FOURTEEN
This small town of Galesburg, as I look back at it, was a piece of the American Republic. Breeds and blood strains that figure in history were there for me, as a boy, to see and hear in their faces and their ways of talking and acting. People from New England and their children owned much of the town and set the main tone in politics, churches, schools and colleges. I heard Yankee old-timers and how they talked “through the nose.” Up from Kentucky and Tennessee had come English and Scotch-Irish breeds who were mostly Democrats in favor of the saloons and farther back in favor of Stephen A. Douglas as against Lincoln.
Many Swedes had become voters and a power in politics and business. Their Republican leader for years was a banker, Moses O. Williamson, known as “Mose.” He was on the Illinois State Committee of the Republican Party, and if you wanted a state or Federal office the word was “See Mose.”
And the Irish? I had Irish schoolteachers and playmates. I would stand still in the Q. yards to watch the switchman, Tom Carmody, walk. He was a prize-winning dancer and his way of walking had a music to it. Tom Beckum, the happiest drinking man in town, I can never forget nor Mark Connelly, a Q. shopman. At parties, sociables, picnics, political rallies, among the shopmen, or in a cigar store, Mark, the young Irishman, would give his Swedish dialect stories. He was as good as any Swede at imitating a green Swede. One of his stories that us kids learned ran:
“Goliatt vas a grate beeg fallow, femteen [fifteen] feet high. Dawveed vas a leetle fallow, he hawrdly come up to de knees of Goliatt. Goliatt, he say, ‘Dawveed, I goin’ to keel you an’ eat you.’ An’ Dawveed, he anta been scared. Dawveed he go to de crick an’ he peek heem five stones. An’ he put a stone in hees sleeng an’ he trow it at Goliatt. An’ vat you tink? De stone he trow hit Goliatt right in de stomach an’ knock all his brains out!”
The Irish liked it. The Swedes liked it. The “pure Americans” laughed till their ribs shook Frank Pollock, of one of the nativeborn American families, at parties and concerts gave imitations of green Swedes. Like Connelly he was a born comedian, though he ended later as a grand-opera tenor. I didn’t notice Swedes being sore about these imitations of green Swedes. Along with other young Swedes I did some imitating myself. I had been among the Irish enough so that I picked up their brogue. At times in later years I would drop into the Irish brogue not knowing I was talking it, and I have been taken for one of the Irish. Their brogue and the Swedish accent are the only ones I can put on and be taken for the real thing.
There were names us kids liked to use. We liked them mostly because they sounded funny. A Jew was a “sheeny.” The Irish were “micks.” A Swede was a “snorky.” A Yankee was a “skinflint.” The Germans were “Dutch.” The Italians were “dagoes.” A Negro was a “nigger” or a “smoke.” I heard Irish boys say of themselves, “Us micks” and Negroes speak of themselves as “Us niggers,” and one Swede boy to another, “Hello, snork.” When you hated and wanted to be mean you said, “goddam mick” or “goddam nigger.” We believed that the “sheenies” on the quiet might be calling us “snorkies” and calling the Irish “micks” and that would be all right with us because that’s what we were. But if they called us “goddam snorkies” or “goddam micks” then we would look for bricks to heave.
Two German Jews, Sol Frolich and Henry Gardt, owned the Union Hotel and bar, and the biggest saloon in that part of Illinois, the White Elephant on Boone’s Avenue, next door south of Main Street. Gardt was the quiet one of the two, a smallish man with a black mustache. People said he did the thinking and his partner the talking. Sol Frolich was tall and bald, one of the breeziest laughing men in town. He could mix in any bunch of men with his thick and comical German accent and his sense of fun and fellowship, and they would listen to him. Being in the liquor business, Frolich and Gardt were up to their ears in politics but their foot tracks were not easy to find. Somehow I can’t remember any scandal that was raised about them unless it would be that the Reverend W. H. Geistweit mentioned from his pulpit that the White Elephant had been open after midnight. They were strict about not selling liquor to minors and no women allowed at the bars and no gambling in their places. Many people had a way of laughing when they mentioned “Frolich and Gardt” maybe with a wink of the eye, as though they might more than once have stepped up to the most elegant bar in town at the Union Hotel or into the big barroom of the White Elephant that sold more drinks to more men than any other saloon in town. Frolich and Gardt gave Galesburg color and fun.
The Gumbiner pawnshop, the only one in town, what else was there like it? Where else were there so many different watches to look at—gold, silver, and nickel watches, big old-fashioned “turnips” too big for a vest pocket a Waltham or two pawned by railroad engineers? But we heard an engineer say the Walthams came “from pickpockets a thousand miles away” and “No engineer would hock his Waltham unless he was drunk and wanted to get drunker.” Here at Gumbiner’s we saw gold, silver, and brass watch chains, silk and satin watch fobs, big hunting knives and small penknives, pocketknives we wished we had the money to buy, brass knucks and slung shots you could knock a man senseless with, shotguns and rifles and old squirrel guns, Colt’s revolvers and the old-time one-shot pocket pistol. And when it came to fifes, flutes, flageolets, clarinets, ocarinas (here I bought my fifteen-cent ocarina, my “sweet potato”), fiddles, accordions, concertinas, banjoes, and guitars plain and fancy, there was no place like Gumbiner’s. Nor was there any auctioneer like the slicker at Gumbiner’s. His tongue and throat never went back on him. He seemed to wind himself up and then let go on his spiel and he didn’t have to stop to oil himself. We were thankful the Gumbiner Jews had come to Galesburg.
Finest of the Jews, said everybody, was Max J. Mack of the men’s clothing firm, Jacobi & Mack. Every year a few days after New Year’s their front windows would blaze with red price tags and they would have page spreads in the newspapers about their “Annual Red Tag Sale.” You couldn’t get away from it. They made you want to buy a new suit of clothes.
Max J. Mack for many years was elected alderman from his ward. He was regular at city-council meetings, had his head in all the facts and figures of city business, watched every ordinance, and if a deal was crooked or wasteful he would vote against it and tell why without insulting anybody. The plainest people could go to him with a complaint or a question and he would give them his time as if they had a perfect right to it. He had a warm heart for all people, and when he said, “I’m for what’s good for the city of Galesburg and its people,” he wasn’t just one more blabmouth politician. There came a time when Mart tried for several years to get Max J. Mack nominated for mayor, but the Boss couldn’t see it. So a Swede failed at giving Galesburg a Jew for mayor.
Among the Negroes I had friends. Morning after morning at the Q. depot I would see “Tip” Murray with his shoeblacking kit hung by a strap from one shoulder. Passengers getting off trains would hear him, “Shine ’em up—a nickel a shine.” Tip and I talked baseball, how the big leagues were doing, and what Galesburg might do in the Three-Eye League (Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa). Tip was lean and wiry and could pitch a good game. I could connect with his outcurve but he nearly always fooled me when he put a drop on it. He had his days, he told me, when nobody wanted a shine, other days when he made a couple of nickels, and circus days, holidays, and “big days,” when the score ran up to fifteen or twenty nickels.
While I was in short pants I would meet the King brothers from Pine Street. They were shorter than I and lighter weight but the older one would shine his eyes at me and say, “You want to fight?” I could see he would like to fight me if I was willing, a “snork” and a “smoke” bloodying each other’s noses. He didn’t holler it nor make a face at me. He said it kind of soft as if he was listening to hear himself say, “You want to fight?” I told him I wasn’t looking for a fight and we went on our ways without another word. I figured that Willy King had been saying to himself, “Am I scared to fight a white boy?” And then to make sure he wasn’t scared, he puts it to the first white boy he meets, “You want to fight?”
Often walking along South Street a Negro would come in sight and some boy would be sure to say, “There’s Double-headed Bill.” He was of medium size and build, had a good face, and an extra-big head. You couldn’t say he was a freak of nature. He just happened to have a head that was bigger than most people had though you had to look twice to notice it. You didn’t draw back from looking at him like when you saw the double-headed calf at the county fair. It was a well-shaped head he had, good to look at even if it was extra-big. But someone had hung on him the nickname “Double-headed Bill” and us kids thought it smart to be saying it.
“Nigger” Duke lived in the Q. yards and shops. He found warm corners for sleeping in the winter, and anywhere would do for him in summer. His meals came out of leftovers in the dinner buckets of shopmen and the wicker baskets of trainmen and enginemen. His legs were two short stubs. He had many years back gone to sleep in a boxcar in zero weather, and the doctors had to saw off his legs a little below the hips. On the bottoms of these stumps he had leather pads. He took short steps and walked himself where he pleased around the Q. yards. Going to the Seventh Ward school we saw him many times near the machine shop or at the Peoria tracks flag shanty. He was thick-chested, a heavy man with fine straight shoulders, a well-shaped head and face. His teeth were white and even, and when he smiled or broke into a laugh from his black-skin face, it was like promises and flowers. He had a greeting, a smile, or a laugh for everyone he met. I heard him say, “We’ve all got our jobs and my job is to chase away the blues.” His voice was high and clear and words tumbled fast from him.
From the Swedes in the shops he had learned to talk Swedish and liked gabbing with the Swedes. There were Swedes hunted him out in the Q. yards to hear a crippled black man talking like any good Swede. We were told in our school days that Nigger Duke happened to be at the Q. depot once when a train loaded with green Swedes fresh from Sweden came in, headed for Nebraska. Nigger Duke lifted himself to a car platform and walked along the aisles of the cars talking Swedish and telling the newcomers, “After a while when you have been in this country as long as I have you’ll turn black like I am.” His Swedish was perfect and his white teeth glistened and his laugh rippled as he told this to Swedes who had never heard a black man speaking Swedish. Some laughed at him. Others looked sober and then gloomy, for they half believed him. And it was told there were women on the train who broke into tears and sobbed.
In later years Mart said that Susan Allen, a Negro woman who did cleaning at his house, claimed it was her husband John Allen who got on the tram and had the Swedes worried about turning black. I think something like it must have happened though I believe most of the Swedes on the train took it as a good joke. I could see a certain kind of tough Swede saying, “So we’re going to change to black, are we? All right, let it come. It’ll be fun watching it happen.”
I didn’t hear what became of Nigger Duke. I can’t forget him and wouldn’t try to. He was made to laugh through life, to laugh at life, and to bring others to laughing with him. He was a strong man. There were railroad men who said that when he would be gone from the Q. yards a few days or a week he was away with Negro women who enjoyed him—and this could have been just talk. The railroad men were proud of him and said no other railroad had anything like him. And the Swedes were proud of him because he could talk to them in a language the Americans and the Irish hadn’t learned. He could say, “Hur mar du i dag?” (How are you today?) like a blessing with promises and flowers.
The Negro voters expected and were given two city jobs. There was always one Negro policeman in uniform. And a Negro drove the police patrol wagon.
One Negro had a bad name in the hobo world. His name was Richardson and he was the night policeman for the Q. in the yards. His club had been bloody many a time from beating the head of a hobo. I talked with hoboes who showed scars on their heads where they said the scalp was broken by Richardson’s club. The word for him among the hoboes was “that goddam nigger bull in the Galesburg yards.” Why the head men of the Q. railroad kept him on duty year after year I didn’t hear. Galesburg was a division point and it could have been there were gangs stealing from the cars. Or there may have been hoboes who had ganged up on Richardson and given him a beating and he was hitting back at any and all hoboes. Anyhow he made a name for himself as a terror to those who tried to ride railroad trains without buying tickets.
I first heard German spoken when I played with Mickey Artz in his front yard on Brooks Street. His mother didn’t like the way we had run over her flower garden. What she told him was plenty. It was all in German but he heard it and we went to the street to play catch. She reminded me of Grimm’s fairy stories and such sentences as, “Hans’ wife became enraged and she threatened to cut his head off.”
The Italians came late but they pushed their carts and cried their bananas and oranges over every street in town. Before they came by carloads there were two well-known Italians. Father Costa was the priest at the Corpus Christi Church at Kellogg and South streets near the center of town. He was a short, thin-lipped man, with deep small black eyes. I would come near speaking to him on the street but his little black eyes would fix me and I didn’t let out a peep. Father Tonelli had the other Catholic church, St Patrick’s, a mile away, off in the Fifth Ward among the Irish. He was handsome, like picture-book Italians. To him I would say a good-morning and he would smile back a good-morning worth at least a dime on a rainy day.
Frenchy Juneau and his father were the only French I knew. I didn’t get to know any Poles, Bohemians, Slovaks, Russians, Hungarians, Spanish, Portuguese, Mexicans, South Americans, or Filipinos. I did stop in to watch our two Chinamen ironing and wrapping laundry two doors south of the fire department on Prairie Street. They wore black blouses. Their heads were shaved, and running down from the crown of the head two or three feet was a braided pigtail of hair. They talked singsong up and down to each other, maybe saying, “He’s a funny little brat come in to look at us.” Through their window I saw them early mornings and late at night ironing, starching, wrapping bundles, and marking the bundles with Chinese letters in big black crayon. They made me think about the human race and how different some parts of it are from others.
Often in the 1890’s I would get to thinking about what a young prairie town Galesburg was—nearly twenty thousand people, and they had all come in fifty years. Before that it was empty rolling prairie. And I would ask: Why did they come? Why couldn’t they get along where they had started from? Was Galesburg any different from the many other towns, some bigger and some smaller? Did I know America, the United States, because of what I knew about Galesburg? In Sweden all the people in a town were Swedes, in England they were all English, and in Ireland all Irish. But here in Galesburg we had a few from everywhere and there had even been cases of Swedish Lutherans marrying Irish Catholic girls—and what was to come of it all? It didn’t bother me nor keep me awake nights but I couldn’t help thinking about it and asking: What is this America I am a part of, where I will soon be a full citizen and a voter? All of us are living under the American flag, the Stars and Stripes—what does it mean? Men have died for it—why? When they say it is a free country, they mean free for what and free for whom, and what is freedom?
I said I would listen and read and ask and maybe I would learn. By guessing and hoping and reaching out I might get a hold on some of the answers. Those questions in those words may not have run through my mind yet they ran in my blood. Dark and tangled they were to run in my blood for many years. To some of the questions I would across the years get only half-answers, mystery answers.