[5] Written three days before the foundering of the Monitor off Hatteras, Dec. 31st 1862.
Our contraband is a woman, and she comes upon the scene of action in this wise, retrospectively.
Some three months before the events recorded in the preceding chapters, to wit about the middle of March, Egbert Crawford, Tombs lawyer, doing a thriving business in the line especially affected by such gentry, and not yet elevated to a Colonel's commission in the volunteer army by the parental forethought of Governor Edwin D. Morgan,—had occasion to visit that portion of Thomas Street lying between West Broadway and Hudson. The locality is not by any means a pleasant one, either for the eye or the other senses, and the character of the street is not materially improved by the recollection of the Ellen Jewett murder, which occurred on the south side, within a few doors of Hudson. Garbage left unremoved by Hackley festers alike on pavement, sidewalk and gutter; and a mass of black and white humanity (the former predominating) left unremoved by the civilization of New York in the last half of the nineteenth century, festers within the crazy and tumble-down tenements. Colored cotton handkerchiefs wrapping woolly heads, and shoes slouched at the heel furnishing doubtful covering to feet redolent of filth and crippled by disease—alternate with the scanty habiliments of black and white children, brought up in the kennel and reduced by blows, mud and exposure to a woful similarity of hue. The whiskey bottle generally accompanies the basket with a quart of decayed potatoes, from the grocery at the corner; and even the begged calf's-liver or the stolen beef-bone comes home accompanied by a flavor of bad gin. It is no wonder that the few shutters hang by the eye-lids, and that even the wagon-boys who vend antediluvian vegetables from castaway wagons drawn by twenty-shilling horse-frames, hurry through without any hope in the yells intended to attract custom.
Any observer who should have seen the neatly-dressed lawyer peering into the broken doors and up the black staircases of Thomas Street, would naturally have supposed his visit connected with some revelation of crime, and that he was either looking up a witness whose testimony might be necessary to save a perilled burglar from Sing Sing, or taking measures to keep one hidden who might have told too much if brought upon the witness-stand. And yet Egbert Crawford was really visiting that den of black squalor with a very different object—to find an old darkey woman who was reported as living in that street, and in his capacity as one of the eleven hundred and fifty Commissioners of Deeds of the City and County of New York, to procure her "X mark" and take her acknowledgment in the little matter of a quitclaim deed. A very harmless purpose, in itself, certainly; and yet the observer might have been nearer right in his suspicion than even the lawyer himself believed, when the whole result of the visit was taken into account.
One of the ricketty houses on the south side of the street, not far from the Ellen Jewett house, and not much further from the equally celebrated panel-house which furnished the weekly papers with illustrations of that peculiar species of man-trap a few years ago—seemed to the seeker to bear out the description that had been given him. The door was wide open, and all within appeared to be a sort of dark cabin out of which issued occasional sounds of quarrelling voices and continual puffs of fetid air foul enough to sicken the strongest stomach. He went in, as one of the lost might go into Pandemonium, impelled by an imperious necessity. He mounted the ricketty and creaking stair, with the bannister half gone and the steps groaning beneath his tread as if they contained the spirits of the dead respectability that had left them half a century before. He had been told that the old woman lived on the third floor, and though he met no one he concluded to dare the perils of a second ascent, in spite of the landing place being in almost pitchy darkness. Rushing along with a hasty step that even the gloom could not make a slower one, he felt something bump against his knees and the lower part of his body, and then something human fell to the floor with a crash that had the jingling of broken crockery blended with it.
"Boo! hoo! hoo! e-e-e-gh! Mammy! Mammy!" yelled a voice. "Boo! hoo! hoo! e-e-e-gh! Mammy! Mammy!" and Crawford could just discern that he had run over and partially demolished a little negro boy carrying a pitcher, the pitcher and the boy seeming to have suffered about equally. Neither of them had any nose left, to speak of; and the little imp did not make any effort to rise from the floor, but lay there and yelled merrily. The victor in the collision did not have much time for inspection, for the moment after a door at the back end of the passage opened hurriedly, and a hideous old negro woman came rushing out, with a sputtering fragment of lighted tallow-candle in her hand, and exclaiming:
"What's de matter, Jeffy? Here am Mamma!"
"Big man run'd ober me! broke de pitcher! Boo! hoo! hoo!" yelled the black atom in reply, without any additional effort at getting up.
"Get out ob dar! d—n you, I run'd ober you, mind dat!" screeched out the old woman, catching sight of the dark form of Crawford. "Hurtin' leetle boys!—I pay you for it, honey!"
"I hit him accidentally," said the lawyer, who had no intention of getting into a row in that "negro quarter." "It was dark, and I did not see him. I'll pay for the pitcher."