Episode 3: Boston Bill in Philadelphia
The Seaworthys were travel weary when they pulled into the Hampton Inn, just outside of Philadelphia. After their experience in the rural plantation life of Maryland, he was determined to stay in the cities from now on. His original purpose of hiding from his past had succeeded for the most part except for that pots and pans vendor in North Carolina. Bill was sure that things would turn for the better in the city. He thought at first of moving to rural Pennsylvania where many religions had found a place of tolerance but in the end he, along with Rebecca Ann decided the city was the best place to raise Elizabeth Aphra. The city was bigger than Boston was when he left it so many years ago. It had been a long time since he had lived in the city and at first he was uncomfortable with the pace of life.
Seabreeze loved the city and immediately applied for teaching positions in all the surrounding schools up through high schools. She was offered a position at private Catholic school teaching French and Spanish. The classes started at break of dawn and ran till dusk and involved students from grades 1-12. She loved her work but Seafoam needed someone to look after her till her mother got home at night. A neighbor offered to do it for two silver pieces a week, almost a day’s pay. Bill tried to get work at several factories including; shoes, textiles, locomotive, machinery, and shipbuilding. Although he wanted to work at shipbuilding none of his particular skills were needed, so he ended up working on the production line of a farm equipment manufacturer as a tooling technician. He was good at fixing the machines when they broke, but he didn’t like the work and liked the people even less.
Because he wasn’t happy on the job he took to the bars at night. He fell into the company of some hard drinking Irishmen at O’Touls bar and grill. There was a lot of talk about how Admiral Sir William Penn loaned Charles II 16,000 pounds forty years earlier and was given all the land between Lord Baltimore and the Duke of York. And all of a sudden it didn’t matter that the Swedes, Finns, and Dutch had been here for fifty years. Then to make things worse York gives Penn three counties to the south and Penn sets up his cousin, William Markham as deputy governor of the newly formed Delaware. So the English took control just before Bill was born and now it seems all the land has been divided up among the wealthy from England.
One hundred years of slavery had made Pennsylvania as rich as it had the southern colonies in spite of the predominance of Quakers and other freedom loving religions that had settled in the area and insisted on laws protecting the rights of worship. Bill was careful with his drinking and avoided the usual fights that happen in bars over women and bets. But one night late there came a large man with scar across his throat from ear to ear about half an inch wide. When he pushed his way through the crowd, he wasn’t that careful about whose toes he stepped on. By the time he reached the bar he had five or six men cursing him and finished with shouldering Bill to one side to make room for his wide shoulders. Bill looked him right in the eye. The man was at least twice his weight and had eight inches on him in height. He bellowed out that his name was the Dutchman and he hailed from Amsterdam and he called out any man brave enough to step outside with him. All eyes went to the floor except Bill’s. Bill quietly told the Dutchman that he had spilled a drink when he first pushed his way to the bar and that a replacement was expected. The Dutchman roared with laughter and before Bill could move his hand the man had sunk a fish-scaling knife into his hand that was holding what was left of his drink. The Dutchman said something about replace this little man. The next second Bill pulled out the knife that had his hand pinned to the counter and drove it through the Dutchman’s upper arm and into a post he had been leaning against. The tip of the blade protruded on the other side of a five-inch diameter support. The Dutchman screamed in pain and took his free hand, grabbed a pitcher of beer and swung it at Bill’s head. There was a flash of steel as Bill’s bayonet was briefly seen and a pitcher of beer with a large hand still attached to the handle flew over Bill’s head onto the tavern floor. By this point everyone in the bar was back from the two of them several feet. Bill went back to drinking his beer just beyond the reach of the big man’s stump. With no way to pull the knife out of the arm pinned to the post the Dutchman soon slumped to one side. Bill calmly finished his beer and left. Once Bill was outside the crowd rushed over to the Dutchman to lower him to the floor and get some help. Bill never went in that bar again, he didn’t really like all that whining about how unfair it was the English own everything. When he got home Seabreeze didn’t notice the additional slot in his hand, but Seafoam did the next day. She asked what happened to his hand and he mumbled something about some man dropping something on his hand.
Seabreeze started going to mass at the church with Seafoam, but Bill resisted. Even the mention of religion made him uncomfortable. When he was in Spain he heard stories of the Spanish Inquisition where basically all non-Catholics were tortured till they converted or died. But the priests seemed nice enough and Bill thought he didn’t have to worry about his small family while they were at the church and there was Klondike to see them home. Becky became active in church affairs and soon had Elizabeth helping with the charities and volunteering at the orphanage. Since they didn’t need the money she spent most her money on books, any book, all books, free books, gifted books, books on history, books on science, books about education, just about anything in print she could get her hands on. Bill did like to go through the ones on politics and science. Many evenings were spent with the three of them reading well into the night with Klondike snoring to the point of them shaking him to break up the pattern.
Bill was the one who usually walked Klondike at night since the three men incident. But in the day Klondike was pretty much Seafoam’s shadow. The school kids loved playing with him at recess. He would pretty much let them do anything that didn’t hurt much. So there were rides where five sometimes six kids would ride around the schoolyard on his back and when he had had enough he would simply lie down and they would go tumbling off to one side or the other. Other dogs would lower their heads when approaching Klondike to trade sniffs but mostly they would avoid him at all costs. Only two times that Bill knew of were there fights involving Klondike. The first was when he was walking Klondike at night and big black Newfoundland came running down the street alone with a pack of twenty or so dogs following. They encircled Bill and Klondike and one by one they would dart in try to bite one of them then jump back before they were bit. Finally one managed to get a back leg of Klondike and Bill let go of the leash. Klondike was exceptionally fast for a big dog and quickly removed the heads of two of the yappers. The Newfoundland was another matter. The two dogs went into the most vicious fight Bill had seen since he was in Hong Kong at a dogfight between a pit bull and a mastiff. All at once there was quiet. The pack ran down the street leaving their leader hanging from Klondike’s jaws. Klondike gave one final shake then dropped the dog to the street. The second was when Becky and Elizabeth were walking home from a church function. Four teenage boys knocked Becky down as they ran by laughing and yelling at her to get off the sidewalk. Klondaike had been momentarily distracted behind a porch stoop where some meat was lying on the sidewalk. The boys hadn’t gone ten feet when the one at the back was smashed to the ground by hundreds of pounds of growling dog. The boy lay unconscious with the wind knocked out of him like a horse at full gallop had just hit him. Klondike sat with one paw squashing the boy’s face into a puddle of dark, oily liquid. Becky got up quickly and started for Klondike to grab his collar before anything really bad happened. The three boys stopped turned and began throwing anything they could get their hands on at Klondike to get his paws off their friend. This was a mistake, they should have kept running. Klondike would have moved on with some urging from Becky to leave the unconscious boy alone and continue on. But by the time the second rock hit Klondike in the face he was in no mood to listen to Becky ordering him to stop. People were gathering to watch the drama. Some had seen it all and were encouraging Klondike to get the other boys. The neighborhood had been terrorized by those teenagers for months and more than one father had sworn to take care of the problem once and for all. They were brothers and their father had told anyone who said something about the boys to shut up or he would shut them up. The constable said the boys hadn’t broken any laws and to stay away from the father who had friends in city hall. When the oldest brother took out a knife and started for Klondike, Becky screamed for him to stop. Just as he lunged at the dog with the blade aimed at Klondike’s chest, Klondike sprang forward and while still in an upward momentum caught the head of the boy in his teeth. The weight of Klondike and the twisting of the fall of the two, left the boys face a bloody mess when they finally came to a stop several feet away. No legal action was taken against the Seaworthys upon the death of the oldest son that day and the father did not approach Bill since the story of the Dutchman was well known by that time. Life otherwise was without incident during the early days in Philadelphia.
Seabreeze, besides reading everything in print, took up the violin and played in the community symphony after the first year of playing. Elizabeth also had started piano lessons from an older woman that once played in Vienna professionally. Bill was happy about the kinds of things his family was involved in, but he had no such interests. He would go though to recitals and events in the arts center. It was the center where Rebecca met Hans Buerer, a second generation descendent of one of the original eighty families that settled Philadelphia area in 1683 and fourth generation Pennsylvania families from Sweden in the 1630s. Hans was an accomplished man of letters and would make a good match for Rebecca. The family thought Seabreeze to be a delightful woman and would welcome her into their family readily.
Philadelphia in 1725 was the strongest economic city in the colonies and would remain number one for almost the next hundred years. Pennsylvania like Delaware, New York, and New Jersey were mostly made up of people who had left their families in the old country while they made their fortune in the colonies before they sent for them. This was essential for the industry to flourish with all these people with no home life to fuel the great industrialization under way. Paper and textiles were the main products and labor was plentiful and cheap. There was also an extensive infrastructure of shipyards and the ironworks needed to supply them. Bill changed jobs frequently during these years. There was always something that he couldn’t go along with, each time he’d show up at a new job. His smoking and drinking became more and more of a problem for Seabreeze to deal with, but her life was so busy that Seafoam got lost in the busy routines of both of them. She was eleven now, only a year younger than Bill was when he went to sea and she didn’t let him forget either. He started spending Sundays with her and things settled down some.
Just because Pennsylvania had laws to guarantee the right to worship does not mean freed slaves had any real rights. If one should have a desire and go ahead with a marriage to a white they would be sent back into slavery for life no exceptions or possibility of freedom whatsoever. Even being caught alone with a white where anything of a sexual nature was suspected the penalty was seven years of slavery. So when a black boy around Seafoam’s age showed up at the door to get the assignment for school the next day, Bill asked him to not come back to their house again for both their sakes. He then spent the rest of the night and most the next day going over why she was never to talk to him even at school. The colony was good in many ways but that was not one of them, and yes it wasn’t fair the way things are.
The biggest city was growing faster than any other city as well. Germans from the Rhineland, Scotts and Irish that didn’t settle in the Cumberland gap, and the English were still moving in by the thousands each year. The arts were attracting people from throughout the North American continent. In fact, the title “Athens of the Colonies” was bestowed on Philadelphia during this period. Bill was feeling more out of place with each year. The excitement Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” was creating in certain circles was lost on Bill completely. He longed for his quiet life in the Carolinas with his dear Elizabeth, working at his own pace on farm equipment that had broken down. Taking Seabreeze to the beach and telling her stories of far away places. These stories had less and less interest as his little family became more and more involved with city life. Aphra would tease him whenever he would dose off in the symphony, like during the summer passage of the Four Seasons, when only a couple of the musicians were playing and they were playing so quietly you could barely hear them. Bill preferred marching music where your blood ran faster and you wanted to get up and do something, anything. It wasn’t that he was an embarrassment to them in their circles because he could tell great stories without cursing throughout.
Rebecca’s rise in the elite circles of society continued with her marriage to Hans. The women in that circle were champions of women’s suffrage and abolition of slavery. Bill was assigned one of the rooms on the fourth floor of the Buerer mansion, next to the attic doorway. There was talk of sending Aphra off to finishing school in Paris or London. It would seem he was longer needed in any real sense at this point and began to look for still another job closer to the mansion. But there were no factories in that part of town and whatever professional work there was needed a degree of some sort. Bill headed back to the bars of yesteryear to regain some control of his life. He even needed help paying for the biggest wedding he ever heard of. He‘d had so many jobs ’19 that he would skip two at a time so it didn’t sound so bad.
Rebecca’s ties to the Roman Catholic Church grew strong with each year. Pennsylvania had the largest Catholic population in the colonies and the second largest population of a religion behind only the Quakers. Rebecca now had strong ties to a Jesuit order with origins in Paris. It was decided that Elizabeth would be given special permission to study at the Seminaire de St-Sulpice in Paris and receive an education usually reserved for future leaders of the church and Catholic monarchs. She would be staying at an adjoining Ursuline nunnery where she would receive additional instruction and supervision. Bill was chosen to see her safely across the Atlantic with Effa Buerer as the voyage nanny. Arrangements were made for a special stop over of a French ship leaving Quebec in a month from the decision day. Bill insisted that an aging Klondike be brought for additional protection on the high seas. Seafoam hugged her Grandpa and told him how glad she was that he was coming too. She knew he missed the sea and was bored with all the society events that went on and on and on.
TO BE CONTINUED!