An American Hero

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 2004 by Moss, Stanley

It wasn't all smell of Adirondack lilac

and flowering chestnut trees along Broadway

in the spring of 1824.

Human sewers, mostly Negroes, carried waste in tubs.

at night to the Hudson and East Rivers. James Hewlett,

said to be ex-slave, ex-tubman, self-purchaser,

ex-houseboy to English actors, leapt up like a wildcat,

then like a witch, he joined a Shakespeare theater of ex-slaves,

billed himself: "Vocalist and Shakespeare's Proud Representative."

I pick his pocket.

He played Richard the Third and Othello,

sang Il Barbieri, La Marseillaise, and "O!

say not that woman's love is bought" in one evening.

Humped in silk, Mr. Hewlett called out:

"Now is the winter of our discontent,

made glorious summer by this son of New York,"

to black applause. Whatever the beauty of the season,

his actors and actresses were beaten up,

his theater finally burned to the ground, speechless.

I pick his pocket.

Adrift in an open boat, he let the winds of eloquence

take him where they would. Often, late at night, he recited

speeches from Shakespeare in the street,

sometimes in the snow.

In disgrace for marrying a pretty-as-a-picture white woman,

he served six months for stealing wine, then three years

for stealing a silver watch from the vest pocket

of a dead man, a showoff laid out in tails.

What good is a watch in the grave?

He answered the sentencing with

"I have done the state some service, and they know it."

I pick his pocket.

While he was away playing with himself,

better people attended the fashionable theater

and minstrel shows, danced the cotillion. The industrious poor,

slaves who bought their freedom, or whose fathers or mothers

had bought their freedom, a few simply freed

dressed up as no one had dressed before, hired ballrooms,

danced the cotillion too, held a benefit dance and supper

to support Greek freedom. Late in the evening,

sweating and full of whiskey, their loins sweetened,

they fell to what whites called "crazy dancing

and senseless music" that "frightened the horses."

"Free," Hewlett gave one last performance-a newspaper reported:

"to great applause he made a fine speech before the curtain,

which ended up-he could not help himself

in some kind of talk you had to be a nigger to understand."

I pick his pocket.

Signed up on a crew of freemen and slaves,

he made his way to Trinidad,

Shakespeare's Representative found a stage,

portrayed Mr. Keene playing nine tragic roles.

Sometimes he gave himself laughing gas to please the crowd

or pretended to. A one-man band,

Othello sang La Marseillaise. I pick his pocket.

He disappeared in New York in the Forties,

the streets slave-free after 1827,

full of Negroes and Irish; older, there is no reason to think

he was kidnapped and shipped south for sale.

What had it come to beyond the gaslights

and wood fires? History as entertainment,

a stained purse I grab. I sit in the dark, listening

to a call and response, a call and response.

For no reason, beauty reports, disappears

not like early-morning birdsong in the city

but like the report of a rifle. I pick his pocket

in the third balcony of my life, segregated from myself,

I am barely a ghost in my own poem.