Passing the Fire

It is no more than six miles from Bladensburg to Washington City and the late summer twilight still lingers as they come in sight of the twin buildings of the Capitol, its sandstone blocks glowing red in this last light, rows of windows dark and ocular against it. They stop at a crossroads just before the complex. Mansions line the street, and their windows are dark as well, though in one Towerhill thinks he sees a candle flare up and go out, like a blink. Cockburn nods to him and he in turn nods to Neb, who walks forward into the road, holding a white flag of truce. They need to be certain, Scott told him, that the town has surrendered. Towerhill had wanted to carry the flag himself, but Cockburn had forbidden it, told him not to be absurd. For a few hours that afternoon, camped at Bladensburg, he had been afraid he would be robbed of whatever sense of culmination his entrance into the capital would provide, afraid, at first, they would bypass Washington altogether or that only the white troops would be allowed to enter the city. But General Ross had made it clear how he wanted to use the black marines. “It will be fitting,” he said to Admiral Cockburn, “if Sergeant Towerhill and his Colonial Marines lead our parade into that—what do you call it, George?—that ‘nest of buggering vipers.’”

Scrapping their eyeballs with the sight of black men with guns, their nightmares unbound into their waking lives. Just say it, Ross, he had thought, tightening his lips to keep the words in. Seeing in his mind the plantation he had burnt to free himself, all the plantations and houses and towns after that, a pyre to commemorate and incinerate the years of his enslavement, a line of burnt offerings that would end here.

________

Now Neb walks into the street. At first he simply struts, but then, as some of the white soldiers laugh, he begins bobbing and dancing, waving the flag vigorously, acting—to Towerhill’s anger—the fool for them. But the shot that cracks through the air does not come near Neb. It strikes Ross’s horse. For an instant, there is complete silence, the British frozen in a tableaux. The horse whinnies once, not loudly, and a shudder travels through its flesh. It collapses slowly, as if allowing its master time to safely dismount. During the day’s fight, it had been as untouched and unflinching as its rider, charging with him into the thick of combat. Towerhill knows, has been told repeatedly, that this horse carried the general through all the fighting in Spain and France. Now he sees Ross kneel by it, holding its great head in his hands and murmuring to it, tears running down his cheeks as his aides stand by uneasily. “There will be no punishment unless there is resistance,” Ross had ordered. Towerhill feels a surge of gratitude towards the animal. Its death will burn a city.

All of them standing and watching Ross’s farewell to his horse as if it is a stage play. Another shot rings out; he sees the flash from the window of one of the mansions lining the street. A soldier from the fusiliers falls, clutching his stomach. More shots. One rips a hole in Neb’s white flag; he waves it with more energy, still dancing in circles in the street, jumping up and down and laughing. Another strikes near Cockburn’s horse, the animal rearing, and then two more soldiers go down; his marines and the British are firing back now, squads running into the mansion. Towerhill yells at Craney to follow him; he runs to the other side of the Capitol in time to see a group of Americans, none in uniform but all armed with muskets, laughing and clapping each other on the back like schoolboys playing a prank as they run down the hill in the direction of the White House. He stops, shoots, his people opening fire also; one of the Americans clutches his head, spins, falls. His comrades, no longer laughing, scatter, abandoning him. For an instant Towerhill considers following them. But then he feels the heat of the flames behind him. When his squad comes back to the street, the shooters’ mansion is on fire, and George Evans is battering at a padlock on the Capitol doors with the hilt of his sword. The lock swings back and forth, undamaged, until Evans curses, steps back, draws his pistol, and shoots it off.

Some of the marines rush forward into the south building, following Ross and his aides. The House of Representatives, Towerhill recalls. He had studied the plans for these buildings when he had been hired out to the architect William Boulton; he had been taken to Washington to see the start of the construction. Whose black hands had finished the task? Another Towerhill, Towerhills, building in servitude for another American patriot feverish with visions of freedom and blind to the hypocrisy of framing it on enslaved black bodies. Or, worse, aware of it. Towerhill studies the tangible buildings themselves now, coldly, methodically, only his sixth finger twitching, as if it is the gauge of some inner turmoil. The two structures are made of enormous blocks of sandstone, and their roofs are iron. But between them—he knows the plans are to join them under a great dome—is only a connecting wooden passageway. It will burn. The rest must be put to fire from the inside out.

Cockburn and Scott enter with some of the fusiliers, who are carrying a tripod and several Congreve rockets; the admiral, apparently, has become fond of them. A mistake, Towerhill thinks. He hurries after them. Just inside the door, an old slave dressed in silk pantaloons and a white wig tries to block his way. “Where you going, nigger,” the old man demands. Towerhill grabs him by the two sides of his vest, lifts him, and puts him aside. High firestone columns rise to support a vaulted ceiling and glass skylights, with red silk curtains hanging ceiling to floor, and creating what seems to his eyes a jarring opulence against the elegantly simple architecture of the room. A huge carved eagle, wings spread, and a marble statue of a woman holding a document stand above and behind the rostrum at the head of the chamber. The Constitution of the United States of America. He remembers Cedric Hallam, Jacob’s father, standing as he read the document to Jacob and himself. A believer in educating darkies, if not freeing them. His eyes shining, his lips trembling. Reading to his captive audience in the book-lined sanctuary that had been his study. The sanctuary of lies. The repository of lies.

Cockburn, laughing like a schoolboy, has set up the tripod and—before Towerhill can warn him—sets off a rocket aimed at the ceiling. It bursts in a flower of red, showering sparks and shrapnel that ricochet off floors and tables and, surprisingly, do not kill anyone. Cockburn, his face blackened by powder, looks uncharacteristically embarrassed for a moment, but then recovers himself, and stands on the speaker’s chair at the head of the room. “What say you, gentlemen?” he yells, his voice echoing. “Shall this harbor of Yankee democracy be burned? All for it, say aye!” Most of the men laugh, and yell aye, a wave of giddiness running through the room.

A hand claps Towerhill on the back; he spins, bringing his rifle around, nearly shooting the white soldier smiling at him. “Here be even hotter than blooming Africa, ain’t it, Blackie,” the man says in MacDougal’s voice, his face and form blurring for a moment, and then coming back into focus as the tall, lean soldier from the 21st, the man offering him and Neb tea before Bladensburg. Towerhill brings his rifle up to the vertical, in salute, and turns away. The soldiers are piling up furniture, lugging in desks and cabinets and chairs they’ve dragged from the offices along the corridors, slathering them with gunpowder paste, giggling and giddy. “Leave the bloody corridors clear,” he hears Scott shout. Cockburn himself ignites the fire; it shoots up to the ceiling, a wave of heat fanning out. “More!” he yells. “More fuel for Mr. Monroe’s bonfire!” He spots Towerhill. “What say you, my good sergeant? How shall we proceed? What more do we need to feed this republican blaze?” He lifts and lowers himself on his tiptoes, excited as a child, the flames reflected in his eyes.

What they need comes to him. “Words,” Towerhill says.

He turns, searching the chamber, spots the old slave still near the entrance, and strides over to the man, calling for Craney, Mingo, and Neb to follow him. The old man looks at him defiantly.

“Where’s the library?” Towerhill asks.

“Call the Library of Congress, here,” the old man says. “And the library of this Congress ain’t a place for no traitorous trash like you.”

Neb has his knife at the man’s throat before Towerhill can say a word.

“You take us, old man, or I carve you another smile.”

“You do that, nigger.”

“Leave him,” Towerhill says, suddenly weary. “I remember where it should be.”

He leads them down the connecting wooden corridor to the North Wing, passing the Senate on the first floor, then the Supreme Court Chamber, where other soldiers are already piling furniture into a huge pyramid, then upstairs, following his memory, where he flings open the heavy oak doors. Shelves, with thousands of books in them, stand above him on all sides. Hallam’s study writ large. As his eyes brush the leather spines, he feels the words stir all around him, squirming on the pages, scurrying to slyly configure themselves to the prospects notched in his mind. Pretending to shape the world into beauty. Millions of words. A tower hill of lies. A little nigger boy, his brain crawling with insectoid words, spewing them from his lips as if they were his. As if he could own them. As if they could save him. The freak of nature. The educated nigger. The terror in their lives. He goes to the shelves, and begins gathering armfuls of the books, throwing them onto the floor. This harbor of Yankee democracy. Neb grinning at him. Cap’n Book. Laughing at him. Laughing with him. He laughs with Neb, two black men laughing together in the face of lies. Debates of the British House of Commons, Journals of the Lords and Commons. Law books. Glanvill, Hale, and Coke. Boswell’s Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides. Bertram’s Travels. History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay. John Locke. The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom. Shakespeare. Hath not a nigger organs, he will proclaim to Neb, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a white man is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. Jefferson. Cedric Hallam standing like Moses descended from the mount, like God in his heaven, reading down to them. We hold these lies to be self-evident.

“You going read them all, Book?” Neb asks.

An analogy, Towerhill thinks. Neb is to Towerhill as Bertram was to Jacob.

Craney looks at them worriedly. “Admiral is waiting on this, Towerhill.”

“Let him wait,” Neb says. “Cap’n Book reading.”

Towerhill points at the shelves. “Craney, you, Mingo; you remember the day the north barn burned?”

Craney looks at him, puzzled.

“You remember how we made a line, passed buckets?”

“Sure, Towerhill. Put out the fire.”

“You get the others, get the British too, form a line, here back to Cockburn.”

Neb laughs, seeing it. “Going to pass the fire.”

Craney nods. “Sure, Towerhill. We can do that.”

“Then go.”

At first, they pass the books along the line of men stretching from the library back to the South Wing, but this is too slow, and soon soldiers are taking armloads, throwing some into the now-burning Senate Chamber, running more over to Cockburn in the other wing, throwing books onto the bonfire, the heat blasting back into their faces, woolen uniforms growing hotter, sweat soaking into the fiber, steaming, so that little clouds hover over their shoulders as they run. Other soldiers have found documents in the clerks’ office downstairs and throw them into the flames as well. Towerhill tears down a damask curtain from an anteroom near the library, fills it time and again with load after load of books, running back and forth, panting, breathing in lungfuls of hot smoke from the burning pages, tasting their ash on his lips. Finally the room is empty, and he runs with the last load and flings it onto the fire. The books flare as they hit the flames, burst into flame themselves, pages swiftly blackening and curling. The heat has grown unbearable, and some men scream in pain as they inadvertently touch metal buckles or buttons. Fire runs up the silk curtains; the glass of the skylights melts and drips, molten glass falling on one man’s back, threatening to torch him as his comrades roll him on the floor. Ross, sweat runnelling his blackened face, finally yells at them to evacuate the buildings.

Outside Towerhill stands with Cockburn, Ross, and the others watching from a safe distance, their features strangely animated and fluid in the light from the fire. It is full night now, but the flames shooting up from the two buildings and from the fires across town in the Navy Yard—set ablaze by the Americans themselves—illuminate the sky with false daylight.

Towerhill walks away from the laughing Englishmen over to the silent formation of his own people, standing in solemn witness, each of them, to a man and woman, understanding what the British will never understand about what they are seeing on this night. He walks back further, until he can take in all of the picture. But as the buildings burn, it is only the image of books flaring like moths drawn into a fire that he sees in front of his eyes, the books and a room where three children sit surrounded by other books, entranced by lies and promises. He wants to rejoice, to flicker and elongate and dance like a flame himself at this culmination for which he has been waiting and killing, his life a line of fire moving inexorably from the flames of the plantation’s manor house to this blaze lighting the sky over Washington. Something loosens in him at this moment, a fist that has been squeezing his heart for so long he no longer knows it is there until it suddenly releases its grip. He has come to this place and has done what he has needed to do; he has liberated the words and now he can see them rise phoenix-like from the flames, their letters twisting and writhing, shaping into forms unforeseen by those who had fashioned them, released now into the world like unwrapped promises.

________

In the White House, the smell of roasted meat fills his nostrils. In the dining room, the table had been set, as if in anticipation of their arrival: a damask tablecloth, matching napkins, fine china plates, crystal goblets. Now the light from their torches sparks gleams of fire from the silverware and crystal. For a few seconds, the small crowd of British oOcers, caked with ash, dust, and sweat, stand stunned. And then erupt into laughter. How good of Madison to prepare a feast to celebrate their victory. Will the famous Dolley attend them? One hears she offers quite a spread. Ah, madeira wine; what aristocratic tastes these democrats have. The beef too rare, what? Not to worry, it will be Cockburned to a crisp soon enough.

And so on.

As the officers sit at the table, Cockburn waves a leg of lamb at Towerhill, motioning for him to join them. But he remains in the doorway. He is repulsed by their hilarity, though he cannot understand why. The faces—Cockburn, Ross, Smith, Evans, Scott, Glieg—all familiar to him, seem transformed, as if some devil beneath their skins has been unfettered. Scott spreads his hands, his gesture taking in the table, all the silver and crystal finery. “A feast worthy of the champions of republican freedom, what?” he says, directing his statement to the stray American they’d dragged in with them, coming across him as they walked to the White House. The plump young man is seated next to Cockburn, terrified and trembling, his white wig askew. He blanched when he’d been told the admiral’s name. Now Cockburn throws an arm around his shoulder, pushes a wine-filled goblet under his nose with his other hand. “Come, good Yankee... what did you say your name was?” The man mumbles something. “What?” Cockburn shouts. “Speak up, lad! Display some of the boldness and courage your countrymen exhibited at Bladensburg!”

“Bold as rabbits,” Evans laughs.

“It’s Roger Weightman, sir.”

“Of course it is not. It is Jonathan, yes? Roger Jonathan. Jonathan Jonathan.”

The others at the table chant the name. “Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan.”

“And what is your standing in life, Monsieur Jonathan?”

“Sir?”

“What work do you do, idiot?” Scott calls.

“I’m a bookseller, sir.”

Cockburn laughs. “And I’m a book burner. Isn’t that right, Sergeant Towerhill? Where are you going, sergeant? Stay. Stay while we make a toast.”

He stands, dragging the bookseller up. Raises his goblet. “To peace! To peace with America and to hell with Madison!” He drains the goblet, fills it again, makes Weightman drink. “That’s it, Jonathan. Quaff it like a man! Quaff, quaff!”

“Quaff, quaff,” the others call.

Cockburn releases the bookseller, lifts himself up, and pulls a cushion out from underneath himself. “Know what this is, Jonathan?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Took it from your queen’s dressing room upstairs, to have me a small souvenir of our presidential feast.” He raises, kisses the cushion. “Belongs... no, belonged to your queen herself, Mistress Dolley, wife of the rather swiftly vacating James. I will keep it to remind me of her. . . seat.”

The British roar. Except, Towerhill sees, for Ross. A faint look of disgust passes over the general’s face.

“And now let’s have a dance. Show our American representative here how John Bull spins!”

Smith and Scott get up from the table and dance, an exaggerated minuet, singing to each other, their voices pitched high:

A landlady of France,She loved an officer, ’tis said,And this officer he dearly loved her brandy, O!Sighed she, “I love this officer,Although his nose is red,And his legs are what his regiment call bandy, O!”

“Come join us, my dear sable friend,” Scott calls to Towerhill. “Show us how Blackie can dance as well. No? Why not? Come back! Desertion is punishable by hanging!” He wags a finger at Towerhill, and George Smith sings to him, extending his arms:

Fifty I got for selling me coat,Fifty for selling me blanket.If ever I ’lists for a soldier again,The devil shall be me sergeant...

Towerhill leaves the singers. Enters the kitchen. The place must have been abandoned moments before they arrived. Spits with joints of meat are still turning on the fire. A black man sits on a stool in front of the grate, singing softly to himself, drinking from a silver goblet. He turns to look at Towerhill, takes in the singed red uniform. His eyes are yellow and bloodshot.

“What are you doing here?” Towerhill asks.

“What’s it look like I doing?”

Towerhill waves a hand at the kitchen. “All this. Who was it for?”

“Who you think lives here, nigger? It’s for the president, when he come back.”

“You’re free, man. You can leave.”

The man snorts. “Where to, Mr. Nigger Red Coat? I’m American. I’m here.”

Towerhill stares at him, their eyes locked.

“Stay,” he says to the man. “Stay and burn.”

When he returns to the dining room, it is crowded with men from the 20th Fusiliers, Cockburn’s sailors, and some of his own Colonial Marines. One of the white soldiers has piled all of the silver, plates, and goblets in the center of the damask tablecloth; he and another bring the two ends of the cloth together, creating a sack for the loot. Ross, his face still serious, tells the man to bring it all outside. He spots Towerhill.

“Come, help us, sergeant,” says Ross. “There is still work to be done this night.”

The general picks up a chair, puts it on the table. Swaying slightly, the other officers, including Cockburn, follow his example; along with the soldiers, they pile all of the furniture in the room on the tabletop. They tear down the curtains and add them to the heap; then the fusiliers spread on the gunpowder paste, as they had done in the Capitol.

“Towerhill,” Cockburn calls. He is holding a torch. Towerhill walks over to the admiral. Cockburn hands him the torch, looking into his eyes, all drunkenness seemingly vanished. Towerhill raises it to him in salute, turns, and puts the torch to the edge of the tablecloth. It bursts into flame. A cheer arises, and the others begin throwing their torches onto the pile.

“Are your marines ready?” Cockburn asks, as they move towards the door.

Before Towerhill can answer, they are outside in the humid August air, which feels cool on his face after the blast of heat inside. He sees Neb, in front of the company, next to another company of white marines and sailors. The men in both groups hold long poles, topped with plate-sized balls of cloth smeared with gunpowder paste. They surround the White House.

“They’re ready, sir.”

Cockburn nods. “I owe a certain debt to you, sergeant. This evening’s work is my first payment on it.” He nods towards the building. The flames inside make the windows glow red. “You may proceed.”

Towerhill walks over to one of the windows. He can see the flicker of flame inside, the shadow of fire playing on a corridor wall. He raises his rifle, smashes it butt first into the glass, a shard cutting his cheek as it falls, his tongue spontaneously licking out, tasting the blood on his lips. “Like that,” he says to Neb.

“Break them up!” Neb yells, and the marines surge forward and smash the glass with their muskets. Mingo stands nearby holding one of the fire poles. Towerhill remembers him felling Adams with an iron bar, on the day of the revolt, the day of a beginning that has brought them here. Towerhill strikes a match and nods to the smith, who grins and lowers the pole. He touches the flame to the gunpowder-smeared ball. It flares. “Light them!” he shouts, and Mingo touches the flaming ball to the next pole, and the next. When all are aflame, the men throw them through the broken windows.

Fire finding fire.