by Mary Burns
I got into bed alongside my sister and let her hug the side of me, stifling as it was in that upstairs room. I was that scared and that lonesome then, not knowing what I’d find on the morrow.
Wednesday, July 30, 1919
Maybe I did sleep for a spell but, if so, it could a been only for a minute before the sun came up on the Wednesday, when I planned to make my way half across the city to see for myself if it was indeed my man Desmond struck down.
Margaret, seeing my resolve, if not knowing its inspiration, inspected my feet again. Puny to have carried me all the places they had, with a lump the size of my thumb on the right one—a bunion I’d developed soon after we started wearing city shoes, Margaret and me, starting with them never fit properly because we’d hauled them out of a bag of mission donations. The toes though—the little fellow at the end, and the longer one in the middle, on the left foot—oh, weren’t they rosy, and the heel of my right foot, skin hanging white at the edge of a crater even redder, and wet as the inside of a mouth. The little fellow on the right not red so much, but yellow where a corn spread around its white eye at the center.
“Maeve, you can’t go, not like this. You can’t. Sure you’d be crucifyin’ yourself.”
“I have to, Megs.”
Them digits not damaged, crooked, and the whole lot better hid in stockings. She insisted on bandaging the worst with gauze and the tape she kept with her sewing. This would make the shoes even tighter, but she had the idea of cutting open a seam.
“Spoil a good shoe when the comin’ in money is goin’ to shrink to half if your shop stays out long? I’ll keep the laces loose and there are people after offerin’ rides in cars. Just smile if you want a ride. The papers said it yesterday.”
“Well, then...”
Little Margaret, her fair hair tangled again after the restless sleep and her shirtwaist wrinkled and her eyes squinty because of her needing specs, them she got the next year. Offered me her hat, because any walks she’d be taking would be short compared to what I faced, and she didn’t even know how far I planned to go. Her picture hat with its edge broad enough to screen me, and smelling of Margaret’s head and decorated in a lovely way by herself, who was always searching for feathers and bits of ribbon and silk flowers to change the look of it. Roses of pink and yellow wound all round by a satin ribbon she’d added just that week, the rim straightened—as I’d known she would manage to do after it got bent in the crowd the day the Wingfoot Express went down.
Seemed a hundred years ago I stood with the crowd on Jackson Boulevard watching the tragedy unfold. Thirteen killed that day. Nearly twenty in the riot so far. Little Janet Wilkinson. Then a judge jumped to his death. If the summer continued along the same route, there’d be more than the soldiers’d been killed and those came home to die. As many dead as living in the city, their corpses piled up and waiting for graves, and it being as sweltry as it was, they’d add to the stink of the Yards and the blazes offending our noses.
I stepped out that morning into streets lively with folks already, all of us thinking to get an advantage, be one of them found room in the back of a truck or a wagon for a few coins. The newsies long out by then. The little wop boy peddled the Trib, his curly hair already damp under his cap, voice ringing above the boy opposite.
RIOTS SPREAD, THEN WANE!
DOWNSTATE TROOPS CALLED TO AID CHICAGO!
COOL HEADED MEN ASK NEW STRIKE VOTE!
RIOTERS IGNORE OVERSEAS
NEGRO WOUND STRIPES!
LOOP EMPTIED OF 250,000 IN RECORD SPEED!
Some of them miniature businessmen read the headlines straight out, but not the imaginative Italian child seemed to own the stop where I would board the car on a normal day. He’d yell something make you curious so’s you had to buy a paper and he’d thrust one in your hand and grab another from his stack to tempt the next customer. Couldn’t a been ten years of age, though maybe it was his size made him seem so.
Some hopeful passengers hung around, wistfully looking up and down the track, but no car clattered toward us. Men without their car men’s uniforms carried signs asking for fair pay for their work—and didn’t we all want that—but in spite of my feet I didn’t think hard thoughts about the fellas out on strike, since mine would be one of them got the benefit of the pay, and wouldn’t that mean a more swell life for us both.
If he wasn’t too bad, that is. If the head injury didn’t mean he’d lost his wits, the broken leg cripple him so he had to give up the job altogether. It crossed my mind to tap one of them sign carriers on the shoulder and ask if he’d heard any news of poor Desmond Malloy, the popular conductor usually worked this line. I stood for a minute staring at the older man there, seemed a serious sort, him frowning under his bowler hat as if it was only him bearing the responsibility of all that’d happened.
Then a wagon halted and a man hollered, “Ten cents to the river!” Taking advantage, as people will. I was near enough to step on the box he put down and climb on with the crowd laughing about how the old days’d been better. You could always count on a horse and horses didn’t form unions, and every other such joke. Even I felt lighter, considering, watching a pickle truck pass us, its back open and people waving from it, the whole affair a holiday, in spite of all the grief, and it not long before the towers of downtown soared into view and people started clamoring to get off. Someone yelled, “The cars aren’t running but the El is.” We could see a train stretched out in the space between the buildings, then not. So moving, sure. People cheered, and a man hollered, “It’s a beautiful day in Chicago!”
Hah! He had to be forgetting all was plaguing the city. Yet the air felt cooler and the elevated cars ran south, where I had to go. Had me pondering. To ride the El and get there quicker, but face the mobs of rioters must be crowding the elevated like they’d crowded the streetcars? People pulled off, and what a fall it’d be from up there onto the road, where any order kept before had been lost in the throng of automobiles and hearses carrying the sick, and horses and buggies, and jitney cabs—some of them pulled by horses, too, others motorized—and trucks. No, I would trust my injured, but dependable, feet.
The driver aimed his nag towards the curb just by the post office. “Far’s I’m goin,” he announced.
Every corner in the Loop had its newsstand, but the downtown newsboys dressed like their gentlemen customers, in suits with waistcoats and ties, fedoras pushed down over their grimy necks, shouting the latest headlines or a version of them, near the truth.
CITY AT WAR!
5,000 TROOPS UNDER ARMS!
The usual rivers of people merged into a flood overflowed the sidewalk and mixed in with the motoring outfits on the road itself—laundry trucks, open cars, and them closed. A different, testy feel in the shadow of the office blocks. Cautious. Listening. A shot? Sun white as a peppermint lozenge, clouds definite above the lake, the haze sliding into clumps like dirty laundry gathered in piles. So much to look at I forgot my feet, or they were numb with all the wrapping and the tight fit, me walking till I hit Dearborn, where normally I’d a turned left and continued on to the lovely Marquette Building.
But Mr. R’d said maybe he’d keep the door closed. Who’d be there today, anyway? Billy worked only a few hours, so why risk himself? He’d never showed up yesterday and so probably not today, neither, whether or not he knew Mr. R’s plans. With Ruth in her downtown building, she could get to work easy. Could be sitting at her desk already, braiding and unbraiding her hair. If she’d got in the door. If Mr. R had meant what he said about magic being the most important thing and opened The Chicago Magic Company same as usual.
But none of us there to move the magic along to them needed it. None save Ruth. For what would she do if she didn’t go to work? Drink pot after pot of tea with the other single girls lived there in their small rooms and gathered in a parlor fitted out to look homey, but never managing to fool those missed ho
me. She’d write to her brother, no doubt, describing all went on that week. Or study something. But what could it be? All I’d ever seen her read was her “True Life Love Stories.” She claimed to have a scrapbook full of them at home.
Melancholy George, the artist, was ashamed of his shyness where danger came into it, didn’t have the stuff. Them two, same as yesterday, using the office to hide in their ways, like Mr. R’d hid in his bottle. I was glad Eveline’d got out of town for she would a stood up to anybody and hold them off with some smart remark. Given the tempers running hot, those against her choice of man would a been ready to put their fists behind their opinions that week.
Funny, the magic, all of it lying there in books, in cases, in Mr. R himself, yet him as if dead, that powerless. ’Tis the magician makes the magic, he’d said, and with Anna Eva somewhere I didn’t know, and all those others, the Blackstones, the Thurstons, the Oriental man did the card tricks nowhere to be found—all them wanting to avoid the troubles no doubt—it had to be me did whatever needed doing. And if a cape or a hat or a wand or a crystal ball could transform a calamity into a celebration, well, I had none of those with me and I would not stop into the Marquette and ask for the loan of them.
TROUBLE SPREADS TO WEST SIDE!
MAN RIDDLES NEGRO’S BODY WITH 16 BULLETS
COVERS IT WITH GASOLINE, AND SETS IT AFIRE!
I stepped over the horse droppings and straw, pages flown out of the newspapers, shopping bags empty, wrappers from candy. Over the steel rails, where we would see cars again before the end of the week, and from Dearborn proceeded one block east to State Street, which led me directly south into the troubles, even shooting.
§
500 WHITES STORM PALMER HOUSE!
NEGRO WAITER ESCAPES
The Palmer House itself? That grand place, and white men chasing a Negro worked there? Never mind South State, ’twas just as perilous there in the heart of the city, despite police standing guard at each corner.
The big stores opened, counting on their telephone lines for sales more than shoppers usually arrived on the streetcars. I glanced in the doorway of The Fair to see if the mulatto doorman’d had the courage to stand his post. There was no sign of him. Then came Mandel’s and The Boston Store, a soda shop, the Bijou Dream, where Margaret and me’d seen a show. More stores, cafés, hotels down the ladder of elegance from Potter Palmer’s place, sure, with signs out front declared the price for a bed. Then a mission, and further along, where the buildings rose to less lofty heights—squatting at the edge of the broad street—lots empty and scraggly with weeds and garbage and two children throwing a ball made you wonder if their mother knew all was transpiring around us.
Then the Fashion Theater, where we’d seen another show, not as fancy as the Bijou, but a place I remembered because there’d been a woman trying to present herself as the next Anna Eva, seemed. A kind of seer. A girl not much older than me, dressed swell, but hadn’t the wit to recover herself with something funny when she fumbled the answer to the question asked. She might a made a show of the mistake, tell the public something would trick us into believing she’d given that answer to purposely mislead us. But, no, she only let herself be saved by a man with a monkey and an organ, same as you saw on the street. Trying as she was to make magic, in the end the poor girl, for all her beauty, made nothing but a fool of herself, and the audience hard as audiences could be, threw not pennies, as people did when they liked a show, but crumpled up paper and even the burning butt ends of cigars.
TROUBLES CONTINUE
THROUGHOUT DAY AND NIGHT
HEAVY CASUALTIES!
Rooming house after rooming house, maybe one of them where Eveline lived, and stores sold liquor, cafés, peddlers on this route, too, ringing their bells, offering spuds and tomatoes, corn from farms on the edge of town. More vacant lots made me think of the gap left when you lose a tooth. But even here you found a newsie on a street corner, not every one, like in the Loop, but you could get your paper if you wanted it, or hear the news yelled out.
Beneath the corset, my skin’d gone wet as if I were in the bath, and not just because of the effort of walking those many blocks, or even the heat, because the temperature did not rise so high that day. My hair also damp beneath the band of Margaret’s hat and my stomach folding over on itself and roaring, though I had a chunk of bread in my pocketbook and a bit of cheese would go greasy if I left it. The color of the people began to shift in a noticeable manner. More of the storeowners peering out their shuttered shop doors, those staring out the windows of the three-flats, and the rooming houses, too—not all, but many—dark skinned.
Chicago was bigger than Margaret and me’d experienced. We’d been to some parts, and they became the city we knew, the Loop most common, and our neighborhood on the Near West Side. South of the Loop we knew only as the place to ride through on our way to White City and Prairie Avenue. White City, the amusement park, was the furthest south we ever went. Prairie Avenue was closer, where the grand mansions stood. I veered off State, over to Prairie because I’d walked that street plenty of times, first when we arrived and Margaret was looking for a job, then later, to meet her at the house where she assisted the older lady did the laundry for one of them stately households, the one she finally quit on account of the husband and his slick ways.
It was shady there and quiet at the north end of Prairie, another world, sure, than the one existed a couple of blocks west, and in the spot I chose to rest no one but me sat on the curb. No matter it looked odd, odder here without the same crowd filled the Loop. But then wasn’t everything odd that week in Chicago? I’m a small woman, I have always been small, and I knew how to make my way, but I was also a woman with tormented feet and I didn’t dare loosen the laces any more, because a hurt contained was more manageable than when it spilled out for me and all the world to see.
Laughter sparkled the air, but me not the target of it. No, only a young couple, both dressed in white, and him carrying a basket to the car waiting in front of the big house nearest to where I sat. In a ribbon of sun unrolled through the leaves on the big tree, I saw the girl’s blonde curls bounce, and I heard someone calling from the door, “Missy, Missy, you don’ forget this here lemonade I fixed you.” This somehow made them laugh again, the golden ones, and I was after thinking two things—there could be as many colored as Paddy maids, and the golden couple, they must be off for a picnic in their motor car, a picnic somewhere trouble couldn’t sneak up on them.
If they found themselves alone, and her no doubt in a fetching bathing costume, with all the proper accessories, and them secluded—because most Chicagoans would be staying in if they could—what would they do? Thought got me uncomfortable and wound me back to Desmond on top of me, pushing into my deepest parts, probing with that part of him I’d not yet touched. The tender gate to the insides I’d not known before. And then didn’t I remember the bruise on my bottom I’d dared not complain about to Margaret?
How might it have gone for my sister and me if Margaret’d looked for another big house wanted a Bridget after she quit the first? Somewhere she’d have a nicer room and all the food she wanted, and wouldn’t have to risk her eyes sewing. Them splendid houses, rising three to four stories high, with windows set right in the roofs of some of them, and decorative chimneys and curtains every bit as plush as those we’d seen at the theaters. Plaster work inside, like the Palmer House itself, and marvelous chandeliers. One of these would a been a better place for Margaret I thought then, but she might not a met Harry, who pleased her, if not always me.
No, never good to reconsider, for all things change. What seemed sensible, even wise, can seem foolish in retrospect, and a foolish choice can turn out to have been the wise one. If every piece of a life could be put alongside all the other pieces, to see how one fits into the other, neat as a jigsaw puzzle, but no. We are not given that view from above, only the one we get as if from the back o
f a train, watching all we’ve been through get further away.
Not that any such ruminations took up all my thoughts. No, not them, but the bread in my pocketbook and that bit of cheese, both of which I nibbled at daintily as if I’d been sitting inside one of them fancy houses and not on the lip of the street outside. Just as, when I arrived in the city, no one noticed me. I might a been invisible there beneath the green arms of that lovely tree, where birds perched and a breeze stirred and a single leaf drifted down into my lap. Funny that, a leaf curled and brown at the edges in mid-summer, as if to remind that time is just something we imagine. Sometimes a train speeded up past all we want to hang on to, sometimes stalled on the tracks in the suffering heat.
Could be yesterday I sat there fiddling with the crisp spine of that fallen leaf. When I got up to continue on my way, I did not think of Desmond every step either, no, but every other, and devoted the struggle with my feet for the sake of his recovery. It is easier to bear pain, said the Sisters of Perpetual Grace, if you offer it to Our Lord who hung on the cross for three hours, his head bleeding from the crown of thorns, and nails pounded right through the holy flesh of his hands and feet.
Imagination necessarily filled out all I didn’t know. First, what’d happened. Could be my man talking rough to one of the Negroes and being attacked, them young coloreds bolder because of the trouble already started on Sunday. Sunday. Or maybe a scene made him look like the kind of man’d win a medal. Defending a body on his car, maybe a child, one like I’d tended in Florida, but older so, to be on the car by herself.
Maybe even his mates from the old neighborhood—boys from some of those wild clans came together for sport, they claimed. Young Micks fired up by drink, some of them. Not Packy, him not a drinker, or much of one, though he liked his beer, Packy did. Those young boys from the clubs, with the eyes burned, they’d be men. Could a joshed him. Come on, let us have her, Dessie. Of course, I liked the picture made him look the best and it could a been true, or he might have been torn at the moment, not being fond of Negroes himself, but still and all the man in charge of the car, obliged to defend his passengers.