Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  North Gowanus is an old, sleepy, shabby neighborhood that lies between the head of the Gowanus Canal and the Borough Hall shopping district. There are factories in it, and coal tipples and junk yards, but it is primarily residential, and red-brick tenements and brownstone apartment houses are most numerous. The Caughnawagas all live within ten blocks of each other, in an area bounded by Court Street on the west, Schermerhorn Street on the north, Fourth Avenue on the east, and Warren Street on the south. They live in the best houses on the best blocks. As a rule, Caughnawaga women are good housekeepers and keep their apartments Dutch-clean. Most of them decorate a mantel or a wall with heirlooms brought down from the reservation – a drum, a set of rattles, a mask, a cradleboard. Otherwise, their apartments look much the same as those of their white neighbors. A typical family group consists of husband and wife and a couple of children and a female relative or two. After they get through school on the reservation, many Caughnawaga girls come down to North Gowanus and work in factories. Some work for the Fred Goat Company, a metal-stamping factory in the neighborhood, and some work for the Gem Safety Razor Corporation, whose factory is within walking distance. Quite a few of these girls have married whites; several have broken all ties with the band and the reservation. In the last ten years, Caughnawaga girls have married Filipinos, Germans, Italians, Jews, Norwegians, and Puerto Ricans. Many North Gowanus families often have relatives visiting them for long periods; when there is a new baby in a family, a grandmother or an aunt almost always comes down from the reservation and helps out. Caughnawagas are allowed to cross the border freely. However, each is required to carry a card, to which a photograph is attached, certifying that he or she is a member of the band. These cards are issued by the Indian Affairs Branch; the Caughnawagas refer to them as ‘passports.’ More than half of the North Gowanus housewives spend their spare time making souvenirs. They make a lot of them. They specialize in dolls, handbags, and belts, which they ornament with colored beads, using variations of ancient Iroquois designs such as the sky dome, the night sun, the day sun, the fern head, the ever-growing tree, the world turtle, and the council fire. Every fall, a few of the most Indian-looking of the men take vacations from structural steel for a month or so and go out with automobile loads of these souvenirs and sell them on the midways of state, county, and community fairs in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The men wear buckskins and feathers on these trips and sleep in canvas tepees pitched on fairgrounds. Occasionally, on midways, to attract attention, they let out self-conscious wahoos and do fragments of the Duel Dance, the Dove Dance, the Falseface Dance, and other old half-forgotten Mohawk dances. The women obtain the raw materials for souvenirs from the Plume Trading & Sales Company, at 155 Lexington Avenue, in Manhattan, a concern that sells beads, deerskin, imitation eagle feathers, and similar merchandise to Indian handicraftsmen all over the United States and Canada. There are approximately fifty children of school age in the colony. Two-thirds go to Public School 47, on Pacific Street, and the others go to parochial schools – St Paul’s, St Agnes’s, and St Charles Borromeo’s. Caughnawaga children read comic books, listen to the radio while doing their homework, sit twice through double features, and play stick ball in vacant lots the same as the other children in the neighborhood; teachers say that they differ from the others mainly in that they are more reserved and polite. They have unusual manual dexterity; by the age of three, most of them are able to tie their shoelaces. The adult Caughnawagas are multilingual; all speak Mohawk, all speak English, and all speak or understand at least a little French. In homes where both parents are Caughnawagas, Mohawk is spoken almost exclusively, and the children pick it up. In homes where the mother is non-Indian and the father is away a good deal, a situation that is becoming more and more frequent, the children sometimes fail to learn the language, and this causes much sadness.

  The Caughnawagas are churchgoers. The majority of the Catholics go to St Paul’s Church, at Court and Congress streets, and the majority of the Protestants go to Cuyler Presbyterian Church, on Pacific Street. Dr David Munroe Cory, the pastor at Cuyler, is a man of incongruous interests. He is an amateur wrestler; he is vice-president of the Iceberg Athletic Club, a group that swims in the ocean at Coney Island throughout the winter; he once ran for Borough President of Brooklyn on the Socialist ticket; he is an authority on Faustus Socinus, the sixteenth-century Italian religious thinker; he studies languages for pleasure and knows eight, among them Hebrew, Greek, and Gaelic. A few Caughnawagas started turning up at Cuyler Church in the middle thirties, and Dr Cory decided to learn Mohawk and see if he could attract more of them. He has not achieved fluency in Mohawk, but Caughnawagas say that he speaks it better than other white men, mostly anthropologists and priests, who have studied it. He holds a complete service in Mohawk the first Sunday evening in each month, after the English service, and twenty or thirty Caughnawagas usually attend. Twenty-five have joined the church. Michael Diabo, a retired riveter, was recently elected a deacon. Steven M. Schmidt, an Austrian-American who is married to Mrs Josephine Skye Schmidt, a Caughnawaga woman, is an elder. Mr Schmidt works in the compensation-claim department of an insurance company. Under Dr Cory’s guidance, two Caughnawaga women, Mrs Schmidt and Mrs Margaret Lahache, translated a group of hymns into Mohawk and compiled a hymnal, The Caughnawaga Hymnal, which is used in Cuyler and in the Protestant church on the reservation. Dr Cory himself translated the Gospel According to Luke into Mohawk. Dr Cory is quiet and serious, his sermons are free of cant, he has an intuitive understanding of Indian conversational taboos, and he is the only white person who is liked and trusted by the whole colony. Caughnawagas who are not members of his congregation, even some Catholics and longhouse people, go to him for advice.

  Occasionally, in a saloon or at a wedding or a wake, Caughnawagas become vivacious and talkative. Ordinarily, however, they are rather dour and don’t talk much. There is only one person in the North Gowanus colony who has a reputation for garrulity. He is a man of fifty-four whose white name is Orvis Diabo and whose Indian name is O-ron-ia-ke-te, or He Carries the Sky. Mr Diabo is squat and barrel-chested. He has small, sharp eyes and a round, swarthy, double-chinned, piratical face. Unlike most other Caughnawagas, he does not deny or even minimize his white blood. ‘My mother was half Scotch and half Indian,’ he says. ‘My grandmother on my father’s side was Scotch-Irish. Somewhere along the line, I forget just where, some French immigrant and some full Irish crept in. If you were to take my blood and strain it, God only knows what you’d find.’ He was born a Catholic; in young manhood, he became a Presbyterian; he now thinks of himself as ‘a kind of a free-thinker.’ Mr Diabo started working in riveting gangs when he was nineteen and quit a year and a half ago. He had to quit because of crippling attacks of arthritis. He was a heater and worked on bridges and buildings in seventeen states. ‘I heated a million rivets,’ he says. ‘When they talk about the men that built this country, one of the men they mean is me.’ Mr Diabo owns a house and thirty-three acres of farmland on the reservation. He inherited the farmland and rents it to a French Canadian. Soon after he quit work, his wife, who had lived in North Gowanus off and on for almost twenty years but had never liked it, went back to the reservation. She tried to get him to go along, but he decided to stay on awhile and rented a room in the apartment of a cousin. ‘I enjoy New York,’ he says. ‘The people are as high-strung as rats and the air is too gritty, but I enjoy it.’ Mr Diabo reads a lot. Some years ago, in a Western magazine, he came across an advertisement of the Haldeman-Julius Company, a mail-order publishing house in Girard, Kansas, that puts out over eighteen hundred paperbound books, most of them dealing with religion, health, sex, history, or popular science. They are called Little Blue Books and cost a dime apiece. ‘I sent away for a dollar’s worth of Little Blue Books,’ Mr Diabo says, ‘and they opened my eyes to what an ignorant man I was. Ignorant and superstitious. Didn’t know beans from back up. Since then, I’ve become a great reader. I’ve read dozens u
pon dozens of Little Blue Books, and I’ve improved my mind to the extent that I’m far beyond most of the people I associate with. When you come right down to it, I’m an educated man.’ Mr Diabo has five favorite Little Blue Books – Absurdities of the Bible, by Clarence Darrow; Seven Infidel U.S. Presidents, by Joseph McCabe; Queer Facts about Lost Civilizations, by Charles J. Finger; Why I Do Not Fear Death, by E. Haldeman-Julius; and Is Our Civilization Over-Sexed?, by Theodore Dreiser. He carries them around in his pockets and reads them over and over. Mr Diabo stays in bed until noon. Then, using a cane, he hobbles over to a neighborhood saloon, the Nevins Bar & Grill, at 75 Nevins Street, and sits in a booth. If there is someone around who will sit still and listen, he talks. If not, he reads a Little Blue Book. The Nevins is the social center of the Caughnawaga colony. The men in the gangs that work in the city customarily stop there for an hour or so on the way home. On weekend nights, they go there with their wives and drink Montreal ale and look at the television. When gangs come in from out-of-town jobs, they go on sprees there. When a Caughnawaga high-steel man is killed on the job, a collection is taken up in the Nevins for the immediate expenses of his family; these collections rarely run less than two hundred dollars; pasted on the bar mirror are several notes of thanks from widows. The Nevins is small and snug and plain and old. It is one of the oldest saloons in Brooklyn. It was opened in 1888, when North Gowanus was an Irishtown, and it was originally called Connelly’s Abbey. Irish customers still call it the Abbey. Its present owners are Artie Rose and Bunny Davis. Davis is married to a Caughnawaga girl, the former Mavis Rice.

  One afternoon a while back, I sat down with Mr Diabo in his booth in the Nevins. He almost always drinks ale. This day he was drinking gin.

  ‘I feel very low in my mind,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go back to the reservation. I’ve run out of excuses and I can’t put it off much longer. I got a letter from my wife today and she’s disgusted with me. “I’m sick and tired of begging you to come home,” she said. “You can sit in Brooklyn until your tail takes root.” The trouble is, I don’t want to go. That is, I do and I don’t. I’ll try to explain what I mean. An Indian high-steel man, when he first leaves the reservation to work in the States, the homesickness just about kills him. The first few years, he goes back as often as he can. Every time he finishes a job, unless he’s thousands of miles away, he goes back. If he’s working in New York, he drives up weekends, and it’s a twelve-hour drive. After a while, he gets married and brings his wife down and starts a family, and he doesn’t go back so often. Oh, he most likely takes the wife and children up for the summer, but he doesn’t stay with them. After three or four days, the reservation gets on his nerves and he highballs it back to the States. He gets used to the States. The years go by. He gets to be my age, maybe a little older, maybe a little younger, and one fine morning he comes to the conclusion he’s a little too damned stiff in the joints to be walking a naked beam five hundred feet up in the air. Either that, or some foreman notices he hasn’t got a sure step any longer and takes him aside and tells him a few home truths. He gives up high-steel work and he packs his belongings and he takes his money out of the bank or the postal savings, what little he’s been able to squirrel away, and he goes on back to the reservation for good. And it’s hard on him. He’s used to danger, and reservation life is very slow; the biggest thing that ever happens is a funeral. He’s used to jumping around from job to job, and reservation life boxes him in. He’s used to having a drink, and it’s against the law to traffic in liquor on the reservation; he has to buy a bottle in some French-Canadian town across the river and smuggle it in like a high-school boy, and that annoys the hell out of him.

  ‘There’s not much he can do to occupy the time. He can sit on the highway and watch the cars go by, or he can sit on the riverbank and fish for eels and watch the boats go by, or he can weed the garden, or he can go to church, or he can congregate in the grocery stores with the other old retired high-steel men and play cards and talk. That is, if he can stand it. You’d think those old men would talk about the cities they worked in, the sprees they went on, the girls that follow construction all over the country that they knew, the skyscrapers and bridges they put up – only they don’t. After they been sitting around the reservation five years, six years, seven years, they seem to turn against their high-steel days. Some of them, they get to be as Indian as all hell; they won’t even speak English any more; they make out they can’t understand it. And some of them, they get to be soreheads, the kind of old men that can chew nails and spit rust. When they do talk, they talk gloomy. They like to talk about family fights. There’s families on the reservation that got on the outs with each other generations ago and they’re still on the outs; maybe it started with a land dispute, maybe it started with a mixed-marriage dispute, maybe it started when some woman accused another woman of meeting her husband in the bushes in the graveyard. Even down here in Brooklyn, there’s certain Indians that won’t work in gangs with certain other Indians because of bad blood between their families; their wives, when they meet on Atlantic Avenue, they look right through each other. The old men like to bring up such matters and refresh their recollections on some of the details. Also, they like to talk about religion. A miraculous cure they heard about, something the priest said – they’ll harp on it for weeks. They’re all amateur priests, or preachers. They’ve all got some religious notion lurking around in their minds.

  ‘And they like to talk about reservation matters. The last time I was home, I sat down with the bunch in a store and I tried to tell them about something I’d been studying up on that interested me very much – Mongolian spots. They’re dark-purple spots that occur on the skin on the backs of Japanese and other Mongolians. Every now and then, a full-blood American Indian is born with them. The old men didn’t want to hear about Mongolian spots. They were too busy discussing the matter of street names for Caughnawaga village. The electric-light company that supplies the village had been trying and trying to get the Indians to name the streets and lanes. The meter-readers are always getting balled up, and the company had offered to put up street signs and house numbers free of charge. The old men didn’t want street names; they were raising holy hell about it. It wouldn’t be Indian. And they were discussing the pros and cons of a waterworks system. They’re eternally discussing that. Some want a waterworks, but the majority don’t. The majority of them, they’d a whole lot rather get behind a poor old horse that his next step might be his last and cart their water up from the river by the barrel. It’s more Indian. Sometimes, the way an Indian reasons, there’s no rhyme or reason to it. Electric lights are all right and the biggest second-hand car they can find, and radios that the only time they turn them off is when they’re changing the tubes, and seventy-five-dollar baby carriages, and four-hundred-dollar coffins, but street names and tap water – oh, Jesus, no! That’s going entirely too damned far.

  ‘On the other hand, there’s things I look forward to. I look forward to eating real Indian grub again. Such as o-nen-sto, or corn soup. That’s the Mohawk national dish. Some of the women make it down here in Brooklyn, but they use Quaker corn meal. The good old women up on the reservation, they make it the hard way, the way the Mohawks were making it five hundred years ago. They shell some corn, and they put it in a pot with a handful of maple ashes and boil it. The lye in the ashes skins the hulls off the kernels, and the kernels swell up into big fat pearls. Then they wash off the lye. Then they put in some red kidney beans. Then they put in a pig’s head; in the old days, it was a bear’s head. Then they cook it until it’s as thick as mud. And when it’s cooking, it smells so good. If you were breathing your last, if you had the rattle in your throat, and the wind blew you a faint suggestion of a smell of it, you’d rise and walk. And I look forward to eating some Indian bread that’s made with the same kind of corn. Down here, the women always use Quaker meal. Indian bread is boiled, and it’s shaped like a hamburger, and it’s got kidney beans sprinkled through it.
On the reservation, according to an old-time custom, we have steak for breakfast every Sunday morning, whether we can afford it or not, and we pour the steak gravy on the Indian bread.

  ‘And another thing I look forward to, if I can manage it – I want to attend a longhouse festival. If I have to join to do so, I’ll join. One night, the last time I was home, the longhousers were having a festival. I decided I’d go up to the Catholic graveyard that’s right below the longhouse and hide in the bushes and listen to the music. So I snuck up there and waded through the thistles and the twitch grass and the Queen Anne’s lace, and I sat down on a flat stone on the grave of an uncle of mine, Miles Diabo, who was a warwhooper with the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show and died with the pneumonia in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1916. Uncle Miles was one of the last of the Caughnawaga circus Indians. My mother is in that graveyard, and my father, old Nazareth Diabo that I hardly even knew. They called him Nazzry. He was a pioneer high-steel Indian. He was away from home the majority of the time, and he was killed in the disaster – when the Quebec Bridge went down. There’s hundreds of high-steel men buried in there. The ones that were killed on the job, they don’t have stones; their graves are marked with lengths of steel girders made into crosses. There’s a forest of girder crosses in there. So I was sitting on Uncle Miles’s stone, thinking of the way things go in life, and suddenly the people in the longhouse began to sing and dance and drum on their drums. They were singing Mohawk chants that came down from the old, old red-Indian times. I could hear men’s voices and women’s voices and children’s voices. The Mohawk language, when it’s sung, it’s beautiful to hear. Oh, it takes your breath away. A feeling ran through me that made me tremble; I had to take a deep breath to quiet my heart, it was beating so fast. I felt very sad; at the same time, I felt very peaceful. I thought I was all alone in the graveyard, and then who loomed up out of the dark and sat down beside me but an old high-steel man I had been talking with in a store that afternoon, one of the soreheads, an old man that fights every improvement that’s suggested on the reservation, whatever it is, on the grounds it isn’t Indian – this isn’t Indian, that isn’t Indian. So he said to me, “You’re not alone up here. Look over there.” I looked where he pointed, and I saw a white shirt in among the bushes. And he said, “Look over there,” and I saw a cigarette gleaming in the dark. “The bushes are full of Catholics and Protestants,” he said. “Every night there’s a longhouse festival, they creep up here and listen to the singing. It draws them like flies.” So I said, “The longhouse music is beautiful to hear, isn’t it?” And he remarked it ought to be, it was the old Indian music. So I said the longhouse religion appealed to me. “One of these days,” I said, “I might possibly join.” I asked him how he felt about it. He said he was a Catholic and it was out of the question. “If I was to join the longhouse,” he said, “I’d be excommunicated, and I couldn’t be buried in holy ground, and I’d burn in Hell.” I said to him, “Hell isn’t Indian.” It was the wrong thing to say. He didn’t reply to me. He sat there awhile – I guess he was thinking it over – and then he got up and walked away.’