Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" Read Online Free PDF

they owned—wives, slaves, plantations. The names of heroicgamblers like Star Davis, Jimmy Fitzgerald, Napoleon Bonaparte White, and Colonel Charles Starr were rolled off like a litany anywhere a form of chance took place—around a card table, out at one of the city’s racetracks, in a cockpit, or at a dog fight. Jim McLane was among the most famous and a disgrace to his highly placed family: his mother sent him ten thousand dollars a year to stay away from home.
    In 1938 the pioneering folklorist Alan Lomax chanced upon Jelly Roll Morton playing piano in a third-rate nightclub in Washington, D.C. By that point Morton was a prematurely aged and forgotten figure, but in the early years of jazz he was famous as a pianist, composer, and bandleader. And just as he could recall for Lomax the names and styles of men who played piano in the tonks of turn-of-the-century New Orleans—Sammy Davis, Alfred Wilson, Kid Ross, the incomparable Tony Jackson—so he could recall also the city’s legendary gamblers, pimps, and outlaws of that time and place: Aaron Harris, Black Benny, Sheep Eye, Chicken Dick, and Ed Mochez who left behind a hundred and ten suits when he died. “Aaron Harris,” Jelly told Lomax, “was no doubt the most heartless man I’ve ever heard of. He could chew up pig iron—the same thing that would cut a hog’s entrails to pieces—and spit it out razor blades.”
    There were heartless outlaws on the streets and waterfronts of New York, too, but in the nineteenth century they generally formed gangs, particularly after 1820, and there were times when they actually seemed to rule the entire city, as they did during the Draft Riots of July 1863. Slums like Five Points, the Bowery, and the Fourth Ward spawned gangs of such fearsome reputation as the Five Pointers, the Bowery Boys, the Plug Uglies, Dead Rabbits, and the Hudson Dusters. They fought each other for turf and for control of certain forms of commerce and roughneck entertainment, sometimes in pitched battles that would go on for days. Figures like Mose, the “Bowery B’hoy,” whatever their historical origins may have been, transcended the grim and doubtless pathetic facts of their lives to become legends and at last the sanitized figures of popular culture. At the level of oral lore Mose was an eight-foot figure of terror, carrying into battle a ponderous paving stone in one hand and a wagon tongue in the other. If an opponent was lucky enough to avoid these, Mose might stomp him to death with his copper-soled shoes studded with inch-long nails. His Herculean habits recall in an urban vein those of young Mike Fink: in the dog days of summer Mose was to be seen striding the mean streets of his kingdom with a fifty-gallon keg of ale swinging from his belt. By the 1840s and thereafterMose became a comic figure of the stage, a swaggering, flag-waving tall-talker in a red flannel undershirt.
    Equally fiercesome if not gigantic was George Leese, better known as Snatchum, a member of the Slaughter House gang, who prowled the waterfront dripping with his weaponry. His singular claim to fame, though, was his work at bare-knuckle boxing matches where Snatchum acted as a kind of precursor of modern-day boxing’s expert “cut men.” But Snatchum, instead of cauterizing and swabbing the boxers’ cuts, as the modern men do, would suck the blood from their wounds. Others in the pantheon with him included Hop Along Peter, Patsy Conroy, Kid Shanahan, Kid Twist, and the original Billy the Kid, a thief who was arrested one hundred times before his twenty-sixth birthday. Big Nose Bunker belongs here as well. Big Nose was a celebrated rough-and-tumble fighter whose final opponent chopped off four of his fingers and stabbed him six times in the stomach. Somehow Big Nose was able to carry his fingers in a paper sack to the nearest police station where he asked for a doctor to sew them back on. He died before the ambulance arrived.

Twain
    The Deerslayer, American