City of the Absent by Robert W. Walker Page B

waterway. Tinted, dappled green and brown, was the brow of the riverbank, the only witness to the chaotic evil along its shore. For in darkness the black ribbon of water became a sullen place for suicides and murder. And on either side of the dark waters stood monuments to the god Mammon, warehouses and businesses and brothels of export and import for all manner of goods and services. The myriad blinking gas-lit windows winking, like the million eyes of Hell’s own, as wharf lights gleamed like fireflies and small beckoning hearths, flaring red and glaring yellow, summoning the naive, the destitute, the sick, poor, and addicted.
    One small window acted as a shaft for an oblique green light reflected in the water and across the wharf. Endless threats to burn this place to the ground came in at police stations across the city, angry ministers and ladies’ organizations, upset fathers, distraught mothers, outraged brothers, enraged sisters, and even an occasional hopping mad grandparent. This window was Madam Maude DuQuasi’s brothel—the Silver Palace—a symbol of everything ugly and decadent in Chicago, and make no mistake about it, Maude, the girls who worked for her, and the clapboard shack she called the “old palace” were all three so frightfully ugly and pigsty in nature that many considered them a separate race of beings, as their surroundings and their sexual appetites were those, it was said, of apes.
    This is where Newly Nightlinger found himself this morning, waking in the bed with three of the ugliest, homeliest, dirtiest, smelliest women he’d ever set eyes on. It startled him, as he could not recall the previous several days, and even now, staring at his big black hands, he felt dazed, confused, hazy in the extreme. One moment he was drinking at a tavern after a long day of work hefting feedbags off Cap’n Wakely’s boat at Grathian’s warehouse on the wharf, and now this, waking to such a horror, finding himself completely naked amid a snake pit of black and white-skinned pig-women! In fact, the white women here were such low creatures that a black man could not be hung for making love to them, or so it was said. In the deep South, he knew such considerations got no play—that despite the horrid look of a woman or her vile animal nature or profession, that ultimately she remained a white maiden, a dove —spoiled perhaps but yet a dove that his black ass had defiled. And he’d be hung at the nearest stout tree for sleeping with it. But Chicago was a progressive town.
    He had lost three days and nights to a drinking binge, and he’d likely not a cent left to his name, and had surely lost his job by now. He tried to imagine a worse circumstance and could not, until he realized that he couldn’t find his shirt and pants. His face must tell all, because a thin, straight, lanky white man in the hallway looking in on him asked, “Do we need help here, Mr. Nightlinger?”
    He knows my name, and he calls me Mister. Must be he works here. Maybe they’ve laundered my pants and shirt…
    â€œI sure do. Don’t even know where my pants’re.”
    â€œLook here, wrap yourself in this”—the stranger tossed him a grayed, stained sheet—“and follow me. I need a strong man for a day’s work. Are you interested?”
    â€œAbsolutely, boss. I’m your man!”
    â€œClimb outta there then, and come along.”
    Newly Nightlinger’s father had been a slave in Mississippi all his life and had died before the Civil War that ended human bondage in America. His mother’s name had been America, but she, too, had died a slave when, on the verge of Emancipation, she died of cholera. Newly, as a young man, traveled north and had settled in Chicago after many a ride atop a train, and he had bumped from one job to another in the city, until landing the permanent job with Captain Jeremiah Wakely, who, although a