy Conroys.
Joshua learned rat baiting at the Five Points, learned how to draw blood from bare-knuckle wounds with his mouth, this taught to him by an expert named Suckface, a member of the Slaughterhouse gang, who for ten cents would bite the head off a live mouse, and for a quarter off a live rat. Joshua learned to deal cards in a Five Points dive owned by a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound Negro woman called The Purple Turtle. She, like Joshua, lived on a street called Double Alley, and when Joshua told all this to John McGee in a later year, an enduring bond was forged between them; for John knew the Five Points intimately, had cousins there from Connacht (considered by some the lowliest place in Ireland, although not by the people from Connacht), had been in The Turtle’s place often, and for years sang the song of Double Alley and its poetic alias, Paradise Alley.
Now Double Alley’s our Paradise Alley,
For that’s where we learned how to die.
We suckled on trouble and fightin’ and gin,
And we loved every girl who was ready to sin.
Old Double Alley’s our Paradise Alley
For nobody ever got old.
We fought for a nickel and died for a dime,
We knew there was nothin’ but havin’ a time.
Oh, I’d sure love to see the old place in its prime,
Double old Paradise Alley.
The Five Points harmony, though quitesuch it never was between the Negroes and the Irish, waned perceptibly when the war fever came on. The fight to free the niggers was all idiot stuff to the Five Points paddies, whose principal interest was freeing themselves from the woes that ailed them. And so it happened that many Negroes wisely moved out of Paradise to less hostile quarters. Joshua, by then, was long gone from Double Alley, and by the time the war erupted he’d been conducting on the Railroad for more than a decade.
At a brisk tap of the drum the Griswold Stakes got off with as even a start as ever was. Blue Grass Warrior and Tipperary Birdcatcher led a tight pack by a pair of noses, Barrister and Royal Traveler neck and neck behind the leaders, Zigzag Master two lengths off, and Comfort trailing. So it went until the half mile, when Zigzag made his move and challenged the leading duo, his nose at the Warrior’s saddle girths, Barrister falling back after a spent burst of speed, and Comfort trailing. At the top of the stretch the Catcher lost wind, and Zigzag took the lead by a head, but the Warrior on the outside, attentive to the Negro jockey’s whip and whisper, moved alongside Zigzag, and then with a surge of power moved in front by a full length, then two, and in the stretch was going away to win the heat. The results: