The Street Sweeper (6 page)

‘Could they get out of it?’

‘Thinking like a lawyer already! Yes, you could get out of it, but listen how. If you had enough money to pay a substitute to go instead of you and your name was called, the substitute would go instead of you.’

‘But who’d want to do that?’

‘Exactly. Not many people wanted to be someone else’s substitute so it cost a lot of money to get a substitute, and who didn’t have a lot of money?’

‘Black people?’

‘Right, but black people were exempt, which means they didn’t have to go into the lottery. You know why?’

‘Because Abraham Lincoln liked black people?’

‘No, because they weren’t even considered citizens. That’s why black men were exempt from the federal draft law. But poor white men, the Irish and the Germans, they weren’t exempt and they couldn’t afford to hire substitutes. But there was another way out of it too. If you simply paid the government a fee you could get out of it. That sounds a pretty easy way to get out of it, doesn’t it?’

‘Sure, but what if you didn’t have that money either?’

‘Exactly! If you paid the government a fee of $300 you could forget the whole thing. But you know how long it took the average person to earn $300?’

‘No.’

‘A whole year. It took a whole year for the average person to earn $300. And it wasn’t simply a matter of working for a year and hoping your name wasn’t called while you were saving. What were you supposed to live on? In that year you had to eat, to buy clothes, to pay rent. Maybe you had a wife, maybe you had children to support. Where was the average working man going to suddenly get a whole year’s worth of wages? So it’s the hot summer of 1863 and many of the newspapers were run by people who were in favour of slavery.’

‘Were they slave owners?’

‘Probably not, but people with a lot of money often save much of their sympathy for other people who have a lot of money. So the sympathies of the newspaper owners were mostly with the slave owners. They would have known how well New York did from slavery. The slaves weren’t here, they were down south, but all the cotton, all the crops – everything the slaves produced for their southern masters – it all had to be sold, traded or transported to some other market, even to some markets overseas.’

‘Like Australia?’

‘No, it was too early for anyone to be talking about Australia. This was 1863. I’m talking about Europe. If you had to ship goods to Europe, where would you do it from?’

‘New York?’

‘Exactly – greatest natural harbour in America. Everything the slaves produced, sooner or later, was coming into New York. At the least it
was
before the beginning of the Civil War. So the newspaper owners knew how much New York benefited from slavery and they started publishing articles, stories, pieces in their newspapers designed to make working-class Irish and Germans angry at the Federal Government for introducing the draft law.’

‘But they were already angry.’

‘That’s right, they were. But the newspapers could stir things up, make them even angrier. And they did. They criticised the Federal Government for causing all this trouble just for what they called a “nigger war”. They encouraged a climate in which white working-class men thought that their value was slipping compared to the value of slaves. Whereas a slave might sell for about $1000, the Irish and Germans thought now
they
could be bought for just $300 ‘cause it took $300 to buy them an exemption from the draft.’

‘Yeah but they’d still be free. The slaves were slaves forever till they died.’

‘That’s absolutely right. But this is how grown men were thinking at that time because they were scared, poor, angry, and sick with that virus.’

‘Racism.’

‘You bet! Racism. Saturday 11 July the first New York draw was held to see who’d have to go to fight. The whole city was uneasy. It was hot. People, especially working people, were living crammed together in the tenements downtown. Whole families were living in one room. To get out, to get away, men went to the taverns and drank. They drank and they talked about all the things that bothered them. A lot of things bothered them so they drank a lot. Two days later, some time between six and seven in the morning, mobs of men started to form on the lower East Side. They moved west across Broadway and headed towards the draft office. They were armed with wooden sticks, planks and iron bars.

‘As they moved uptown they collected more and more men, dissatisfied angry men who’d already been so humiliated by their circumstances,
by their poverty, that they didn’t know themselves any more. They had lost their individuality. You know what I mean by that?’

‘Not really.’

‘Each man had forgotten what made him different from the next guy. And now, added to all the chronic humiliation was his anger at the unfairness of the draft, at the possibility of becoming, not a man any more, but an animal in a pack of animals. There were thousands of men like this and they headed towards the draft office on 3rd Avenue. By the time they reached it there were 15,000 of them and they set to destroying the building. They smashed and burned it. They set all sorts of things on fire, other buildings, everything. They cut the telegraph wires so that reinforcements couldn’t be sent to assist what few police were there. Remember that many of the regular police force were already in the Army. There was a small military detachment at the draft office and, even though they were armed with rifles, they were no match for the mob. It was too big. One soldier was disarmed, then beaten and kicked to death and then his body was thrown twenty feet to the ground. Train tracks were ripped up. Street cars were destroyed. The armoury on 21st Street was looted then destroyed.

‘Columns of black smoke blotted out the July sun. They went after any policeman they could find, politicians, anyone who looked rich enough to pay the $300 needed to be exempt from the draft.’

‘How could they tell?’

‘By the way someone looked, the way they were dressed.’

‘But they could be wrong. Maybe a poor person was wearing their best clothes.’

‘They
could
be wrong but they didn’t care. It didn’t matter to them. Watch your case. Are you watching your suitcase?

‘By eleven-thirty that Monday morning the draft, at least in New York, was suspended. But it was too late. The mob was in charge of Manhattan. At two-thirty that afternoon it reached the Colored Orphan Asylum. This was a charitable institution for black children who had lost their parents and who had no one else to take care of them. It had its own nursery, a school and an infirmary. There were 230 or so children. They were having a normal day when suddenly the building was rushed by
the mob. Anything that could be taken, lifted, carried from the building was looted; sheets, blankets, clothes, even food. They took toys. Everything else was set on fire after someone in the mob yelled “Burn the niggers’ nest!” They were black orphaned children. Was there anyone more vulnerable in all the city? The mob set upon the asylum. With clubs, brick bats, anything they had to hand. It only took about twenty minutes to destroy the whole place.’

‘Did anyone try to stop it?’

‘Actually, yes. It was reported that one man – he was Irish – pleaded with the mob to help the children but they set upon him too.’

‘And what … what happened to the children?’

‘The children, carrying whatever belongings they could hold, were led out through a side entrance by some staff and through the streets with a police guard. Some soldiers armed with bayonets came to escort them and keep them from the mob.’

‘So none of them were killed?’

‘One of them was, a ten-year-old girl.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘As she was being led away from the building, a piece of furniture hurled out the window of the asylum by the mob hit her in the head. It’s horrible, Adam, what people can do, what they’re capable of.’

‘Did her friends see, the other children, I mean? Did they see her get killed?’

‘I guess they must have.’

‘And what happened to the rest of them, the children?’

‘Well, I read one account that said they were taken to a police station on 35th Street and another version said they were put on a barge and towed out to the middle of the East River to keep them safe from the mob.’

‘Which one’s right?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe someone knows. Maybe it’s one of those things … one of those things people don’t know.’

‘Why don’t people know? Why are there two versions of the ending? Does that mean that one of the versions is wrong?’

‘I don’t know. That’s what historians do, that’s for historians. They take raw material and piece together the stories that make up history for the rest of us.’

‘What do you mean, “raw material”?’

‘Whatever they can find, eyewitness statements, police statements, newspaper reports – anything they can find. You want to see where it happened?’

‘The Colored Orphan Asylum?’

‘It’s only a block away. You can probably see where it was from here. It’s 43rd and 5th. Look, just there, that corner, you see? We’ll go there but then we’ll have to get a cab.’

The cab would take them to the airport where Jake Zignelik would say goodbye to his son Adam and put him on the long flight back to his mother. But before that the father dragged the son who dragged his suitcase to the corner of 43rd and 5th where the Colored Orphan Asylum had once stood. Young Adam craned his neck and looked up. He was looking in the air for furniture that might be thrown out of a window by people wanting to kill children, children who had already lost their parents. It had happened right there. It was no fairytale, not even a dark one with hidden meanings known only to grown-ups, known only to students of history, some sinister tale not really meant for children, a tale that had crossed the Atlantic from the thick forests of Europe. No, this was something that had happened right there on the corner of 43rd Street and 5th Avenue. It was New York where the Colored Orphan Asylum had been attacked. It was New York where a ten-year-old black girl had been killed when furniture pushed out of the window fell on her as she was fleeing the mob that had invaded the orphanage she’d been sent to after she was abandoned. This was the same New York his dad worked and lived in.

More than the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building, the Statue of Liberty, Broadway or Times Square, this was the New York young Adam thought about when he got home to his mother. This was the New York he took with him on the plane. New York was the city where the orphans were attacked. Irrespective of whether Jake Zignelik thought he had turned the exercise of separation, first from his wife, then
from his son, into an art, irrespective of the delis with wise-cracking old waiters who knew everything, irrespective of his dad’s doting lady friends with their intoxicating perfume and cigarette cases that snapped shut with a crisp sound you wanted to try to emulate, pretty ladies who ran their fingers through a little boy’s hair with the genuine but transient affection of someone temporarily engaging with a cat they were visiting, irrespective of shows he didn’t always understand and museums and art galleries that were interesting up to the point where the back of his legs hurt, irrespective of the parks and
the
park, Central Park, and irrespective of kindly William McCray and his son Charles, who took care of Adam from time to time when their fathers had important work to do, New York was first and foremost to young Adam Zignelik the city with the Colored Orphan Asylum. This was the place of the orphans. Do you know about them, he would say, do you know what happened at the Colored Orphan Asylum? New York was the city of orphans.

‘What was her name?’

‘What?’

‘What was the little girl’s name?’ Adam asked his father in the cab on the way to the airport, looking out the window at late 1970s Queens.

‘Which little girl?’

‘The little girl who was killed by the furniture the mob threw out the window at the Colored Orphan Asylum?’

‘You know, I don’t know.’

‘Do people know?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

‘But if the other children … if some of the other children saw it happen then … some of them would have known her name, even if she was shy … and they could have told the soldiers with the bayonets so some grown-ups would know her name.’

Jake Zignelik, whose thoughts had been elsewhere, realised how much his son had remembered of the story he had told him and he didn’t know whether to be pleased, proud or perhaps alarmed.

‘Maybe they did,’ he said to his son in the back of the cab, now running his fingers through Adam’s hair, ‘maybe her name is known and it’s just that … 
I
don’t know her name.
We
don’t know her name. Maybe
that’s something you could look into next time you visit me. You could read up about it and tell me her name.’

William McCray was a better father to his son Charles than Jake Zignelik was to his son Adam. ‘I never see him,’ Jake Zignelik said to William McCray over coffee during an adjournment in the US Supreme Court.

‘Well, that’s not
his
fault. What did you talk about with him when he was here? You talked to him about the decision in
Brown versus Board of Education
, didn’t you?’

William’s son, Charles McCray, was now the Chairman of the History Department at Columbia. One of the youngest people ever to hold the position, he was also the first African American to hold the position. He had married a woman some ten years younger named Michelle. Uncommonly beautiful, Michelle was a social worker. Much as she tried to dress down, she found her looks hampered her work. Charles and Michelle had one child, a daughter, Sonia.

Adam Zignelik never forgot his father’s account of the events leading up to the New York draft riots and the mob attack on the Colored Orphan Asylum in the summer of 1863. But he never found out the name of the little girl who had been killed by the furniture they had thrown out the window.

Shortly before 4.30 am that Monday morning, Adam Zignelik was to awake momentarily uncertain of where he was and experience a shortness of breath sometimes associated with a heart attack or at least with the tart panic of a nightmare. In the minutes before he woke a montage of images in his mind, mostly in monochrome, had induced a series of increasingly violent bodily tremors almost indistinguishable from a convulsion. The images, except for those of his father and of a white television newsreader on Australian television broadcast in black and white, were mainly of black people. They were from another time. He saw Emmett Till and Emmett’s mother, Mamie. He saw Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Addie May Collins, all aged fourteen, and little Denise McNair, aged eleven, smiling, her braided hair tied tight with ribbons, the four little girls who had been killed when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed by white segregationists. He saw
Arthurine Lucy. He saw Elizabeth Eckford and the others of the ‘Little Rock Nine’. And he saw the Colored Orphan Asylum at the corner of 43rd and 5th. But he couldn’t see the little girl from there who had been killed by the falling piece of furniture. He looked but could not find her. There he was, aged eight, alternately looking for her, looking out for falling objects, and looking out for his father, who had been there a moment ago. And whenever he thought he saw her it wasn’t her but little Denise McNair, her braided hair tied tight with ribbons, smiling.