Scenes from Crossing the River

 

 

Two Lanterns, Pages 117-119

 

     Having dragged his trailing leg awkwardly through his opened bedroom window, Robert Newman lowered himself onto the roof of the abutting shed. For a good twenty seconds he listened. Across and down the roof he then proceeded, slowly -- silently, he prayed -- lest he be heard by the British officers downstairs at their game of whist. He had excused himself from the general company ten minutes earlier, telling his mother that he was tired and wanted to retire. At the edge of the roof, listening, staring, he detected no one in the street. Carefully, soundlessly, he lowered himself, his shoes reaching the top of an upright, empty flour barrel. Crouched atop the barrel, he extended his left leg until the toe of his shoe touched the pavement.

     Had they heard him? Stiff as a grave marker, he listened.

     The dark shape of Christ Church dwarfed him. He moved quickly across the street into its shadow. A young man, twenty-three, he was the church sexton. His older brother was the organist. Times were hard; Newman did not like his job; too bad. When Paul Revere had explained to him what he had wanted, Newman had been eager to participate. Afterward, he had reckoned the peril.

     Hearing footsteps on the cobblestones, he stepped behind the church’s corner. John Pulling emerged from the darkness. “Sssst! Over here!” Newman whispered.

     Pulling was a church vestryman. Revere had recruited him to be Newman’s lookout.

     “Not here yet?” Pulling asked.

     “He didn't say when. Any time, I suspect.” He was right. Soon they heard aggressive footsteps. Paul Revere’s broad figure approached.

     “Nervous?” Revere asked, joining them at the church’s darkest corner.

     Newman nodded.

     “You become accustomed to it.” For perhaps ten seconds Revere gazed at the deserted street.

     Newman was taken by the silversmith’s air of confidence.

     “The British soldiers are in the boats,” Revere informed. “Go easy. Take your time. But do your work to its completion. If I’m arrested, our fortune may rest entirely upon what you accomplish.” He patted Newman’s left shoulder. “I must prepare to leave. God be with you.”

     Newman listened to Revere’s footfalls and then, too soon, but the night sounds.

 It was too late to renege.

 “All right,” he said, raising angrily his hands. He pulled out of his side coat pocket a ring of keys. He inserted a long key into the lock of the side entrance door. He turned the key and pushed open the door. Pulling nodded. Newman closed the door, locked it, and in darkness felt his way to a closet. Leaving it, carrying two lanterns, he moved to the stairway that led to the belfry.

     Past the bell loft he climbed, the eight great bells within somnolent. He reached the highest window. To the north he saw in the moonlight the shoulder of Copp's Hill. Beyond lay the mouth of the Charles River and the glimmering lights of the Somerset, a moving, ethereal flicker.

     He reached downward, lit the lanterns, and raised them chest high. Somewhere amid the lights of Charlestown, beyond the Somerset, Sons of Liberty were watching. They would now know that Gage’s soldiers were crossing the Back Bay.

     Having counted to twenty, he set the lanterns down below the window. He extinguished them. Such a short while they had glowed, but Mr. Revere had assured him that patriots of Liberty would be watching. He had not wanted others, especially sailors on the man-of-war, to see them!

     Other people, however, just might! An officer, taking a brisk walk along Snow Street. Newman imagined others: a soldier at the burying ground engaging a whore, sentries idling at the Charlestown Ferry. How swiftly might the source of that strange illumination be determined? How soon might soldiers be dispatched to investigate?

     He heard unnatural sounds in the street! Sounds loud enough to startle him. What was Pulling doing? His heart thumped.

     He waited a full minute.

     He imagined Pulling arrested, soldiers posted silently outside the main entrance. Impeded by doubt, by anxiety, he tarried.

     Ashamed of his cowardice, he willed himself down the dark stairway. He returned the lanterns to the closet. Then, to the opposite end of the church he walked, stopping to listen after each step. Eventually, he reached the window farthest from the main entrance. He opened it, not without some noise, listened again to silence, climbed through it, and placed his shoes on firm soil.

     Five minutes later he was standing on the roof of the shed adjacent to his bedroom window. He eased himself soundlessly over the sill. Leaving his outer garments on the floor, he climbed into his bed. For at least an hour he lay still, his agitated mind imagining frightful consequences.

     Below, concluding a most delightful evening, the officers jested and guffawed.



 

Book Reviews

 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith



I need to be reminded periodically of what a masterful writer’s attention to detail, character portrayal, and replication of human kindnesses and cruelties accomplishes.  Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” is an excellent example.

 

This book is about poor people in Brooklyn living against the odds before and during World War I.  It is especially about strong women – the Rommely women – Mary, the grandmother; Mary’s three daughters Sissy, Katie, and Evy; and most particularly granddaughter Francie: all “made out of thin invisible steel.”  It is also about their husbands and neighbors, shopkeepers and school children, teachers and co-workers.  It is a compelling, detailed slice of life as the author must have experienced it.

 

Francie Nolan, the book’s main character, born in 1902, is eleven in the novel’s first chapter.  Living in poverty in Brooklyn with her brother Neeley (a year younger than she), her truthful, resolute, practical mother Katie, and her empathetic, unrealistic, drunkard father Johnny, she exhibits already what Katie’s uneducated but wise mother Mary Rommely had advised Katie about raising her two children.  “’The child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination.  …  It is necessary that she believe.  …  Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.’”  Francie has imagination.  When Katie pointed out to her mother that the child, growing up, would find out things for herself, her mother responded, “’It is a good thing to learn the truth one’s self.  To first believe with all your heart, and then not to believe … fattens the emotions and makes them to stretch.  When as a woman life and people disappoint her, she will have had practice in disappointment and it will not come so hard.  …  Do not forget that suffering is good, too.  It makes a person rich in character.’”  Early on, Francie, shunned by girls her own age, fantasizes about the lives of people she observes from the fire escape landing outside her window, lives in the stories of the library books she reads, and plays games with imaginary friends.  She loves her imperfect father deeply.  Over the course of five years she experiences nastiness, cruelty, grieves, yet perseveres.  At the book’s end she is rich in character.

 

 These scenes in particular moved me.

 

When Francie had been seven and Neeley six, Katie had sent them to the nearby public health center to be vaccinated.  Katie had needed to work that day and Johnny had been at the waiters union hall hoping to be emplouyed that night.  Told by older boys that his arm would be cut off at the health center, Neeley had been terrified.  To distract him before leaving for the center, Francie had taken him out into the yard to make mud pies.  They had left for the center just before they were scheduled to report, their arms covered with mud. “‘Filth, filth, filth, from morning to night.  I know they’re poor but they could wash.  Water is free and soap is cheap,’” the doctor had said to the nurse assisting him.  The doctor had then speculated “how that kind of people could survive; that it would be a better world if they were all sterilized and couldn’t breed any more.”  After she had received her vaccination, Francie, terribly hurt, had fired back.  “’My brother is next.  His arm is just as dirty as mine so don’t be surprised.  And you don’t have to tell him.  You told me.  …  Besides, it won’t do no good.  He’s a boy and he don’t care if he is dirty.’”

 

Francie’s teacher at the neighborhood school was also scornful of the poor.  The spinster principal was nasty and brutal.  Francie, turned nine, had her father fake their address to permit her to transfer to a better school.  That November her new class participated in a Thanksgiving Day ceremony.  Four chosen girls held symbols of the Thanksgiving feast.  One symbol was a saucer-sized pumpkin pie.  The teacher threw away the other symbols after the ceremony but not the pie, offering it to anyone who wanted to take it home.  “Thirty mouths watered; thirty hands itched to go up into the air, but no one moved.  …  All were too proud to accept charitable food.”  When the teacher was about to throw away the pie, Francie raised her hand.  She explained she wanted to give the pie to “a very poor family.”  The following Monday the teacher asked Francie about how the family had enjoyed the pie.  Francie expanded on her lie by saying that there were twin girls in the family, they had not eaten for three days, and a doctor had said that they would have died but for the pie.  Caught in her lie, Francie confessed.  She pleaded not to be punished.  The teacher answered, “’I’ll not punish you for having an imagination.’”  She explained the difference between a lie and a story.  The incident inspired Francie to channel her tendency to exaggerate events into writing stories.

 

A year later Francie told a whopping lie.  She and Neeley attended a Christmas celebration conducted for the poor of all faiths by a Protestant organization.  At the end of the celebration an exquisitely dressed, lovely girl named Mary came on stage carrying a foot-high beautiful doll.  The woman that had accompanied the little girl announced, “’Mary wants to give the doll to some poor little girl in the audience who is named Mary.  …  Is there any poor little girl in the audience named Mary?’”  Struck dumb by the adjective “poor,” no Mary spoke up.  But at the last moment Francie did.  As she walked back up the aisle carrying the doll, “the girls leaned towards her and whispered hissingly, ‘Beggar, beggar, beggar.’  …  They were as poor as she but they had something she lacked – pride.”

 

Francie was extremely proud of her seventh grade composition printed in the school magazine at the close of the school year.  Eager to meet her father in the street to show him the published composition, she saw a girl named Joanna come out of her flat pushing a baby carriage.  Joanna, who was seventeen, wasn’t married.  Several housewives on the sidewalk gasped as Joanna strolled past them.  Katie and Johnny had talked about Joanna.  At the end of their conversation Katie had said to Francie, “’Let Joanna be a lesson to you.’”  Seeing her, Francie wondered how Joanna was a lesson.  She was friendly.  She wanted everybody else to be friendly.  She smiled at the ladies on the street.  They frowned.  She smiled at nearby children.  Some of them smiled back.  Francie, believing she probably wasn’t supposed to, did not smile back.  Joanna continued to walk up and down the sidewalk.  The ladies became more outraged.  One woman eventually spoke.  “’Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’”  Joanna answered back.  “’Get off the street, you whore,’” the woman demanded.  A verbal fight ensured.  The women began to throw stones.  One struck the baby on the forehead.  Joanna carried the baby into her flat, leaving the carriage on the sidewalk.  The women disappeared.  Little boys began to play with the carriage.  Francie wheeled the carriage back to the front door of Joanna’s flat.  She placed her story on the carriage cushion as recompense for not having smiled.  She decided later that the lesson she had learned was that she hated women.  “She feared them for their devious ways, she mistrusted their instincts.  She began to hate them for this disloyalty and their cruelty to each other.”

 

Francie’s father died when she was fourteen.  Thereafter, instead of writing about the beauty of birds and trees she wrote four little stories about Johnny to show that despite his shortcomings he had been “a good father and kindly man.”  Her new English teacher marked her compositions “C,” not what Francie was accustomed to, “A.”  Afterward, she and Francie had a private conversation.  The teacher wanted Francie to write about beauty and truth as she had before.  “’Poverty, starvation and drunkenness are ugly subjects.  …  Drunkards belong in jail, not in stories.  And poverty.  There is no excuse for that.  There’s enough work for all who want it.  People are poor because they’re too lazy to work.  There’s nothing beautiful about laziness.  …  Now that we’ve talked things out, I’m sure you’ll stop writing these sordid little stories.’”  She advised Francie to burn her four compositions in her stove when she got home.  Instead, Francie burned all her “A” compositions.  She told herself, “I never saw a poplar and I read somewhere about the sky arching and I never saw those flowers except in a seed catalogue.  I got A’s because I was a good liar.  … I am burning ugliness.  I am burning ugliness.”

 

Two years later Francie met a twenty-one year old soldier about to be shipped off to the war in Europe.  They spent an evening together and kissed.  They met the next evening and the soldier asked Francie to have sex with him and to marry him if he came back from the war.  They did not engage in sex but she accepted his proposal.  He went back home to Pennsylvania the next day to see his mother before being shipped out.  Several days later Francie received a letter from the soldier’s mother informing her that the woman’s son had married his fiancée.  Francie needed her mother to tell her hard truths.

 

Told what had happened, having read the letter, Katie recognized she could no longer stand between her children and heartache. 

 

“’Say something,’ demanded Francie.

 

“’What can I say?’

 

“’Say that I’m young – that I’ll get over it.  Go ahead and say it.  Go ahead and lie,’” Francie said bitterly.

 

“’I know that’s what people say – you’ll get over it.  I’d say it, too.  But I know it’s not true.  …  Every time you fall in love it will be because something in the man reminds you of him.’

 

“’Mother, he asked me to be with him for the night.  Should I have gone?  …  Don’t make up a lie, Mother.  Tell me the truth.’

 …

 

“’There are two truths,’ said Katie finally.  ‘As a mother, I say it would have been a terrible thing for a girl to sleep with a stranger.  …  Your whole life might have been ruined.  …  But as a woman …’ she hesitated.  ‘I will tell you … It would have been a very beautiful thing.  Because there is only once that you love that way.’”

 

“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” is such a bittersweet, beautiful book.  Betty Smith assures us that amid the misery and ugliness of poverty honest, empathetic people rich in character do exist.  We need to know that.   We need to retain hope for the human race.



 

Blogs about English Settlements at Roanoke 1584-1590

 

Two Ships Enter Pamlico Sound

Two English ships, one weighing 50 tons and the other approximately 35 tons, arrived off the Outer Banks of the North Carolina coast during the second week of July 1584.  Sailing north, the ships paralleled the great sand banks for more than one hundred miles before their pilot, Simon Ferdinando, found a narrow passage into Pamlico Sound.  The next morning, July 13, -- the ships anchored inside the inlet -- Captains Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, a contingent of soldiers, and Ferdinando, using two longboats, rowed to Hatarask Island a mile off.  The captains declared possession of the land in the name of Queen Elizabeth.  A soldier fired his harquebus at a flock of cranes, sending additional flocks, an undulating wave, crying shrilly, skyward.  The party explored the island the remainder of the day and returned to their ships before nightfall. 

 

The next morning three natives in a dugout canoe approached.  The Englishmen watched them beach their canoe not more than four harquebus shots away.   Two of the natives remained in the canoe while the third proceeded to walk the sandbank shoreline toward the ships.  He reached the point of land closest to Barlowe and Amadas, stopped, looked at them, walked back toward the canoe, pivoted, and headed back.  Barlowe, Amadas, Ferdinando, and several soldiers climbed into a longboat and rowed toward him.

 

Standing erect, the native showed no fear.  He had been commanded by his Algonquian werowance, Wingina, to communicate with these peculiarly attired, pale-complexioned strangers.

 

They came together.  The native delivered a long speech, which the Englishmen did not understand.  Barlowe responded.  Pointing, he indicated that he wished the native to come aboard his ship.  The native agreed.  He was impressed with the ship’s enormous timbers, the strangers’ ability to craft such a ship, very likely the conspicuous cannons, and, certainly, the operations of the captain’s compass and telescope.  He was given gifts, including a shirt and a hat.  He tasted wine and ship’s meat, which he demonstrably liked.  He must have noticed that the strangers sailed without women and children.  Their faces were hairy; they smelled foul – he and his villagers bathed twice a day.  Their clothing was excessive and, surely, burdensome.

 

They returned him to his canoe and rowed back to Barlowe’s ship.  They watched him talk to his two companions, saw the two examine the gifts.  The three natives pushed the canoe into the water.  They paddled some fifty yards off shore where, using spears and a net, they fished.  An hour later, they returned the canoe, deep in the water, to the point of land where the Englishmen and the lone native had met.  The leader directed his companions to make two piles of fish.  They did so.  Gazing at Barlowe and Amadas, he pointed at one pile, then pointed at Amadas’s ship.  He pointed at the other pile.  He pointed at Barlowe’s ship.  His companions pushed the empty canoe into the water.  The three natives climbed inside.  The canoe disappeared behind a distant spur of land.

 

Friendly contact had occurred.  Captains Barlowe and Amadas had accomplished their first objective. 

 

Wingina would similarly be pleased.  His scouts had made contact with these newcomers.  Having been aboard one of their ships, his lead scout could report on their strength and their numbers.  Despite their strange language and behavior, they could be approached and they desired friendship.  Despite their technology that his scout didn’t understand and their considerable weaponry, they did not seem to pose a threat.  Perhaps he could establish with these imposing strangers a beneficial alliance.

 

My future blog entries will focus on different aspects of Sir Walter Raleigh’s attempts to establish an English outpost inside North Carolina’s Outer Banks nearly two decades before the settlement of Jamestown and how the native communities responded.  The story involves self-interest, miscommunication, disregard of the native culture, hostility, cruelty, and betrayal.  I plan to dramatize this in a novel.



Blogs about the American Revolution

Is There a Doctor in the House?

One of the most important rebel historical figures in Massachusetts prior to the beginning of the Revolutionary War was Doctor Joseph Warren.  Had he survived the war, he would most certainly have been a major contributor to the creation and governance of our new nation.  I can easily see him a member of George Washington’s cabinet, a governor of Massachusetts, a U. S. Senator or Congressman.  If you have read Crossing the River, you are acquainted with him.  I won’t repeat the biographical information I provided in the book.  I thought, however, that you would like to know two pieces of information I left out of my narrative.

As stated in my book, “Dr. Warren was highly esteemed.  He had made his name as one of two physicians who had inoculated nearly 5,000 people during the small pox epidemic of 1763.”  Inoculation had not yet been widely accepted as a weapon against small pox.  Many doctors had opposed it.  In 1763 Warren, then twenty, had been the youngest doctor in Boston.  He and a colleague, at one of two hospitals provided to quarantine the sick and inoculate the well, had treated over a thousand patients.  Of the 4,977 people whom the two hospitals had inoculated, 46 had died.  Of the 699 people who had contracted the disease naturally, 124 had died.

In March 1775 Warren spoke to a church full of citizens and British officers to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Boston Massacre.  The officers were anticipating inflammatory remarks.  They had hatched a plan to retaliate.  They had assigned an ensign to throw an egg at Warren as a signal that he was to be arrested.  On the way to the meeting the ensign had fallen, dislocated a knee, and not attended.  Had he been present, he would not have been able to throw the egg, his fall having broken it open.  Enumerating the dangers of a standing army in Boston in a time of peace, Warren had refrained from called the Massacre “bloody.”  Although some of the officers had hooted their displeasure, violence had not occurred.

My next blog entry will recount Joseph Warren’s death.

American Historical Ficton Blog

Websites about Crossing the River

          Here are a few websites that might help you decide whether or not to purchase Crossing the River, written by Florence, Oregon, resident Harold Titus.

 

          Eight reader reviews posted on amazon.com:

          http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-the-River-ebook/dp/B005Y2H9QW 

          Chapter excerpts:

          http://booklocker.com/books/5692.html

          http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-the-River-ebook/dp/B005Y2H9QW

          http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/crossing-the-river-harold-titus/1105685142

          http://historicalfictionexcerpts.blogspot.com/2012/01/harold-titus-crossing-river.html

 

          Two interviews of the author:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/131099

             http://wapiaponi.wordpress.com/author-interviews/harold-titus/

 

Blog entries written by the author, mostly about historical figures that appear in his novel or may appear in a forthcoming novel

 http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5390145.Harold-Titus/blog

Harold Titus’s Goodreads.com author’s page:

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5390145.Harold-Titus

 

Hardback, paperback, and ebook versions of Crossing the River can be purchased online at these links.

 http://booklocker.com/books/5692.html (author’s preference)

http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-River-Harold-Titus/dp/1614344760

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/crossing-the-river-harold-titus/1105685142