Telegraph Avenue Quotes

Walter broke off a piece of a smile and tucked it into his left cheek as if reserving it for future use.

Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands.

Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.

The evening laid its cool palm against his weary brow as if feeling for a temperature.

Do what you gotta do and stay fly

A high point in a life lived at sea level, prone to flooding.

He addressed the class...in a soft, stupefied, increasingly breathless tone like an astronaut pleading with a mad supercomputer to open an airlock.

Combing her thoughts, yanking them into a pigtail.

It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him.

The lucky ones are the people like your husband there. The ones who find work that means something to them. That they can really put their heart into, however foolish it might look to other people.

There was nothing a man couldn't do with three thousand dollars and a suitcase full of canned tuna fish and pregnancy brassieres. The car was called an El Camino for a reason. (Telegraph Avenue, p399)

The little boy had wandered away from his mother, tacking across the grass to the play structure. His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time.

The instructor, Ms. Pease, also taught in the church's religious school, and she had a Sunday school manner at once saccharine and condemnatory.

You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Not even if you died. Alive or dead a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling you to do, perform, or say anything at all.

He reached up and out with both arms to shoot his cuffs, and for an instant he might have served to illustrate the crucial step in a manual on the seizing of days. He had already seized this particular day once, but he was prepared, if need be, to go ahead and seize the motherfucker all over again.

Regret, hurt, bereavement, loss, to permit the flow of even one tear at the upwelling of such feelings was to imperil ancient root systems and retaining walls. Mudslide and black avalanche would result and drown him.

They had an old-fashioned sincerity...that touched Archy in this time when everything good in life was either synthesised in transgenic cyborg vats or shade-grown in small batches by a Buddhist collective of blind ex-Carmelite Wiccans.

If you walk five blocks north from the wholefoods in Berkeley along Telegraph Avenue and then turn right at Dwight way, you'll soon come to a trash-strewn patch of grass and trees dotted with the tattered camps of a few homeless people.

Black people live their whole lives in a fantasy world, it's just not their fantasy.

A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, in the bottom of Flowers's face.

Gibson Goode to Archy: "You're just being stubborn now. Stubbornness in the service of a mistaken notion is a vanity and a sin.

The past was irretrievable, the league of lonely men a fiction, the pursuit of the past a doomed attempt to run a hustle on mortality.

Knowing he had done wrong, prepared to make amends, settle his business. Determined to return to Brokeland, open the doors wide to the angel of retail death, and run the place into the ground all by himself, if that was what it took-but to fail calmly, to fail with style, to fail above all with that true dignity, unknown to his wife or his partner, which lay in never tripping out, never showing offense or hurt to those who had offended or hurt you.

The officious swagger in her gait might have been some flavor of self-possession or the cool skedaddle of a shoplifter making for the door. In either case, the streamer of toilet paper that trailed from the waistband of her tiny skirt like the banner of an advertising airplane pretty much spoiled the effect.

Gwen thinks Lazar disrespected her because she's black. And look I mean you're aware of my policy when it comes to that kind of situation." "Your policy is 'What do I know about being black?'" "What do I know about being black?...

You got the good heart. Underneath all the other stuff. Good heart is eighty-five percent of everything in life.' ... 'What is the other fifteen percent?' Nat said. 'Just out of curiosity?' 'Politeness,' Mr. Jones said without hesitation. 'And keeping a level head.

Vulgar language," Chan said..."Always the first and last refuge of the man with nothing to say.

Julie wanted to die of his own whiteness, to be drowned in the tide of his embarrassment on behalf of all uncool white people everywhere when they tried to be cool.

...she deferred to her partner, to the virtuoso hands of Gwen Shanks, freaky-big, fluid as a couple of tide-pool dwellers, cabled like the Golden Gate Bridge.

Alcohol as helpful to the making of scapegoats as mud to the shaping of golems.

Like the Party he had joined too late, too young, Chan was a lost claim check, a series of time lapse photos of a promise as it broke.

He felt, and not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989.

That was how troubles arrived, mourners rushing the bar at a wake. Though they came in funereal flocks, they could be dismissed only one at a time, and that was how she would have to proceed.

I love the predictions of a man right before his first child is born,” Flowers said. “They’re like little snowflakes. Right before the sun comes blazing out the clouds and melts those happy dreams away.

Singletary arched an eyebrow then, after taking a look around the room, smiled a dubious but encouraging smile, the way you might smile at someone about to depress the ignition button on a homemade jetpack.

Wait, no, fuck cheese. Cheese is all about spores and, and, molds and all that shit. Maybe cheese is trying to colonize our brains, too. Cheese and music duking it out for control of the human nervous system.

They were little more than boys, and yet while they differed in race, in temperament, and in their understanding of love, they were united in this: The remnant of their boyhood was a ballast they wished to cut away.

Fatherhood impose[s] an obligation that [is] more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.

He was aware, as he did so, of a poignant air of tragic dedication in all his actions, the dutiful routines of a doomed picket manning his lonely watch, as, beyond the next range of hills, the barbarian horde mounted its conquering ponies.

A laboring woman, though, while she endured her labor, lay at the center of something truly radiant in four dimensions; every birth everywhere, all the vectors of human evolution and migration originating and terminating at the parting of her legs.

His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time.

Chabon’s success can be traced back to three requirements: talent, luck, and discipline. “Discipline,” he says, “is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.

Only Aviva’s long habit of taking the temperature of her own racism, of her biases and stereotypes about young black males (or about the iron-hard perdurance of their grandmothers) enabled Aviva to set aside, for the time being, her gut reaction—the boy was trouble—and admire Titus’s stillness.

Valetta," he said, thinking she still looked good, then abandoning his Spidey sense long enough to let her take him in her arms, the skin of her bare shoulder in a halter top cool against his shoulder, the lady most definitely giving off that heavy 1978 Spencer's smell of love candles and sandlewood incense but, laid over top of it, the stink of cigarette, the instant-potatoes smell you might find in the interior of a beat-to-shit Toronado. "Damn.

Huh-uh,” Archy said, not trying to charm or work her anymore, the deep 1978 El Cerrito–apartment sullenness starting to seep out of him as he remembered how Luther and Valletta used to leave him there all night by himself, nothing on the television but Wolfman Jack and some movie where a shark-toothed devil doll was biting Karen Black on the ankles.

What kind of heaven is that, you can’t have your records?

Black people live their whole lives in a fantasy world, it’s just not their fantasy.

You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the

Bird of Wide Experience I

bullshit sniffer set as ever to a brutally low ppm.

Julie, with two disappointing years of fencing lessons in his recent past, had the advantage of knowing what to do with a sword if you actually held one, while Titus had the advantage that he always would have: The whole thing was his idea. He was the one causing things to happen, driving them, taking them seriously long enough and intensely enough—and in public—to make them somehow be.

As he played it off to Nat, Archy knew—felt, like the baby-shaped ache in his left arm—that neither his ability nor his willingness to care for Rolando English for an hour, a day, a week, had anything whatsoever to do with his willingness or ability to be a father to the forthcoming child now putting the finishing touches on its respiratory and endocrine systems in the dark laboratory of his wife’s womb. Wiping

Gwen found herself in possession, coolly palmed in her thoughts like a dollar coin, of the idea that she was about to bring another abandoned son into the world, the son of an abandoned son. The heir to a history of disappointment and betrayal, violence, and loss. Centuries of loss, empires of disappointment. All the anger that Gwen had been feeling, not just today or over the past nine months but all her life--feeding on to it like a sun, using it to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream--struck her for the first time as a liability. As purely tragic. There was no way to partake of it without handing it on down the generations.

Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.

Titus, operating under the terms of the more modest package that he had negotiated with Gwen, which included room, board, and at the end of his own Candy Land path, the ambiguous pink-frosting-roofed gingerbread house of a family to love him and fuck him up, instantly got out of the car, observed the agreed-upon conventions of civilized intercourse among strangers, and got back into the car. The boy was still visiting their planet from his own faraway home world, but Archy figured that with time, he would adjust to the local gravity and microbes. Keeping close to the baby most of the time, as if Clark were the object he had crossed the stellar void to study.

A model of probity, a steady hand to reassure the grieving, a sober man—a grave man—solid as the pillar of a tomb. A good dose of gangster to the hat to let you know the councilman played his politics old-school, with a shovel in the dark of the moon. Plus that touch of Tombstone, of Gothic western undertaker, like maybe sometimes when the moon was full and Flowers & Sons stood empty and dark but for the vigil lights, Chan Flowers might up and straddle a coffin, ride it like a bronco.

Of always fighting against feeling useless. Of how sad it makes me feel that sisters won’t go to a midwife. Also, frankly, I’m sick of overprivileged, neurotic, crazy-ass . . .” She stopped talking. She tucked her crossed arms between her breasts and belly like a pencil behind an ear. “You were going to say white ladies.” “Yes!” Gwen said. “With their white-lady latex allergies, and their white-lady OCD birth plans, and that bullshit white-lady machismo competition thing they all get into,

Archy was tired of Nat, and he was tired of Gwen and of her pregnancy with all the unsuspected depths of his insufficiency that it threatened to reveal. He was tired of Brokeland, and of black people, and of white people, and of all their schemes and grudges, their frontings, hustles and corruptions. Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.

Because you know, truth is, I don’t give a shit about some scratched-up vinyl Rahsaan Kirk, Ornette Coleman sound-like-a-goose-trying-to-fuck-a-bicycle bootleg pressing from the rare Paris concert of 1967. I spend five minutes listening to that, I’m like to want to slap somebody. I

From a Berkeley Notebook' ~Denis Johnson One changes so much from moment to moment that when one hugs oneself against the chill air at the inception of spring, at night, knees drawn to chin, he finds himself in the arms of a total stranger, the arms of one he might move away from on the dark playground. Also, it breaks the heart that the sign revolving like a flame above the gas station remembers the price of gas, but forgets entirely this face it has been looking at all day. And so the heart is exhausted that even the face of the dismal facts we wait for the loves of the past to come walking from the fire, the tree, the stone, tangible and unchanged and repentant but what can you do. Half the time I think about my wife and child, the other half I think how to become a citizen with an apartment, and sex too is quite on my mind, though it seems the women have no time for you here, for which in my larger, more mature moments I can’t blame them. These are the absolute Pastures I am led to: I am in Berkeley, California, trapped inside my body, I am the secret my body is going to keep forever, as if its secret were merely silence. It lies between two mistakes of the earth, the San Andreas and Hayward faults, and at night from the hill above the stadium where I sleep, I can see the yellow aurora of Telegraph Avenue uplifted by the holocaust. My sleeping bag has little cowboys lassoing bulls embroidered all over its pastel inner lining, the pines are tall and straight, converging in a sort of roof above me, it’s nice, oh loves, oh loves, why aren’t you here? Morgan, my pyjamas are so lonesome without the orangutans—I write and write, and transcend nothing, escape nothing, nothing is truly born from me, yet magically it’s better than nothing—I know you must be quite changed by now, but you are just the same, too, like those stars that keep shining for a long time after they go out—but it’s just a light they touch us with this evening amid the fine rain like mist, among the pines.

series you followed. Not even if you died. Alive or dead or a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling on you to do, perform, or say anything at all.

The little boy had wandered away from his mother, tacking across the grass toward the play structure. His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time.

She balanced on a point between rage and its relief. Amid the layers of conscious thought and the involuntary actions of her body, Gwen found herself in possession, coolly palmed in her thoughts like a dollar coin, of the idea that she was about to bring another abandoned son into the world, the son of an abandoned son. The heir to a history of disappointment and betrayal, violence and loss. Centuries of loss, empires of disappointment. All the anger that Gwen had been feeling, not just today or over the past nine months but all her life—feeding on it like a sun, using it to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream—struck her for the first time as a liability. As purely tragic. There was no way to partake of it without handing it on down the generations.

You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Not even if you died. Alive or dead or a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling on you to do, perform, or say anything at all.

He didn’t stop when they got there, though. Just slowed down, in his drag-ass, baby-smelling, style-free Subaru wagon, long enough to check out a banner announcing, in baseball-jersey script, the imminent opening for business, between the United Federation of Donuts and the King of Bling, of a trading card store called Mr. Nostalgia’s Neighborhood. Beyond the fourth grade or so, Archy had never taken much interest in baseball cards, but he could feel the underlying vibe of that particular madness. Although he knew he would never be able to set foot in that building again without breaking his heart, he understood that the new operation held promise, and in principle, at least, he approved. The merchandise was not the thing, and neither, for that matter, was the nostalgia. It was all about the neighborhood, that space where common sorrow could be drowned in common passion as the talk grew ever more scholarly and wild.

Now the moment had arrived. Birgit took her place beside him in the command car. She pulled up her large striped cotton dirndl skirt made by her fellow national, Katya of Sweden, and looked around with an excited smile. But to onlookers it was more like the strained expression of a Swedish farm woman in a Swedish outhouse in the dead of a Swedish winter. She was trying to restrain her excitement at the sight of all those naked limbs in the amber light. From the shoulders up she had the delicate neckline and face of a Nordic goddess, but below her body was breastless, lumpy with bulging hips and huge round legs like sawed-off telegraph posts. She felt elated, sitting there with her man who was leading these colored people in this march for their rights. She loved colored people. Her eyeblue eyes gleamed with this love. When she looked at the white cops her lips curled with scorn. A number of police cruisers had appeared at the moment the march was to begin. They stared at the white woman and the colored man in the command car. Their lips compressed but they said nothing, did nothing. Marcus had got a police permit. The marchers lined up four abreast on the right side of the street, facing west. The command car was at the lead. Two police cars brought up the rear. Three were parked at intervals down the street as far as the railroad station. Several others cruised slowly in the westbound traffic, turned north at Lenox Avenue, east again on 126th Street, back to 125th Street on Second Avenue and retraced the route. The chief inspector had said he didn’t want any trouble in Harlem. “Squads, MARCH!” Marcus shouted over the amplifier.

[...]a man and a boy, side by side on a yellow Swedish sofa from the 1950s that the man had bought because it somehow reminded him of a zoot suit, watching the A’s play Baltimore, Rich Harden on the mound working that devious ghost pitch, two pairs of stocking feet, size 11 and size 15, rising from the deck of the coffee table at either end like towers of the Bay Bridge, between the feet the remains in an open pizza box of a bad, cheap, and formerly enormous XL meat lover’s special, sausage, pepperoni, bacon, ground beef, and ham, all of it gone but crumbs and parentheses of crusts left by the boy, brackets for the blankness of his conversation and, for all the man knew, of his thoughts, Titus having said nothing to Archy since Gwen’s departure apart from monosyllables doled out in response to direct yes-or-nos, Do you like baseball? you like pizza? eat meat? pork?, the boy limiting himself whenever possible to a tight little nod, guarding himself at his end of the sofa as if riding on a crowded train with something breakable on his lap, nobody saying anything in the room, the city, or the world except Bill King and Ken Korach calling the plays, the game eventless and yet blessedly slow, player substitutions and deep pitch counts eating up swaths of time during which no one was required to say or to decide anything, to feel what might conceivably be felt, to dread what might be dreaded, the game standing tied at 1 and in theory capable of going on that way forever, or at least until there was not a live arm left in the bullpen, the third-string catcher sent in to pitch the thirty-second inning, batters catnapping slumped against one another on the bench, dead on their feet in the on-deck circle, the stands emptied and echoing, hot dog wrappers rolling like tumbleweeds past the diehards asleep in their seats, inning giving way to inning as the dawn sky glowed blue as the burner on a stove, and busloads of farmhands were brought in under emergency rules to fill out the weary roster, from Sacramento and Stockton and Norfolk, Virginia, entire villages in the Dominican ransacked for the flower of their youth who were loaded into the bellies of C-130s and flown to Oakland to feed the unassuageable appetite of this one game for batsmen and fielders and set-up men, threat after threat giving way to the third out, weak pop flies, called third strikes, inning after inning, week after week, beards growing long, Christmas coming, summer looping back around on itself, wars ending, babies graduating from college, and there’s ball four to load the bases for the 3,211th time, followed by a routine can of corn to left, the commissioner calling in varsity teams and the stars of girls’ softball squads and Little Leaguers, Archy and Titus sustained all that time in their equally infinite silence, nothing between them at all but three feet of sofa;

When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was filled with rejoicings. [Horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken out. Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the High Street incessantly. Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from the Stag. The town was illuminated. Gold caskets were securely sealed in glass cases. Coins were well and duly laid under stones. Hospitals were founded. Rat and Sparrow clubs were inaugurated. Turkish women by the dozen were burnt in effigy in the market place, together with scores of peasant boys with the label ‘I am a base Pretender’, lolling from their mouths. The Queen’s cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the avenue with a command to Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that very same night. Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with invitations from the Countess of R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston, the Marchioness of P., Mrs. W.E. Gladstone, and others, beseeching the pleasure of her company, reminding her of ancient alliances between their family and her own, etc.] — all of which is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason that a parenthesis it was without any importance in Orlando’s life. She skipped it, to get on with the text

When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was filled with rejoicings. [Horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken out. Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the High Street incessantly. Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from the Stag. The town was illuminated. Gold caskets were securely sealed in glass cases. Coins were well and duly laid under stones. Hospitals were founded. Rat and Sparrow clubs were inaugurated. Turkish women by the dozen were burnt in effigy in the market place, together with scores of peasant boys with the label ‘I am a base Pretender’, lolling from their mouths. The Queen’s cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the avenue with a command to Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that very same night. Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with invitations from the Countess of R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston, the Marchioness of P., Mrs. W.E. Gladstone, and others, beseeching the pleasure of her company, reminding her of ancient alliances between their family and her own, etc.] — all of which is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason that a parenthesis it was without any importance in Orlando’s life. She skipped it, to get on with the text.

When the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was filled with rejoicings. [Horses were put into carriages for the sole purpose of being taken out. Empty barouches and landaus were trundled up and down the High Street incessantly. Addresses were read from the Bull. Replies were made from the Stag. The town was illuminated. Gold caskets were securely sealed in glass cases. Coins were well and duly laid under stones. Hospitals were founded. Rat and Sparrow clubs were inaugurated. Turkish women by the dozen were burnt in effigy in the market place, together with scores of peasant boys with the label ‘I am a base Pretender’, lolling from their mouths. The Queen’s cream-coloured ponies were soon seen trotting up the avenue with a command to Orlando to dine and sleep at the Castle, that very same night. Her table, as on a previous occasion, was snowed under with invitations from the Countess of R., Lady Q., Lady Palmerston, the Marchioness of P., Mrs. W.E. Gladstone, and others, beseeching the pleasure of her company, reminding her of ancient alliances between their family and her own, etc.] — all of which is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason that a parenthesis it was without any importance in Orlando’s life. She skipped it, to get on with the text.

Cochise Jones always liked to play against your expectations of a song, to light the gloomy heart of a ballad with a Latin tempo and a sheen of vibrato, root out the hidden mournfulness, the ache of longing, in an up-tempo pop tune. Cochise’s six-minute outing on the opening track of Redbonin’ was a classic exercise in B-3 revisionism, turning a song inside out. It opened with big Gary King playing a fat, choogling bass line, sounding like the funky intro to some ghetto-themed sitcom of the seventies, and then Cochise Jones came in, the first four drawbars pulled all the way out, giving the Lloyd Webber melody a treatment that was not cheery so much as jittery, playing up the anxiety inherent in the song’s title, there being so many thousand possible ways to Love Him, so little time to choose among them. Cochise’s fingers skipped and darted as if the keys of the organ were the wicks of candles and he was trying to light all of them with a single match. Then, as Idris Muhammad settled into a rolling burlesque-hall bump and grind, and King fell into step beside him, Cochise began his vandalism in earnest, snapping off bright bunches of the melody and scattering it in handfuls, packing it with extra notes in giddy runs. He was ruining the song, rifling it, mocking it with an antic edge of joy. You might have thought, some critics felt, that the meaning or spirit of the original song meant no more to Cochise Jones than a poem means to a shark that is eating the poet. But somewhere around the three-minute mark, Cochise began to build, in ragged layers, out of a few repeated notes on top of a left-hand walking blues, a solo at once dense and rudimentary, hammering at it, the organ taking on a raw, vox humana hoarseness, the tune getting bluer and harder and nastier. Inside the perfectly miked Leslie amplifier, the treble horn whirled, and the drivers fired, and you heard the song as the admission of failure it truly was, a confession of ignorance and helplessness. And then in the last measures of the song, without warning, the patented Creed Taylor strings came in, mannered and restrained but not quite tasteful. A hint of syrup, a throb of the pathetic, in the face of which the drums and bass fell silent, so that in the end it was Cochise Jones and some rented violins, half a dozen mournful studio Jews, and then the strings fell silent, too, and it was just Mr. Jones, fading away, ending the track with the startling revelation that the song was an apology, an expression, such as only the blues could ever tender, of limitless regret.

York City, as bloodthirsty mobs of enraged working-class Whites roamed Midtown Manhattan “armed with clubs, pitchforks, iron bars, swords, and many with guns and pistols,” looking for any African Americans they could find.1 Marching through the streets, those with weapons fired toward anyone in their way, even at New York City policemen. On the corner of Twenty-Ninth Street, “a crowd who had been engaged all day in hunting down and stoning to death every negro they could spy” lingered in plain view of the Twenty-First Precinct police station. It was undermanned because thousands of New York State Militia troops who would have served as backup had been sent to the Battle of Gettysburg.2 Nothing was spared. The Colored Orphan Asylum at Forty-Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, home to more than two hundred disadvantaged Black children, had been burned to the ground. Horses pulling streetcars had been shot to death and the cars smashed to pieces. The homes of prominent abolitionists were being looted and destroyed. Railroad tracks had been torn up and telegraph wires cut. Dozens of public buildings, including churches, were ransacked and torched. Even the house of the New York City mayor, George Opdyke, was raided and set on fire. It was mayhem. Ever since President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, the city’s poorest Whites feared that freed slaves would migrate to Manhattan and steal their jobs. Then in March, Congress passed the Enrollment Act, which made all able-bodied adult males immediately eligible to be drafted into the Union Army. This reality sank in when the names of New York City draftees were published leading up to “Draft Week.” Making matters worse was that under the Enrollment Act, any wealthy man could escape the draft by paying a $300 fee (the equivalent of more than $6,500 today).3 He would be replaced by some poor fellow who simply couldn’t afford to pay that.