City of Dreams (28 page)

“The King’s Arms Tavern, Miss Tamsyn, in the countryside beyond Trinity Church. A number of the women and children are being sheltered there until the villains are caught and the rebellion safely put down.” Craddock turned to the older woman. “Mistress Bess, I believe it’s wise to take you both at once to that safety.”

Bess still wasn’t listening. “Tom. He’s been with us since he was eight.”

“If it makes you feel better,” Craddock said, “I heard there was witchcraft involved. Magic from the islands. They gave your slave chicken blood to drink. Small wonder he—”

“Sweet God in heaven.” Christopher whispered the words, but they were spoken with such shock it was as if he’d shouted. “The chicken dance out by Beekman’s Swamp.”

Craddock turned to him. “Am I to understand you know something of this business, Turner?”

“I didn’t realize it until this very moment. Sometime back, New Year’s day it was, I had a patient, a pauper in the hospital. He was crazed with fever and poisoned blood so I paid little attention, but he went on about seeing the chicken dance, and seeing people drinking blood out by Beekman’s Swamp.”

“Where is he? You must bring this man to Governor Hunter. He may have valuable intelligence that—”

“I’m afraid I can’t oblige. He died a few days after I first saw him.”

“Aye,” Craddock said. “I might have guessed. Put the old man to the knife, did you?”

“His arm was rotting with gangrene. I took it off. The pity is that I didn’t get to him sooner. If I had, he might still be alive to contribute his intelligence to this action against rebellion.”

“Or you might have recognized the importance of what he was saying before you did your cutting.”

Christopher paled with fury, but he managed to sound civil. “Unfortunately, sir, I did not. Perhaps in the fine city of Edinburgh you have time to pay attention to every rant inspired by illness and fever. Here in the colonies we must spend our energies on making people well.”

“Aye, until they are corpses moldering in the ground.” Craddock turned to the women. “Perhaps you might help your mother to dress, Miss Tamsyn. Before all the best places at the King’s Arms are taken.”

“Yes, of course. Come, Mama. Zachary has a sound plan.” Tamsyn took Bess’s arm.

The older woman allowed herself to be led toward the door. “Tom,” she murmured. “All those years … Never whipped, not once. You know that, Tamsyn. You know no slave is ever whipped in this house.”

“I do, Mama. Everyone knows it. Now, come.” Tamsyn had guided her mother as far as the door from the shop to the house before she turned back to look at Christopher. “Thank you for coming, Cousin Chris. It was kind of you to think of us. But as you can see, we are in excellent hands.”

The job of the sentinels posted at the landing places of the Long Island ferries was to prevent any slave escaping by that route. None were foolish enough to try. By mid-morning the garrison had been supplemented by regular militia from the towns of White Stone and Jamaica. By noon the governor had ordered the combined forces to beat a drive up Manhattan.

A long thin line of bright redcoats and drab colonial militia marched out of the city and through the farmlands and the orchards. They crossed Minetta Brook and the swamplands, went around the Collect Pond, which was too deep to ford, then headed over the Old Kill, which carried the waters of the pond out to the East River, up Potters’ Hill and down the other side, and past the Powder House to the flat Common. Finally into the woods. It was a hard slow slog, and that first day they had nothing to show for it.

The armed men of the town conducting a house-to-house search had better luck. They found Robin, the slave who had murdered his master’s boy, hiding in a cellar on Stone Street. A survivor of the massacre identified him.

Two more rebels were found nearby, in the storeroom behind the mill in Jews’ Lane. Both were Africans, and each had a knife. When they heard the whites coming for them each man slit his own throat.

Six slaves who were with the group the soldiers eventually discovered in the woods also killed themselves. They’d been there nearly two weeks by then and were half crazed with starvation. Those who didn’t choose suicide seemed almost glad to give themselves up.

Kinsowa, Quaco, and Amba had been among those taken alive the first day. In the end they also got Peter the Doctor and Red Bess’s boy, Tom. By the fifteenth of April there were seventy blacks in custody. It was well known that there hadn’t been that many in the Crookes’ orchard, but the whites were convinced that nearly every slave in New York had been aware of the plot to murder, as they put it, “each Christian man, woman, and child.”

There had never been such terror in the city. In the coffeehouses and the taverns and the alehouses men spoke of what might have happened if the plotters had been better strategists. Over their back fences and at the markets the women whispered the same thing. “What if they had come into the town? Would our own slaves have risen from their beds and murdered us in our sleep?”

New York was the largest slaveholding colony north of Chesapeake Bay. The city at the tip of Manhattan island had an enormous stake in the “peculiar institution.” Of the total population of just over five thousand, nearly two thousand were slaves. Three days of bloody vengeance was the minimum catharsis required for such soul-destroying dread as was caused by this rebellion.

New York had become too important to be governed from the back room of a tavern. There was a new City Hall going up on Wall Street, halfway between the East River and Trinity Church. The City Hall wasn’t entirely finished, but among the first projects completed had been the leveling of the bit of ground in front of the entrance, and the installation of the pillory, stocks, and whipping cage. Next to those devices they erected the gallows.

On an April Monday fourteen of the rebels—the two Indians, some of the locally born blacks, and the handful of “seasoned slaves” from the islands—were brought to the place of execution and hanged. The huge crowd that had gathered to watch cheered each opening of the trapdoor and every snap of the noose, but when it was finished they went away grumbling. Their hatred and their fear were too powerful to be satisfied by such easy deaths.

Tuesday was better. Three of the blacks were racked: Robin and two of the African Fantis. After two hours of half-inch by half-inch stretching and almost constant screaming Robin and one of the Fantis were broken on the wheel and died. The other man was not granted such a speedy end. They stretched him until it seemed he could take no more but was still alive. Then a Dutch sailor who had learned the technique in Rotterdam stood above Claus’s racked body and used a club to break all his bones one by one. It took hours and he stopped occasionally to quench his thirst at a nearby alehouse, then returned to his task. Meanwhile the soldiers brought out Kinsowa.

The Ibo had been whipped repeatedly and many of his wounds still bled. In the last few days of captivity he’d been well fed, but that had nothing to do with mercy. They stood Kinsowa beneath the gallows, but they did not put the noose around his neck. Instead they wrapped chains around his arms and his legs and hauled him to the top of the gibbet and fixed him in place crosswise.

Kinsowa’s sentence was to hang on the gibbet until he starved to death. It was sure to take many days. As for Claus, he died at two in the morning. Most of the onlookers had left by then and the sailor’s arm was getting tired. He finally bashed in the black man’s skull.

Wednesday promised to be the most satisfying day of all, so the crowd came early.

The three poles and most of the logs had been soaking in water for many hours, so the fire would take longer to catch hold. The lower halves of the men would be well incinerated before their upper bodies began to char. That was the sentence, burned alive in a slow fire. It was calculated by those who knew about such things that the screams would go on for eight or nine hours.

For Governor Robert Hunter’s purposes—edification of the whites and terrorizing of the blacks—the wind was right, a stiff sea breeze blowing east to west. Everyone in town would smell the burning flesh.

Everyone who wasn’t already there to watch.

In 1699, when the old wooden palisade came down, the plan had been to make Wall Street into a wide boulevard. It turned out the governor of the time had bought the parade ground to the north, divided it into building lots, and made a fortune selling them off. As a result Wall Street was what it had always been, a thirty-six-foot-wide trench. That day it was packed solid with people. The lucky ones were above the crush, hanging out the windows and clinging to the steeply pitched roofs of the grand residences that now lined the street.

The man who styled himself Will Devrey—Willem Van der Vries was both too Dutch and too obviously connected with the sordid family history—owned one of them. His was a square mansion of dark red brick, with long, elegant windows, four tall chimneys, and a steep slate roof topped by a gleaming white ornamental balustrade.

Devrey got the money to build his house the same way the owners of most of the other fine houses on Wall Street got theirs: from the Guinea ships. Will had seven. Mostly they plied the Middle Passage, the most profitable leg in the Triangle Trade. Some Devrey ships brought grain and meat from the English colonies to the West Indies, and rum and sundry goods from the Caribbean to Africa. Most had been built solely to bring slaves back from the forts along the Guinea coast. The trade had made him very rich, but it occurred to Will that after this episode he might become much poorer.

Already, since it was widely believed they had led the insurrection, there was talk of forbidding the direct importation of African slaves. Will planned to argue against so rash a law. In fact, as a man of substantial means and a member of the governor’s council, he should have been on the arcaded porch of the City Hall with Governor Hunter and the other dignitaries. It would have been an excellent opportunity to make his case. Instead he was forced to stay up here with his wife and the twittering ladies she’d invited for the occasion. Because, of course, his damned sister was bound to make a spectacle of herself.