Shockoe Slip
Based (loosely) on a true story
1807
It was a tobacco-stain of an August night in Shockoe Slip, so humid a body seemed to drizzle when it moved. Stench from the outhouses on the canal bank behind the hotels and shop fronts and the sweet fug of flue-cured leaf tarred the air. Inside the Eagle Tavern, bourbon whiskey and rouged cheeks shimmering in smoky lantern light raised a man’s threshold for swelter.
The General was down to his last few dollars. He held only a pair of deuces and a single bullet in his hand now. However, his eclipse had been a long time in the making. That it should happen here was ironic. He had been in many worse places.
An army officer since his youth, he had long understood he might perish of thirst in a deep Texas oak thicket or be pierced by an arrow on some damned buffalo plain. Many times over, he could have been gut-shot on the dunes of North Africa. By contrast, no matter how loudly the falls clattered, the bustling banks of the James, in the bosom of Southern plantation hospitality, did not seem an obvious threat. He was forty-three. His weaknesses included whiskey, women, and cards, but even more a liberal constitution, a vivid imagination, and not just a lack but an absolute rejection of caution. These last had once made him a force of nature and a charmer — a man who could lead a horse to water and make it beg for a drink.
The General’s aide-de-camp, Mustafa, sat across the room, measuring the crowd and meditating on the gold medal recently awarded to the General. It hung just out of sight around his neck, like a cursed scarab. Mustafa had followed the General to the United States from Egypt. As the General’s fortunes languished, he watched his behavior grow more erratic. The General, fearless at the worst of times, now drank as if to extinguish a fire and gambled as if to obliterate the past.
Mustafa understood what was eating at him, a man who had battled the longest of odds in the Barbary War and won. He had been biding his time, waiting for the General to figure out a way to set things right again. So abysmal were circumstances at the moment that Mustafa had begun to crave the scorch of bourbon too, a betrayal of his religion and a thing unheard of in his family.
The trial of Aaron Burr had gathered an impressive group of politicians, salesmen, gossipers, and whoremongers to the Virginia capital, at the fall lines of the James. Above the miasma, on Shockoe Hill, not far from Patrick Henry’s church, rose the state’s neo-Roman capitol, designed by President Jefferson. It was both a symbol of the city’s vanity and a beacon of hope to its Episcopal citizenry, who still enjoyed the full cornucopia of humanity’s sins.
In the Eagle, just down from Shockoe Hill, the din of pressmen, gentlemen farmers, lawmakers, slave traders, merchants, and unattached ladies was considerable. Their prosperous city of 6,000 souls had recently received its first bank charter, and a public library had opened. Their talk ranged from the price of tobacco leaf and the prospects of rain to the European war, but most of all to the trial being presided over by Chief Justice John Marshall and of particular interest to President Jefferson.
The General was a player in the drama. Prior to his exploits in North Africa, he had entertained a proposal from Burr involving the territories stretching west of the Mississippi and down into Mexico. The scheme — to hew a new kingdom out of this wilderness — had collapsed, and now the General was called to bear witness against Burr on charges of treason.
The General had testified that day. As he sat in the stand, a military hero, in a place, at last, where that seemed to matter, his luster had returned. That evening, when he took his seat at a gaming table in the Eagle, he felt fresh again, his battered confidence restored.
Across from the General, the gentleman from Shirley Plantation, a broad raw-boned man who was the largest property owner and slaveholder in the state, dealt, his massive fingers barely able to distinguish the cards. To the General’s left sat the principal of Southside Plantation, a man whose bald forehead was speckled red by the sun and whose teeth approached in color his few strands of brown hair. To the General’s right, a legislator from Maryland, a smart silver chain dangling from the fob of his waistcoat, observed the table with darting eyes.
“So you were the hero of Derna?” the legislator asked rhetorically, looking at his hand, an eyebrow raised. The General, still in possession of his instincts, instantly sensed this man to be a threat.
“The Marines were instrumental,” he replied, not looking up. “But it was my notion, so I received the shiny medal to show for it.” Any man who read the newspapers knew that he had, in fact, orchestrated the coup of a particularly inimical pasha, recruiting an army of cutthroats in Egypt, marching across Libya, and taking the Mediterranean port. The sudden and extraordinary blow had shocked the piratical Barbary dictators, who had immediately treated for peace. The General had effectively won the Barbary War.
“I raise a glass to you, sir,” said the Shirley man, with earnest admiration.
The others raised theirs, filled with Thorp’s corn liquor — bourbon — invented by an Episcopal priest at Berkeley, well before Kentucky was chipped off her mother state. “The Gen’ral,” they said.
The General neither smiled nor reacted. The twirl of a dress in the glint of lantern light had caught his eye. His mind leaped the sea. The pasha’s older brother, the rightful ruler of Derna, whom the General had found in Egypt and installed in place of his usurping younger sibling, had just as quickly been abandoned by the U.S. government, deposed, and beheaded. The General had used his persuasive arts to induce the man to risk his life in the cause of another man’s nation. Then he had walked out on him at the insistence of that nation. A lifelong soldier, the General still struggled to swallow his indignation. Though outwardly sure, he had come to despise himself.
The General laid down knaves over deuces, a lady high. Looking away, he gathered in the pot as if it meant nothing. He was a virtual chameleon when he wanted to be — having once, it was sworn to by good and sober U.S. Army officers, learned a certain Indian language, stained his skin to infiltrate the tribe’s village, and returned with intelligence that caused its destruction.
The General’s aide-de-camp sat in a dark corner.
“Do you know what they’d do to you?” Rosy O’Sharon said, when his eyes met hers.
“I am not a black man,” he countered in his bass voice. “My name is Mustafa. I am an Arab.” Rose’s head tilted a notch. He was tall, over six feet, square-shouldered, café au lait.
“Liar,” she spat. “A-rabs don’t drink.”
“They do not dwell in the devil’s lair either,” he responded flatly, eyeing the Marylander, who he noted wore a blade in his boot and a carefully concealed shoulder holster.
“Well, I seen slaves lighter’n you, doll,” she warmed, “but none as handsome.”
Mustafa watched her feet as she walked away. “Can you dance?” he called to her.
“I’m Irish,” she answered.
“Can your friends?”
The youngest brother of the feuding pashas, Mustafa had crossed Libya with the General and fought at Derna in his ragtag army, which numbered a dozen Americans, forty-odd Greeks and Italians, and some five hundred Turks, Mamluks, and Arabs. When the General requested that Mustafa continue in his personal employ, he had considered it an honor.
The General returned to the U.S. to great fanfare. In Washington, Mustafa had stood proudly in the background in his flowing white haik and a black turban. He took in his new country with glowing eyes, as he would a sumptuous meal of camel.
In New England, the General’s wife, however, received his two aides-de-camp — one Arab, one Italian — coolly. “William, with all due respect to your men,” she had stated, “they shall bed down elsewhere.”