Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

141. MY MOUTH WANTED TO ASK BUT MY LIPS STAYED SHUT:

And it never was as if I'd found a medicine man in a ball or something but where she was standing within that small store I knew I could feel and reach a million other things - Perth Amboy was actually one of those typical wasted New Jersey towns wherein everything of any worth or value or any historical remnant had long ago been erased into a strange and vague blankness of empty nothing filled by people with absolutely no brains nor understanding - one of those places where the past has been wiped clean and I mean wiped completely and there was left an absolute emptiness filled with newcomers or lost souls or complete vacuous idiots intent on uncivilizing anything in their way in order to make for themselves what went as a 'better' life in an absolutely evil way and in fact Perth Amboy itself once did have a storied place and history in all that occurred early on : less then a half mile from where her very place was in fact had been once a great waterfront teeming with vessels and piled high with oyster shells and a clamming industry and sheds and clam-shucker and oyster-cleaning industries which brought in a great and worthy trade of vessels and merchants and drayage and waterfront and inland traffic and at the same spot somewhat later on too had been one of the early slave-trade markets one of the busiest - ships and boats bringing fresh-slave-captives from over the ocean and all the marketing and buying and selling of this odd human cargo took place on platforms and sheds at this very spot and it was the capital too of East Jersey the colony of which Benjamin Franklin's loyalist son was Governor and who - once the revolution had succeeded and the royal colony of Ambo Point was turned over - was arrested in the Proprietary House just up the hill (the old Royal Governor's Mansion) by his father Benjamin Franklin himself and the earliest church in the fledgling nation (St. Peter's Episcopal) still stands along with its pock-marked graveyard and gravestones which once had been bombarded from the harbor by troops in boats nearby and in which also the first free Negro voter after emancipation was buried and in the Civil War era also this area had housed and hospitalized troops and prisoners transported here and the old barracks and town hall and all the other early and Civil War era buildings and markets stood just above the harbor in a circular plateau now called Market Street - but like the people and the rest of the place everything was bereft and without any idea of its own past - the people were immigrant sojourners from besotted nations around the globe and blacks and Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and Mexicans and the rest now filled the place up in droves with layers upon layers of their own tactless and tasteless cultural artifacts and habits and mores all of which had subsumed this once-vivid place into a type of nameless mess still called by its old and now erroneous name - no one knew and no one cared - but in this lady's old antique shop and in her presence I could sense and feel the utter deprivation which had overtaken everything and it was all alive here as if yet it was today's world - vivid and steady as ever - I could hear the voices and sounds of afar and as she spoke and looked about I knew she was viewing a different reality - one wherein the harbor still glistened and teemed with people and trade and water-craft and sailboats of cargo and people and livestock and foodstuffs came and went - the small waterfront was filled with activity and the squalid work of thousands - smokes and smells shouts and oaths and affirmations abounded : she knew it all and was still part of it all : and there really once was a time when work was solid and people were not frivolous (though yes they were some of them in chains - oddly paradoxical no?) but many things arose to my mind that I wished to ask here but did not would not and had I heard answers I'd have been astounded anyway : were the same merchants and tradesmen who worked the slave trade the ones who worked the counting houses and law offices along the street - English gentlemen and great merchants of commerce at once together on each side of the Atlantic ? were the great waves of Jewish merchant-dom yet started there if not here ? counting lists and names and pennies and weights ? announcing descriptions of strong young men and women being led off ships for inspection and onto the trading platforms and auction blocks ? young African women sold for sexual service and servitude as slaves being 'inspected' by salacious buyers intent on viewing their naked bodies ? renegade and un-cooperative black bucks sold as slaves and prisoners being beaten and whipped into submission before hundreds ? WHO was behind all this activity and WHY ? where was this money based and where did it go? and I'd wanted to ask of her what basis any of this made for the establishment of this small harbor city she was so much an ancient part of - the original 'Indians' who were once here now gone decimated broken and dead HOW had all that occurred and how were the woods and marshes cleansed ? - my mouth so wanted to ask but my lips they stayed shut.