BBMessage [timestamp]
[JW] Call me now
[AT] Am at dinner w commish and wacko wanda among others. May have to talk about her!
[JW] We have an issue with that
[AT] wtf
[JW] I’m heading downtown. Get out of there now
Blog entry [user: emilyw] [locked]
ANY INTEREST in finance becomes an interest in power, and an interest in place, I think. When I started working on Wall Street, I was interested first and foremost in doing a good job in a high-pressure environment. But it became apparent to me, quite quickly, that I would do my job better if I took notice of the real flows of currency, and the actors and locations they gravitated to and spun around. And I think—it might even be too obvious to state!—that that leads you to a study of history.
There I was, routing around financial meltdowns the world over, not realizing that I was standing on the site of the original American financial meltdown. Wall Street itself, named for the wall the Dutch put up to fortify the New Amsterdam settlement against the natives, a wall that eventually extended out to what is now Pearl Street, the old shoreline. It was here on Wall Street that the smart operators of the 1600s looked to do business with the locals, the people of Werpoes and the other Lenape villages of what they called Mannahatta.
The Europeans had noticed that the Native Americans seemed to place great value on something called wampum, or “white strings.” These were lengths of beading made from shells and woven together into strips or belts. They had many uses. The relative complexity afforded by shape and color meant that wampum could be used as a communications medium and as a record of events, not unlike a simple tapestry. There are surviving photos of wampum belts constructed to seal and commemorate treaties. They were used as devices to preserve and tell stories from one generation to the next, a crucial cultural aid in otherwise oral societies. Wampum had myriad other social functions. In short, there was perceptible value to wampum in Native American society.
When the Europeans arrived, they immediately looked for ways to open commerce with the natives, and when they saw the traffic of wampum, they felt sure that they’d found it. Therefore, they began to produce their own wampum. It must have been difficult at first, essentially trying to forge a currency without really understanding it, but the Europeans had one important advantage. The natives of Mannahatta were a preserved Stone Age culture. These seventeenth-century Europeans had metal tools and all the advantages of coming from a world poised less than a century from the top of the Industrial Revolution.
The natives, at first, must have found it to be some weird way of reaching out. The Europeans making wampum, rich with cultural memory and meaning, and wanting to hand it over in exchange for furs and food. I wonder if the natives felt
Soon, of course, the inevitable happened. The Dutch flooded this tiny primitive market with fake wampum. They massively overproduced it, at great speed, and the villages of Mannahatta couldn’t absorb more than a fraction of it. Wall Street caused and presided over America’s first financial collapse. But the furs and the food and the other goods obtained from the Lenape with fake currency allowed the wall of Wall Street to grow until it enclosed and swallowed villages like Werpoes. It’s still there now, buried under downtown, a hidden place of power. I don’t think of it as subsumed into the new power of Wall Street.
I think of it as lying in wait, glowing with the half-life of its lessons learned and its vengeance pending.
I’m not supposed to go near Werpoes. If you can see this friends-locked entry, then you know there are issues in my life that I can discuss only in the most allusive of ways. But I invent new reasons, weekly, to get a little closer. Purchasing cut flowers from a certain store. Getting food from a certain cafe. I edge nearer, incrementally, despite the risks, because my first interest was in power. And Werpoes was the first community I know of that was crushed by the sort of financial wrongdoing that I did for a living. The living that, in fact, gave me, completely, the life I have now.
I’ve had to learn a lot about Native American culture since those days. I’m drawn to it, fascinated by it, and hope that what I’ve learned will protect me in the years to come. But I’m drawn to power, too, and there is power there.
Don’t go to Werpoes. It’s not safe.
TALLOW WOKE up about six a.m., feeling like boulders had been rolled over him in the night.
The shower didn’t help. He endured a short but explosive session on the toilet, and when he turned to flush there was blood in the bowl. He got dressed, stuffed some things back in the laptop bag, and left.
At seven a.m., he was outside a large florist’s store that he knew, on Maiden Lane. They were just opening, bringing in leafy goods from trucks temporarily double-parked on the tree-lined street. Tallow slid in the front door, past two unpleasantly healthy men in wife-beaters and jogging pants carrying pallets of heavy pots like they were cafeteria trays. A slender woman spotted him in the gap between two large and odious monoliths of vegetation that might have been triffids and said, “I’m sorry, we’re not really open yet.”
With a smear of regret, Tallow badged her. “I know. I just have a quick question about something.”
The woman walked around to him, wiping her palms on a pair of jeans that hadn’t been blue in five years. She was white like lilies, and willowy, her hair the pale glow of blondes who have worked in the sun for a long time. “What did you need, Detective? Is this quick question for a wife, a girlfriend, or your mother?”
“I didn’t badge you to get special treatment, I promise. I need to see a tobacco plant, if you have one.”
Her eyes said she was in her forties, but only two lines were drawn on her forehead as she made a small pensive frown. “Hm. You know, I think I do. Come with me.”
She led him past four or five stages of plant life, along an aisle, and into a small jungle of shrubs. Tallow watched her eyes tick down and across three levels of shelving. She settled on a small pot containing a sickly- looking collection of sticks topped with wispy white heads. “Woman’s tobacco,” she told him. “The Native Americans used the leaves to alleviate heavy periods, postnatal sickness, and stomach problems.”
There were so few leaves on the object that Tallow didn’t want to touch them for fear of killing the thing.
“Or there’s this,” she said, lifting a heavier pot filled with a vivid, vigorous green foliage that sprayed white trumpets of flowers whose mouths were a warm pink. “Your basic
Tallow rubbed one of the leaves between thumb and forefinger. He got a,
“That’s it,” he said. “I think. Maybe if I crushed it up and burned it.”
“You crush and burn it, you buy it,” the florist said with a smile.
“Sorry,” Tallow said. “It’s for something I’m working on, believe it or not. You seem to know about this stuff.”
She rolled her eyes around the room. “I kind of should, don’t you think?”
“Sorry. Sorry. I’m not really awake yet. Would you know if this is the sort of tobacco plant that would have grown naturally around here, way back when?”
She bit her cheek, turning the pot around in her soil-streaked hands. Her nails were longer and stronger than he would have expected for someone in her job. “Well. It’s a cultivar, like I said, and some people think it has a couple of other tobacco plants mixed up in it. But sure, something pretty much like it would have grown around here. The woman’s tobacco would have been local too. You would have found it on the slopes headed down toward where Pearl Street and Water Street are now, back in the days before the natives sold the place to the Dutch.”
Tallow made a decision. “I’d like to buy this, um, this one with the flowers here.”
“Yeah.”
She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I don’t do cop discounts. And women really do prefer roses.”
