by Mary Burns
“Think of what they might have done to her!” Ruth’s eyes could a popped right out. I never said a word about what I knew, but if Eveline’d been there she would a laughed that laugh of hers and cocked her head to the side and said if we wanted the real dope, it was no wonder the paper didn’t want to hear what she had to say, for they wouldn’t a wanted to print the juicy details. But Eveline was not there, and I didn’t tell what I knew because Mr. Jordan and Eveline herself had sworn me to secrecy. Our nervous mood caused both Ruth and me to wonder if she’d ever be back again.
Cooler there where we sat on the marble stairs across from the wonderful picture made of all the little tiles, me concentrating on the raised hand of Père Marquette blessing the near-naked Indians stepping out of their boat, their canoe. A paltry breeze snuck up from the whirly doors to where we perched, since no one was going up or coming down.
“They say the whole city’s going to get mixed up in it. Are you frightened, Maeve?”
“I am so, but this mornin’, on my way here, with the rioters not even in bed yet, I didn’t know until I saw the paper and I wasn’t scared at all. I was thinkin’ of my beau...”
I needed to tell someone, make it actual. Desmond. Not tell all but let on this’d begun it for me, the life I hoped to have, as didn’t we all? Ruth loved stories of romance and she would not tease me as Eveline might a, making me confess more than I intended.
“A new fella, then, Maeve. Oh,” said she, “I am happy for you, and it was not so long, too long, after your Patrick. I am happy for you, Maeve,” she repeated and me like accepting her congratulations, same as would come my way once I made the announcement at Bridey’s.
“It’s Desmond,” said I. “We had a grand time of it yesterday by the lake and all. Would never guess trouble boilin’ up so close.”
“Is he handsome?”
“Oh, he is,” said me. “Wonderful soft thick eyebrows over eyes the green of moss, and brown hair with the wave in it, and tall.” It surprised me, the poetry spilled out so natural. Oh I missed him.
“To you any man would look tall.”
“It’s true, but he’s taller than Packy, as tall, sure, as Mr. R, and he likes his baseball, and…”
“So, it’s serious, is it?”
“I think he’s the one. I think I’ll have news for y’es all before long.”
“Then we might both be leaving the Magic. I’ll be at the Normal College and you’ll be setting up a home with your man.”
I smiled with the happiness of the telling confirmed it, and didn’t I feel satisfied, like something’d been accomplished. All the letters answered, all the clothes clean and mended, all the floors scrubbed and the water thrown on the lane, all the taties forked off the plate and gravy wiped up with the heel of the loaf. Prayers said. Bed covers torn back. A good first step into our future because what we’d done proved my Desmond wanted me. We would walk forward together like we’d marched hand and hand across the browning grass of the park bright with picnic blankets and children dressed in their summer clothes.
Was it that tempted them, the good people? They are not partial to smugness, nor even satisfaction seems like, for didn’t I pay for it when the morning Trib came out on Tuesday and there in the list of names of them wounded in the melee, D. Malloy. D. Malloy? D. Malloy! Could a been Donnie, could a been Declan, could a been Douglas, Daniel, David, Dennis, but the sick in my stomach when I saw that name, it had to be him, Desmond, and then didn’t the world and all crash.
§
That night, though, the Monday, I didn’t have the news, nor know much of anything except the fear went round the house at Bridey’s, and all of it aimed toward the south of us, where most of the tens of thousands of Negroes’d come up from the south’d settled and spread out from there to neighborhoods more white and trying to stay white, as Mr. Jordan’d reminded me. Near enough, the riots could spread to West Monroe. And then wouldn’t we be hiding in our beds? Addled John, sensing the fear, started to bawl and Bridey scowled at us and told him, “There, there, John, there is nothin’ to worry about,” and wouldn’t he like another spoon of potatoes?—because food always quieted him.
Harry drove his truck by to see we were all right, and told of gangs lying in wait for the niggers—he called them niggers then and until the day he died, even when the papers later said that kind of name calling was part of all made the trouble—for those people to show up for their jobs at the Yards, places’d opened for them on account of all the men went to war. But those men, many of them, had come back from war and deserved to have their jobs back. The colored workers were only servants of big money, whether they knew it or not, Harry said. Margaret walked him down the fire escape, so called, from Bridey’s place.
Me? I never knew fear could turn to hatefulness in such a flash, me with my dreaming of Desmond Malloy and all we’d done, he’d done to me, and the feel of his lips so soft, and the taste of lake water on them, didn’t seem poisoned at all, for everything said about the lake. Never could think in a straight line, but the temper of the conversation pulled me back to it.
When she came up from the street again—my sister who’d held the chocolate-skinned babies in her arms same as me and laughed at the comical expressions in their saucer eyes those years we spent at the mission in Florida—Margaret joined in with the rest. Bridey, her other boarders, Lucille and Frances, and Bridey’s old woman relative from somewhere, not Ireland. Mrs. Smith, who said less than me, and shared Bridey’s table and ate every scrap, Bridey complained, though John’s the one needed it. Them from Bridey’s and the two fellas from the floor below. Everyone talking mean, even Mrs. Smith, and egging each other on in a spirit made them into a body big enough to stand up to any threat. You could feel it. There, perched on the stair landings at the back, where we tended to gather, Margaret noticed my quietness, and challenged me. “Don’t you think so, Maeve?”
“It’s too hot to think and there’s too much goin’ on out there. It makes a body dizzy.”
“But what if your fella and you marry, and want a place of your own, same as me and Harry. What will you find, with all them movin’ in, takin’ over?”
“It’s a big city, sure.”
“Be careful out there, though. They’re pullin’ ’em off the cars, and well they should, but they can’t pull all of ’em off, and you got to think this will give ’em the excuse they need to go after white girls. They’re always after the white girls, you must a heard. Just months ago, maybe not even that, some upstandin’ married woman was dragged into an alley on the South Side. Didn’t you see the story? Lucky her screams saved her.”
One of the young men from the second floor said this, nodding, as if he knew it all, and maybe entertaining himself with pictures of a colored man ravishing a white woman. You saw crude cartoons like that on handbills plastered up on fences in some corners. A memory of Eveline sailed through my mind and caused me to shiver in its wake. But she’d never looked scared.
“We don’t know there’ll be cars tomorrow.”
True, what Lucille reminded us of, and I did not have my inside knowledge then, not having seen my man on the coming-home car, not knowing he lay in a hospital where he should not have been taken, feelings running as they were.
We washed our clothes and hung them to dry, Margaret and me, her continuing her prattle about what would happen, and how would it turn out, and how would we all feel after. With her chatter and her expectations, she would fit in well with the other wives in the neighborhood where she and Harry planned to stay. He had his eye on the upper floor of a two flat, but they would have to wait till all the strikes were settled. She blamed that on the coloreds, too, Margaret did, even then parroting the man’d be her husband. But, in truth, wasn’t there always someone needed whatever they could get? Somebody from a place worse off than Chicago, in that summer when each new edition of the papers blared more complications to
a tangled mess destined maybe never to be unknotted?
COLORED PASSENGERS DRAGGED FROM CARS
THREE HUNDRED ARMED NEGROES GATHER
JANET’S BIER AWES CROWDS
JACK DEMPSEY IN CITY
The last light fell through the window onto my Daily News. Mayor Thompson’d been out West, but he was back, praise be.
MAYOR HOME IN HAPPY MOOD
HOPES RACE RIOTS WILL CEASE
AND CAR WAGE DISPUTE BE SOLVED
Tuesday, July 29, 1919
STRIKE IS ON; CARS STOP!
There it was, the men’d gone out, as if we needed the newsies to tell us what the silence on the tracks screamed louder. But, just as prominent, as if them two stories were in a race to make it first to the top of the Herald-Examiner and the Trib…
20 SLAIN IN RACE RIOT
And, in smaller print below
List of Slain in Day’s Rioting
Partial list of wounded, too, starting with the policeman injured, him from the Cottage Grove station, 155 whites, 151 black hurt. Later, it would turn out they weren’t so evenly distributed, the injuries, between dark and light—more colored than whites wounded. Not that color concerned me much then as my eyes raced down the list of names, my heart speeding as if knowing I was going to see.
D. Malloy, Bridgeport, head injuries, broken leg, taken to Provident Hospital.
Yes, it could a been Donnie, or Declan, or Diarmid, or some other name began with D, but D. Malloy, and Bridgeport, too? It had to be my man, and didn’t I feel the beginnings of the same fear ran through the crowd last night on Bridey’s back stairs and turned toward hatred? In another part of my mind, though, I was just thirteen and homesick and holding them babies lost their mothers somehow like I’d lost mine—squeezing them out of guilt, maybe, because while they’d been put at the mission because their mammies abandoned them or died, or been shamed into giving them up, hadn’t I gone willfully away, dragging my sister with me, at that?
Yes, but that day in Chicago was a day different from when I played with the little ones in the thin Florida dirt outside the mission and pried the bugs out of their fingers, and wiped their faces and kissed them and opened my nightdress to bring that one screaming to my breast, which wasn’t much of a breast then, but it comforted him, it did. Wasn’t that worth every bit of the scolding, the terrible beating Sister Mary Theresa gave me with a switch, rose welts on my chest, when she came upon us and pulled him away hollering?
Because of them, because of all the people we’d come across in America, in every shade skin could be, I’d lost the fear I had of coloreds when first I saw one on the Mauretania. Even the proud ones, like that guard at The Fair, looking me over, like I was a thief. No cause for him to think himself better than me, that one. But…what to think, knowing what I’d learned from the papers? For D. Malloy had to be Desmond. He lived in Bridgeport, must be him, and there he lay in Provident Hospital, somewhere I couldn’t get to, not with the cars out. Couldn’t sit by his bedside to comfort him. And what terrible thing’d put him there?
It being Tuesday, I was supposed to be at work, but didn’t I have to set out on foot with all the rest of Chicago? We walked in a mob over the river bridges into the Loop, the weather being the only thing to be thankful for, cooler so. The talk rising around me, the anger, impatience, people complaining, and some of ’em—me—walking her thoughts out. Thoughts mostly of Desmond. Head injury? How bad they didn’t say.
But also the coloreds, the car men, and then a thought of poor Janet rushing in and what would happen to Fitzgerald? Would they put him to death at Joliet? Everyone was calling for it, most of us strangers to each other, all of us worried, and me plotting. How long could the cars stay out?
Would my man even be safe at Provident, it being the colored hospital? And him already the victim of some hard Negro or he wouldn’t a been there in the first place. Unless it’d been him who went too far, maybe threw somebody off his car, bullying, as he had made the young man give up his seat for me. But that was for me. Had he gone too far with someone had more nerve than that fella slunk off when Desmond told him to? How far would it be to walk to Provident? No matter, I could do it. We’d walked, half run, actually, Margaret and me, to the train station in St. Augustine and did so before day broke. I would get myself to Provident Hospital, too, but where was it exactly?
My feet were after burning from the pinch of my boots, and the toe rubbed raw by sand’d collected in my stocking on the Sunday. I’d considered the selection there might be at Hull House on bundle day, yet the shame of visiting the settlement house when both Margaret and me had jobs stopped me. I was not as bad off as I might be.
Pound, pound, over the cobblestones, stepping around the horse droppings, the trash gathered alongside the streets, the YWCA on the West Side, where ladies like that Clare and Elizabeth I’d met at Thompson’s might be working in an office. Past Thomas Elevator, small factories, corner stores, Italian, Greek, Jew, and, with little enough in it, my stomach after turning from the smells came from their open doors. The green spaces, some of them with a bench and a water fountain called themselves parks, other lots empty, save for grass too long and too yellow and the remains of things tossed there, but even at those places people stopped for a rest. Never a shortage of people. There clopped by a produce wagon, then the blurt of a motorcycle, its sidecar filled.
I stuck to West Monroe, though a look over my left shoulder told me most were tramping Madison, same as if the streetcar still ran there. Habit, I suppose, and I had to laugh too—despite the troubles and me sick with worry for Desmond—at the enterprises immediately sprung up along the route. People selling cold drinks, and more papers, another edition, but the news no better. A little to the south I could see St. Pat’s, the steeple anyway, but temptation never caused me to veer off and say a prayer for Desmond or anyone else. My church going would come to an end altogether before long, though I did then, and still do, think fondly of them heavenly windows, the brilliant light pouring in and the smell of the wax on the wood pews. A marvelous place to pray, sure, but to a God didn’t care, seemed.
Soon the grand post office and Union Station and then the bridge and it recalling Ennis, same as himself did with his eyebrows being reminders of the old friary. I thought of how I used to stand on the Bindon bridge, scaring myself by imagining the running Fergus the backs of brown animals herded there by some giant figure our mammy would call upon to frighten us into behaving. With my feet moving automatic by then and stamping me deeper into my thoughts, I never stopped to stare down at the river in Chicago that day. Head injury, could be bad. How soon could I get to Provident Hospital? And what could I do for him there but pat his hand and assure him I loved him? Was this to be my fate? Finding a man, imagining a future, only to have the fella knocked down by illness or injury, and none of it the fault of the man himself, but only circumstance, that queer combination of events comes from whose hand? If God’s, sure a meddling god, worse than the good people, or maybe ’twas them punishing me for the lying and thieving I’d done. But how else could we have got to where we needed to go better ourselves and our lives and ease the burden from our poor parents?
§
The answer didn’t come like magic, but not much work got done at the almost empty office of The Chicago Magic Company, neither. No Billy, still no Florence. Eveline, of course, gone to her cousin’s. Mr. R himself missing for half the day left me free to search the directory for the location of Provident Hospital. It would be a long walk and not a safe one, sure, not for someone skin light as mine in a neighborhood belonged to all those people at the heart of the trouble. Oh, what to do? But safe not even around us in the Loop when a colored man could be attacked and shot on his way home from work, something I learned when I took the elevator down and stepped outside and saw the story in another paper, all the papers plastered up to the board at the corner and me not the only one crowding
in to read.
NEGRO FIGHTS FUTILELY
AGAINST CROWD IN LOOP
SHOT WHEN HE STOPS
TO BATTLE WHITES SECOND TIME
Happened two blocks from where I stood with the others, and me having to angle in from the side, since there were few shoulders low enough for me to see above. Two blocks away only, the poor fella’d run from the mob chasing him. And he’d not been the only one hounded, though he was the only one killed.
One hundred whites, led by five sailors, marched through the Loop early this morning in search of Negro employees. The mob was dispersed by a squad of policemen from the central station, but there was no violence. A Negro employed at Weeghman’s restaurant on Madison, near Dearborn, was driven into the kitchen. He escaped by jumping through a window and running down the alley. Later the mob chased a Negro busboy into a restaurant in the McVickers building. He took refuge in an ice box.
Oh, and the oddness of it having started on the Sunday Desmond and I lazed at the beach, me lost in the smile, them nice teeth, the beauty of the lake shining behind him. Come on, Maeve… In my dream I stepped right on top of the water and never broke through and we walked right across it to somewhere such misery’d never visited.
Provident, though, the Negro hospital? Why had they put him there?
Back on the ninth floor, still no Mr. R, only Ruth at the back and her using the occasion to write a letter to her brother not home yet from the hospital where he’d been put to recover from whatever got him during the war. Ruth never identified it, his malady. We couldn’t let the front stand empty so, door open, not knowing if Mr. R’d come back soon, or at all. I turned the key locked it, in case any murdering types had in mind the sacking of the Marquette Building, not that Clyde would let them pass, no. Clyde stood solid at his post no matter all the goin’s-on outside the building.