The Next Day

                              More and more, history
seems to me like the General Slocum, slow, wooden, paddle-wheel 
                              steamship loaded down

with one thousand three hundred and forty-two German Americans 
                              from Kleindeutschland,
immigrant neighborhood on the Lower East Side. They were traveling

                              to northern Long Island
for a Sunday-school picnic on June 15, 1904. The steamship caught fire.
                              Blue sky. Sun.

A windy Wednesday. They were passing Hell Gate, narrow strait 
                              where tides
from Long Island Sound and the New York Bay collide, create

                              rough water.
On board, a brass band was playing Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” 
                              Wind fanned the fire.

Inmates from the lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island waved frantically 
                              at the General Slocum
to alert them to the flames. Everyone thought they were being

                              “crazy.” Ignored
the idiot inmates. Within ten minutes, fire that started below 
                              the forward deck

engulfed the boat. The screaming passengers—nursing mothers with babies 
                              and older children—
ran up to the hurricane deck. It collapsed, hurling women, infants,

                              kids, and a few
old men into the water where they drowned. Most couldn’t swim.
                              The cork life preservers

were so rotted that they crumbled in the mothers’ hands.
                              Captain Van Schaick
beached the burning boat on North Brother Island. The twenty-six

                              paddles of both
sidewheels, still turning, battered people to death. One thousand 
                              nineteen

passengers and two crew members died. Few now recall 
                              this history
that wiped out in one hour a whole immigrant neighborhood.

                              Tenements empty except
for husbands who had been at work. When the National Association 
                              of Credit Men learned

fire had scuttled their plans for a dinner cruise aboard the General Slocum 
                              the next day,
they chartered another steamship. The six hundred financiers schmoozed,

                              got drunk, ate creamed
asparagus, squab, strawberry shortcake, while burned bodies were 
                              still being fished out of the East River.

Read more from Issue 21.1.