Ambrose Bierce & the One-Eyed Jacks - Rilegato

CHAPTER ONE

TUESDAY, APRIL 27, 1891

Unlike Bierce, my friend Father Flanagan, of Old St. Mary's Cathedral, applauded my piece on the slave girls, and said to me, "I will introduce you to a person who is actually doing something about the plight of those unfortunate children."

Miss Eliza Lindley, directress of the Protestant Stockton Street Mission, was seated at a cluttered desk beneath an elaborate sign that announced: I CAN DO ALL THINGS THROUGH CHRIST WHICH STRENGTHENETH ME. Upstairs was the cheerful racket of the girls the Mission had saved from slavery-"at study," which sounded more like play to me.

Miss Lindley wore severe black-rimmed eyeglasses, a white shirtwaist, and her light brown hair drawn into a bun. She smelled of soap. She ran this place with an iron hand, Father Flanagan had told me. She was a New Englander of granite conscience and devotion to her cause.

"Thank you for your piece in the Examiner, Mr. Redmond," she said, rising to proffer her hand. "It was very encouraging to our work here."

"Saving Chinese children's souls," I said.

"And their bodies, Mr. Redmond."

It was the Mission's work to rescue the enslaved children who were worked to the bone by cruel masters and mistresses. She admitted an inability to deal with those who had been imported as the most degraded of prostitutes. Some of their powerful masters were reputed to be white men, and their guardians were armed highbinders.

She was assisted by a teacher of English, Miss Cochran, and a Chinese interpreter. The girls were instructed in American homemaking and female responsibilities in preparation for marriage with reputable gentlemen of their race.

I wanted to see her in action, if that was possible, and she quickly assented. So we went for a walk through the noisy streets of Chinatown, with its powerful smells and brilliant colors and exotic mix of the foreign and the familiar. Miss Lindley seemed very much at home here, in her tight tweed jacket and voluminous skirt. She had removed the spectacles which gave her face a severe expression, and now she looked eager, expectant, and quite pretty, with her high cheekbones and vivid blue eyes. I had to stretch my steps to match the confident stride of her polished black boots.

We halted by a basement entrance beneath an herbalist's shop, where a wraith of a girl was chopping wood. She looked nine or ten, in a filthy white shift, her hair in two untidy braids. She balanced a piece of log on its end, grasped her hatchet with both hands, and brought it down to split off a sliver of the wood. She glanced up at Miss Lindley and quickly away.

"They will claim she is their daughter," Miss Lindley said, as we strode on. "She is not, of course. Did you notice the burns on her arms where they have tortured her?"

"I'm afraid I did not."

"I beg of you that you did," Miss Lindley said, "for we are going before Judge Tallent with that information."

"Does she know who you are?" I asked.

"She knows," Miss Lindley said.

In Judge Tallent's office in Old City Hall I cheerfully perjured myself. A search warrant was issued, a patrolman provided. His name was Perkin and he seemed to be an old friend of Miss Lindley's.

With Miss Lindley leading the way almost at a trot, Perkin hustling behind her in his eight-button blue uniform, we returned to the herbalist's shop. Miss Lindley threw open the basement door. Here were pots boiling over wood fires, in a powerful steaming-vegetable stench. We made our way past clotheslines and hanging garments. A sour-faced Chinaman with a gray beard appeared, calling out, "This velly good house! You go way, Missy Lingling!"

I knew that many of these storefronts concealed gambling establishments and opium dens. Miss Lindley proceeded along a dim passage, sliding her hands over wooden paneling, stooping and stretching. Finally she found something. "Perkin!"

Perkin produced a short iron bar from his pocket, inserted it into a crack, and levered a panel open. Miss Lindley was first inside: a dim room with a lamp burning, a fan-tan layout on a teakwood table, a human squeaking sound. The Chinese child detached herself from an old woman and flung herself into Miss Lindley's arms.

"Perkin! Mr. Redmond!" Miss Lindley said. "Observe that she wears no jewelry. They will come after her for theft."

We observed. The old woman shrieked at us in Chinese. We departed with the child clinging to Miss Lindley's skirts, this time with Perkin bringing up the rear flourishing his iron bar. We made our way past the malodorous pots and into the light and air.

"My God, Miss Lindley," I called to her. "Do you do this often?"

"She do, mister," Perkin said.

Back at the Mission, Miss Lindley showed me the red welts of a recent beating on the child's painfully thin back. The shivering slave girl was turned over to a motherly Chinese woman who rattled at her in her own language and escorted her from the room. Miss Lindley seated herself behind the desk again. A few strands of hair had come loose from her tightly combed coif; her scrubbed face was bright with triumph.

"Well, Mr. Redmond," she said. "Have you enjoyed our foray?"

"Indeed I have!"

"May I summon you if this comes to court?"

"You may."

"And what will you write of us here at the Mission?"

"Just what I have observed."

"Always there is a shortage of money," Miss Lindley said. "Our faithful lawyer, Mr. Duggan, is on one of his infamous drunks again. So we must hire another, who does not serve for the love of a worthy cause."

I asked if I might escort her to dinner.

She directed me to a nearby restaurant replete with golden dragons and red flags. She was very expert in her ordering, and handling her chopsticks. We became friends. I saw that she liked the people among whom she worked, and was loved in return, though I had no doubt she was hated by others. I thought she lived a dangerous life, and one of service to a cause, beyond that of anyone else I knew. At that time I did not know that she often carried a revolver in her reticule.

"And were you impressed with Miss Lindley?" Father Flanagan inquired when I met him in the vestry at St. Mary's the next day. He was a short, balding young man in a black cassock with a face so sympathetic you knew that forgiveness was built into his soul.

I said I had been very impressed indeed. "She is a natural wonder."

"She is, unfortunately, a Protestant wonder. She is truly saving souls, Tom, and I do have an impression there is the True Faith somewhere in her background. You must help me to cultivate her."

"Does the Church engage in such rescues?" Do you, I meant.

"I wish it did. I'm afraid it requires an indomitable and truly blessed lady such as Miss Lindley. Those poor children trust her; they all know her by some underground railroad of communication. She risks her life, you see. She is offending powerful tong forces."

"I have told her I will write of our adventure," I said.

"You have her permission?"

"I have."

But I wondered how Sam Chamberlain would view my topic.

--from Ambrose Bierce and the One-Eyed Jacks by Oakley M. Hall, Copyright © February 2003, Viking Press, a member of the Penguin Group, used with permission.