by Elisa New
Page through ledgers of Maryland planters or old tobacco sales accounts; watch the loading docks of Annapolis and Port Tobacco, of Norfolk as it suddenly appears on maps. Turn the leaves of Tatham’s classic Tobacco Culture (1800) or browse the glass cases and etchings of the Maryland Historical Society.
You will see pictures like this. In the double dugout (two canoes with a hogshead lashed between), a boy leans back. His oar lifts in a stroke of ink. The object he rows or pushes, a hogshead of tobacco, is many times larger than he is. It weighs about a thousand pounds. He weighs, perhaps, ninety.
He is fourteen or fifteen years old.
On this boy, a slave, American tobacco culture depended.
Arriving in America in 1868 or 1869, a few years after the Civil War ended, Bernhard Baron was just in time to catch and ride a great crest of industrialization and modernization that would eventually carry him out of New York and Baltimore to glittering London. The last decades of the nineteenth century saw a demand for affordable, rapidly produced luxuries of all kinds. Demand for tobacco kept rising, and so grew the need for more efficient and viable ways of producing it.
Baron arrived, in other words, in a country without a theory of labor adequate to this modern demand, and in a region in shock from the loss of its slaves.
As a child traveling in a car through Baltimore and its environs, I always found it incredible to consider that the places we passed by had a mere century ago been the “slave south,” a phrase I would pronounce under my breath as we drove. I think it must have been during those drives that I began to grow curious about tobacco and about our nineteenth-century relatives who made their fortune in it. During these drives my father sometimes skirted I-95, going Route 29 from the D.C. suburbs to Baltimore ’s, and we ’d drive through farm-lands. Old houses—white, the porches sagging, sheds akimbo—stood back from the road. How old were they: Eighty? Ninety? One hundred? In late summer, the crops along the road were mostly familiar. I recognized corn by its height, also the spinach, tomatoes, and other summer vegetables growing in what our social studies books called “truck gardens.” But what was this tall plant, firm leafed, spreading, as high as corn but broader?
It was tobacco.
The road to the seashore, to Bethany in Maryland or Dewey in Delaware, was lined with tobacco. Even in the killing heat of August we ’d see workers plucking the top leaves. Many of the towns on the way to the Ocean Bridge had national landmark signs near stoplights. These relayed the information, fascinating to me, that the sweltering fields we passed through had once been worked by slaves.
Slaves! It seemed unimaginable, outlandish, and yet fascinating. The unremarkable look of the lands we passed through—so close to our modern suburban life—was part of History, that far foreign country, inaccessible to modern people. But these drives taught me that I could get to History by stepping over the margin of the familiar as easily as over a crack in the sidewalk. I could step into the past, out of the narrows and into the broadness of time, simply by looking out the window. Certain sights give up eloquent stories to those who know where to look and how to listen. Open barn doors were evocative, their black squares full of floating dust. Evocative too were lyrical little creeks, the bridges we passed in the blue dusk serenaded by cricket orchestras. Absent a highway to travel down, there were pages—books—full of the same lyrical chirpings. Reading a certain book or poem might put you there, in History.
My youthful fascination later propelled me on my life course. This perception of history, sometime while I was in graduate school, made me shift my scholarly specialty from the study of poetry to American poetry, and eventually to American literature before 1900. As a young professor at the University of Pennsylvania, I felt moved every semester when teaching, say, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to remind my students that the Mason-Dixon Line was only forty minutes away from our classroom. Once I brought in a map to show them that not forty-five miles from their seats in West Philadelphia, Route 13 branched toward Odessa, Delaware, from I-95—and this was the slave South.
I remember once, searching for a way to convey the uncanniness of it, that I told students about the golf club, a mere twenty-five minutes west of my parents’ suburban Washington house, in which I’d worked as a cocktail waitress during a summer vacation. Out Route 270 from Potomac, this too had been part of the slave south. The club’s regulars, from families resident in the area for generations, now found more time for golf and drinking and less for work as they sold their farms bit by bit to developers. They were the closest I’d ever been to southern cavaliers, courtly and never rude to college girls who worked the bar, and I count the summer I spent bending with my tray over tables billowing with their cigar smoke a crucial installment in my education. Whether the families of some of these men would have once held slaves I could not tell, but it seemed plausible to think so. There were no blacks who belonged to or worked at the club, not even a caddy, and I myself felt a little swarthy. My Jewishness was not something I advertised.
Once I’d begun to research Bernhard Baron, his career and that of my uncles, not just permitting but requiring me to follow the history of tobacco, my passion for the bewitching vegetable flared up in eccentric ways. Every year, when I taught Byrd or other Chesapeake characters, I began to bring in my large box top full of yellow tobacco, collected from Joey Scott ’s garden, and during vacations I sought out ways to immerse myself in tobacco history. By the time I drove up to the big white gabled farm in Glyndon that my great-uncle Paul, Jacob’s brother, purchased in 1911, I had already discovered that these acres had once been owned by one of Reisterstown’s most notorious slave-owning families. The whole town of Glyndon, including the farmstead where my mother had played, had once been the property of a slaveholder, Thomas Worthington. Files at the Maryland Historical Society made clear that my Uncle Paul’s street, Bond Avenue, was named for the bondsmen—slaves—who were once penned down the rise from his chicken coops. Like all the slaves in the area, the Worthington slaves farmed tobacco as well as corn and wheat and then sent it by rail or wagon to Baltimore.
One May, I drove the back roads near the Bay Bridge until I found the Great House Farm where Frederick Douglass toiled in tobacco. I got out of the car to look at the little creeks. Another year, on my European trip to Belarus, I sought out and gazed at the massive brick pile of the tobacco factory in Grodno, now as then the largest in the district where Bernhard Baron was born, and where his father might well have worked. Back in the United States, I took myself to Maryland’s Port Tobacco Courthouse (“once listed on world maps!” its website boasts). Later I lost myself in the George Arents Collection of the New York Public Library, on the history, literature, and lore of tobacco, with its pamphlets, broadsides, engravings, royal decrees, and slave bills. And of course at a certain point, I taught myself to smoke.
It was at the end of the day that I visited Joey Scott. Joey had asserted adamantly that he didn’t smoke, of course not, and, moreover, that he’d taught his children to view the pretty acres he farmed simply as agriculture for export. Philip Morris had nothing to do with his family. Still, late that afternoon I decided that my probity as researcher required some sampling, some firsthand taste of this bewitching vegetable, and so I bought a pack of the local product.
Lighting my first from the gas burner in the kitchen, I went out to the porch, cigarette in one hand, large glass of wine in the other. How fast the weed burned down as I took my puffs, how full and plump the sensation along the lungs and up the sinuses to my very brainstem! I felt brighter, smarter, calmer, my chest a little ragged to be sure, but pleasantly so. Bewitching, indeed, the delicious vegetable. I felt like another and lit one from the red end of the first.
One more and I’d be a smoker now.
SIX
What Is to Be Done?
It is said that the immigrant’s fondest wish is a better life for his children.
If this is true, then my great-grandfather, Jacob Levy, and my great-gre
at uncle Bernhard Baron were aberrant, or at least uncooperative, examples of their kind, for the comfortable lives their children achieved gave them little apparent pleasure.
Late photos show both men looking vexed and frustrated, frowns drawing down their mouths, as if disappointment long resisted had finally landed full on them and there was nothing to do but carry it. In these photos they look like brothers more than rivals, both attired impeccably. Surrounded by the glossy and thriving members of their families, posing for photos that framed and ratified their great successes, both men drooped.
No one ever told me that both had died as saddened men. Even less did anyone let on that what made them look so disconsolate was a common disappointment in the children they “shared,” Jacob’s by birth but Bernhard ’s by name.
I had to gather this understanding bit by bit, building on stray, nervous hints my relatives dropped about a certain eccentricity of Jacob’s or a crotchet of Uncle Baron’s. The theme that united their peculiarities was the socialist politics espoused by both.
A memorable anecdote concerned the time Jacob dragged his daughter Jean’s little Earle—only six years old—out of bed on a frigid winter day. Why would he disturb a little boy’s rest? And worry his mother so? Going into his room to wake the boy, she found him gone, the door to her father’s room open too. Where had they gone? To 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. There, with motley old socialists for company, the little boy shivered while his grandfather and comrades stood at attention for the hero-felon Eugene Debs, just released from jail.
Then there was the perplexing matter of Uncle Baron’s refusing a British title. Had many other men of Hebrew extraction been so honored by the king? “Plain Mister is good enough for me,” Baron had said, charming his interviewers but exasperating his children. And his perverse choice of residence—not in London or even in the country near his children, but in plebian Hove, near Brighton. With all his money (“Richer than the Rockefellers, that’s just what he was!” my aunts would emphasize), what was his point in eschewing the luxuries—a townhouse in Belgravia such as Eddie occupied or even a modest flat off Park Lane—unless, perhaps, to make a point of his humility.
Jacob had a passion, shared with his brother Paul, for the elevation of the Jewish people through physical labor. “Return to the land! Hand and brain!” he would thunder, cribbing from Debs. His belief in the salutary effects of bucolic exertion led him, late in life, to propagandize for Stalin’s brainchild, the Jewish homeland in Birobidzhan. And his favored punishment for errant juveniles was a spell of summer labor pulling up carrots on Uncle Paul’s scraggly farm.
Uncle Baron invariably produced effusions for his workers, those sentimental encomiums delivered at the conclusion of every shareholder meeting and duly transcribed each year in the London Times city page.
Dispatched to the family in America by Paul or sometimes Edward, the clippings made clear that no meeting of Carreras ended without a peroration by the Old Man to his able, loyal, skillful, sacrificing, meritorious, and beloved workers in whose debt he, they, nay all England, stood always. Which debt, certain younger members of the family intimated, was most handsomely discharged—not only in such extravagances as three thousand sterling silver medals on velvet ribbons (each engraved “MY THANKS FOR ALL YOUR HELP”) presented at the factory’s grand opening, as well as the free canteen, the vacations, the paid education, sport facilities, yearly theatricals, and immense bonuses of turkeys, hams, cakes, and cigarettes the entire Carreras staff enjoyed.
In our family, no one expressed open disloyalty to the two old men. To their great credit, my aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles would stick by the official family story that these were good men, loving, kind, providing for their families and striving always to do right. But in more unguarded moments they also let slip how these old fellows certainly did have their ways, their quirks, and certain topics on which they were—truth be told—a little nuts.
Once they got on these hobbyhorses, try to stop them:
The intrinsic virtue of the worker.
The dignity of labor.
The betterment of humankind through cooperation, innovation, and efficient address of worker grievances.
Through reform if one sought to avoid redistribution; through redistribution if one wanted to head off revolution.
Which was to say through judicious, liberal progressive management.
Their children humored them as best they could, but they were a hard pair to please.
This humoring, I surmise, would have been a large part of what gave Jacob and Uncle Baron their look of constant vexation, the telltale squint or wince before the camera, worn like part of a uniform they donned along with a silk tie or formal cutaway. They were not stupid. Both were more learned and experienced in the world than any of the younger ones. They would have been maddened to know their children winked behind their backs.
“Just a snap of the Guv’ner,” writes Paul jauntily from England, dashing off a note in 1928 to his brother Emil, one line of slanting scrawl filling the whole back of the picture of Uncle Baron taken on the day of the great factory’s opening, when Baron looked so weary.
Had Jacob picked up the card, his forehead would have puckered too, his jawline tightened. “Guv’ner” was a new locution for Paul, who had arrived in London just two years earlier from Baltimore, where he had worked as a delivery boy. It was a good term, one well adapted to the young man’s need to be offhand about the elder who paid his way, a good term for the person to whom he owed his natty suits and cream-colored coupe.
See Paul with roadster. Paul at races. Paul in morning coat. Paul striding, tailored, sleek. Said “snap” was one of many Paul dispatched from Europe’s pleasure capitals; his new job was making sure Black Cat and Craven A cigarettes were found at every corner newsstand, on every boulevard.
What tone, Paul found, delighted, in the English phrase book, such a fine compendium of usages ready to hand for an Englishman still wet behind the ears. He had been relieved to observe that mastering the English accent was not, as he’d feared, crucial. Learning on the job from brother Eddie, he noticed that the vowels of old Baltimore would at times escape, with no harm done.
Not if one had the touch. The way, at a shareholders meeting (members of the press in the front row) if no one else struck up the cheer for the Old Man, Eddie, standing modestly at the dais, darkly handsome, struck the ringing, rousing vocal salute:
Hear! Hear!
“Snap of the Guv’ner” sent from London by Paul Levy to his brother, Robert Levy, in Baltimore, 1928.
Eddie, Paul noted well, did not attempt to draw the r out overmuch. His “Hear Hear” brought the accent down firmly on the hee, the r’s flying straight and unabashed off those long Baltimore vowels. That r—along with his ingenuous American grin—begged the room’s indulgence for crimes of elocution. If his simple “Hear Hear” did not do the trick, Eddie might then essay the even more adorably English “Hip Hip Hooray.” The charm of it was at times sufficient to raise the room and so head off one of the Old Man’s lugubrious lectures. It was known, and much appreciated, that Edward took it as his office to watch out for the stockholders. Men leaving their desks in the City were without infinite leisure to listen to lectures.
No fool, the Guv’ner was aware that his presumptive heirs took him for a throwback. He let them laugh. In his will he had safeguarded his principles, giving just enough but no more than was necessary to those who winked, and found a worthy, charitable purpose for every last dime that might otherwise be spent on cocktails or thoroughbreds. By means of a complex set of trusts, he effectually skimmed millions off his fortune, bestowing on worthy causes—his workers, first; then the pioneers in Palestine; North London’s foundlings, plus Brighton’s and Hove’s; diseases of the lung and heart; researches pulmonary, ophthalmological, and gynecological; the Baron Cottages in Sussex; the athletic fields in Regents Park; the Park Tennis Courts; the Liberal Synagogue; the Liberal Party; the
Bernhard Baron Settlement House; and only then his son, Louis; and only then his sister, Deborah, in Baltimore, along with her husband Morris; his deceased sister Sarah’s husband Paul Levy; Myrtle, Fanny, Jean, Emil, and Robert Levy; and only then, the three boys, brothers, who had taken his name.
For their stewardship, their business acumen, and their sense of honor, when Baron died in 1929 he left to his one son, Louis, and then to his adopted sons Edward, Paul, and Theodore, the magnificent Carreras cigarette factory as well as rights to the patents on the Baron continuous cigarette rolling machine. They might build or wreck as their talents permitted. It was, he would have reckoned, far more than they’d ever have gotten in Baltimore. Jacob’s sons were hardly expected to rise to be directors of Carreras cigarettes—with thousands of employees, standing orders around the world, and the largest factory in the metropolis under their supervision. If the Old Man’s will came as a surprise or shock, their good English manners would have kept them from breathing a syllable of disappointment in the final disposition of their great benefactor toward them.
Just as Baron’s late sense of having miscalculated, having failed to predict the outcome of his generosity, kept him from ever telling them that they had not turned out as he hoped.
Jacob, who died ten years later, felt no such constraints.
Jacob made sure his last will and testament, written sometime in the spring of 1939, was a masterpiece of acidic pointedness, a document that would bring a laughing bon vivant up short.
For a prodigal son could not—even from across an ocean—read the document that arrived in late August 1939 without a pang. “As each of my sons,” the abandoned father writes, “is prosperous in his own right, I, Jacob M. Levy, bequeath to my son Paul the sum of one hundred dollars. And to my son Roosevelt Theodore, I bequeath the sum of one hundred dollars.” The third son, reading the will, could only feel worse for being singled out: “And to my eldest son, Edward Samson, as he is prosperous in his own right” (again that phrase) “I bequeath the sum of ten dollars and my Morrocan Bound Bible.”