The first thing you notice about Five Points is the smell. Not the second thing or the third thing, but the first. It hits you before you see the buildings or hear the voices or notice the children running barefoot through streets that were more mud than cobblestone. It is the smell of five thousand people living on top of each other in spaces no architect would have approved for a dog kennel.

I wrote that down in my notebook. The first thing you notice about Five Points is the smell. Then I crossed it out because it was true but useless. Truth without context is just gossip, and I was not writing gossip. I was writing for the Tribune, and the Tribune wanted something deeper than a Bostonian's impression of a place his mother had warned him about.

The second thing you notice is the noise. Not the noise of a city, which has a rhythm to it even when you cannot hear the rhythm. This was noise without pattern, a sound that seemed designed to prevent you from thinking your own thoughts. A man was shouting about the war in one voice, a woman was singing in another, a horse was screaming in a third, and underneath it all was the sound of boots on wet wood, because the streets of Five Points were never dry even when it had not rained.

I found Jack Mulroy on a Tuesday, which was a mistake because Tuesday was his drinking day and he was worse on Tuesdays than on other days. He was sitting on the steps of a building that had once been a church and was now something else, holding a bottle that was either whiskey or something worse and arguing with a dog that had more presence of mind than most men I had met in this neighbourhood.

"You the reporter?" he asked without looking at me.

"I am."

"You writing about us or about the war?"

"About the war. But also about us. I suppose."

He laughed, which was a sound like glass breaking in a bucket. "They're all the same. They want to know about the draft riots and the soldiers and the politicians. Nobody wants to know about the children who die in the winter because the streets are too dangerous to walk and the buildings are too cold to live in." He took a drink. "But ask me. Ask me everything. I'll tell you everything. And then you can decide what's true."

I asked him everything. He told me everything. Most of it was contradictory.

Sarah O'Connor was different. She was working in a shoe factory on the edge of Five Points, punching leather with a machine that sounded like a heartbeat gone wrong. She was twenty-four, had been working since she was twelve, and could read and write better than most of the men who came to her factory asking for higher wages.

"They want me to join the strike," she told me, wiping leather dust from her hands. "But strikes don't put food on the table. Wages do. Words don't feed children."

"Then why are you talking to me?"

"Because someone should write the truth. Even if it doesn't put food on the table."

She had a face that was neither beautiful nor ugly, which was the most dangerous kind of face because it made people look twice and then realize they had been wrong the first time. Her hands were rough from work, but she held a book while she spoke, a small worn volume of poetry that she had borrowed from the library and was returning tomorrow.

"Who wrote it?" I asked.

"Blake," she said. "He understood about seeing the world in a grain of sand. I think he would have understood Five Points, if he had ever been here."

Councilman Platt visited me on a Thursday. He arrived in a carriage that was too clean for this part of the city, wearing a suit that was too expensive for a man who claimed to represent the working class. He was fifty years old, which in Five Points meant he had survived long enough to learn which side of every argument made money.

"Mr. Delaney," he said, extending a hand that was soft and clean and smelled of lavender. "I understand you are writing about our community."

"Our neighbourhood," I corrected.

He smiled, which was not a kind smile. "Of course. And I want to help you write the truth. The truth is that Five Points is dangerous. It is a breeding ground for crime and disorder and men who want to burn this city to the ground. The truth is that the draft riots were not about the war. They were about men who had nothing to lose and everything to fear."

"And the men who are afraid?"

"Are rational men in a rational city making rational decisions to protect their interests." He paused. "Your article will be balanced, I trust? Not one-sided?"

"I write the truth," I said.

"Then you will write that Five Points needs order. Not charity. Not reform. Order."

He left a card on my desk. Thomas Platt, Alderman, Tammany Hall. I put it in my pocket and did not throw it away because throwing it away would have been an act, and I was not ready to make acts yet. I was still a reporter, which meant I was still a man who collected words and hoped they meant something.

The riots came on a Wednesday, which was a Tuesday for Jack Mulroy and a strike day for Sarah O'Connor and a day when Councilman Platt was shaking hands with men who would have shot him if they knew what he was really thinking.

I was in Five Points when it started, which was a mistake I would have remembered if I had been the kind of man who learned from mistakes. The first shot was not fired by a soldier or a policeman or a rioter. It was fired by a boy, no older than sixteen, holding a pistol that was too big for his hand and shaking so hard I thought he would shoot himself.

He shot a man instead. A man who was just walking home from work, who had done nothing to deserve being shot, who fell in the street and did not get up and the street kept moving over him because that is what streets do.

I ran. I am not proud of it, but I ran, and I ran through alleys I had never seen and past doors I would never open and into a building that I hoped was safe and out of breath and shaking and alive.

I did not write the article that night. I did not write it the next day or the day after that. I wrote it a week later, when the bodies had been removed and the soldiers had left and Five Points was trying to remember what it looked like before.

I wrote the truth. It was not balanced. It was not one-sided. It was the truth of a man who had seen a boy shoot a stranger and run and watched everyone else run too, including himself.

I returned to Five Points a month later. Sarah was back at the factory. Jack was back on the steps. The boy who had fired the shot had disappeared, which in Five Points meant he had moved two streets over and changed his name.

I sat down with my notebook and began to write again, because that is what reporters do. We collect words and hope they mean something, and sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't, and the difference between the two is the difference between Five Points and the rest of the city, which is that Five Points knows the difference and the rest of the city does not want to.

---END_OF_STORY---

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