Conjurer (7 page)

Ruth is one of the newer inmates. She's nineteen, or thereabouts, a free Negress, not a runaway slave; and nearly three years of her life have been spent in a tiny, barrel-vaulted cell with a food slot cut in the thick oak door and a slit roof-window. Unlike her male counterparts, who are provided with private outdoor spaces as well as indoor beds, females are assigned to only one interior room for the duration of their term. The architects who designed the building reasoned that men, being muscular, needed light and air; women, even those confined, were to be protected from the elements at all times.

Ruth was once a maid-of-all-work. Caught stealing potatoes to tote home to her sickly baby son—he was born doubly afflicted: a victim of the falling disease, and offspring of a white father who forced himself upon her one unlucky day—she was released without references, a sentence nearly tantamount to death.

With her mulatto child in tow, she returned to the Negro ghetto bordered by South and Seventh Streets, doing what meager work passed her way, existing on meals of scraps and refuse. When she could no longer afford even a sleeping place on a vermin-infested floor, she bundled up her son and quit the ghetto, taking to the streets to beg pennies off the well-to-do whose warm and lamp-lit homes adjoined Washington Square.

Begging proved problematic. To the abolitionists, Ruth was an object of pity, sometimes even of sympathy, but to the many newly arrived Irish who struggled with their own poverty and unemployment, she was a pariah. Men and women alike spat upon her, kicked at her baby as he lay sleeping in her lap, called her a “sambo” and her son an “antichrist” while they glared at her child's paler skin and the features that looked so much like her nameless oppressor.

Ruth cowered under the threats, remembering every horrific moment of the riots of the 1830s when entire houses along Fitzwater and St. Mary's streets were burned to the ground, and neighbors dragged off shrieking into the night. She'd lost what little she had of family in those dark times.

Driven by hunger, despair, and the mewling cries of her son, Ruth finally gave up begging in favor of a nervous kind of thievery; she would dart between market-bound farm wagons so that the bellowing drivers were distracted, and objects from their varying cargoes could be removed by nimbler and more daring fingers than her own. A ham, a bushel of peaches, flour stitched into a sack: The goods would be shared between Ruth and her accomplices.

Her baby, quivering and glassy-eyed when the fits came upon him, limp and slack-lipped after they'd passed, ate and grew.

Finally arrested and pulled before the slumbrous-voiced and heavy-lidded Judge Alonzo Craig, Ruth stood tight-faced and silent, and was sentenced to Eastern State Penitentiary for three years. “Larceny” and “the receiving of stolen goods” were her twin crimes. Incarcerated, she was to experience regret for her evil ways; fortnightly and with an unseen teacher, she was to be engaged in learning the rudiments of reading and figuring, as well as mastering the skill of sewing. As for her child, a stranger took him from the courtroom; he was two years old, and as he walked away his body heaved with terrible tears. When he stumbled, the stranger dragged him forward. That was the last image Ruth had of her little boy.

“‘Whither thou goest, I will go,'” she now murmurs in the smallest of whispers. Her voice feels strange in her throat, like that of one who is deaf. She sits on her cornhusk-filled mattress, upright, hands resting on her lap. The warders, whose shoes are muffled with swaddling, are adept at peeking through the cell eyeholes just in time to catch and punish profligate behavior: handiwork dashed to the floor, words of protest, rage, and grief scribbled on the whitewashed stone walls.

“‘And where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:'”

She begins the lines again. “From the Book of Ruth,” the Quaker lady told her during one of her visits. The choice of Scripture was inadvertent; not knowing the prisoner's name, race, creed, or age, the woman sat in the corridor, speaking quietly and unseen through the door slit where food is delivered daily. “The Old Testament. Thee must learn thy Bible, child.”

The lady's queer Quaker speech remains in Ruth's ears: thee, thine, thou. “The story tells of the widowed Ruth,” the woman continued in the same hushed tone, “who journeys with her mother-in-law, Naomi, to dwell in an alien land, and is then raised up by marriage to the wealthy and powerful Boaz. Ruth will become the great-grandmother of David, the king. I tell the story to teach thee about overcoming adversity. Ruth was a loyal and loving woman; she did not succumb to temptation nor to vice as thou hast—”

“I am Ruth,” Ruth had suddenly blurted, although she knew that sharing her identity was as forbidden as talking aloud.

The Quaker lady remained silent, then finally responded with a constrained “Thee mustn't speak or say thy name. Only the warden can know thy history. It's for thine own good, girl, so that departing this place, no one shall guess thy past. That is why a sack is placed upon thy head the moment thee enters the gates—”

“But I'm also a Ruth” had been the stubborn—although hushed—reply, but the lady rejected the effort, proceeding with a placid:

“And why thou art conveyed to thy cell blindfolded, why thee and thy fellow penitents are dressed in identical and prison-stitched clothing, why thou dost not know among whom thou lodgest: male, female, old, young … Thee must remain B415 to me.”

“I am Ruth,” was the sullen and louder answer, “dwelling in an alien land.”

“Thou blasphemest, child. Now keep silent, or the warders will force me to go.”

Remembering this exchange, Ruth feels her eyes narrow and her fingers clench.
Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God
. She bows her head. Whose God? she wonders. Whose people?

Something that sounds like a club bangs sharply against the cell's wood door. The onetime maid-of-all-work leaps up, surprised to see her meal tray sliding inward through the food slot. In her three years in Cherry Hill, she's never grown accustomed to the arrival of her keepers.

She takes the tray but doesn't attempt to peer through the opening. According to prison rules, no words are exchanged. Brown bread, water, a dented metal bowl of meat gristle: She carries the meal back to her bed. The whale-oil lamp sputters, emitting a choking, fish-innard odor that for a moment masks the all-enveloping stench of the prison.

Thy people shall be my people
, she tells herself silently, then, unwittingly and against all better judgment, thinks of her son, her little Cai. Almost five years old, he would be now. Five years this winter. But whether he lives or whether he has died, Ruth doesn't know.

While ruth cowers in the upper reaches of the female wing, another prisoner practices his walking in his own quiet cell on the ground floor of the men's wing. He's a slight man, thin-boned and sprightly, save for one terrible flaw. He was born with a club foot. Or, rather, no true foot. Where his right heel should be, he has only an ankle, the vestigial right toes curling up backward around a scrawny calf.

Unlike Ruth, he's white and because he's male has been assigned both a cell for sleeping and a solitary one for exercise. The advantage of such beneficence is lost upon him.

Long ago and despite his affliction, he glimpsed a better future for himself. He envisioned a man of modest means, his own small shop (he was a tailor by trade before his arrest for thievery), and a wife and children dwelling comfortably above his place of business. He pictured a weekly supper of roasted meat, a jug of ale upon the table, neighbors to whom he spoke and among whom he was admired.

From his earliest youth, he worked toward this gilded dream, teaching himself to walk erect and tall, not giving in to his withered right extremity. When he turned eight—he was called Dicket back then—he strapped the first of many hand-hewn sticks to his leg. His father by then being dead, his mother apprenticed him to a tailor. It was the last Dicket saw of her or of home.

His tailor-master renamed him Josiah, as his own name was deemed too juvenile for the trade he was entering. The tailor was a religious man beside being a shrewd one.

When Josiah reached sixteen, this master died, leaving his estate in ruins and his apprentice adrift. Josiah strapped on a “good” leg and walked carefully—and without a crutch—through the town seeking a new position. By then he'd learned to attach an empty shoe to the stick, to wrap the harsh wood in cotton batting, to stitch on a clean stocking. The bogus foot often looked better than the real. Josiah's secret remained his own.

The slim beginnings of prosperity ensued, and Josiah (now a hired man) dared to take a wife. She produced a daughter, a pink and round-faced child almost perfect except for her predominant brow.
All babies have big heads
, Josiah told his bride.
Susan will grow into hers like every other infant
.

The child proved him wrong. Her head grew and grew; her body followed fitfully, turning fat where it should have been long, her shoulders rounding into pasty lumps, her hands lying listlessly at her sides. She rarely reached for objects as other children did; instead, her eyes became milky, staring at nothing. When her mother held her, spittle ran from the little girl's mouth; when her parents tried to teach her the sounds and meaning of speech, she merely gurgled and drooled all the more.

Josiah's wife grieved, then grew angry. Alone with her baby she berated the child's sluggishness, her inattention, her vapid quiescence. The bitter words turned to pinches, then furtive slaps. Susan mewed like a hurt kitten and retreated further into her silent world, while inside the mother's head, frustration and wrath roared louder and louder.

Spilled porridge, lost milk, a broken dish: One of those infinitesimal moments brought ruin to Josiah's wife. When the child's insignificant transgression had concluded, mother and daughter eyed each other, the dawning of understanding etching terror on the child's face, endless hatred on the mother's.

Josiah's wife snatched up her baby, shaking Susan so fiercely that vomit belched from her mouth. Finished, the mother flung her daughter and herself on the pallet that served as mattress and commenced to wail, then shriek, and finally to beat her head against the wooden floor.

It was the noise of this rhythmic self-destruction that eventually brought the neighbors and the day watch who removed the screaming woman to the Asylum for Relief of Persons Deprived of Their Use of Reason. Susan, motionless except for her quivering fingers, accompanied her mother in the wagon.

When Josiah returned home, his tiny apartment was all but bare. When, days later, he was finally allowed to visit his wife and child, both were as dumb and immobile as clods of earth. He left his false foot in the Asylum's carriage entry, kicking it away as if driving off a vicious dog, and limping home on the remaining stick, the “peg.”

One month passed, then two and three. His daughter gradually improved to her former state; his wife did not. Josiah, in his distraction and despair, stitched sleeves shut, buttons without holes, breeches that could not close upon the calves.

He was released from service, but not before pilfering a gentleman's fine pocket watch. The white face set in gold reminded him of his daughter's visage: round, flat, its outward calm masking a world of spinning motion. Recklessly, Josiah held this lovely object to the sun, studying it as it turned, like a budding flower, toward the light. It was then that he was arrested.

Just as Ruth recites her own litany of want and despair, daily Josiah relives every moment of his wretched descent until the stones of the prison walls seem to begin to move closer, the barrel-vaulted ceiling to sink, and the floor to rise beneath his feet. Even the brief glimpse of sky seen from his solitary exercise cell appears oppressive and sinister, as if about to collapse down upon him. He knows that if he doesn't escape from this place he will turn as mad as his lost wife.

So he makes a daring plan, saving scraps of cloth from the yardage supplied for his prison work: a frock coat for the warden and a driving mantle for his wife. Josiah intends to stitch himself a dark jacket, lighter trousers, a white cravat to wrap elegantly around his neck—and a shoe made of heavy felt.

Dressed in this finery, he aims to scramble up and over the wall of his exercise yard just after a band of visitors has passed. If luck holds, he will mingle with them. When they leave the prison grounds, he will be in their midst, his only problem the reek that emanates from a prisoner's skin, but he believes this will remain unnoticed until he's free of the compound itself.

So Josiah waits, counting the hours and days until he hears a large group of visitors approach, practicing how they respond to their guide's remarks, reiterating the facts and numbers he's already heard from other tourists, oohing and aahing in copied awe and approval. “… The kennels for the Great Danes …” He imagines himself murmuring appreciatively to those around him. “… Walls thirty feet high, ten feet thick at the base, and buried twelve feet beneath the earth … How extraordinary …”

What he never rehearses is his final farewell to the place that's been his home for five long years.

A Refuge for the Poor

T
HE ASSOCIATION FOR THE CARE
of Colored Orphans has been in existence for five proud years. The women who created it and who annually seek contributions for its benefit are among the chosen of the city: a Lippincott, a Morris, a Biddle, a Yarnall, a Cadwalader. These ladies envisioned an orphans' refuge at Thirteenth and Fitzwater streets—among the poorest of the poor—and their ardor and hard work have wrought a miracle: a comfortable place with scrubbed pine floors, wide windows, and plenty of fresh, invigorating air.

The gifts the women accept on behalf of their young charges are (when not ready cash) of a healthful, instructive nature: dried peaches, bags of beans, pocket handkerchiefs, stockings, sweet potatoes, and a map of Africa—which is a place so foreign that the foundlings who gaze upon it believe it is a chart of the heavens.