Brother Fish (32 page)

‘How'd they know when the devil was gone?' I asked.

‘Dat easy, man. Da matron come down every two hours an' ask you to ree-cite yo' bible verses. If you can do it den da devil he gone, if you stutter some more da devil still der inside.'

‘That's ridiculous, Jimmy,' I protested. ‘What if a kid has a permanent stutter or he can't control his nerves?'

Jimmy shook his head sadly. ‘Nah, it don't work like dat. A chile put in dat cupboard, he gonna get hysterical in 'bout four hours. He gonna think dem rats dey's gonna eat him. He gonna hear da dead children moanin' and der bones rattlin' in da coffin and da ghosts callin' out, he gonna soon be screamin' and shakin' and moanin' hisself. “Ha!” da matron say. “Praise da Lord! Now da devil is comin' out! Hallelujah! Hear da devil comin' out o' Jesus' precious child. Hear him moanin' an' cryin' out inside dat poor child. Hear him hissin' and roarin' and wrestlin' wid da Lord Jesus. Praise His precious name!”' Jimmy paused, his eyes sad. ‘When dat chile he can't scream no more an' he sit huggin' his knees shakin' an' shiverin' an' sobbin', den dey take him out an' carry him to his cottage an' put him in his bed an' da house mother she give him hot choco-late an' she tell him how Jesus loves him, savin' him from da devil in da nick o' time.'

It wasn't too hard to guess that Jimmy had been through this experience, perhaps more than once. He'd never dwell too long on the orphanage, telling me disconnected bits and pieces, such as the devil-evicting episode. Perhaps his memories of the orphanage were too deeply buried to surface in other than episodic snatches of conversation, pushing momentarily to the surface and then retreating before too much anger and sadness became attached to them.

I was left with the impression of a place where godliness and cleanliness took the place of love and compassion, a place of icy showers and chilblained skin rubbed raw by the hard, unforgiving edges of crude blocks of blue carbolic soap. Of small children on their knees muttering earnest and confused prayers to a Jesus they were told to love but grew to fear. Where small children lived in permanent terror that they might offend, often not understanding why they were being punished, and finally coming to accept that punishment was arbitrary.

The naturally timid became submissive, overanxious in all things and sycophantic, while others, such as Jimmy, grew to be deeply resentful, which, in turn, eventually led them astray.

What was also apparent was that no serious attempt was made to develope their intellect. The education they received was rudimentary, the three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic taught to a point of basic competency. The boys worked in the vegetable gardens and the grounds or the carpentry shop; the girls worked in the kitchen, did sewing or quilting or simply completed the domestic chores around the orphanage. From the age of eight to twelve they worked in the laundry, which took in washing and ironing from the nearby monastery and the College of Mount St Vincent.

In the minds of many they were the biblical children of Ham and destined to become maids and labourers. Accordingly they were being trained as good Christian coloured folk competent in those tasks for which it was thought they were intellectually capable. The white women who held the future of these black children in their hands firmly believed they were doing the Lord's work. The idea of a black orphan aspiring to rise above his or her predestined station in life simply never occurred to them. Children such as Jimmy who were demonstrably bright were regarded as potentially dangerous. They would only become frustrated in later life and, as a consequence, turn to crime. It was better to subdue them while they were young so that they didn't aspire to achieve a status in society they would not be allowed to sustain. This was referred to as becoming ‘too big for their boots'. Jimmy was one of the few children who remained unbroken and thus confirmed this hypothesis when he eventually ended up at Elmira Reformatory, a tough institution for boys.

The white women gave thanks to a bountiful God when, at the age of twelve, the orphans were required to leave the Colored Orphan Asylum. The girls were indentured as maids in good homes and the young boys were taken on as gardeners on the estates of the rich or as rural workers. The women never failed to pray for the souls of those of their boys and girls who had strayed from the Lord and subsequently found themselves in Elmira or the Hanavah Lavenburg Home for Working Girls.

The good Protestant ladies took great pride in the fact that they had a permanent waiting list of white folk who wanted their twelve-year-old orphans. It never seemed to have occurred to them that this was hardly surprising – even at the tender age of twelve the children were skilled, passive and submissive domestic servants, and capable and obedient gardeners and farm labourers. They could be snapped up for the cost of the food they ate and the second-hand clothes they wore, and could be regarded as free labour until they grew old enough to leave for salaried employment or, as more often happened with the boys, decided to run away to the city.

However, singing was one area where the women who ran the institution allowed the children to excel. They accepted that the Lord had especially gifted coloured folk with a talent for music and song, and the Colored Orphan Asylum Children's Choir had become a famous New York institution that earned the orphanage a great deal of public approbation. The choir often appeared at functions within the white community. They were popular additions to private weddings and funerals and performed publicly at events such as mayoral receptions, gala occasions and the like.

On several occasions, when a choir in a particular year had been exceptional, they'd appear at the Metropolitan. On the 4th of July it had become a cherished annual tradition for the choir to assemble between the two great Piccirilli lions on the steps of the New York State Library. Here they would sing the national anthem at the raising of the flag, and thereafter entertain the crowd with a medley of patriotic songs.

In return for these private and civic appearances the orphanage never asked for recompense; instead, a donation to the American Missionary Society's work in Africa was considered an appropriate response. From the time of Dr David Livingstone, the orphanage choir had helped to fund the work of the society in darkest Africa and this had further helped to boost its reputation as a praiseworthy Christian institution.

‘Dat da big joke – we singin' all dem songs an' people, dey clappin', an' we's gettin' money dey gonna send to Africa so da black brothers over der dey gonna have Jesus in der souls. Once I ask da house mother, “Ma'am, we's black so why's dey don't pay us money so's we can have da Lord Jesus in our souls?” She reply we American blacks, we don't need to get no money to have Jesus – we got Him for nothing. It only da African blacks dat get da money we send so as dey gonna convert!' Jimmy laughed. ‘Dem black cats in Africa – dey know somthin' we don't know, man! Dey done make Christianity a fine-payin' prop-o-sition.'

In his own way Jimmy was right – it seemed never to have struck any of the Quakers as an irony that these were the voices of orphans descended from slaves who may very well have been captured 200 or more years previously from the very tribes being urged to repent their sins and to accept the Lord Jesus into their lives. Or perhaps it did, and they simply marvelled at the mysterious ways of the Lord.

The choir had become the acceptable – if not celebrated – public face of the Colored Orphan Asylum so that when, from time to time, rumours of the way the orphanage was run surfaced and questions were raised about the uncommonly high number of deaths among its children, they were quietly ignored by city welfare officials. Without exception the politicians of the day regarded people of colour as inferior and a constant drain on the city's resources. They would have seen an inquiry into conditions at the orphanage as a blatant misuse of public funds.

When the orphanage was closed in 1946, public examination of its often mouldy but extensive and carefully kept basement records showed that several hundred children had died in its care, with the term ‘accidental death' on death certificates too common a thread through the files not to have caused major concern had the orphanage housed any other than coloured children. Instead, the Negro and American Indian orphans who ‘Passed away in the arms of Jesus' were buried quietly and forgotten in unmarked graves in the Bronx and Westchester cemeteries.

In fairness, the existence of the Colored Orphan Asylum spanned 110 years during which time standards of hygiene and basic medical care changed enormously, with most of the childhood diseases that commonly led to death eradicated over time. While the conditions in which the children were housed and the way they were cared for might today seem reprehensible, they would not have been atypical of the domestic accommodation and health facilities available to working-class communities at the time. Moreover, they would have been considerably better than those existing in the slums of Manhattan the year Jimmy was born.

When I'd asked Jimmy to come to the island with me I'd naturally assumed his life in an orphanage in New York and time spent in Elmira Reformatory were about as far removed from mine on the island as it was possible to get. I promised him long, lazy days diving for crays, surfing (I'd teach him how to ride a surfboard), fishing or simply lazing about on the beach. It would be, I told myself, a wonderful new experience, something someone with his background would have difficulty comprehending at first. Or so I fondly imagined.

In fact, children are by nature tough, irrepressible and optimistic souls and make the best of such means as are put at their disposal. A bank of the Hudson River formed part of the orphanage boundary, and in Jimmy's time the river had not yet become polluted by industrial effluent. It was clear and clean and often referred to as ‘the blue Hudson'. I recall on one occasion talking enthusiastically about catching the large island crabs that Sue, the family expert, would cook on an open wood fire on the beach and serve with her secret Chinaman's sauce. I'd made it sound quite idyllic and expected Jimmy to express his bewilderment. Instead he volunteered, ‘Yeah man, dat sound good. Catchin' dem crabs to cook an' fishin' and swimmin', we done dat in da Hudson River. It good fun and den we take tomatoes and onion and potato from da garden and we make us a fire down by da river and cook a dee-lish-us fish stew in some ole boilin' pot we find on a garbage heap.'

It was a rare glimpse into a universal childhood I'd not allowed Jimmy Oldcorn to experience. Instead I'd created my own mind-pictures of his time in the orphanage, and they hadn't allowed that even the most underprivileged children have fun. By inviting him to the island I was to be his benefactor, allowing him the catch-up experiences denied him in childhood. Now that I think of it, it was both patronising and presumptuous. He told of climbing the stone wall surrounding the Mount St Vincent monastery and stealing apples, cherries and strawberries from the monks' garden. Of visits to Coney Island, sponsored by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and once a year a visit to Radio City Music Hall sponsored by a Jewish businessmen's charity in the Bronx. Also, of the pig-outs that would occur after the choir performed at the various receptions, where they were allowed to eat all they could stuff into their hungry stomachs but forbidden to take anything away with them. Jimmy laughingly recalled how the boys concealed cakes in their shirt fronts while the girls did the same in their knickers. ‘One girl, we called her Cup Cake Connie, when her knickers full put two o' dem cup cakes where her boobies, what she ain't got none, suppose to be!'

As his twelfth birthday approached and the time for his indenture drew closer, Jimmy, who hitherto had conducted a fairly casual relationship with God, now took to getting down on his knees and praying to Jesus in earnest. He was asking for a reprieve from being sent away to become a farm labourer somewhere unfamiliar and lonely. He was big for his age, naturally intelligent and not afraid to assert himself. He was also popular with the other children, who saw him as their leader. As a consequence he was regarded as somewhat of a troublemaker, and he knew the orphanage would be anxious to see the last of him. But he was also an exceptionally good boy soprano, and while he retained his childhood voice he knew he was safe. The choir needed him. He was a charismatic performer with a smile that made an audience grin. His solo during Handel's
Messiah
had been commented on by the resident music critic of the
New York Times
, who lamented the fact that he had not been discovered earlier in his life and better use made of his exceptional voice. And so Jimmy prayed to the supposedly loving Jesus that the onset of puberty would be delayed.

When Jimmy talked about the past he seemed to return to it physically as well as in his mind. His face and mannerisms took on the concerns of the orphan child he'd once been, and his voice seemed to rise an octave. He was, and still is, a consummate actor and could turn a simple explanation into a compelling performance, which made it almost impossible to refuse him anything he desired. He'd never quite forgiven the Lord Jesus for being able to resist his considerable powers of persuasion. ‘Brother Fish, dat last year I pray every night to da Lord Jesus – I ask him to keep mah voice so it not broke. “Lord, let me sing yo' praise,” I says to him. “I done good in dat choir singin' for you, Jesus. Maybe yo' read what da man say in da
New York Times
? I worth keepin', Lord. I done mah best singin' da gospel. Now I needs a small favour. Jus' one more year, please Lord? Jus' one more year to be a boy soprano – after dat I ain't gonna ask no more favours no more. Please Jesus, let me keep mah chile voice. Praise yo' precious name, Amen.”'