Algren at Sea

  It ought to have been plain enough to her that, when there are forty-seven people on one side and one on the other, it isn’t going to help anybody to change the ratio to forty-six to two. Yet I sensed that this wouldn’t convince her, so I ignored the question a second time.

  She scooped up my tableful of heart-shaped greetings, arrows with bows, tears with vows.

  “If you don’t send a valentine to everyone you can’t send any to anybody.”

  “Nobody sent Mildred any last year, Ma,” I fell back on precedent.

  “Then this is the year to start.”

  “But nobody sends a valentine to a nigger, Ma.”

  As Governor Faubus was to express it in later years, the situation had become untenable.

  “You do,” was the decision.

  From that verdict there was no appeal.

  The valentine that Mildred received from me possessed as much wit as one penny could buy. It showed a tearful puppy pleading: “Don’t Treat Me Like a Dog. Be My Valentine.”

  That was about as far as anybody could go and still stay segregated in 1918.

  All I could see of her, from where I sat, was a pair of nappy pigtails tied with blue-ribbon bows, bent above a reluctant valentine.

  I never spoke to Mildred Ford; she never spoke to me. Yet by one shuttered glance, passing through a door while I stood to one side to let her pass, she acknowledged my gift.

  “You’re on the other side, Stay there,” that glance plainly told me.

  A few weeks after, in Sunday weather, Ethel and her mother, my mother and myself, put swimming suits in a basket lunch and went picnicking in Jackson Park.

  A replica of Columbus’ flagship had been rotting on the Jackson Park lagoon since 1893. We took our lunch on the sunny grass in view of the Santa Maria’s bulging hulk.

  I was too big to change to a swimming suit in front of women, my mother felt. If I wanted to go swimming I had to go to the men’s bath-house. Fair enough—but I had to keep my winter underwear on! Those were orders.

  I didn’t realize what a skinny kid wearing a man’s trunks looks like in public when he is wearing them over long flannels, but when Ethel’s mother began to laugh I began to get the idea. When my mother laughed I knew: I was a pitiful sight. But when Ethel laughed I slugged her. My mother promptly slugged me.

  First she had caused my public humiliation, then she’d hit me—I began to bawl.

  Ethel’s mother promptly slugged Ethel simply to make matters even. Ethel began to bawl. Matters were evened, so I quit bawling. When I quit, Ethel quit.

  Nobody was mad at anybody—until her mother and mine left us alone a little later. Ethel took one more look at the longies—but she didn’t laugh. She knew better now. All she did was express a kind of overall disdain.

  “You send valentines to niggers,” she observed.

  I didn’t crack her.

  “I send valentines to everybody,” I answered with a disdain quite as derisive as her own.

  Mildred Ford had been wrong. If I didn’t send valentines to everybody, I couldn’t send them to anybody. I needed her to send a valentine to as much as she needed me to receive one.

  No, she didn’t want me on her side. I didn’t want to be on her side.

  Yet I was there all the same.

  My mother’s idea of making things up to me for the battle of the Santa Maria was a promise to cut down my Uncle Harry’s Spanish-American naval uniform. Uncle Harry had died of yellow fever in Cuba in 1898, but, twenty years afterward, his uniform still hung in our clothes closet awaiting the final trump. The promise was that I could wear it to school on the anniversary of the sinking of the battleship Maine.

  To be the only kid in the school with a colored sweetheart was tough, but the prospect now offered was too much. I believe that it was the first time I stood my mother off successfully.

  Yet in pauses in our play Ethel would now survey me gravely—then give me a smile of thinnest mockery as she saw me once more in a swimming suit drawn over a suit of long underwear. Ground lost by such experience is never regained.

  As the roll-a-hoop spring came on as blue as peace. By the light that now lingered, the light that held, I stood bowed against the gas-lamp crying warning—“eight—nine—ten—redlight! ” As the roll-a-hoop spring raced to a summer of redlit pursuit.

  And our Edison Vic hit a crack—the same crack every time—America I love you

  You’re like an old sweetheart of mine

  From ocean to ocean

  A nation’s devotion—devotion—devotion—

  I also worked up a bit on Uncle-Theodore-The-Great-Lakes-Sailor coming home drunk which my mother said she could live without.

  A terrier got hit in the street by a car that kept going. We heard its yelp and watched it drag itself to the curb. Ethel gave it last rites.

  The next morning she got me out of bed to give it a Catholic burial. I hadn’t even known the brute was a Christian.

  We took turns digging with a toy shovel. When it was deep enough Ethel began crossing herself, and I stepped back until she should tell me to throw in the deceased.

  Crazy Johnny Sheely came up, put his container of six quarts of milk down, and took the shovel from me. The grave wasn’t deep enough, it looked to Johnny.

  At his first stroke, the shovel bent and Johnny looked humiliated.

  “Wait for me,” he asked us. We stood around until he came back bearing a man-sized shovel.

  Johnny dug until we grew tired of watching him and wandered off to find four-leaf clovers. When we came back he had dug himself down to his waist.

  The dead terrier lay beside the milk. Ethel threw in a prayer for Crazy Johnny and I practiced crossing myself until it was time for lunch.

  From our front window, I watched Johnny digging for his life. He had, it was plain, forgotten both dog and milk, dirty home and dirty mother. In the early afternoon Ethel came down to fetch me, and we went out to watch Johnny for lack of anything else to do. A crowd had gathered.

  “You’re going to catch it if you don’t get home,” Ethel shouted down into the hole from which we could see Johnny’s dark, sweat-tousled head. Her answer was a shovelful of dirt from which we both jumped back.

  Johnny dug until we saw his mother coming—somebody had snitched! This was a formidable harridan who supported half-a-dozen nutty sons and nuttier daughters by her backyard dairy, doing more herself than her whole nutty brood combined. Johnny tried to scramble out but couldn’t get a hold. His mother had to get two of his nutty brothers out of bed to pull him up.

  When they got him up, without a word they both began punching him, while his mother slapped him with the broad of her hand. Johnny ducked into a running crouch and all three followed, punching and slapping, the old woman carrying the soured milk in her left hand while she slapped at his ears with her right. The battle went across South Park Avenue, with Ethel and I following, drawn by flying joy, through a narrow way between buildings and up the alley between South Park and Vernon Avenue, when Ethel’s mother and mine both hollered us back into our own yards. I don’t remember whether the terrier ever got buried.

  I know the great hole remained there until my father filled it, with the shovel Johnny had left, and Ethel and I had to return the shovel as some sort of punishment. Nobody knew what we had to be punished for, but my punishment now was always the same: “You’re excommunicated,” my father told me. I don’t see how my father was qualified to excommunicate anybody, but he did it all the same.

  Somebody was always excommunicating me.

  This time it was my mother who thought the action was comical and my father who went around growling that somebody ought to have that milk-delivery kid locked up before he started thinking about girls.

  So far as I know, Johnny never got any ideas about girls that were any funnier than anybody else’s.

  In the late sunflowered summer of nineteen-and-eighteen nobody played Cops and Robbers any more. Some of us had to be Allies and so
me of us had to be Huns. Those who were Huns had to die or run when stuck by a sunflower stalk-bayonet. Most Huns chose to die, as that was not only more dramatic but much braver. Some died face-down, some leaped as though blown—if we had a few yards of barbed wire I’m sure we would have had volunteers for impalement.

  Then the Huns rose as Allies, Brave American Boys, Heroic French-men, and Noble English, and it was the turn of those who had so recently been victorious to decide which was better, retreat or death.

  But on Sundays there was no war. That was the day I escorted Ethel to John The Greek’s at Seventy-first and Vernon. Ethel would order a strawberry sundae and I would order chocolate and John would put a roll in the player-piano and, pumping away, no hands on the keys, would sing—I’m floating down the old Green River

  On the good ship Rock and Rye

  or—If you don’t like your Uncle Sammy,

  If you don’t like the red, white, and blue—

  In the cornstalked autumn of nineteen-and-eighteen my father bought me a new pair of roller skates, so I could use one for a new pushmobile. He helped me screw the front wheels on so that it would swing a corner. He bought me a bell for the handlebars, and then I punched holes in an old tomato can, hung it by a wire below the bell, and stuck a candle in the can.

  When my father got off the Seventy-first Street trolley with his lunch box under his arm, he saw me flickering, he heard me ringing toward him in the dark. And I carried his lunchbox for him all the way home.

  I did not know, then, how much this meant to him. I know now. It meant more than a father’s pride in having a son. It meant he had a son to whom he had given a home. His own father had been an Indiana squatter who had deserted wife and sons on unclaimed land near Black Oak. Now he knew he was doing better for his own than his father had done for him.

  He had come off the farm, with a brother, to see the World’s Fair of 1893. They had seen Little Egypt dance, but neither had done any dancing since. One to the steel mills and one to the garages—their fun times had been few and now were fewer.

  But before his marriage my father had gone, once or twice or perhaps oftener, to the Columbia Dance Hall on North Clark where musicians, calling themselves “McGuire’s Ice-Cream Kings,” had worn white pants. And a “Special Introducer” had stood by to introduce backward youths to up-to-date ladies who knew The Speedy Three-Step.

  He had also been to Heinie Kabibbler’s saloon, where he’d been given a slit mug of beer. When he’d lifted it to his mouth, the beer had spilled down the front of his shirt.

  He remembered Patrick Prendergast, a thirty-year-old newsboy who had handed a revolver to Sergeant McDonnell of the Desplaines Street Station, one October evening of 1893, and explained, “I’ve just killed the mayor.”

  He had shot Carter Harrison in the mayor’s home out of a fantasy that Harrison had promised to make him Corporation Counsel. For his poor judgment and accurate aim, Prendergast The Newsboy had been hanged.

  Both my mother and father had been scandalized by Bad-News Tillie, who had told a grocer that she’d like to do her Daddy in—and she didn’t mean her father—a couple of hours before Tillie’s Daddy slipped on a bar of soap while bathing and broke his neck. It looked like more bad news for Bad-News Tillie until her lawyer pointed out that the bar Daddy had slipped on was a different brand than the one Tillie had bought from the grocer. That had been good news for Bad-News Tillie.

  Both my parents had been to the Electrified Fountain in Lincoln Park and had gone together to the Bismarck Gardens; that once stood where the Marigold Gardens now stand.

  My father was a workingman in a day when the working hour was from 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. He left the house before daylight six days a week and returned home after dark six days a week, year in and year out.

  He worked for McCormick Reaper and Otis Elevator and Packard and The Yellow Cab Company in a time when there were no sick leave, no vacations, no seniority, and no social security. There was nothing for him to do but to get a hold as a machinist and to hold on as hard as he could for as long as he could.

  He was a good holder, but he was unable to hold on to any one job because he was as unable to give orders as he was to take them. He was a tenacious holder; but, after four or five years he would hit a foreman. This would happen so suddenly, so blindly, that he would be as stunned by it as the man he had hit. There was never an understandable provocation.

  When he walked into the kitchen at noon with his tool chest under his arm, my mother knew it had happened again. The first time this happened I was frightened, because I had never seen him in the middle of a weekday. My mother was going to go for him now like never before, I felt.

  That was one time she didn’t go for him at all.

  Yet for days we lived under an oppression of which none but the tool chest in the kitchen spoke. On the morning I rose to find the tool chest and the old man gone to work together, life began once more.

  He was a fixer of machinery in basements and garages who had seen the Electrified Fountain in Lincoln Park.

  My father was a farm youth who had come to the city to see Little Egypt dance, and had stayed on to work. For many great plants that offered him twice the wages that others were getting for doing the same work.

  My father liked getting double wages, and would stay on the job loyally until some picket would take him aside and ask him how he would like to have his head blown off his shoulders.

  My father would say that he would like to wait until after lunch if he wasn’t asking too much.

  He had witnessed the fight between police and anarchists on the Black Road near the McCormick works. He had heard Samuel Fielden speak on the lakefront. Yet his most vivid memory was of Honeythroat Regan singing If He Can Fight Like He Can Love / Goodby Germany.

  My father avoided being killed in situations simmering with violence only because he didn’t know anything was cooking.

  That autumn my mother took me to see my grandmother and grandfather. We walked together below the Lake Street El, and a grandfatherly light fell through the Lake Street ties, all the way to The Westside House.

  The Westside House was where my grandfather sat sealing cigars of his own making with a lick of his tongue. The red band with which he bound each cigar said each was a Father & Son Cigar.

  And the old man had promised that, one day, he would tell me a secret he had never told any of his other grandchildren.

  Neither of us knew that it was his last autumn.

  And the secret that I was never to tell was that he himself, personally, my own grandfather, had thought up the name of the Father & Son Cigar! That he was therefore the inventor of the Father & Son Cigar! And that he had applied for a patent on the name: Father & Son Cigar.

  And that it was a good cigar.

  I was proud to have the man who had invented the Father & Son Cigar for a grandfather.

  Then he made the wooden half-figure of a clown on his worktable blow real smoke at me, and we went upstairs to dinner.

  Behind my grandfather’s Westside House stood the Sommerhaus, a little old-world cottage with blinds.

  It was always summer in the Sommerhaus.

  The old man sat at dinner with his wife at his right hand and all his married daughters, and all his married sons, and his grandchildren running in and out of The Westside House. He was proud of being a Civil War veteran and that all his grandchildren had been born in The States. But I was the only one in that whole tribe for whom he made a wooden clown that blew real smoke.

  I was the only one the old man ever told who thought up the name of the Father & Son Cigar.

  And it was a good cigar.

  After dinner Uncle Bill sat at the player piano and played The Faded Coat of Blue and Aunt Toby sang the words. Aunt Toby didn’t look exactly faint and hungry the way it said in the song—He sank faint and hungry

  Among the vanquished brave,

  And they laid him sad and lonely

  In a grave unknown.


  O no more the bugle

  Calls the lonely one,

  Rest, noble spirit

  In thy grave unknown—

  but I figured it must be because she’d just had dinner.

  Then in no time at all it was time to go home, and I walked back with my mother below the Lake Street El, listening to her humming cheerfully— it had been a good day.

  Take me out for a joy ride

  A girl-ride, a boy-ride,

  I’m as reckless as I can be,

  I don’t care what becomes of me—

  And a grandfatherly light like yellow cigar smoke drifted down between the Lake Street ties.

  All the way home.

  That Halloween Ethel and I put on false-faces and went up and down Seventy-first Street chalking windows of laundry, undertaker, delicatessen and butcher shop. Dotty as ever, Ethel chalked a cross on John The Greek’s, and I wrote below the cross—Everything inside is a penny! and we ran off screaming. On my way home from the Park Manor School the next noon, all the store windows had been washed clean except John The Greek’s.

  John’s window stayed chalked. On Sunday morning police broke the lock and found John hanging by his belt above his candy tins.

  Now I knew what I had sensed in that rage behind the evening cross: there was a fury padfooting the world.

  “Gawd called him home,” Ethel explained contentedly.

  I began to skip cracks in the sidewalk. I skipped the cracks with particular care when passing The Hanged Man’s Place. Frost froze the cracks over and The Hanged Man’s windows went white.

  I rubbed off the frost with my mitten and peered in: Dust and cold had laid their gray hands across Green River and Coca-Cola. The great jar of fresh strawberry syrup had fermented, then split the bowl and bubbled over the counter: it hung in a long frozen drip, like a string of raw meat.

  The magic of strawberry had been hung. The magic of its smell and the magic of its color.

  Hanged.