"Sodden despair...."

From the journal entries of Benedict Marlowe.

The Inn of the King’s Arms, Port Dominion.

Friday, April the 14th

This morning Mr. Franklin Benjamin entrusted me with the melancholy duty of journeying to Red Row and thence into that darker quarter of the town so ill-named “The Hollows.” His purpose is to have my observations shaped into a proper report for His Excellency the Governor, that measures may be considered for alleviation of the distresses endured by the poorer sort.

Red Row, which ever teeters between industry and decay, has borne the storm with grievous consequence. The streets there are no streets but trenches of muck and stagnant water, foul with refuse. Wooden houses, crooked and ill-built even in fairer times, sag further under the weight of rain, with walls bowed and roofs leaking. Children ran barefoot in mud up to the ankle, their garments plastered to their skin, while their mothers sought to scoop water from doorsteps in vain effort to preserve a dry corner within. The alehouse there, being of stouter timber, stood still, yet I spied men huddled in its gloom, more inclined to forget their sorrows than amend them.

But if Red Row seemed pitiable, The Hollows revealed misery of the most abject sort. There the rainwater collected as in a basin, for the ground lies lower than the rest of town. The lanes were more swamp than street, rank with the stench of sewage and stagnant pools. One cellar I came upon had filled so entirely with water that the family who had dwelt there were forced to climb out upon crates, and now share a half-collapsed garret with three other households. Many huts of clapboard and salvaged planks fell outright beneath the weight of rain, so that families crouched beneath tarred canvas or huddled in corners of neighbors’ rooms.

The people there bear faces carved by long privation, yet the storm has sharpened their suffering. I saw infants shivering, old women coughing from damp, and men with hollow eyes that spoke of hunger as much as weariness. One woman told me that her husband’s few tools, the only means by which he earned day-wages, are now rusted and spoiled. Another spoke of bread so sodden it had to be wrung before eaten.

The Hollows is misery made flesh, and though I confess my stomach quailed at the filth and despair, yet I know Mr. Benjamin desires a clear account, free of too much sentiment. He wishes to place before the Governor a record not merely of squalor, but of a people in desperate want of aid. Timber to mend their dwellings, food and meal to quiet their hunger, medicine for the agues and flux that shall surely rise from such dampness—all these might be proposed.

Yet I cannot but confess here in the privacy of my own book, that I wonder whether aid, if granted, will serve for long. The Hollows is not made by storms alone. Its misery is the slow accretion of years of neglect, of men and women left to build lives in the crevices of society, where filth and despair breed without ceasing. A storm only strips away the veil to reveal what was always there.

Still, it is my task to shape what I saw into words persuasive and proper, so that His Excellency may be moved to act. Mr. Benjamin believes that such a petition might stir the conscience of government. God grant it is so, and that the cries of the Hollows may not be swallowed again by silence.