Johnny One-Eye Read online

  More praise for

  Johnny One-Eye

  “A masterful tale.”

  —Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered

  “Anyone who relishes adventurous fiction will enjoy watching this risk-taking author strut along the high wire.”

  —Wendy Smith, Washington Post Book World

  “Jerome Charyn is merely one of our finest writers, with a polymorphous imagination and crack comic timing. Whatever milieu he chooses to inhabit his characters sizzle with life, and his sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable.”

  —Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude

  “A comic masterpiece that is also historical literature of the highest order.”

  —Jewish Book World

  “A terrific read, an imaginative evocation of Manhattan in chaos written with great energy and seductive cadence.”

  —Manuela Holterhoff, Bloomberg News

  “Flipping our familiar, historical understanding of Washington, Charyn instead celebrates a red-blooded American icon, a flawed, courageous leader.”

  —Katy Olson, King Features Syndicate

  “Charyn’s command of time and place is masterful: the reader can practically smell the gunpowder that suffuses the war-torn city. As a kaleidoscopic view of a tumultuous era, the book deserves to be spoken about in the same breath as E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.”

  —Michael Chabon, author of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

  “Johnny One-Eye is the first great Revolutionary War novel to appear in many decades. Charyn’s knowledge of the era’s strangeness is matched only by his eye for its even stranger familiarities. This book is the obvious product of deep learning, but its knowledge is worn so lightly, and controlled so expertly, and run through the alchemist’s laboratory of imagination so beautifully, that it becomes less a reading experience and more an all-consuming emotional experience. Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer—so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible.”

  —Tom Bissell, author of God Lives in St. Petersburg

  “Johnny One-Eye is a literary seduction, a down-low expose of revolutionary New York, an irresistible netherworld narrative of sexual and political intrigue. This imaginary tale is full of fantastic images and improbable happenings, but rendered believable and often poignant by Jerome Charyn’s vivid literary gifts. Here are the founding fathers as you’ve never seen them.”

  —Timothy Gilfoyle, author of City of Eros and The Pickpocket’s Tale

  “Comic and bawdy, Charyn’s fine novel provides a portrait of our new-born nation and Revolutionary New York through the eyes of its leaders, harlots, brothel-keepers, and much overlooked black residents. The book is a tremendous pleasure to read.”

  —Herbert Gold, author of The Man Who Was Not With It

  “Not American History 101.”

  —Library Journal

  “Never before has the American Revolution been so glorious or tawdry as it is in Charyn’s picaresque adventure of spies, harlots, and founding fathers…. Filled as the book is with bawdy episodes and magnificently imagined historical dignitaries, perhaps the most compelling facet is the simmering racial undercurrent that Charyn delivers on the sly. With a wicked sense of humor and lively period prose, Charyn’s remarkably smart and definitely naughty novel repaints revolutionary America as a gleefully strange and tumultuous swirl of passions, adventure, and intrigue that anyone with an eye for great, lusty tales cannot afford to miss.”

  —Booklist

  “Sure to set fire to the genre of historical fiction, this bawdy and adventuresome tale of the American Revolution carries us deep inside the newly postcolonial Manhattan.”

  —Booknotes

  Johnny One-Eye

  A Tale of the American Revolution

  Jerome Charyn

  W. W. Norton & Company

  New York • London

  This book is for Bob Weil.

  And for the late Jim Shenton,

  who loved American history more than anyone I know.

  Copyright © 2008 by Jerome Charyn

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Production manager: Julia Druskin

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Charyn, Jerome.

  Johnny One-Eye: a tale of the American Revolution/Jerome Charyn.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-06781-1

  1. Spies—Fiction. 2. Prostitutes—Fiction. 3. Brothels—Fiction. 4. New York (N.Y.)—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3553.H33J64 2008

  813'.54—dc22

  2007034343

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Map: The City of New York 1776

  Dramatis Personae

  THE CARETAKER OF KING’S 1776

  VINGT-ET-UN 1777

  SILVER BULLETS AND THE BLACK BRIGADE 1778

  THE JERSEY 1779

  ARNOLD 1780

  YORKTOWN 1781

  GENTLE JACK 1782

  CLARA 1783

  HERCULES: AN ENDING

  Author’s Note

  List of Illustrations

  Tearing Down the Statue of George III on Bowling Green

  Battle of Harlem Heights

  Colonial Days in New York, Corner of Liberty and William Streets

  New York During the Revolution

  The Prison Ship Jersey

  Washington’s Headquarters at Jumel Mansion

  New Jersey Palisades

  New York Harbor

  Robinson Street and Its Environs

  Dramatis Personae

  PRINCIPAL PLAYERS

  JOHN STOCKING, alias JOHNNY ONE-EYE, a man-child of uncertain birth

  MRS. GERTRUDE JENNINGS, proprietress of the Queen’s Yard, a bordello in Manhattan

  CLARA, an octoroon from Dominica, in the West Indies, and a “nun” at the Queen’s Yard

  GEORGE WASHINGTON, commander in chief of the Continental Army

  BENEDICT ARNOLD, American general and turncoat

  PEGGY SHIPPEN, later PEGGY SHIPPEN ARNOLD, the daughter of a Philadelphia merchant with Loyalist sympathies

  SECONDARY PLAYERS

  GERTRUDE’S NUNS, omnipresent at the Queen’s Yard, who serve as a silent chorus

  “BLACK DICK,” viz., Admiral Lord Richard Howe, commander in chief of the British fleet in North America

  GENERAL SIR WILLIAM HOWE, alias SIR BILLY, commander in chief of the British army and Black Dick’s younger brother

  MRS. (ELIZABETH) LORING, concubine and “war wife” of General Howe

  JOSHUA LORING, husband of Mrs. Loring

  MRS. ANNE HARDING, wife of a Massachusetts farmer

  PRINCE PAUL, leader of Little Africa, Manhattan’s impoverished black quarter

  JOHN ANDRÉ, British officer, aide-de-camp to General Henry Clinton and head of Clinton’s secret service

  HENRY CLINTON, British general and commander in chief

  SIR HAROLD MORSE, a resident of the Queen’s Yard and mentor to Johnny One-Eye

  SPARKS, Washington’s military valet

  ALEXA
NDER HAMILTON, illegitimate son of James Hamilton and Rachel Lavien, Washington’s chief aide and former fellow student of Johnny One-Eye

  JASON JENNINGS, a pirate and assassin

  FELTRINELLI, or the ANGEL OF BOLOGNA, a castrato noted for his sexual prowess and his interpretation of Handel’s oratorios

  MORTIMER, General Howe’s valet and bodyguard

  MAJOR MALCOLM TREAT, Washington’s chief of intelligence

  TERTIARY PLAYERS

  HARVEY HILL, or the TOWN CRIER, a member of Washington’s secret service

  CORPORAL MARTIN JAGGERS, a member of Benedict Arnold’s expeditionary force to Canada in 1775

  SERGEANT JOHN CHAMPE, a member of Washington’s Life Guard

  HERCULES, Washington’s mulatto cook

  MARTHA CUSTIS WASHINGTON, wife of George Washington

  ELIZABETH SCHUYLER, later ELIZABETH SCHUYLER HAMILTON, daughter of Philip Schuyler, Continental general and Hudson Valley baron

  FAT TOBIAS, a jailor on the Jersey

  REDMUND, Manhattan’s mulatto hangman

  CAPTAIN KIDD, high sheriff of Manhattan

  THE COMTE DE ROCHAMBEAU, commander of the French Army in North America

  THE MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE, a French nobleman who in 1777 will become Washington’s youngest general

  LORD CHARLES CORNWALLIS, British general and Clinton’s second-in-command

  MATTHEW PIN, former president of King’s College

  “BLACK SAM” FRAUNCES, proprietor of Fraunces’ Tavern

  AMBROSE SERLE, Admiral Howe’s civilian aide

  NED STARK, a British captain and frequent reveler at the Queen’s Yard

  SIMON, the royal chimney sweep

  ASSASSIN in a red wig

  CHARACTERS MENTIONED BUT NEVER SEEN

  GEORGE III, the farmer-king who ruled Great Britain from 1760 to 1820

  JOHN BURGOYNE, British general

  CHARLES LEE, flamboyant American general who always went around with a pack of dogs

  JACK CUSTIS, Washington’s stepson

  TALL WATER, an Algonquin chief

  Anno Domini 1776

  THE CARETAKER OF KING’S

  Manhattan

  APRIL 1776

  It was the very mask of war. General Sir William Howe, the British commander in chief, had disappeared with his armada of men and battleships. There was not a redcoat to be found in all the colonies, not even a drummer boy. And so there was a strange calm, a profound and disturbing silence instead of cannon fire.

  George Washington had arrived in Manhattan but a few weeks ago on his white horse. Both rebels and Loyalists were in awe of the Continental Army’s commander in chief, who sat in his saddle with the insouciance of a king. He was the tallest man on our island, and seemed everywhere at once, inspecting the works near Fort George, crossing with his horse on the barge to Brooklyn so that he could inspect our works at Brooklyn Heights.

  Every street of Manhattan had been turned into a ditch—our island was now an armed camp. Black stevedores dug beside militiamen. Women and children could not be found. We waited in a kind of fractured peace for the sound of a squall—the wind that would bring the British. General Howe could have but one objective: to drive Washington out of Manhattan, or better still, to break him and his army on the island itself and thus bring a quick death to the rebellion.

  The rebels’ hopes hinged on this very man, the farmer-soldier from Virginia. And the only time he ever appeared without his horse was when he visited Holy Ground, a street of brothels so named because of its proximity to St. Paul’s Chapel; hence its whores were known as nuns. The commander in chief was not a whoremonger. But he did have a secret vice—he loved to gamble. He would come to Holy Ground and its most celebrated brothel, the Queen’s Yard, when he was mortally tired and could not sleep. He would play vingt-et-un—Manhattan black-jack—a game that might have been born at this brothel. He would lose his britches every third or fourth night, but the nuns who presided over vingt-et-un always returned his coins and his britches to the commander in chief. And since he never sat at the table with a single bodyguard, the nuns themselves would often drive him back to headquarters, a little north of Holy Ground.

  One

  WHERE SHALL I BEGIN MY UNREMARKABLE LIFE? My hands were bound with hangman’s rope. A rifle dug into my ribs. My accomplices were slobbering at my side, a pair of yobs from Westchester who didn’t comprehend the ways of York Island. “It’s him,” they said, pointing to me with their snouts, since their hands were tied as tight as mine.

  “It’s him, Your Worship. He’s the Divil. He made us do it.”

  “’Tis true,” said the second scoundrel. “We’re innocent as lambs, Your Worthy. He hissed evil things in our ears. Offered us pieces of silver to poison your soup. We’re cooks, I swear we are. Attached to your rebel army.”

  The first scoundrel corrected him. “Don’t say rebel, Charles. Say the Continentals. He’s their king…and commander.”

  He was a giant, this commander and king, with reddish hair and a long nose. I liked him, truly liked him. The lord of all the rebels was an erstwhile land surveyor from Virginia, not a professional soldier and assassin, like King George’s generals. He had far more power than any monarch, even with a piddling army that could not stand in formation or fight in an open field. His pigtail was tied with a piece of fine silk. He was a gentleman with a farmer’s rough hands.

  “Please don’t hang us, Your Worship,” begged the scoundrels, slobbering again. They were stinking Cowboys who worried the hills of Westchester and shouldn’t have come to our waterfront. I’d paid them handsomely, but they were counting on more. They would have slaughtered me and disappeared with my purse once the poison had taken hold and the general sat with his young aides, all of them puking out their guts.

  “George Washington, bless that name!” the first yob said.

  “I’ll repent, Your Worship, I will. Save us, Sir George,” said the second.

  The general was no longer looking at these yobs. His bodyguards blindfolded them with their own neckcloths and took them out to the gibbet, an ordinary hanging tree. He dismissed his aides and sat down at his portable writing desk with a glass of Madeira and a piece of mutton. But his youngest aide wouldn’t leave.

  “Excellency, what about him? He’s a desperate character,” meaning your humble servant. “He might be hiding a knife somewhere on his person…or under his patch. I don’t believe in that impertinent eye patch.”

  And then the young aide flicked his riding crop perilously close to my one good eye. He was hot to blind me. “Shall I undress his eye, sir?”

  The general wouldn’t answer him. He must have been sick with fatigue. I’ve seen it before, in soldiers and clergymen who have a bit of the colic and bad teeth. Grudgingly, with murder in his own grim gray eyes—murder for me—the young man left. And now the giant and I were alone. He got up from his desk (it could barely contain his knees) and cut my cords with a scalping knife. He’d been an Indian fighter long before he was a general, and some chief might have rewarded him with such a knife out of fear and trembling.

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  “You heard those lads. I’m the Divil.” I had to rub my hands, because they’d gone to sleep. “And John Stocking some of the time, Sir John to my friends, or Professor John.”

  “How old are you, Professor?”

  “Seventeen, Your Excellency, seventeen years and eleven days.”

  “And you go around poisoning people’s soup.”

  I had to be twice as clever as this rebel king. I didn’t want him to guess my grand design. The poison was but a mix of magnesia and castor oil—a powerful purge. It couldn’t have killed a flea.

  “Well?” he asked, impatient to rid himself of me.

  “A ruse, sir. I knew it wouldn’t work. I was hoping it would get me into your camp…for a tête-à-tête.”

  He laughed. He didn’t have a tooth I could find, but some device that served as teeth.r />
  “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t hang you?”

  “I could lend you a dozen. I’m attached to Sir William in a tinkering sort of way.” Sir William Howe had sailed out of Boston with the entire British fleet and fell off the face of the earth. No one could find him, not George Washington, not King George.

  “Tinkerer, are you soldier or civilian?”

  “Both. I’m a secret agent.”

  The general offered me some Madeira in a cup that wasn’t entirely clean. “You’re blunt enough, I’ll give you that. Lost you an eye in Sir William’s service?”

  “No, sir. I lost it while I was with General Arnold in Quebec.”

  Benedict Arnold had tried to steal Quebec from the British by scampering across the wilderness of Maine. That wilderness was uncrossable to anyone but a madman or a brilliant soldier. And Arnold was both.

  But the giant didn’t believe I’d been with Arnold. His face filled with fury. He began to scold me like a father to a wayward son. “Rude little boy, didst thou trek with Arnold across the wild lands?”

  And I answered him with all the Divil’s wile. “Arnold doth not have much of a hand. I had to write his letters and read his dispatches…as a confidential secretary. He was but a colonel then. I would parry with my sword and read to him from the Holy Book. I was foolish and wanton. We were in the midst of war, and whilst I prattled, a redcoat stole up and stabbed me in the eye.”

  “Hang me, boy, if I haven’t heard about a one-eyed parson over at the King’s College.”

  King’s sat like a citadel on our highest hill. I’d been a student there before I joined up with Arnold. The college was a rookery for Loyalists until Washington shut it down and turned it into an army barracks.

  “I am not a parson, sir. I am the caretaker at King’s. No one else is around. We haven’t a single scholar. The president ran away to London and abandoned us to our misery.”