The Emancipator's Wife (18 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Chicago May 1875

O
N
W
EDNESDAY AFTERNOONS
J
OHN WALKED INTO TOWN AND TOOK
the train to Chicago. An hour and a quarter through flat warm prairies, green with summer's advance, combed by wind and broken by the emerald tufts of woodlots. Then a quarter-hour through thickening lines of brown brick workingmen's cottages—white workingmen—that eroded into a ring of shacks and shanties, boardinghouses and clapboard saloons, the streets dirtier and more crowded and the steel rails doubling and trebling and quadrupling and the stench of the packing-yards growing until it was impossible to believe that the stink could still be invisible: John always felt that somewhere it stood in a glowing green wall of filth, he was only looking in the wrong direction....

And that was Chicago.

He knew most of the people who rode on Wednesday afternoons in the third-class “Negro” car. These were men who worked as gardeners or stablemen during the week in Batavia or Geneva, and women who were maids in Wheaton. There wasn't much work for blacks in Chicago, let alone out in the white peaceful towns of the prairie countryside. Those few who had it, tended to leave their families in the city where they had friends to help them if anything went wrong. Amanda, the attendant at Bellevue, had two children in town whom she left with her parents, and would visit every other Tuesday when she had the night off. The Germans and Poles and Hungarians who crossed through the rattletrap car for their own less-than-palatial third-class accommodations—men who'd flocked west in search of jobs that simply weren't to be had in New York—regarded the black enclave with occasional curiosity, occasional suspicion, when they regarded them at all. Mostly the blacks were invisible, as long as they stayed quiet, which they did. Nobody wanted any trouble. The week was hard enough as it was.

All the car windows were open—those that weren't jammed permanently shut—and still the air was hot. Sweat ran down the sides of John's thin face, itched in his close-cropped hair under his mouse-brown derby and stuck his shirt to his back. The thick lenses of his spectacles slipped down heavy on his nose. As the train slowed down flies came in, the flies that seemed to hang over Chicago in the summer like a roaring,
glittering cloud.

Once they got into the city itself the noise of the other trains, coming and going all around them as the tracks converged, drowned any attempt at conversation. John gritted his teeth, bracing against the din as he always did, as if it were a physical pain. Once he was out of the train he hurried through the echoing immensity of the half-built station to the platform where the southbound local would depart, chugging its slow way through the crowded neighborhoods south of downtown. The shriek of train-whistles, the yelling of the porters, the clamor of the engines, even after all these years, still made his chest feel as if it would burst.

Since the War's end he had lived in cities. In Richmond, briefly and terrifyingly, knowing that his blue uniform and his black skin made him a potential target whenever he stepped outside the Army Headquarters; then this nightmare metropolis where everyone seemed to be rushing, scrambling, fighting at all times amid the unending stink of factory-smoke, horse-dung, and the all-drowning stench of decaying meat. The moments he could snatch in the garden at Bellevue were the more precious, in contrast to this. No wonder women sometimes got well there, away from these hideous streets.

No wonder Dr. Patterson was of the often-expressed opinion that “the Negro race is constitutionally unable to adapt itself to the pace and demands of civilized life.” Most representatives of “the Negro race” that John knew had come, like himself, from the quiet of country plantations.

Chicago was enough to drive anyone, black or white, insane.

From the Twelfth Street station he turned west again, picking his careful way across and through the mazes of tracks. This whole neighborhood between the Galena yards and those of the Illinois Central—which included the river levee and the lower end of Satan's Mile—lay under a permanent pall of sooty smoke, rasping in his lungs. Dead cats and dead dogs lay by the rails, some cut nearly in half. Now and then the trains would claim a child, or a drunk. This close to the river the stink of the packing-houses, of the soap and turpentine plants, was enough to knock you down. Constant, unending, the squeals of the dying pigs, the lowing of cattle terrified and in agony made an aural curtain as palpable as that green, rotting wall of smell.

The houses here, cramped two on a lot along the unpaved streets, sweltered in the clammy heat. The Great Fire of four years ago hadn't reached this far and this part of Satan's Mile was much as it had been for a dozen years: clapboard cottages of two and three stories that had started life as sheds; stables and shacks that still housed goats and pigs; muck-filled alleys and rough frame houses whose very kitchens and hallways were sub-sub-sub-let to make the exorbitant rents. Elsewhere in the city it had been as bad or worse, but the vile “patches”—neighborhoods so rough they were a law unto themselves, like Hell's Half-Acre or Hairtrigger Row—had been supplanted by endless dreary zones of clapboard cottages.

The inhabitants of those ramshackle dwellings still grouped according to nationalities, as they had before the Fire—why live among people you couldn't talk to, even supposing they wouldn't beat you up on sight? But there was a sort of neutrality accorded to the main thoroughfares. John walked quickly as everyone walked in Chicago, tired and hot with his coat slung over his shoulder and his little carpetbag of laundry in his other hand. He mentally counted his way through the neighborhoods: Judd Street, Russians; O'Brien Street, Hungarians; Kramer Street,
now we're down to the Italians—
skinny children with glossy black curls chasing one another through the alleys behind saloons where the kerosene lamps had begun to throw their orange glow over shirtsleeved men in derbies and the thick blue pall of cigar-smoke...

Griffe Moissant's on Maxwell Street—red-peeling paint, shutters thrown wide to the reeking heat—marked the last two blocks before the dump where refuse from a nearby packing-house was thrown. In heavy rains the runoff was the color of coffee, the texture of phlegm, and smelled like nothing of the human earth. The neighbors here were mostly like John, born slaves and either runaways during the War or freed in its wake. Many of the men had fought, in the 22nd C.I. or the 107th or the 2nd Light Artillery. Many more of them had been told, when news of Lee's surrender reached their home plantations, that the government would prefer it if they'd stay put on the same land they'd worked for their former masters, and work it for a wage.

“Funny thing about that,” had said Lionel Jones, when John and his family had first moved in with Lionel, whose brother had still been alive then and married to Cassy. “Once Marse Barton finished takin' out the rent for the cabin, an' the bill for food from the plantation store, an' new shoes for wintertime, an' hire of his hoes an' his plows an' his mules,
we
owed
him
money....But he was nice enough to let us stay on an' work for free.”

“What a good man,” John had replied drily, and Lionel gave him a wink and a savage, broken-toothed grin.

Most had stayed in the South. Seeing some of those who lived along Maxwell Street—none of whom could read and few of whom had any training or experience at anything except agricultural work, much less the connections with police and city politics that were so vital to borrowing money and establishing businesses—John understood why. The devil you knew, in the quiet world of familiar faces and familiar countryside, be it ever so stricken by poverty, was infinitely less terrifying than the grinding, bewildering, many-visaged unknown demons that waited grinning at the end of the tracks.

There were times, when the hammering of the train-engines and the stink of the smoke and the rotting meat seemed about to crush him like a spider between two stones, when he wondered if he shouldn't have gone back to Virginia himself.

John passed Griffe's, and then Cuff's Grocery, where another gaggle of drinkers sat on the porch sipping the stale dregs that Cuff bought from the downtown saloons for a few cents a barrel. As he did so John felt his stomach begin to tighten with dread. It was nearly dark and above the smells of privies and stockyards he could scent the drift of side-meat and beans, cornbread and red-eye from the open doors of those weathered shacks. Could hear old Aunt Machie singing through her open door as he passed her house, singing at the top of her lungs as always, sweet and beautiful as an angel:

“Shoo, shoo turkey, throw your feather way yonder,

Shoo, shoo turkey, throw your feather way yonder. . . .”

He was almost home. That cold quivering behind his breastbone tightened up like a fist around his heart, wondering what the hell he'd find.

Every week—every Wednesday night when he came home to spend his half-holiday with Clarice and Cassy and the rest of his family—it was a toss-up whether he'd have rest and joy, or an agony of chaos and awfulness.

As he walked past the Bonfreres' house in the front of the lot, he found himself listening for his mother's screaming voice.

Nothing.

But no sound of the children either, and they always made a noise as they went about their chores. Cassy and Nando Jones had had three: Selina, Abe, and Miranda, before Nando's death from pneumonia in '71—'71 had been a bad year all around. John's little sister Lucy had grown up wild all her short life, refusing to work with Cassy as a laundress and taking up with a gambling man when first they'd come to Chicago. She'd died birthing her second child, Josephine—Cassy had taken in Josie and Josie's sister, Geraldine. You didn't turn family out-of-doors. Then there were the brothers and sisters John's mother, Phoebe, had borne in Washington during the War, and in Chicago afterwards, those who had survived: Rowena, Sharon, Ora, Ritchie.

With the children of Lionel and his wife, Lulu—George, Tom, Ish, and baby Dellie—that made enough and more than enough to support, and most of them too young to be of much help. A year and a half
ago, against every resolution not to do anything of the kind, John had fallen in love with a girl named Clarice, and now their child, Cora, was just learning to walk. Clarice helped Cassy with her laundry business, her sweetness and tact increasing the number of their clients in times when nearly everyone else was losing them to hard times, tight money, the closing of factories and shops.

But it was backbreaking work, and it took every minute of daylight for the four grown women while nine-year-old Selina looked after the babies and marshaled the younger children to the household chores. When times were good John could hear Selina's sharp, sweet voice calling out commands, encouragement, teasing, sometimes getting Tom and Abe to sing part-songs with her as she swept and they hauled wood for the boilers set up in the narrow yard, just the way Cassy had done, he remembered, with Blue Hill Plantation's “hogmeat gang” all those years ago.

But there was only silence now and the silence went to the pit of John's stomach as he came into the yard. Clarice and Lulu were gathering in washing from the lines that strung back and forth, taking up the whole of the yard between the Bonfreres' house and his own. In the cobalt dark of the porch the open door shone with red-gold kerosene light. Clarice saw him, laid the shirts and sheets carefully back over the line and ran to him, caught him in her arms—“God, I'm so glad to see you!” and their lips met, hard. Hers tasted of sweat, with the slightest whisper of honey. He could have stood there kissing her in the dark all night among the wavering lines of sheets. “Your Mama's gone off.”

Shit.
“Where?”

She shook her head. She was a few inches short of John's own five-foot, eight-inch height, and like John and Cassy built slim; darker than they, nearly full-blooded African, like Lionel and Lulu, but delicate-featured, a coal-black gazelle. She had her hair wrapped up for work and he wanted nothing more than to tear off her headscarf and gather those great, soft, scrunchy handfuls of her hair in his hands, and to hell with Phoebe....

“The kids have gone out after her.” Meaning Selina, Rowena, Abe, and Tom.

“And Cassy didn't?”

“Cassy maybe got other things to do.” His sister appeared at the top of the porch steps, her sleeves pushed up and her arms folded, slim as a strap. He could only see her silhouette, but knew what her expression was from the sound of her voice. “I got ten sets of sheets that need to be delivered tonight if we're going to eat next week, and I'm just starting into the ironing now, brother. Mama was in and out all morning, saying how she had a headache, and a backache, and a bellyache, and how she was just going to stay in bed and get herself better, and then just before the sun started going down she lit out of here, said she was gonna go buy medicine.”

Shit.
John was perfectly familiar with his mother's “medicine-buying” expeditions. “I'll go look for her.”