A Sugar House Christmas

     Ezra Taylor stared through the narrow slot at the decorated tree.  Hessian soldiers had spent the afternoon festooning the limbs of the fir with apples, candied fruits, and ribbons.  He’d thought it an odd custom at the time but now that candles flickered in the boughs, its beauty mesmerized him.
    “Taylor, you gonna stare at them soldiers all night? Come eat.  Sgt. Walley will be back any moment, and then you’ll get nothing,” Small William said.  William’s perpetual stoop in the low ceilinged prison had earned him the incongruous moniker "small", despite his six foot plus stature; hell, even Ezra, at five feet seven, had developed a bowed posture after only six weeks in the storehouse the British used for a jail.
     Ezra sighed.  The rich aroma of mince pie and roast mutton abounded, making it almost possible to forget he was held captive were it not for the icy night air swirling about and the squalid mass of humanity huddled in the corner with him.  They had scrambled forward when Walley appeared, bucket in hand.  “It’s a Christmas feast, lads” he’d said, as if the bits of rancid pork and worm-riddled biscuits were the newest trend in Christmas fare for 1776.  Still, even bad food was appreciated; their last meal had been two days ago.
     “You can have my portion, Will.  I haven’t the stomach for it.  Besides, I’d like to sit a bit longer and listen to the carols.”
     Truth was the carols made him think of home.  And Elizabeth.  If he closed his eyes, he could see her standing in front of their hearth, singing quietly while she stirred the kettle, an errant curl escaping on her forehead, a refugee from her cap.  The cabin would smell sweet, of mountain laurel and yew; the fire beckoning him into its warm glow.
     Snow fluttered in, and with it a frosty chill, splintering the image in his head.  He tried to hold onto the vision of Elizabeth singing but it distorted into the Hessians’ drunken rendition of Joy to the World, leaving him once more prisoner to Christmas in the sugar house.

 

Having never been a soldier...

or a prisoner, I find it difficult to imagine how Ezra might have felt that Christmas in 1776, captive in the Liberty Street Sugar House.  First hands accounts of the place paint a picture of a tall, narrow building “without light, attendance, fire in winter or air in summer.”   More than 2800 soldiers were captured along with Ezra just over a month earlier when Fort Washington fell to the British, but by summer, fewer than 800 remained alive.  Without glass in the narrow windows, when it snowed, they were drifted over while they slept, and when it rained they could not escape the damp.  Filthy straw bedding was never changed, and men were packed in so closely that