The Sandburg Treasury

by Carl Sandburg

  The Kranses were the nearest kinfolk we had in America except for the Holmes family in Galesburg. When John and Lena Krans bought their farm in the early 1870’s, they worked from daylight to dark eight or nine months of the year till at last the mortgages were paid off. They had help from neighbors in getting in their crops and in turn helped the neighbors. The Kranses became part of the land they owned. Their feet wore paths that didn’t change over the years—in the cow pasture with a small creek winding over it, the corn and oat fields, the vegetable garden, the potato patch. John Krans was a landsman, his thoughts never far from his land, the animals, the crops. He could talk about hästarna, meaning “horses,” so to my mind he seemed part horse.

  He was a medium-sized man, but he had a loose, easy way of carrying his shoulders with his head flung back so he gave the impression of being a big man. His eyes had gleam and his lips had a smile you could see through the beard. Even amid the four walls of a room his head, hair, and beard seemed to be in a high wind. When I sat on his knee and ran my five-year-old hand around in his beard, he called me min lille gosse (“my little boy”) and there was a ripple of laughter and love in it. He read his Bible and sometimes a newspaper, though most often he liked to read the land and the sky, the ways of horses and corn. He wasn’t an arguing man except that with a plow he could argue against stubborn land and with strong hands on leather reins he could argue with runaway horses.

  Not often on Sunday did he miss hitching a horse to a light wagon and taking the family to the Lutheran church a mile or two away. I doubt whether he ever listened to a preacher who had less fear and more faith than he had. I have sometimes thought that John Krans pictured God as a Farmer whose chores were endless and inconceivable, that in this world and in worlds beyond God planted and tended and reaped His crops in mysterious ways past human understanding.

  The Kranses had a wooden barn with a dirt floor and three horses and four cows that were driven to and from the near-by pasture night and morning. Here we saw hands at udders and milk streaming into pails. The pails were carried up a slope to the house thirty yards away, where the cellar had a clean, hard dirt floor and plank shelves with a long line of crocks into which the milk was poured. We saw the yellow cream at the top of the crocks and once saw cream churned into butter. Here for the first time we drank milk from cows we saw give the milk and ate fried eggs having seen the hens that laid the eggs.

  When I was about four we moved two blocks over to Berrien Street and a ten-room house with a roomy third-story garret running the length of the house and a four-room cellar that had floors in the two front rooms. A two-compartment privy had a henhouse back of it. The lot was three times the size of the South Street place and had a big garden with several gooseberry bushes, a front yard with five tall soft-maple trees, a picket fence, a brick sidewalk, and a ditch in front. It was really two houses and lots. Two sign numbers said we lived at 622 and 624 East Berrien Street. Here the emigrant Swede August Sandburg set himself up, with due humility and constant anxiety, as a landlord. The two east rooms of the first floor, along with the two cellar rooms under them, were rented to different families across the years, never vacant for more than a day or two. And the large upstairs east rooms always had a renter.

  My father had never learned to write. His schooling had only taught him to read when his father and mother died in Sweden and he went to work as a chore boy in a distillery. He became a teamster at the distillery and laid by enough money for steerage passage to America. When he arrived in New York, Swedes who had kinfolk at Herkimer, New York, sent him to a job in a cheese factory there. After a few months at cheese-making he read a letter from his cousin in Galesburg, Illinois, Magnus Holmes, who wrote that the chances were all good out there. Magnus Holmes had arrived by rail in 1854, the first year the C.B.&Q. reached Galesburg, and joined a gang that built a bridge over the Rock River. He was nineteen. Had he stayed two years longer in Sweden, he would have had to serve two years in the Swedish army. His father had spent all his years after he was twenty-one in the Swedish army, till he was retired. And Magnus Holmes had seen army life close up, didn’t want to be a soldier, and at nineteen skipped Sweden, took steerage passage for New York on a sailing vessel that buffeted stormy seas for ten weeks and, blown off its course, landed at Quebec.

  He reached Albany, took the Erie Canal to Buffalo and railroads to Chicago and Galesburg. There in Galesburg he kept his name of Magnus and changed Holm to Holmes because Holm sounded Swedish and Holmes sounded English. He worked with a railroad construction gang out of Hannibal, Missouri. At a Methodist camp meeting he fell in love with a Swedish girl, a housemaid living with a family that kept slaves. She moved from Hannibal to Galesburg, and Holmes used to call on her when she worked at the Ladies’ Dormitory of Lombard College and he had a job in the Q. blacksmith shop forging and hammering bolts. He was interested that she was not merely good-looking and handy as a cook but that she owned a book she was reading, a translation of Faust. They were married.

  They went to the Knox College campus the afternoon of October 7, 1858, and stood for three hours in a cold northwest wind, in a crowd of twenty thousand, listening to Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debate. Magnus Holmes voted for Lincoln, but refused to answer Lincoln’s call for troops because he hated war and had a conscience about it. So because Holmes hated military service and left Sweden early, to end up at work in a C.B.&Q. Railroad shop, he was there to advise a newcomer cousin to come on West and get a job. The first job my father had was on the Q. railroad with a construction gang at a dollar a day. They lived in bunk cars, cooked their own meals, did their own washing, worked six days a week, ten hours a day.

  My mother—young Clara Mathilda Anderson who married my father—told of her mother dying early and her father marrying again. Her mother was a gooseherd in Appuna, and she helped her mother in working with geese and ducks in two ponds on their place. When her stepmother came, “We didn’t get along so good. I left Sweden because she was so different from my mother. Letters came from Swedes in America about how things were better there and I managed to save the money to come over and do my best. There was a chum, like you say, a good friend of mine, came with me and I wasn’t lonely.”

  How my father and mother happened to meet I heard only from my mother. I had asked her how they came to marry and she said: “I was working in a hotel in Bushnell [Illinois], making the beds and helping in the kitchen. He came to Bushnell with the railroad gang. He came to the hotel and saw me and we talked and he said he wanted to marry me. I saw it was my chance and soon went to Galesburg and the Reverend Lindahl married us and we started housekeeping.” A smile spread over her face half-bashful and a bright light came to her eyes as she said, “I saw it was my chance.” She was saying this years after the wedding and there had been hard work always, tough luck at times, and she had not one regret that she had jumped at her “chance” when she saw it.

  My father’s hair was straight and black and his eyes, black with a hint of brown, were deep-set in the bone, the skin around them crinkling with his smile or laugh. He was below medium height, weighed about a hundred and forty-eight, was well muscled, and the skin of his chest showed a pale white against the grime when his collar was turned down. No sports interested him, though he did make a genuine sport of work that needed to be done. He was at the C.B.&Q. blacksmith shop, rated as “a helper,” the year round, with no vacations. He left home at six forty-five in the morning, walked to arrive at the Q. shop at seven, and was never late. He mauled away at engine and car parts till twelve, then walked home, ate the noon “dinner,” walked back to the shop to begin work at one and go on till the six o’clock whistle, when he stood sledge alongside anvil and walked home.

  It would take him ten or fifteen minutes to get the grime off hands, face, and neck before supper. He poured the cistern rain water from a pail into a tin basin on a washstand, twice throwing the used water into another pail on the floor before the final delicious rinsing at a thir
d basin of the water that had run off the roof into the cistern. The calluses inside his hands were intricate with hollows and fissures. To dig out the black grit from the deep cracks took longer than any part of the washing, and still black lines of smudge failed to come out.

  In late spring, summer, and early fall, he would often work in the garden till after dark, more than one night in October picking tomatoes and digging potatoes by the light of a moon. In the colder months he always found something to fix or improve. He liked to sew patches on his jeans pants or his work coat and had his own strong thread and large needle for replacing lost buttons. In those early years he read a weekly paper from Chicago, Hemlandet, Swedish for Homeland. Regularly he or mother read aloud, to each other and the children, from the Swedish Bible.

  My mother had fair hair, between blond and brown—the color of oat straw just before the sun tans it—eyes light-blue, skin white as fresh linen by candlelight, the mouth for smiling. She had ten smiles for us to one from our father. Her nose was retrousse, not snub. She was five feet five inches high and weighed perhaps one hundred and forty. She had tireless muscles on her bones and was tireless about her housework. She did the cooking, washing, and sewing, bedmaking, and housecleaning for her family of nine. At six in the morning she was up to get breakfast for her man and later breakfast for the children. There were meals for all again at noon and at evening. Always there were clothes to be patched, the boys sometimes wearing out a third seat of trousers. As we got into long pants, the knees usually needed patching. Playing marbles in the spring, wrestling, and scuffling, we wore holes at the knees, which went bare till “Mama” patched the holes. That was always our name for her when we spoke to her or of her in the family circle.

  My father had respect and affection for Magnus Holmes, older by fifteen years, and his close friend and adviser. He was well Americanized when August Sandburg arrived at the Holmes house in the early 1870’s. He had been in Galesburg more than fifteen years; the men he worked with were mostly Irish and English, and he and Mrs. Holmes learned English so well that they made it the one language spoken in their house. So their four sons never learned to speak Swedish and their daughter Lily learned her Swedish speech by going one summer to the Swedish Lutheran parish school.

  From Magnus Holmes, August Sandburg learned many simple and important English words he needed. And this cousin explained where to go and what papers to sign in order to become an American citizen. For years the Holmeses came to the Sandburgs for Thanksgiving dinner, and the Sandburgs went to the Holmeses on New Year’s Day. Once in our house on Thanksgiving I heard Mr. Holmes talk on the Declaration of Independence and then make clear to my father the Constitution of the United States.

  In the Sandburg family the first three children, Mary, Carl August, and Martin Godfrey, learned Swedish fairly well. I am sure that while I was still in dresses, I used only Swedish words to tell what I was wanting. But while the two boys, Emil and Fred, and the two girls, Esther and Martha, who came later knew that mjölk was milk, they couldn’t count to six in Swedish.

  Among the younger church members later there were grumblings and mutterings. “Why must we listen to sermons in Swedish when we can’t understand what the preacher is telling us?” After a time there were occasional sermons in English, and changes went on in many churches till all the preaching was in English. This didn’t come easy for gray-bearded old-timers who could remember when they sat in their pews two hours with their ears drinking in the beloved syllables of the speech of the homeland that still had its hold over them.

  For all that was unjust in living conditions in Sweden that had sent them to America, my father and mother kept a warmth of feeling, a genuine affection, for Swedish people and the language of gamla hemlandet (the old country). It stayed deep in their hearts. But they told us little about the Old Country. In their first years in America they had their minds set on making a go of it in the New Country, and perhaps it was a help to forget the Old Country. Then as the years passed they spoke the language of the new land and made many friends and acquaintances who spoke no Swedish, their own later children speaking only English. They became part of the new land.

  Two: The House on Berrien Street

  IN THE BERRIEN Street house I was to live growing, formative years from 1882 to 1899, from dresses to short pants to long pants. In that house came babies across ten years, the bright companionable boy Emil, the vague younger one Fred, the beautiful girl Esther and her plain and modest sister Martha.

  The ten-room house was a challenge to August Sandburg. He couldn’t see himself paying for repairs, and he became carpenter, bricklayer, house painter, paper-hanger, cabinetmaker, truck gardener. I was his chore boy, Mart later throwing in. When the roof needed shingling I went up the ladder bringing him shingles. When a cistern had its yearly cleaning, I was let down barelegged to shovel mud and silt into the bucket he drew up with a rope. A chair or table getting wobbly, my father brought it down to his cellar workbench and had me holding a kerosene lamp to light him while he chiseled, fitted, mortised, and hammered. I might after supper have taken my place at the kitchen table to read J. T. Headley’s Napoleon and His Marshals, from the Seventh Ward school library. And when he called me, I might be saying, “It’s a good book and I want to know about Napoleon.” But father would say, “Sholly (Charlie), you let Napoleon go for tonight and hold de lamp for me.”

  Though I had been solemnly christened, with holy water sprinkled on my infant head, by the name of Carl August Sandberg, I decided in the first year or two of school, to use the name Charles. It could have been I had a feeling the name Carl would mean one more Poor Swede Boy while the name Charles had them guessing. Also it was about this time that Mary, Mart, and I decided to write “burg” instead of “berg” in our surname.

  Those two letters ch bothered many a Swede boy. In our third-grade Sheldon’s reader was a story titled “Charlie’s Chickens,” about a boy named Charlie who planted feathers and expected a crop of chickens. One after another, Swede boys Johnson, Nelson, Bostrom, and Hillstrom stood up to read the story aloud. One after another they blurted out “Sharlie’s Shickens.” The teacher would ask for it again, herself pronouncing it distinctly correct. But from each again came, “Sharlie’s Shickens” and the good and patient teacher gave it up. In my seat I laughed inside myself because I had picked the name Charles and had a noble and correct way to fill my mouth with it.

  Monday was washday. When I was strong enough, I carried pails of water, from the cistern in the yard, to fill two washtubs. One tub had warm water and a washboard for soaping and rubbing; the other cold water for rinsing, and a wringer attached. On summer and vacation Mondays I often turned the wringer while mother fed the clothes into it. On many winter Mondays I carried the basket of wash out to the back-yard clothesline. Often the clothes would get frozen stiff. Coaxing those frozen pieces of cloth to go around the rope clothesline to be fastened with a wooden clothespin was a winter sport with a challenge to your wit and numb fingers in Illinois zero weather, with sometimes a wild northwest wind knocking a shirt stiff as a board against your head. More than once I had to take the basket into the kitchen for the clothes to thaw out while my fingers thawed out.

  After the wash was hung, three or four of us would climb on the kitchen table. Mama threw soapy water on the floor and scrubbed and mopped while we played we were on an island or on a housetop floating down a river. After supper or the next morning I would go out and pile the frozen clothes high into the basket and bring them into the house. The noon dinner and the evening supper on Monday, never failing for years, were boiled herring and boiled potatoes, sill och potatis, for generations a simple classic menu of which they said with straight faces, “This is what makes the Swedes so strong.”

  Mama saw to it when we had been too long without a bath. She half filled a washtub with warm water, gave us soap, and told us to scrub. The three sisters would clear out of the kitchen while Mart and I took our washtub bath. Then we would
go to bed and the girls would take over.

  Mama watched carefully the cellar corner where the cabbage heads were piled in October so that in part of the winter there would be slaw and boiled cabbage. If we forgot, she reminded Mart and me in February of the garden where we could pound, dig, and rassle out one or two bushels of parsnips from the frozen ground.

  In the triangle closet under the stairs from the first floor to the cellar Papa used to keep a barrel of apples in winter months, when he could afford it. He put a lock on the door and hid the key. He had seen that when a barrel of apples stood where everyone could get at it, we would soon be at the barrel bottom. He would have put a board over the gap above the door had he known what Mart and I were doing. By hard wriggling our boy bodies could squeeze through the gap and drop down to the apple barrel. We took two apples at a time and only every other day. What we stole wasn’t noticed and we said, “When two of us steal two apples and divide them, that’s only stealing one apple apiece and stealing one apple isn’t really stealing, it’s snooking.”

  Of all our renters I like to think of Joe Elser. He came to our house with a carpenter’s tool chest on one shoulder. His belongings had arrived by wagon, and he moved into the two upstairs east rooms, reached by the outside wooden stairway with the coalbin under it.

  Joe Elser didn’t drink, smoke, or chew tobacco. He didn’t go to religious services of any kind. He didn’t have any books in his rooms and didn’t take any from the Public Library. He never complained, and we never knew him to be sick. He did his own cooking and washing; he darned his socks, mended his clothes, and kept his rooms neat and shipshape.

  Joe was tall, strong, spare of build, and we saw him often with his tool chest on his shoulder, carrying it as though he liked it. He was in his early fifties, and his face and hair were grayish, his mustache close-trimmed. He never hurried; in any work he was doing he seemed to have a knack for the next motion after the one now. Joe had fairly regular work as a carpenter across the year. Sometimes because of weather or when a foundation was not finished on a house, he would have days off for sharpening tools and washing bedsheets and pillow-cases.