September, 1859
Around the time that I met Child and photography first took my hand approached the anniversary of when I’d started stealing from the Mumler family business.
My adventures and successes in embezzlement started with a gold-plated timepiece I’d glimpsed on Commercial and that I obtained through titrations of credit over the course of the fortnight that followed. I say and have said and still say the word “credit” for this was all it was at first—or at least as pertains to my parents, the victims, who saw no deficit in gains. This was how I managed it: I’d simply overcharge the client. I’d conceived of a series of installments that would, all told, afford the fob and for every knickknack that I sold in those weeks I would overcharge the client in accordance with my object.
A little fogged with laudanum, my mother’s bookkeeping squared up.
So it was that a number of other accents would join the golden fob that year: silk neckties from Provencal, a stunning pair of ruby cufflinks, a velvet smoking jacket, a deadly pair of Oxford spats that provoked, I was sure as I walked about town, the light murmuring and applause of awed strangers.
Which isn’t to say I cared for things, the vacant glory that they promised, but rather that, much like the money I made for doing what I loved to do, I saw my outfitting in fey accoutre as another advantage to hang round my neck in the headlong and gauntleted dash toward my calling. Patrons are keener to offer a boost if they can be met at halfway on the ladder.
My pockets, they whistled; my fancy, it roared. And oh the threadbare days of youth!
So disparage me, reader, a profligate crook, as well to do for being young.
My father did. My father frowned. My father bent his eye on me. And I fed him with fibs about where the bulk came from, that I had won it playing Monte with the Irish, and so on.
But then came Brianna and with her new pastures—pastures of drinking and smoking and swerving through Boston streets made raw by dawn that cost me several dollars more than the ones I’d been confined to in the bleak house of my boyhood and that needed a fresh change of clothes now and then, preferably French and ingeniously slimming.
New appetites brought new deceits—or new expedience, let’s say. Like a criminal dentist I started to scavenge the more bejewelled of my commissions. Garnet, I soon found, could be passed off as ruby; amethyst, sapphire; moissanite, diamond; shaved and burnished rounds of glass for Poseidon’s own pearls from the nacre-rich deep.
These so-called gems I sold to pawnshops, to fingersmiths and confidence men in back alleys.
Boston’s Lahngworthies were never the wiser—they pouted, and cooed, and rejoiced in their treasures. They gladly paid their doctored quotes, often with a little bonus and left overcharged, overdressed, overjoyed.
The only legitimate commerce I did in in summer or fall of 1859 was the modest under-charging of Lucretia for her necklace.
The reason was this: photography was expensive.
My deliverance, my calling, an absolute racket! For once you had purchased the camera itself there were numberless tools of the trade still to gather, none of them common and none of them cheap. You first needed lenses of varying thickness—a single for landscapes, a double for portraits—and these must be ordered from Ross’s of London whose manufacture process, it was said, reigned supreme. Though if not bought from Mr. Ross—as I couldn’t do barring certain bankruptcy—then you had to seek out Lerebours or Secretan, with the former preferential in the matter of focus. Oh! and you needed paper, Canson Frere’s or Turner’s brand, and a porcelain bath to hold the sheet, and a glass bath for holding the nitrate of silver as it washed the sheet to etch the light, and press frames for printing, glass funnels for straining, and a piece of wash leather to clean off the plates, and then the plates of glass themselves to fit inside the camera slide, and a graduated measure and small scales and weights. That was just the hardware, dry.
The chemicals cost me even more!
Chloride of gold, spirits of wine, Iodide of Potassium, alcohol, Aether, Pyrogallic and Glacial Acetic, both acids. Not to mention the Collodion and Nitrate of Silver. If either weren’t completely pure, as the blood of a virgin or infant must be before it trickles down the altar, the process might as well be doomed.
The camera must be level, the plates well-positioned. The exposure must not be too long but neither must it be too short. And the plates—oh, the plates!—they must always be clean and only handled at the edges lest the photograph’s subject be joined, in the print, by a foggy and underdressed thumbprint.
I liked to call him Mr. Thumb.
He was a sort of foggy dumpling hovering beside my head when I was my subject, as I often was. You see, I would expose the plate but then I would grow anxious at the seconds ticking by and so I would dash through the frame prematurely on my way to secure the reactioning slide.
In these early attempts at depicting myself, Mr. Thumb is more nearly the sitter than I.
There is scarcely the round edge of one of my heels, in most of these prints, caught fleeing the scene.
Yet I still needed sitters; I needed a muse.
So one night at the edge of fall in the wake of a couple of frustrating endeavours I visited Fisk’s at the top of Copp’s Hill where Bill Christian, as always, waited.
Bill was the son of a Fort Hill mortician, a fact he’d only told me lately. He’d always asked after my mother and father, whomever else I might hold dear, and I would tell him all were fine, and he would say the same of his.
“Still making them dead folk look decent,” he’d said a couple of weeks before that night. “And wants to make me next in line. But I’ll be damned if trussing death stacks up to any kind of life. To us, who have gone our own way,” he had toasted. “Me with watch-dogging and you with the girls.”
Tonight however he demurred, not much disposed toward conversation, barely letting me sip from his trusty gin flask before bringing the door wide and showing me down.
Downstairs, I poured myself a drink and settled on my favourite couch, which permitted a view of the room’s panorama.
My plan had been, initially, to chase that drink with several more and with some liquor in my guts to see about a decent whore—Brianna O’ Brennan, if she was in house—then crawl back to the jewellery shop to get some rest before my shift. But life, as such, was not to be.
A clamour went up in the parlour’s far corner.
A skinny man with crow-black hair rose up from the couch he’d been sprawling upon and started berating a feminine form positioned with her back to me. The sweep of purple crinolines and the fever-dream height of Pagoda-style sleeves told me this was Madam Fisk. He yelled with some manner of foreign pronouncement, English-speaking, perhaps but not born of these shores.
“Pay, must I? Cough up? Pipe down? When she is mine and I am hers? If you will make me pay,” he said, “then I will yell till I am hoarse.”
That was when I recognized him.
Never before had I seen him head-on but only that once, hard at work from behind, his Irish paleness pummeling between Brianna’s freckled thighs.
Madam was trying to talk the man down, pushing her palm at him slowly while whispering. But the Irishman grew every second more angry.
“Make me pay to see my girl, you dunderheaded cunt?” he cried. “When me and she have all but died to be together on these shores?”
I swallowed my brandy, rose up from my chair and tapped Madam Fisk on the shoulder. She turned.
“If I might, Madam Fisk, have a word with this man?”
“Don’t trouble yourself, Mr. Mumler,” she said.
“Aye, what’s that, you tub of guts?” said the Irish while straining past Madam to see me. “Wants to have a word with me, I’ll give him words enough to eat.”
“At least, then, allow me to try,” I told Madam. “What may come of it, Madam, I take on myself.”
“You’re a tolerant man, Mr. Mumler,” she said and groggily wandered away from the scene.
Brianna’s drunken paramour tripped over the edge of the couch coming toward me, performing a skidding and one-legged hop as brandy sloshed out of his glass on the carpet. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Madam Fisk pour a gin at the bar.
“So speak, you Christmas hog,” he said.
I put my arm around his shoulder.
“You’re angry now and rightly so. Maybe even a little embarrassed,” I said. He tried to shrug me off of him but I gritted myself and bore down. “Have a name?”
“To some,” he said.
“Care to share it?”
“Fuck off.”
“Care to share your name with him?” I said and nodded at the stairs.
“Not much in the habit of talking to niggers.”
“In the habit of fighting them fist over fist?”
“Eamon,” he said. “My name is Eamon.”
“Eamon, let me ask you this. When she comes through that door, your girl, in a terrible flush of just having been fucked—and she comes in that parlour, her Johnny behind her and catches you here fathoms deep in your cups, who among the three of you do you reckon that pitiful scene will hurt most? Not Brianna, on the clock. Not the Johnny, freshly fucked. Neither one of them,” I said, “is going to bat an eye at you.”
“You know her name,” he said, “my Bri.”
I did not contradict his words. “I know it from experience for I have had your Bri myself.”
He flinched at that, I do admit and I fully expected him, reader, to strike me. Beatific and patient, I’d lowered my eyes and made my peace with earthly pain. But the jar from the Irishman’s fist never came.
I opened my eyes.
He was just staring at me.
And then a gloomy lassitude consumed his person on the spot: his shoulders slumped, his eyes turned down, why even his clothes seem to hang on him sadly. He might’ve let go what was left of his drink had I not gotten under him, bearing him up, and with one arm around his neck, the other one entwined with his as he struggled to walk while still drinking his brandy, we crossed the room of staring men and the whores who would have them and disappeared streetward.
On our way up the stairs onto Snowhill Street proper, a storm of applause filtered up from the parlour. The Irishman’s face underwent a contortion, and when the applause died away there was laughter. And then the door was opening, Bill Christian behind it, spotlit by the lantern.
My, the Negro was a sight, in his spats and suspenders and black stovepipe hat, the light angling off of his plunging cheekbones in such a way they looked stone-carved. Eamon seemed strangely to no longer need me and rushed at Bill Christian headlong up the stairs, waving the drained brandy snifter absurdly as though he meant to have at Bill, but Bill sidled by him, as lithe as a dancer and let him go tumbling into the street, the glass flying from him and shattering brightly upon the cobblestones beyond.
Eamon righted, whirled around.
Bill said: “Come on, you Irish sprat.”
But the Irishman stood in the shadows and heaved. Bill Christian made a cigarette.
“This devil of Africa guarding the gates, what else might I expect?” said Eamon. He straightened his coat and wiped spit from his lips. “We really do reside in hell.”
When Eamon had shambled away through the night, I crossed the street and kicked the glass. Bill had lit his cigarette and was puffing away at it, propped on the wall.
“His liver exceeded his will, I should guess.”
“He was only a gentleman gone out of hand.”
“A gentleman, you call that, Bill?”
“Customer of Madam Fisk’s.”
“You commanded yourself with both honour and grace.”
“The customer always come first,” said Bill Christian.
“Face first sometimes, Bill?” I said.
He flashed the armour-plated smile before his expression went gloomy and distant, and I saw that he wasn’t unflappable, Bill. He was, of everything, ashamed.
“I saw you there that night,” he said. “I delivered that gentleman just what he asked for.”
“Can I ask you a question, Bill?” He nodded, ground his cigarette. “When people talk to you like that, how does it make you feel?” I said.
Bill considered the question I’d asked him a moment, smoke still trailing from his nose.
“It’s like I’m breathing?” said Bill Christian. “It’s like I’m standing there, alive? Like my eyes look at things and my ears they hear things and my hair keeps on growing as every man’s does but I’m absent, I reckon. I’m not really there. Like if they had a mind to they’d brush me aside.”
“That’s a shame,” I said to Bill. “Photogenic man like you.”
Q
It would be more than several hours before Bill showed up at my rooms and, indeed, when I first had invited him there on the offer of taking his picture pro bono, it was anyone’s guess if he’d actually come.
But lo, before the dawn, Bill came.
He stood tired and abashed out on Washington Street, his shift having ended a mere hour before and he scraped off his shoes (though he wore spatterdashes) before gaining the hallway and climbing the stairs. He’d also waxed and combed his hair into a clerk-ish sideways part and, in spite of the darkness surrounding his eyes, had cinched his cravat all the way to the collar.
I too had outfitted myself for the moment, abstaining from brandy in favour of coffee, laving water on my face, erecting the tripod, preparing the slides and arranging the screen at an angle to sunlight, which was just then beginning to pour through the blinds, even going so far as to pour out the fluids that I would need later to finish the prints.
The place, for all that it was not, looked not unlike a studio.
“Power of whatsits you got up in here. Photography,” said Bill. “Some racket.”
“Care to discover the function of each?”
Bill made a pass around the room, stopping near objects to peer at them closer.
“Let’s start with my picture,” Bill rubbed at his eyes, “and then Mist’ Mumler can give me the tour.”
So I ushered Bill over to sit on the stool. I asked that he remove his coat and then to put it on again; had him cradle his hat chimney-up in his lap and then to reverse it to hang toward the floor; had him loosen, a little, his scarlet cravat and told him to smile if it put him at ease.
“Another question, Bill,” I said, “if I may be so bold to ask.”
I was standing, at this point, behind the tripod with Bill dead-to-rights in the eye of the box. I’d never seen him look so awkward, exhausted and stripped of his back-alley wiles. It was all I could do not to fill up his ears with the vulnerable, beautiful poetry of him.
I would make sure to title the portrait, of course, before I next saw Algernon: Black Apollo on his Throne; The Whorehouse Negro, End of Shift.
But I begged off a moment, arranging the plate. “How much do you see in an evening at Fisk’s?”
“Different night to night,” said Bill. “Two greenbacks an hour as a base, normally little extra on the side.”
“I should think that your talents are wasted,” I said, “for such a mediocre fee.”
“Talents,” uttered Bill. “That’s rich. Teaching drunks and whoremongers to work on their manners.”
“A talent by another name.”
“You want to call it that,” said Bill, “I am too damn exhausted to argue with you.”
And that was when I thought it best to capture Bill’s image, exposing the plate.
“Congratulations, Bill,” I said. “You’re the finest and first in a long line of icons.”
Bill said: “You just took my picture!” The smile was bashful, broad and strong.
“You don’t sound glad to hear it, Bill.”
“I weren’t expecting—that,” he said and ran a hand across his hair. “Now all you got to do is soak it?”
I briefly demurred: all that I had to do. My irritation must’ve shown.
But Bill was intent on the now-exposed slide, which I drew from the back of the box and submerged. His soft dark eyes worked tirelessly, tracking the plate as it moved through the air.
“A good long soak is all,” I said. “And Bill will emerge, if the mixture is proper.”
“How much do you charge for them cards de visit?”
“So Bill is keener than he seems.”
“I live in the city of Boston, don’t I?”
“It’s cartes de visite,” I inflected with relish. “And I have not devised a sum. How much would you charge,” I asked Bill, “were you me?”
He considered the prospect. “Fifteen for a dozen.”
“A little steep for novice work.”
“Speak for yourself, Mist’ Mumler,” said Bill. “I may be a Negro, but novice I ain’t.”
We had carried out maybe a dozen exposures before the sun hovered in force over Athens. Between us the process felt glad and ecstatic, like brothers at play in a father’s wardrobe, inciting each other: just one more silk necktie, just one more wool greatcoat before he comes in.
After the final exposure we sat in the midst of my new photographic equipment and shared what was left of a bottle of bourbon I kept on reserve for occasions like these. We sat for what seemed like a very long time, drinking eighty-five-proof with the sun on our cheeks, not really even getting drunk so much as just feeling the bite of the liquor, our shirtsleeves bundled up, eyes raw.
As though taking its cue from the shift in the light, The Sadness expanded, enormous in me.
“Have you ever lost someone you loved?” I asked Bill.
“Name for me a man who hasn’t.”
“But I am asking you,” I said, with a bit of a barb to my voice. “You, Bill. My cousin Cora died. Quite young. And I could’ve saved her but then, well, I didn’t and I suppose I sometimes feel . . .”
“As if you had done it yourself,” said Bill Christian.
“Indeed.” I glanced at him. “Sometimes.”
“How was it she died, Mist’ Mumler?” he said.
“She drowned, Bill,” I told him. “In that very ocean.” I nodded at the east window. “I was twelve and she was ten. Holiday in Nantasket. Our parents were drunk. We were swimming, my cousin and I and—she vanished. We never even found her bones.”
Bill had been watching the light cultivate, moving quietly, mutably over the boards and he looked at me now from the sides of his eyes.
“My mama,” he said. “Coming here, from down South.”
“You lost her at what age?”
“Can’t say.”
“Can’t say how old—”
“No, sir,” said Bill. “I’m twenty-eight or nine, I reckon. But then I can’t say that she’s dead, well, at all.” And here he appeared to grow wordlessly angry; he dazzled the world with his smile, sipped his bourbon. “You asked me had I lost someone and I just told you that,” he said.
“Care to tell me how?” I said.
“We were near to Ohio, it come down upon us. The men we had with us was certified scoundrels. White men, river men. Ferrymen, they were called. But mostly just jackals, dyed white in their fur. Like as not they’d sell us back the very place we’d run off from or cut down the lot of us, triple their shares. Toss our bodies in Old Muddy. And camping out there on some sandbar some night between Kentucky and Ohio, mama set her mind on something. But when she waked up, shaking daddy and me, holding the key to our chains in her hand . . . And it was like she knew,” said Bill. “But wouldn’t—dursn’t—pass the cup.” Bill Christian winced and licked his lips. “We were already fighting upriver without her.”
So Bill and I were not so different—fugitives of former lives. The sun drew focus on the pane and the dew burned away, irretrievably lost.
The best picture I took that day has Bill with his hat pointed up in his lap, his torso tending slightly left, the smile he has brandished to fend off the world just beginning to show at the sides of his mouth; an unassuming, lovely smile. The other ten pictures were botches, I fear—or anyway not up to snuff. I disposed of them quickly, with flinching remonstrance, in the dimly lit alley that bordered the shop.
Mr. Thumb is on the scene in most of these aborted prints, seeming to glare at Bill out of the shadows.
In one, he hovers at Bill’s shoulder. While in yet another he lurks at Bill’s feet. While another one still has him waiting off-stage for rehearsal to end and the show to begin, furtive in his shroud of night-fog, studying my every move.