Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  Like any accomplished nonfiction writer, Mitchell understood and appreciated the raw power of quotation in storytelling. When a character is speaking in a story, there is no one else—not even the author (or so it would seem)—standing between him and the reader. That makes for a strong and visceral connection, one that plugs the reader directly into the character’s thinking, emotions, and motivation for action. That’s why it is just as important for writers of nonfiction as it is for novelists.

  Unlike most other journalists, however, Mitchell routinely stitched together disparate conversations and compressed them into what comes across in the story as a single protracted monologue. That is why the speeches in Mitchell’s stories are so unusually long and so seamless. For Mitchell, this was simply a matter of being comfortable forgoing a literal recounting in order to attain a more fundamental truth. “Something that Louie said after we came down from up in the hotel, I might have had him saying while we were up there,” Mitchell later would say of this tactic. “I don’t think you ought to go around making up quotes, but I do think it’s all right to move them around in the chronology.” Because he had known Morino for so long and was a regular at the restaurant, it’s certain that the speeches in “Hotel” were constructed from multiple conversations over a number of years, even though the story itself turns on a single visit by the writer. “There’s a way of being over-precise and over-documentary,” Mitchell elaborated. “I don’t want to make up anything, but sometimes there are juxtapositions that a writer has to make. Something that’s said at the man’s table when we’re having breakfast, I may quote him when we’re out on the boat, but I see nothing wrong in any way about that. I feel a great responsibility as a reporter or as a writer. I want to get it right.”

  Mitchell’s “waterfront” stories were connected by more than a place or a physical theme. In each, the past becomes an almost palpable presence. But in a sense, these excursions were more like warm-ups for a story Mitchell was slowly working on that would go deeper into the past, and in a more surprising way, than any he had done before.

  CHAPTER 10

  MR. HUNTER

  “To tell you the truth, I’m no great believer in gravestones. To a large extent, I think they come under the heading of what the old preacher called vanity—‘vanity of vanities, all is vanity’—and by the old preacher I mean Ecclesiastes. There’s stones in here that’ve only been up forty or fifty years, and you can’t read a thing it says on them, and what difference does it make? God keeps His eye on those that are dead and buried the same as He does on those that are alive and walking. When the time comes the dead are raised, He won’t need any directions where they’re lying. Their bones may be turned to dust, and weeds may be growing out of their dust, but they aren’t lost. He knows where they are; He knows the exact whereabouts of every speck of dust of every one of them. Stones rot the same as bones rot, and nothing endures but the spirit.”

  —From “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” 1956

  —

  One afternoon back in the spring of 1947, Mitchell’s wanderings took him to the far southern precincts of Staten Island and the tiny community of Sandy Ground. He had heard that the place was founded by free blacks in the middle of the nineteenth century, but he didn’t know much about it beyond that. Walking the quiet neighborhood streets, he came upon an elderly African American man sitting on a porch. Mitchell introduced himself and struck up a conversation.

  The man was James McCoy, a retired oysterman. He was eighty-four years old. McCoy was orphaned at birth in Norfolk, Virginia, and as a boy he was sent north to work the oyster boats of southern Staten Island. He labored for a couple of dollars a day, said McCoy, who, Mitchell made a mental note, had six fingers on his right hand. It was a tough existence for any youth, especially one without family. As he put it, “You had to make every edge cut that would cut.” He used to enjoy raising sweet potatoes, but with years of overplanting you couldn’t raise a decent sweet potato in Sandy Ground anymore, a handy little metaphor for the general decline of the place. As for the oysters that afforded him a living, McCoy said he never ate them. But he did like clams.

  Who else might I see to learn more about the history of Sandy Ground? Mitchell asked. Look up the minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, McCoy suggested. He lives over on Bloomingdale Road, just a few blocks away, where he boards with the head of the church’s trustees—a man named George H. Hunter.

  Mitchell thanked McCoy. He immediately made the short walk to Hunter’s house and knocked on the door. No one was home.

  So, instead, Mitchell made his way over to the church’s cemetery.

  —

  Graveyards can be forbidding places, to be approached with a certain trepidation if they are approached at all. But in the Southern culture, these are not necessarily the impulses cemeteries arouse. Many Southerners, who as a people seem to possess an organically deeper appreciation of history (and mystery) than the general population does, consider cemeteries less termination points than way stations, emotional touchstones whose inhabitants remain as “alive” as if they were about to stroll out from behind a nearby cedar tree. Certainly Mitchell grew up in such an environment.

  He spoke and wrote often, and fondly, of his lifelong attraction to cemeteries, and they pop up so routinely in his stories as to be ancillary characters. He also wrote eloquently about how the customs of his extended family when he was a boy in North Carolina deeply influenced his perspective on cemeteries. Mitchell’s clan visited the local churchyards in pleasant, regular pilgrimages after Sunday services; these sociable outings were comparable to conventional visits with relatives, with the notable exception that, here, the “hosts” were long dead. As such, cemeteries were places the impressionable young Mitchell came to associate with affection and humor and observation; they were much less about death than life. “[E]very time I read the Anna Livia Plurabelle section [of Finnegans Wake] I hear the voices of my mother and my aunts as they walk among the graves in old Iona cemetery and it is getting dark,” he wrote many years later.

  This explains why Mitchell’s habitual wanderings when he was an adult took in many cemeteries. And here was yet another reason for his eternal appreciation of New York; the city, great in numberless ways, is one of the world’s best for cemetery lovers. There are so many of them, developed over such a long period of time and with personalities as diverse as the numerous ethnic groups that established them; they represent ever-evolving American history texts. Too, cemetery-trolling was a passion that afforded Mitchell the opportunity to indulge numerous of his enthusiasms at once—history and genealogy; geography; architecture; masonry and the decorative arts; and horticulture. In particular, Mitchell was a great student of wildflowers, and cemeteries, with their uneven caretaking, were ideal places to find beautiful examples of these, as well as their poor cousins, exotic weeds. When he headed off to a cemetery, Mitchell usually had a field guide to plants with him, and he often made notes of what he saw there. If he came across a plant he couldn’t find in his guide, he would often snip it and tuck it away to be identified when he got back to his apartment and different reference works.

  Given its long history and relative (for New York) expanse, Staten Island was one of Mitchell’s favorite destinations for cemeteries. That pursuit is what took him to Sandy Ground in the first place.

  Now and again over the next few years, Mitchell would return to the island’s southern tip and the Rossville–Sandy Ground area. He continued to record the unique flora he found there, but he also began researching the region’s history and its genealogy—the centuries of farmers and fishermen who had lived and died along the Arthur Kill, the narrow passage separating Staten Island from New Jersey. These were primarily Dutch and English and Huguenots. And then there was this tiny community, Sandy Ground, which had been colonized a century earlier by free black émigrés from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, who were lured to work the oyster beds then flourishing all around Staten Island. M
itchell consulted local historians and clergy familiar with the area—but only as able. His research was tucked between writing and reporting his “active” stories of that time. At Sandy Ground, Mitchell was doing the kind of exploratory investigation he often engaged in when he was intrigued by a story idea but not sure if it would pan out. With one thing and another, it wouldn’t be until early June of 1955 that the writer actually sat down to talk with George Henry Hunter.

  The day he did, he found the old man sitting in the front row of the A.M.E. Zion Church, off to himself. It was warm enough already that the church had distributed paper fans throughout the pews, courtesy of a local funeral home. George Hunter at that point was eighty-six years old, dignified, articulate, erect of bearing, and clear of thought. As they sat there, Hunter began to slowly unspool for Mitchell the story of his own life and how it came to be intertwined with the history of Sandy Ground. He told of how he was the son of a slave who had escaped to her freedom in New York State just ahead of the Civil War; how she brought her boy to Sandy Ground at age thirteen; how his stepfather was an oysterman and a drunken brute whom George despised; how he left home to be a cook on a codfish boat, then became a hod carrier and eventually learned the brickmason’s trade.

  As they talked, Mitchell and Hunter crossed Bloomingdale Road to Hunter’s house, a two-story frame dwelling set apart from its neighbors by being so well tended and by the array of decorative lightning rods on the roof. Hunter showed Mitchell around the house and took evident pride in how immaculate it was; long a widower, he did his own cleaning. His own cooking, too. He especially enjoyed baking pies and cakes. He showed off the remains of a devil’s food cake he’d baked a few days earlier when he hosted the church choir for dinner. In the pantry was an intact chocolate layer cake; Hunter said the choir ate so much of the main meal that they’d had little room left for his desserts. In the dining room, several ornate placards with religious mottoes hung on the wall. The first read: JESUS NEVER FAILS.

  Credit 10.1

  George Hunter in a portrait by Therese. The Mitchells visited him often in the years after The New Yorker published “Mr. Hunter’s Grave”

  Hunter continued with his personal history: How he had been an alcoholic as a young adult, then beat the affliction and turned his life to the Lord. How he began his own business building and cleaning brick cesspools and made a success of it. How he married the prettiest girl in Sandy Ground, lived contentedly with her for over thirty years, and deprived her of nothing until she died. How he remarried a few years later, again happily, only to see his second wife pass away also. At the time Hunter himself was confined to bed with a bad heart. When his wife was returned to their home for the wake, Hunter’s friends carried him in their arms downstairs so he could see her.

  By the time that first meeting was over, Mitchell knew he had a viable story about the life and slow death of the Sandy Ground community. And he knew George Hunter would be the vehicle for that story.

  From Mitchell’s reporting notes, it’s known that the writer interviewed Hunter on at least seven different occasions, from that initial meeting, in June 1955, through the spring of 1956. Several times Therese accompanied her husband and made portraits of Hunter, which she later presented to him as a gift. When Mitchell was back for a third interview, on a Sunday in late September, Hunter led the writer on the short walk over to the church cemetery, the oversight of which fell to him as head of the church’s board of trustees. Weeds and vines had largely overtaken it, and Hunter carried a sharp hoe to hack the vegetation away from the stones as they went along, grave by grave. Here and there he pointed out key members of the Sandy Ground community and people who had figured prominently in his life. At last they came to a section of the cemetery devoted to Hunter’s own family. His two wives were buried there. But the freshest grave belonged to his son, William, who had recently died after a hard life.

  By now Mitchell knew he had not only a good story but something much richer—a larger tale about the human impulse to persevere. In being steered by chance to George Hunter almost a decade earlier, Mitchell stumbled on to what would turn out to be one of the most enduring and defining stories of his career. “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” appeared in The New Yorker on September 22, 1956. In a story of fifteen thousand words, Mitchell managed to pull together almost all the great themes he’d been writing about, and thinking about, for a quarter century.

  —

  The structure of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” is deceptively simple, and, but for the title, the early going gives no indication of the sober subjects it will eventually traverse. As with so many of his pieces, Mitchell sets up the story as a visit, and the action, in Joycean fashion, is compressed into the course of a single warm summer afternoon—Mitchell using that third visit as his narrative framework. He opens the story by explaining how his cemetery wanderings brought him to tiny Sandy Ground in the first place, then goes into its history. For more than fifty years the black oystermen had thrived in brutally laborious jobs, and with their success Sandy Ground itself experienced a kind of prosperity. The hamlet developed with much more of a Southern feel and pace than a Northern one. Dozens of tidy white frame homes, neatly built and maintained, arose on spacious lots. People visited one another on inviting front porches. Residents put out large gardens, to feed themselves and to ferry fresh produce—particularly the luscious strawberries the island was known for—to Manhattan’s markets. Sandy Ground at that time afforded its residents an almost impossibly edenic life, especially for people of color in a highly segregated world. And it was a life that tended to revolve around the one fixture in the residents’ lives other than the oyster beds—the A.M.E. Zion Church.

  By the turn of the century, however, the rest of New York began to see what the Sandy Ground oystermen had known for some time: With the explosion in the region’s population and its commercial activities, including severe overfishing, the waters in and around New York Harbor were now highly polluted. Yields from the oyster beds atrophied, and questions arose about the safety of the shellfish. Finally, in 1916, in the wake of a typhoid epidemic that was linked to Staten Island oysters, the beds were shut down and the inevitable downward spiral of Sandy Ground began. As its residents scrambled for non-fishing opportunities, the population declined. By the time Mitchell discovered it, Sandy Ground had reached a dilapidated and parlous state. “The way it is now,” Hunter laments, “Sandy Ground is just a ghost of its former self. There’s a disproportionate number of old people. A good many of the big old rambling houses that used to be full of children, there’s only old men and old women living in them now. And you hardly ever see them.”

  Hunter is one of the last holdouts. Mitchell had been told the octogenarian’s memory was still acute, and indeed as he talks he summons long-passed names, stories, and personalities with gripping detail. Mitchell, as is by now his custom, lets Hunter talk for pages of unbroken monologue. As the two men set off for the Sandy Ground cemetery, in the narrative version of their actual graveyard tour, Hunter segues into his personal history, including a spell of alcoholism that was a kind of crucible for him. “I turned into a sot myself,” he says. “After I had been drinking several years, I was standing in a grocery store in Rossville one day, and I saw my mother walk past outside on the street. I just caught a glimpse of her face through the store window as she walked past, and she didn’t know anybody was looking at her, and she had a horrible hopeless look on her face.” About a week later, he continues, he bought a bottle of whiskey and was opening it when something happened.

  “I knew what whiskey was doing to me, and yet I couldn’t stop drinking it. I tore the stamp off the bottle and pulled out the cork, and got ready to take a drink, and then I remembered the look on my mother’s face, and then a peculiar thing happened. The best way I can explain it, my gorge rose. I got mad at myself, and I got mad at the world. Instead of taking a drink, I poured the whiskey on the ground and smashed the bottle on a rock, and stood up and walked out of the
woods. And I never drank another drop. I wanted to many a time, many and many a time, but I tightened my jaw against myself, and I stood it off. When I look back, I don’t know how I did it, but I stood it off, I stood it off.”

  Embracing religion, the newly sober young man would go on to become active in the A.M.E. Zion Church, memorize much of the Bible, and engage ministers in Talmudic contemplations on the meanings of certain passages. (“We discuss what I call the mysterious verses, the ones that if you could just understand them they might explain everything—why we’re put here, why we’re taken away—but they go down too deep; you study them over and over, and you go down as deep as you can, and you still don’t touch bottom.”) His cesspool business prospered, he had the long marriage to a woman named Celia, and they had their son, Billy.

  At this point in the story, subject and interlocutor arrive at the cemetery. As they do, Mitchell’s slow reveal of Hunter’s life darkens considerably. Celia dies of cancer, as does his second wife, Edith. Hunter then opens up about Billy. As a young man, Billy joined the family business and got married, and Hunter relates how proud all this made him. But then Billy began to drink. At first, recalling his own battle, George Hunter stifled his worry and said nothing. But in time, as Billy sank deeper into alcoholism, his father tried to intervene. “I asked him to stop, and I begged him to stop, and I did all I could, went to doctors for advice, tried this, tried that, but he wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t exactly he wouldn’t stop, he couldn’t stop.” Finally Billy, too, was diagnosed with cancer; he died a year before the story takes place. Hunter recalls the funeral service and the beautiful floral wreath that marked his son’s grave and then later coming across the wreath as the flowers were dying. With that, Hunter reaches into his wallet and takes out a patch of fabric, which he had retrieved from the wreath. Unfolding a ribbon, he shows it to Mitchell. Inscribed on it, in gold letters, are the words BELOVED SON.