The Reason for Time

by Mary Burns

  Yet, didn’t I miss the magic company, and in those hours I sat with my own child at my breast, a proper womanly breast, didn’t I daydream of getting back into that business teased your powers of belief, though in my case even Mr. R couldn’t bring back what’d been there and then gone again so quickly. Couldn’t make what appeared disappear, or the other way round, no matter how elegantly he might flourish his cape and say “Presto!”

  I was already practiced in the art of illusion, as hadn’t himself been so? The magician of magicians with his power to inspire belief. You can call it lying or dress it up and call it illusion. Irene’s never heard of the fellow. She knows her late father, and the children their late grandfather, by the name of Patrick Dwyer, the poor fellow died of influenza, and I made Margaret promise to never say different. Of course the timing’s off, but with time itself different than we thought, what does it matter? It may turn out that it’s not only time we invent, but people, things. It may be that life itself is an illusion, we almost dead ones at the threshold between two rooms is all, two rooms different only on account of the angle of light pouring in. I will know before long, sure.

  Whenever the Bluebird bus took me and Irene to visit Margaret and Harry and their two boys, her cousins, in the city, I always looked in the directory, under M. There were many D. Malloys, and a wild thought occurred to me sometimes. Maybe I’d acted too quick. Accustomed to disappointment, hadn’t I somehow looked for every opportunity to find it? Could a been another D. Malloy, after all, and it just the blazing bandage around his head confused me. The woman at the bed’d never said his name—Desmond—the same I’d whispered so breathless the Sunday the riot broke out. Desmond. The first and last time I was in a position to breathe like that at all into a man’s ear. Desmond.

  Afterword

  While examining old newspapers at the Newberry Library in Chicago a number of years ago, I came across a time period—July 21 to July 30, 1919—that astounded me for the size of the headlines on consecutive days. During those ten days in Chicago, a blimp crash in the Loop, a major race riot, a streetcar strike, and a child abduction all competed for top story status. These big events played out against a post-WWI backdrop that mixed the return of soldiers and sailors with the Great Migration of African Americans from southern to northern states, and the urban influx of self-supporting single women living apart from their families.

  The Nineteenth Amendment—which gave women the right to vote—had been passed by Congress the previous month, and the Wartime Prohibition Act—which banned the sale of beverages containing more than 2.75% alcohol—took effect on June 30th. Class warfare became deadly when so-called “Bolsheviks” sent bombs to prominent politicians and those investigating “the Red Scare.” To round out an incredible summer, the Black Sox Scandal erupted during the World Series—with Chicago White Sox players accused of intentionally losing games.

  1919 was also the year when, during a total solar eclipse in May, Sir Arthur Eddington put Einstein’s theory of relativity to the test and altered our concept of time.

  Just as immigration continues to create tension in Europe and the United States today, the Great Migration of African Americans from the south to the north caused tensions that erupted in what was called the “Red Summer of 1919”—due to the blood spilled on the streets of twenty-five American cities. Chicago’s African American population had increased from 44,000 in 1909, to almost 110,000 in 1919, an increase of about 148 percent. Competition for jobs in the city’s stockyards was particularly intense, pitting African Americans against whites (both native born and immigrants). Tensions ran highest on the city’s South Side, where the majority of black residents lived, many of them in old, dilapidated housing and without adequate services.

  On July 27, 1919, an African American teenager drowned in Lake Michigan after he violated the unofficial segregation of Chicago’s beaches, and was stoned by a group of white youths. His death, and the police’s refusal to arrest the white man whom eyewitnesses identified as causing it, instigated a week of rioting between gangs of black and white Chicagoans. When the riots finally ended on August 3rd, fifteen whites and twenty-three blacks had been killed, and more than five hundred people injured. One thousand African American families lost their homes when they were torched by rioters. It was the worst of the riots in the United States that year, and the worst in Chicago’s history. Much of the mayhem was blamed on white “athletic” clubs, such as the Hamburg Club, of which Chicago’s future mayor, Richard J. Daley—then seventeen years old—was a member.

  The final death toll for the crash of the Wingfoot Air Express was one crew member, two passengers, and ten bank employees. Twenty-seven members of the bank’s staff were injured. The bank reopened for business the day after the crash. While seventeen Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company employees—including the blimp’s pilot—were arrested after the crash, there were no charges filed and no trial. However, within hours of the crash the Chicago City Council passed a resolution urging the adoption of regulations to control air traffic above the city.

  Thomas Fitzgerald, the man who abducted and murdered six-year-old Janet Wilkinson, was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. He was executed on October 17, 1919 at the Cook County Jail.

  The strike by employees of Chicago’s elevated and surface lines—which began a day after the race riots had, and involved 15,000 workers—ended after only four days, on August 2nd. Workers in other Chicago industries—stock yards, steel mills, clothing, agricultural equipment, etc.—as well as actors, also went on strike that year.

  §

  As a former journalist, I was intrigued by the coverage of these events in Chicago’s nine general circulation newspapers of the time. My primary newspaper sources were the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Daily News, including the latter’s fantastic photo collection, held by the Chicago History Museum. I also consulted back issues of the Chicago Defender, the Herald Examiner, and popular magazines and dime novels of the time, when reading was a major leisure activity, and—just before radio became popular in the 1920’s—how people got their news.

  As a novelist, I wanted to imagine the lives of people historians rarely bother with. The Reason for Time presents the life of an ordinary person who lived through those extraordinary days in Chicago. While Maeve Curragh is a fictional character, she is typical of the young women wage earners who were living on their own in American cities during the first decades of the twentieth century. An Irish immigrant, she works as a clerk at a job that pays poorly, she lives in a boarding house, she takes many of her meals at cheap lunchrooms, and enjoys the city’s plethora of theaters—for the then-declining vaudeville shows, and for films. She hopes marriage and children are in her future.

  §

  The most useful source I found for information about race relations in Chicago in 1919 is the exhaustive study by The Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago; A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (University of Chicago Press, 1922) [https://archive.org/details/negroinchicagost00chic].

  Carl Sandburg wrote about the race riots as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News. His articles were later published as a collection, The Chicago Race Riots, July 1919

  [https://archive.org/details/chicagoraceriots00sand].

  Readers interested in the condition of single women should consider Joanne J. Meyerowitz’s excellent book Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 1991).

  Those and other non-fiction books, as well as novels of the time—including Studs Lonigan, by James T. Farrell—helped me to fill out my imagined July in Chicago, the year when the notion of time and many other things changed forever…not only for Maeve Curragh.

  §

  Editor’s note

  Gary Krist’s non-fiction book City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (Crown, 2012) covers the tumultuous days of lat
e July 1919 from a political perspective.

  To learn more about Carl Sandburg, please visit:

  http://www.nps.gov/carl

  Acknowledgments

  The Reason for Time began as an idea that occurred to me while browsing newspaper microfilm at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The staff of that institution, of the Chicago History Museum, and of the Harold Washington Library always courteously, and sometimes even enthusiastically, answered questions, searched for materials, and showed me the way around equipment. Thanks to all of them. My niece Amanda Brady put me up during the research phase, and I am grateful for her hospitality and her interest in the project. Also to Gwyneth Campbell, for helping me access newspaper files at Northwestern University. Finally, I must most sincerely thank Emily Victorson for her enthusiasm, and her tireless attention to detail.

  About The Author

  A former journalist and documentary filmmaker, Mary Burns is the author of four novels, two short-story collections, a non-fiction book about snow geese, and several radio and stage plays. She grew up near Chicago and now lives just north of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

  For more information, visit her website,

  www.maryburns.ca.

  Also Published By Allium Press Of Chicago

  Visit our website for more information:

  www.alliumpress.com

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