The Proud and the Free Read online

I got in me head many things, and I don’t know how to use them, like ye take me who was a minstrel and set me to coopering. Me father was struck down by the tyrant’s hand when he led the march of the starving folk on Dublin town, and I was just a lad when he lay there, with a bullet in his chest and dying in me arms. Danny, he said to me, ye must not take it amiss that a bullet strikes down yer father and lose yer taste for freedom. We are a downtrodden folk, Danny, me lad, and we got no taste for the finer things; but we got a taste for music and a taste for freedom, and these are from the olden times. So he died out his life there, and for the sake of me poor mother, for ten pounds in her hand and passage for me, I bind out to Pennsylvania for two years. But I got this in me head: We hold these truths to be self-evident – that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In me head is all this, when I come into the Hardwick House tonight to see if I can find a smell of justice for the Kelly boy. I am a free man. I am no peasant sod, but a free man in the army of the Revolution, in which I enlisted of me own free will out of hatred for the Union Jack and for the rich tyrant who murders the poor. So I come into the Hardwick House, pushing aside Frank Meyers, the stinking orderly who is lapdog there, and there are the gentlemen of the 9th, fifteen of them sitting at this long table, with white linen and candles as bright as the sun, and all of them in their finest buff and blue, and all of them shaven clean, and all of them wigged, and all of them with lace at the cuff and lace at the throat, and all of them with wine in the glass and wine in the bottle, and I am standing there when in there comes a roast of mutton with the very smell enough to break me poor heart. But not even to smell it am I permitted, for I am rushed out of there like I am the plague, which maybe I am from the look of me, and as for Kelly, they said to me that the dirty dog got what he deserved.… So there it is, Jamie Stuart, who is not like myself, a dirty foreigner, but native born out of Pennsylvania. Where have we been and where are we going?…

  They looked at me, all of them fanciful people – some good, some bad, some bright and some dull – but all of them fanciful folk or they would not have been there, and I looked back at the thick of their upturned faces, half seen in the dim firelight, with passion and anger wiped out through the mood of Danny Connell’s tale, and only a question left. But the question was not new. With high hope and high heart, we answered the call to come to Boston in 1776 where the Yankees had hemmed the British tyrant into the tidewater town; and each and every one of us came with that curious, unspoken, unformed dream that is in the heart of every man with a foot on his neck. They were farmers around Boston town, but we were a different crew, and I came with a dream that no more would an apprentice work for grits and beatings; the sailors came with the dream that free men would sail ships with no lashes on their backs; and the Scottish buckskin men came with a dream of land, so that they would no longer hire out as hunters and pack animals, and so that some day they would wear woven Christian cloth instead of animal skin. The Jews came with a dream of standing up as men free, and so did the black men; and in the bellies of the Irish estevars and ropewalkers was a hunger ache a thousand years old and a hate almost as ancient. And the Poles and the Germans came with their heads bowed, but they would hold them upright now, and all of it because the British were hemmed in Boston town. We did not reason it out. Here was talk of freedom and we knew what side we were on, and we had nothing to lose. But then the years went by, and the question began to burn in us; still we were the poor led by the rich, the disinherited led by those who did inherit, and here were curses and whiplashes and blows from those who spoke the pretty words of freedom. Here was worse hunger, and we knew hunger; here was worse cold, and we knew cold.

  The others went home; they came and they went, did the Yankees, which is something that is forgotten now, but the Pennsylvania Line stayed: the foreigns stayed. They had no place to go, and now the foreigns looked at me out of the shadows and out of bloodshot eyes, and I looked at Handsome Jack Maloney, who sat as I did on an uppermost bunk, his small, sharp face the only clean-shaven one among us, his little black eyes observing me narrowly, his mouth twitching a little, as it did in the excitement of an engagement – he who had been a master sergeant in a British regiment, and had deserted and had come to us and our hell with the cold logic of a man who chooses between two sides. That he was, cold and logical and hard as rock.

  The first to do, Jamie, he said, is to lay poor Tommy out in the cold, for the lad is beginning to stink, and then we will talk it over until we get it out of our systems.

  I am tired of talk, growled big Angus MacGrath.

  It helps.

  If we talk in a straight line then it may help, said the Jew Gonzales. If we talk in a circle, we come back to each other where is no solution. We must lift up our heads.

  And our eyes, I agreed.

  Jim Holt picked up the drummer lad in his arms, and the women wept.

  When you return, said Jack Maloney, bring with you men from the 1st and the 3rd and from the artillery company. Tell them there’s a Congress sitting in the hut of Jamie Stuart, and they should not send any damned navvies, but good men in respectful standing.

  That was how our Congress came about.

  We let the fire die to embers, for – the way that hut was packed with humankind, their smell and their breath and their warmth – we wanted no other heat; and on the table we lit a tallow lamp. The year turned. We had no watch among us, having long ago bartered away the last for food and drink, but the sound of the New Year came up, fretful and uneven, with a huzza here and there through the encampment, and then with the tolling of the bells from the village church. The door was opened to let us have a breath of air, and as the swirling snow eddied in, we saw a man or two run across the moonlit parade, in a grotesque imitation of what a New Year’s Eve should be.

  The tallow wick lashed and flickered, and in a voice as sober as a parson’s on Sunday morn, Jack Maloney spoke and said:

  By the rights invested in me by the race of mankind – to which I have tried to do some good, for all the whoring and drinking I have done – and by a part of that holy right which made me, a deserter from the tyrant George III, master sergeant in the army of this republic of Pennsylvania, in the name of the Line and the 6th Regiment, where every lad is a comrade of mine and calls me by name, I do call into being and session this Congress of the Pennsylvania Line.…

  No one laughed. Our being there and our listening to those pompous words of Handsome Jack’s had already committed us, and our necks were inside of fifty nooses and our hearts were beating faster.

  Representing who? someone asked.

  The Line.

  Not enough.

  The people of Pennsylvania.

  We lie in Jersey now.

  Is there a Jersey lad here? asked Jack Maloney.

  There arose the Dutchman Andrew Yost, who said, That I am, and my father before me.

  Then what in hell are you doing in a Pennsylvania regiment? asked Sean O’Toole.

  Pulled in by my neck, by God, with a promise of twenty-dollar bounty I never got, a promise of a suit of clothes, I never see, a promise of a pint of rum a week I never even smell, and a promise of twelve-dollar-a-month pay I never get paid, not even once, you hear, not even once, God damn it to hell!

  And are ye fit to speak for yer land and folk?

  Maybe yes, maybe no, the Dutchman answered slowly. What we do will make me able to speak later.

  That’s good enough, nodded Jack Maloney, and if it’s yer pleasure, I will put this Congress in your hands to elect a board and a president. But I would solemnly advise ye first to choose a protector, and let him beat up a corporal’s guard of honest lads, so that we’ll have no gentry walking in on us.

  This was done. Angus MacGrath was made protector of the Congress, and he left to find a dozen true lads who would patrol the hut, watching for any dirty informer with his nose in the
eaves or any of the officer gentry with a nose in the door. Then we set about discussing form and shape for the Congress, everyone trying to talk at once, until Danny Connell roared us down, and Chester Rosenbank, the pinch-nosed German schoolteacher from Philadelphia, advised:

  You must have a chairman pro tempore.

  And what in hell is that?

  It is Latin and means “for the time being,” and how else will you have each one talk in turn instead of together?

  Then let it be Jamie Stuart in whose hut we are, said Maloney, and if ye talk, make it cutty and sharp.

  So I was chairman, and then for an hour, instead of turning our thoughts to what we intended to do, we debated the point of what we were and whom we represented and what our form should be. Maloney and Rosenbank and the Gonzales brothers, and the black man Goulay, and three buckskin men from the 1st Regiment and a handful of others all held that we represented the people, and that therefore we were a Congress of the people; but the rest of us opposed this, pointing out that aside from the officer gentry, there were none the people hated more than the foreigners of the Line, as witness the way they let us starve and die in the midst of their plenty.

  After we were set on to rob their trees and pilfer their stock, said Goulay.

  Be that as it may, we do not represent them, and it will be our burden in the future to see if we represent them or if their own guns are turned against us.

  Then who do we represent?

  The soldiers of the Line, said Danny Connell, and then only if they follow us.

  When we ourselves don’t know where we be going, but sit here quacking away?

  Then let us get to where we are going and the hell with the shape of it, whether we are a Congress or a Committee or a Board, Jack Maloney said. And if ye want a president to sit over it, Jamie Stuart is as good for me as any other.

  No, no, I said. Give it to some other.

  Dwight Carpenter is Pennsylvania man, said Prukish slowly. So is Jamie. So is Button Lash.

  Carpenter I remember well – a long, bony man, with a great hatchet chin and a somber way of speech. He had been a powder maker before the war, and he went as powderman for the first cannons we rolled from Philadelphia. Now he was a layer and a sergeant, but always to follow and never to lead; and, knowing this, he shook his head and made the point that linemen would want no cannonmen over them.

  Nobody is going to be over nobody, said Jim Holt. Over us is too many and too long.

  Then let it be Jamie, said Jack Maloney, and I said:

  To hell with that! Let it be you, for I tell you it shouldn’t be any man of the 11th, which has had ten whiplashes for what any of you had – and tell me different!

  But they looked at me out of the dark, hairy faces and said never a word.

  … And ten wounded for each of yours; so they’ll say, It’s a good grievance the 11th has, but why should we thraw for them? And that’s why it shouldn’t be me, and maybe Jack neither, him being British; so what about Billy Bowzar, who can read and write to boot?

  They agreed to that. Bowzar was a native man, quiet and not looking for a fight, but a good soldier and a way of talking that made folks listen. They voted him, and he climbed up onto the table and said:

  I accept and I call you to order in a sober way, my good comrades. Now I say to you that we must bind ourselves together here and become like one man, for it’s the way old Ben Franklin said now, and maybe now for the first time. If we don’t all hang together, just as sure as there’s a God in the heavens above, we will all hang separately.

  He stood with his head under the peaked roof, his head all dark and somber up there, but the edges of his red beard catching a glint from the tallow wick.

  I pledge you together, he said. Take the pledge.

  And we all of us raised our right hands and pledged that we would stay together and see this thing through, come what might, even if it meant that we must die together.

  Then who wants the floor to speak? he said.

  But since we were committed now, since we had all of us already done a thing for which many of our comrades had died in the past – spoken and plotted and organized against the gentry who led us – we fell to brooding upon our position instead of giving voice to thoughts and plans. Silence and cold crept over us. Rum would have loosened our thoughts and our tongues, but we had no rum; and thereby arose at that moment a danger point, where the whole thing might have simmered out, each running to unbraid the particular piece of hemp he wore as his own collar. Sensing this, I began to speak without having any clear orderly notion of what I would say. I only knew that someone had to talk, ease them out, start their own tongues. I knew no more than they did where we were going or what awful road we were preparing to explore; but I did know that as soldiers we had things in common, and soldiers we were, and maybe the best in the whole damned world, if the truth should be known; and I also knew that, as with so many of them, the whole of my grown life had been as a soldier and discipline was in my bones and mutiny was a dreadful thought to entertain. Yet I spoke, telling them:

  It’ll be me first, if you tolerate it, and I welcome you here to the magnificent hut I live in. Anyway, you know me, all of you: Jamie Stuart, sergeant in the 11th; and Danny Connell and Moses Gonzales have watched me since I was a little shaver of a lad, and now I’m a man grown, and all the years in between right here in the Line as a regular soldier. The others of you know me too, and you know what is true and false in me. If the gentry look on us as dirt – and dirty we are – I say the best thing in my life is the comrade in the Line, and I’m here because I want to be here. We joined up in York village before they ever wrote out the fine principles of independence, and I said to myself, shaver that I was, the fine logic of my life is the army of the Revolution. Where else was I to look for logic? Born out of slavery I was, my mother and my father in bondage, like so many of yours, and when I was six, turned into the fields to pick. And apprenticed at ten. And beaten, starved, driven, mocked at. I know not why the Yankee men fight, but I know how it was with us in Pennsylvania, and I know that when I fell in love with a sweet young lass called Molly Bracken, my master beat me and told me love was for the gentry. The devil it is! Love is for us. There are land and woods and iron in this place for all of the world, and this is what my musket says, me, Jamie Stuart. But where am I now? They sold me. My mother and my father they sold, and they sold me, and here I sit, ragged and hungry and worn out with the wild battles they made me fight out of their vanity and stupidity and their fear lest the Revolution should turn itself into something against the officer gentry.… And that’s all. I’ve had my say.

  Then it was Andrew Yost, the Dutchman, who rose ponderously and told what his father had said to him, one day when the Line encamped nearby to his land.

  We hold on quits from the patroon, said Yost, and all his life my father dream of freehold. If we hold land in New York Colony, the patroon goes with the British. Instead, we are lucky. We hold land in Jersey, and the patroon has to go with the Revolution or lose his land. So he goes with the Revolution and they make him colonel. Now patroon is colonel, and the rents go up. On my father’s land, every year since 1776, rents double, and when I go home to my father last spring and ask for food, he just look at me. He just look at me and say, you think I’m not starving too, God damn you to hell, and the Revolution with you. That’s what he say, with barns empty and larder empty, and all the officers of the 4th, 6th and 10th quartered with the patroon and living on the fat of the land. Then he say to me, Lend me your pay. Make me a loan of your pay. I say to him, Pay? My God, old man, you’re surely crazy as hell!

  Then there spoke Freddy Goulay, who said, his voice singing like a drum softly beaten:

  You all know me, I am Goulay, black man, African man whose daddy was sold into slavery for Quenten Soames, the Lord Schofield, who I never seen – only his name I know. But I know that, sure enough. When I eight year old, they put me in the field under the whip, and whip me in the sun a
nd whip me in the rain. Whip me in the sun and whip me in the rain, and I ain’t got no back at all, only the whip marks. Then there comes war for freedom, we hear, war for freedom, sure enough for us, for who need freedom more. Sixty-two of us work the fields out in Blue Valley in Virginia, and when news come, we rise up and slay the overseers. Seven of them, and us do like the Bible say, and put to death them who hold us in bondage. Cold and cruel we put them to death, for they whip us and hold us in bondage, and we brake the muskets over their heads. Then we go across to Pennsylvania, for them in Virginia would be wrought for what we done, and we enlist us here. Sixty-two black men from Lord Schofield’s lands, and only me, Goulay, and Jim Holt and Kabanka is left. We is left, but the other all perish, for the gentry put them in front. All right – the gentry put them in front in Monmouth and eighteen of us is slain right there, and that all right, I tell you. You going to slay for freedom, you going to pay the price. We know that – but we know too that the gentry is turned around, and they don’t want no freedom. Otherwise they don’t take men who fight the war and make beasts of them and slaves of them, and starve them, and let them die away of the plague while they fill their bellies, and whip them and hang them, and gut them in, like so they did to Kelly, and make a mockery of them, and steal their pay and spend it on wine and women …

  Like a drum, his deep voice beat, and the rhythm caught the upturned, haggard, dirty faces of the men, and set them to nodding a rhythmic agreement; for who was not hot with the memory of the fourteen thousand dollars pay money stolen and spent by Lieutenant John Bingham of the 5th and the four others who were with him, and the three thousand dollars spent and squandered by Captain Silas Greene of the 3rd, and how he said, when they tried him – not believe me, as they tried us – that it was better spent than on the lousy Irish and the heathen Jews? Who did not recall that his fate was neither death nor whipping, but six strokes of the cane and then a disgraceful removal of his name from the regimental rolls, a disgrace that paid him well enough? And who was not bitter with the memory of four thousand dollars more of commissary money – hard money and not the worthless paper – appropriated to the Philadelphia tailors to make fine winter woolen uniforms for the officers when all the while we starved in our nakedness? And more and much more; and the memories flooded over us and stiffened us and hardened us as the black man spoke – we who had once hated black men and had then learned to die with them and eat with them and live with them, which was more than our gentry could learn.