Read Online Conjurer by Cordelia Frances Biddle - Free Book Online

is flushed through the great drains twice a month only; when flooding or heavy rains occur, the sewers regurgitate inside the cells themselves, carrying drowned rats, mice, swimming toads, snakes as thick as eels. The stink permeates the air, burrows into the skin and clothing of those incarcerated and even into the great stone slabs themselves. The smell and the enforced seclusion make suicide endemic.
    Ruth is one of the newer inmates. She’s nineteen, or thereabouts, a free Negress, not a runaway slave; and nearly three years of her life have been spent in a tiny, barrel-vaulted cell with a food slot cut in the thick oak door and a slit roof-window. Unlike her male counterparts, who are provided with private outdoor spaces as well as indoor beds, females are assigned to only one interior room for the duration of their term. The architects who designed the building reasoned that men, being muscular, needed light and air; women, even those confined, were to be protected from the elements at all times.
    Ruth was once a maid-of-all-work. Caught stealing potatoes to tote home to her sickly baby son—he was born doubly afflicted: a victim of the falling disease, and offspring of a white father who forced himself upon her one unlucky day—she was released without references, a sentence nearly tantamount to death.
    With her mulatto child in tow, she returned to the Negro ghetto bordered by South and Seventh Streets, doing what meager work passed her way, existing on meals of scraps and refuse. When she could no longer afford even a sleeping place on a vermin-infested floor, she bundled up her son and quit the ghetto, taking to the streets to beg pennies off the well-to-do whose warm and lamp-lit homes adjoined Washington Square.
    Begging proved problematic. To the abolitionists, Ruth was an object of pity, sometimes even of sympathy, but to the many newly arrived Irish who struggled with their own poverty and unemployment, she was a pariah. Men and women alike spat upon her, kicked at her baby as he lay sleeping in her lap, called her a “sambo” and her son an “antichrist” while they glared at her child’s paler skin and the features that looked so much like her nameless oppressor.
    Ruth cowered under the threats, remembering every horrific moment of the riots of the 1830s when entire houses along Fitzwater and St. Mary’s streets were burned to the ground, and neighbors dragged off shrieking into the night. She’d lost what little she had of family in those dark times.
    Driven by hunger, despair, and the mewling cries of her son, Ruth finally gave up begging in favor of a nervous kind of thievery; she would dart between market-bound farm wagons so that the bellowing drivers were distracted, and objects from their varying cargoes could be removed by nimbler and more daring fingers than her own. A ham, a bushel of peaches, flour stitched into a sack: The goods would be shared between Ruth and her accomplices.
    Her baby, quivering and glassy-eyed when the fits came upon him, limp and slack-lipped after they’d passed, ate and grew.
    Finally arrested and pulled before the slumbrous-voiced and heavy-lidded Judge Alonzo Craig, Ruth stood tight-faced and silent, and was sentenced to Eastern State Penitentiary for three years. “Larceny” and “the receiving of stolen goods” were her twin crimes. Incarcerated, she was to experience regret for her evil ways; fortnightly and with an unseen teacher, she was to be engaged in learning the rudiments of reading and figuring, as well as mastering the skill of sewing. As for her child, a stranger took him from the courtroom; he was two years old, and as he walked away his body heaved with terrible tears. When he stumbled, the stranger dragged him forward. That was the last image Ruth had of her little boy.
    â€œâ€˜Whither thou goest, I will go,’” she now murmurs in the smallest of whispers. Her voice feels strange in