The night air is full of crickets, and the sky is full of stars, all wheeling if you lay under them for a long enough spell. It’s peaceful here in the empty streets, laying flat against the cobblestones. With the soldiers all gone, and the echo of their singing in my ears grows quiet now. And the limestone buildings are empty those that didn’t burn and the windows have no glass. That’s the good thing about the owners absented also. It’s quiet now. But I’ll miss the soldiers. And their songs.
A massive enemy invasion was in the offing, predicted the papers. Said the tactic was far from new. Said the governor was a country lawyer. That could be true. Okay. So the Red Coats came by land. Came by river. Came by sea. What did it mean to me? Property once of Hendrick Schoonmaker, left to his son.
I’ve read his will. And the line “Excepting the Negro boy, Tome,” runs like a song through the sentences, disqualifying every child but the last. Saved I was, Tome, the Negro boy, for a special son.
Some people say all life started with a single salty water drop. It fell to germinating from a cloud and took root in the soil of the earth and blossoming there into a very long vine. If you wanted to go back through time to the beginning, if you could run time through your hands like a rope, you could count the bulbs and opened petals of every soul on the way back to a key ancestor – a great, great, great ur-grandmother. A sea otter, I think she was.
At every step along the way, a mother could have hesitated because of what someone else might think, or a father could have misjudged the distance before he jumped, from drink, a famine come or a plague or a lightning strike strobed through an ancestor’s bones. And then, no Tome.
Each generation before me escaped the safe cave of a womb out into a land fraught at all corners, long ago contested, by religion, by corporation, by king or by commerce, not a square yard unencumbered.
Here I should note, I own no property to live inside; but I am no longer alone. Above hunger and thirst and pain and sickness, it’s nice finally to have something really in common with everyone else.
The flames licked hot and bright over beams, posts and pillars, emanating waves of heat and sending oily black clouds up from the rooftops. The city below was a smoldering heap of coal ash, smoky sap and bubbling creosote. It was like a great costume ball where every man carried a torch and appeared in and out of the smoke. Those soldiers didn’t burn the brewery though, Lord have pity on us all. So it was that for the soldiers serving torch and fire, I served the beer. Cup after cup and happy to do it. Which at that point could hardly matter. With his good name at stake, already David Delamatter will have notified the hangman.
Delamatter’s attitude was strange when I refused to follow him and his family, when I threw down what objects he bid me carry behind while he endeavored to catch up on the road to Hurley. His face was a changeable mix of anger and disbelief. He sputtered like a Dutch teapot with a loose pewter lid as he casted about for a way to punish me.
His whip he had mislaid. He could mount no attack with bags of flour or barley. His firstborn, the bastard Maarten had absconded with his rifle and gone on ahead and so Delamatter started to shout for him and that was a nice moment we shared between us. He knew that I knew that he knew his son Maarten was good for nothing, just as likely to run from the sound of his voice as run toward it.
So he stopped shouting and we looked at each other.
“Might as well invite the moon down to dinner and expect a reply,” said he.
And then came the hurt in his eyes. It turned my heart into stone, I can tell you, and that was the moment he saw how it was. He washed his hands of me altogether in the dry air in front of him, held eye contact while he did it and spit into the dirt.
Why he didn’t run right off to get the help of his countrymen, I hope to never know.
I’ve read Delamatter’s will as well. It reads that his son David would have use of all his slaves, Negros and Whinches, best horses, wagons, plows and harrows- and also one Milch cow, an Ox, and one Heffer – his Negros Dick and Anna. To his daughter he left his Negro Whinch named Deen and Negro man named Tome. So Delamatter, at least when he wrote it, recognized I was a man also.
While the British soldiers and I couldn’t speak to each other, still we understood well enough to get on. They were sweaty and soot-covered. We both hated the Dutch, or if we didn’t it was made convenient to do so by the exigencies of fate. To call my attention, the word they finally settled on was Verflunkt, which is German for fluffy. My hair is not fluffy. I use beeswax and oil to keep it wavy. They were trying to say Vervloekt, which is Dutch for damned and they said it frequently when calling for more beer. And I kept the beer coming.
The first time Kingston was burned, I have been told, was more than 100 years ago in the summer of 1663 and a group of men from the tribe of the Esopus burned it. I understand they waited until the noon hour when most good, honest, hardworking, humble Dutch farmers were out toiling in their fields. Alongside their slaves, perhaps. Or on the wagon, behind the horse, pulling the plow. Very few men would have been permitted idleness at that hour. Only the sons and brothers cast in the die of Maarten. This amounted to leaving the women undefended. And the children.
Those Esopus who set out to do what they did entered the village under the pretext of bartering some maize and beans. They spread out. When the signal came, a cry, a scream, who knows what the signal was, with axe and with tomahawk they slaughtered the townspeople wholesale in their houses and in the roads and in their barns and wherever they found them. And then they set fire to the whole place. When the smoke went up the men in the fields came running back. Some women and children they kept as hostages, but not all…
I remember a line I read, recalled by a survivor. “A woman lay burnt, with her child at her side as if she were just delivered.”
No good can come of a literate slave, said David Delamatter when I came into his possession and he said it many times after. That’s the sort of phrase that leaps from the lips unbidden from generation to generation and it must be as true today as it was when the first man enslaved another and caught him at reading. And felt a foreboding.
Here I should confess that it wasn’t just the reading that the Schoonmakers and the Delamatters both found so unnerving about me. Beyond the letters I can make out, was also my propensity for visions. They come over me of a sudden as a thick blanket thrown and in the warm darkness underneath I can look into the future like Pythia, and can provide prophecy. Or I can also look into the past, like Herodotus and Thucydides. So this is how I know why Kingston had to burn. Both times.
That first massacre and the town burning once again is just a manifestation of the endless knot of Karma into which all are tied into. So say the Hindus.
Empowered to forge contracts and make alliances, erect forts, conjure governments and “to do all that the service of these countries and the profit and the increase of trade shall require,” the seed of Karma which would slumber in the earth until the fire blossomed again was planted there by the Dutch East India Company.
Merchants. Privateers with the acknowledgement of the crown. They would become eventually subsidized Slave traders all. They spoke the language of charters and economic missions and they were subsidized with a million guilders by the States General of the United Netherlands. As yet unaffiliated, all that it would take to create the greatest of armed commercial associations was an introduction to a new market. To incorporate, they only waited for the incentive do so and the opportunity to exploit.
Their contact was he, Henry Hudson, that bastard.
Summer was in the air on that day he arrived first in September of 1609, and the people of the tribes unlucky to be gathered there thinking he had sailed in on a great water borne bird greeted him. Henry Hudson went ashore and was treated as a guest. Ignorant of the interests he represented, they brought him pigeon freshly killed with bow and arrow. Seeing something was lacking, they likewise at once killed a fat dog, and skinned it with shells they found from the river.
“They supposed I was afraid of their bows,” Hudson later wrote, “and taking their arrows, they broke them in pieces and threw them into the fire.”
Better they had seen Hudson for what he was then, the original agent of the coming gentrification. The Ur settler.
Hudson was by all accounts a shorthaired ponce, who wore a cartwheel ruff instead of a collar, and it was he who would forward a report of his discoveries back to the Dutch East India Company and so “arouse the enthusiasm of the Dutch backers by the prospect of a lucrative fur trade.” After Hudson and his ship, the Half Moon, came the Fortune, the Tiger, The Little Fox and the Nightingale. And more.
The aim of all these subsequent voyages was commerce rather than colonization, history records, the result notwithstanding.
Had I been there to warn them what was coming, they should have cut his throat and skinned him too, like a fat dog, with the shells they found from the river.
In two years he would be mutineed by his own crew and never to be heard from again. Good.
Lately, I’ve pondered a vision of mine I see time and time again, of three great statues in a park, green with the patina that comes to mellow weathered bronze. The first is Henry Hudson, privateer. The second is Governor George Clinton, hayseed made lawyer. They stand with Peter Stuyvesant, that one-legged sword swallower.
A cannonball took the old pirate’s leg while he was exercising his charter to loot and plunder in the name of God, the States General and the Dutch East India Company. Far from reconsidering his employ, he took it as proof that the Christian God had bigger plans for him. You don’t have to read a book to know he was a narrow minded bigot, a bully and a loser, but I’ve seen it written too.
But about the vision. The park is full of slaves and freemen together, mixed up so and dressed so strangely I can’t tell them apart. They shout together and I don’t know what they want. Maybe they want more corn. But in my vision I’m there too and I’m pleading with them to keep the statues. Trying to explain that statues are not just to remember heroes but to remember villains as well. “ They remind us,” I say, “that there were slavers with ribbons on their shoes.”
Well, a slave-owner with a ribbons on his one shoe. On the other, he wore a studded wooden peg.
And that’s it. Decipher it if you will. The stone of the buildings left are starting to cool and with the soldiers gone it won’t be long. Rain drops float on the air and there’s a bear wandering down the burned out thoroughfare, a sleigh bell tied with a leather strap around his ankle. Someone’s pet.
I am charmed by the bear but then comes an incredible series of clangings and gongings, like a heavy brass bell falling faster than it’s own rope and bouncing down a well.
I think it is the belltower of the old church collapsing.
Which is a sign and an omen of a wrong righted.
When they come to build again, I’ll be long gone.
Join the family! 
