couldn't identify — as if it mattered one damn bit.
Black Suit saluted him with the dragoon pistol. 'So long, Captain Engineer.
'Oh, that's rich. You're a fuckin' sketch.' Bull Voice laughed as Billy tightened inside, waiting for the bullet.
At that same moment, a middle-aged man with a bald head and a face that still possessed a certain cherubic aspect, stormed a breastwork. Those storming it with him, howling for blood, were not soldiers, but civilians; about a third were women.
Instead of shoulder and side arms, they attacked with bottles, bricks, sticks, furniture legs looted from wealthy homes, and in the case of the bald man, a wide black belt he had removed from pants of a volunteer fireman knocked unconscious by another rioter. Using the belt like a flail, Salem Jones had already opened the face of one of Mayor Opdyke's policemen with the big brass buckle.
Black smoke rolled over the rooftops of Manhattan. The streets were a silvery sea of glass. The breastwork — overturned carts, hacks, and wagons — stretched across Broadway from curb to curb just below Forty-third Street. Broadway, like most of the main arteries in this city of eight hundred thousand, had been contested since midmorning and held by the rioters since shortly after noon. On Third Avenue, no street-railway cars were moving anywhere from Park Row to One Hundred and Third. Cannon had been placed around City Hall and Police Headquarters on Mulberry. The mob storming the breastwork had just come from torching the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue, where the self-appointed leaders had decided to evacuate the children only moments before lighting the fires.
Salem Jones was not the first to clamber over the wagons to attack a dozen outnumbered police, but neither was he the last. The police scattered and ran. Jones threw a brick, which struck one of the officers in the back of the head. After the man fell, Jones scrambled out from behind a cartwheel that had briefly shielded him. He snatched the policeman's thick locust stick from his limp hand. He hadn't owned a good truncheon since his days as an overseer at Mont Royal. He felt whole again.
Some rioters ran into a restaurant and reappeared with two Negro waiters. A roar went up. A couple of policemen fired futile shots from the next corner, but that did nothing to deter the crowd. Some produced ropes. Others were shinnying up telegraph poles. Within two minutes, both waiters hung from crossarms, turning, turning slowly in the smoke.
The sight brought a smile to Jones's round face. He had been in New York only ten days, drifting there as he had drifted to so many other places after that damned Orry Main had discharged him. He had found a hovel in Mackerelville where he could sleep for nothing, and in grubby Second Avenue saloons he had listened to angry men thrown out of work by a recent dock strike. One of the most effective, a longshoreman by day and a mackerel with three girls working for him at night, had bellowed his grievances at a crowd that included Salem Jones.
All they wanted on the docks was a raise to twenty-five cents an hour for the nine-hour day. Was that too much to ask? The listeners screamed, 'No!' and thumped their tin pails on tables and chairs. But what did the bosses do? Locked out the white men and brought in vans of niggers. Was that right? '
The following Monday, the draft was to begin dragging these same whites into the army as cannon fodder — hard-working men who couldn't pay three hundred dollars to exempt themselves or hire a substitute. 'We have to go to war for the coons, while they stay here and take our jobs, and bust into our houses, and molest our women. Are we going to let the draft people and the coons get away with that?'
'NO! NO! NO!'
Listening to the screaming, Jones could have told the witless police there would be hell to pay on this Monday morning. He had decided to join the fun.
The longshoreman who had exhorted the saloon crowd was one of the organizers of a mammoth parade, which had started early. Carrying banners and placards proclaiming NO DRAFT!, some ten thousand protestors marched up Sixth Avenue to Central Park. There, speeches had incited the mob to less restrained forms of protest. One of the orators, Jones noted, had a pronounced Southern accent. An agent sent to stir things up?
After the rally, the great crowd had divided into smaller ones. Jones ran with rioters who threw glass jars of sulphurous-smelling Greek fire through the windows of mansions on Lexington. He next joined a band that invaded an office where draft names were supposed to be drawn. They found nothing except furniture to wreck; the officials were conveniently absent. Then he was swept into the crowd at the Orphan Asylum, which was now burning briskly. From Broadway, he could glimpse the flames above the intervening buildings.
Around him Jones saw few evidences of anger. After the breastworks were stormed and the waiters hanged, the mob turned sportive. Celebrants swigged from all kinds of bottles. A drunken man snagged the hand of an unkempt woman, equally tipsy, pushed her into the doorway of an abandoned pawnshop, unbuttoned his pants and displayed his stiff member while spectators, including the woman, applauded and whistled. Soon the man was down on her, bouncing busily. The onlookers stayed a short time, but grew bored and went hunting other diversions.
Never much of a drinker, Jones needed no alcohol to stimulate him. He ran with the crowd down Broadway, then toward the East River. A group of them dashed into a tea shop to overturn chairs and tables, hurl cups and pots at the walls, and generally terrify the customers. On the way out he broke a front window with the stolen truncheon.
Near the river, under black smoke-clouds roiling through the hazy white sky, they collided with a herd of milling cows, pushed on through it and discovered the two cowherds, black boys, cowering on a patch of grass down by the water. The boys were fourteen or fifteen. Jones helped lift one and fling him in the river. Others threw in the second one.
'Hep us, hep us! We can't swim —'
Laughter answered the plea, laughter and rocks thrown by the whites. Jones threw one, reached for a second, imagining he was hurling them at that damned, arrogant Orry Main, who had discovered so-called irregularities in the Mont Royal accounts and retaliated by discharging him. Born in New England, Jones had always favored the South because he loathed colored people. But the snobs along the Ashley, and especially the Mains, had given him another target for his hate.
Jones threw another rock, watched with pleasure as it struck one of the gasping cowherds square in the forehead. A minute later the boy sank beneath the water, followed shortly by the second. Laughing, the people around Jones complained that the fun hadn't lasted long enough.
An hour later, he found himself in another saloon in Mackerelville, listening to still another scruffy fellow harangue a crowd.
'We hain't gone where we really should go — over to the Eighth Ward. Over to Sullivan an' Clarkson an' Thompson streets. Over there we can tree some coons right where they live.'
Fortified by free beer the owner was serving — his way of demonstrating dislike of the draft — Jones thrust his locust stick in his belt and joined the marchers, who defiantly sang 'Dixie' at the top of their lungs as they tramped west.
Arms linked with strangers on either side of him, Jones reflected that he personally liked the conscription law — a sentiment he wouldn't have expressed here, naturally. He liked it because certain states were already paying handsome bounties to men who would enlist and help fill draft quotas. Though he was beyond the age for service, Jones nevertheless believed he could dye his fringe of white hair, lie about the date of his birth, and earn some of that bonus money. Something to think about, anyway — but not till this party was over.
The mob, grown to around one hundred and fifty, brushed with a squad of soldiers, many of whom wore head or arm bandages; the city had even turned out the Invalid Corps for the emergency. The mob easily scattered the invalids and marched on through the glass glitter. The day darkened more rapidly than usual. Heavy smoke, lurid red from all the fires, pressed down on the rooftops. Fire bells tolled from every quarter as the crowd surged into Clarkson Street, a lane of tenements and shacks built from packing boxes.
'Where are they? Where are the niggers?' people shouted. Except for two little girls playing beside an immense garbage heap where fat rats scampered, no human beings could be seen. Jones scanned the tenements. Broken windows, open windows — all were empty.
Some of the rioters vanished behind the packing-box shanties and began tipping outhouses. Most of the
