My father lifted me up, stuck his head between my legs, and there I sat straddle of him, and only a giant could see the parade better than I could. There was the marshal at the head of the parade on a skittish sorrel horse with a shiny bridle and with brass buttons, each bigger than a silver dollar, on the saddle. Then came two rows of policemen with nickel-plated stars shining on their blue coats, each with a club hanging from his belt. A fife-and-drum corps followed. The pounding noise they made seemed to shake the buildings and I took a better grip on my father’s hat to make sure I wouldn’t fall off. Then came a long line of men dressed like they might be going to church on Sunday, marching four in a row.
The Galesburg Marine Band marched past, men walking and blowing into their horns. One man had a big horn that seemed to be wrapped around him and I was puzzled how he got into it. They had on blue coats and blue pants with a stripe down the sides. Their music was slow and sad. It was only twenty years since the war had ended and General Grant was the greatest general in the war and they wanted to show they were sad because he was dead.
Marching past came men wearing dark-blue coats and big black hats tied round with a little gold cord having a tassel. They were the G.A.R., the Grand Army of the Republic, and I heard that some of these men had been in the war with General Grant and could tell how he looked on a horse and what made him a great general. Eight or ten of them walked along the sides of a long black box on a black cart pulled by eight black horses. The body of General Grant wasn’t in the box, but I could see everybody was even more quiet when this part of the parade passed.
I remember a couple of cannon came past with six or eight horses pulling them. The Negro Silver Cornet Band marched. Their music too was slow and sad. They were the only black faces in the parade, and as they passed I saw faces of men and women light up. I had heard from my father and Mr. Holmes that the war where Grant was the big general was a war for the black people to be free. I didn’t quite understand what it was for people to be not free, to be bought and sold like horses. There was nothing like it in Galesburg. But whatever it was it was terrible, and men would shake their heads talking about it. So there was something people liked about seeing the black men playing sad music because General Grant, who had helped them get free, was dead.
A big flag was swinging high over the chunky man carrying it. The end of the pole holding the flag came to some kind of pocket the man had in a belt around his middle. It looked heavy and I could see the sweat rolling on his puffed-out cheeks.
The parade was different from other parades. I had seen a circus parade and people on the sidewalks laughing and hollering at the clowns and elephants and wild animals in cages. I had seen the Republican rally parade with torchlights, and the Democrats on the sidewalks hooted the marching Republicans and the Republicans hooted back. But in this General Grant funeral parade the men marching had straight faces and so did the people on the sidewalks. What boys and girls I saw stood still with straight faces like the old folks. They knew, like I did, it was a day that meant something. Except for the two bands and the fife-and-drum corps and the sound of feet and horse hoofs and wheels on the street stones, you couldn’t hear much of anything. Even the slow sad music seemed quiet. I think the only smile I saw while the parade was passing was once when my father turned his face up toward me and felt good over the way he had fixed it so I could see the parade.
I remember how hard I tried to think about what the war was and what General Grant did that made him the greatest general of all. And I heard he had been President. I heard too he was one of the high men of the Republican party and the Republicans would miss him, and that some Democrats who had been in the war with him liked the way he did things and the way he treated them and these Democrats were sorry along with the Republicans.
The parade over, my father let me down. We walked along Main Street among thousands of people, and then home. I could see it was a day that meant something to my father. In some store windows I noticed pictures of General Grant with black cloth hung around them. I couldn’t see that he looked so different from other men with whiskers over the whole face and the hairs cut close. He didn’t look much different from Mr. Grubb, the Lombard professor who lived across the street from us and milked his Jersey cow each morning before starting out for his classes. And then I said to myself that even though Professor Grubb’s face was nearly exactly like General Grant’s face, if he should die there wouldn’t be any parade as we had seen for General Grant. I went to bed that night saying I hoped sometime I would know more about the war, about the black people made free, about Grant the general and what it was like to be President and the head man of the government in Washington.
Four: Hungry to Learn
ONE OF MY most vivid early memories is our first home Bible, a small Swedish-language Bible. I was about four years old, and it was in the Berrien Street house, in the second-floor bedroom of my father and mother. It was winter, with winds howling outside. Mary and I heard father read a chapter by the light of a small kerosene lamp. Several times that week I went to where the Book lay on top of a bureau, and I opened it and turned the pages. I asked my mother to point out certain words I remembered. I took comfort in mother saying it would be clear to me when I started school and learned to read.
The day came when I started off for the Fourth Ward school, four blocks from our house. But the next year our block on Berrien Street was moved over into the Seventh Ward and we had to walk six blocks more to school. The secrets of the alphabet were unlocked for me. We recited in class and we learned that every word has a right way to say it and a wrong way. It came clear that any language is a lot of words and if you know the words you know the language.
One winter Friday afternoon when I was in the fifth grade, I took home the first volume of John S. C. Abbot’s The History of Napoleon Bonaparte and most of Saturday and Sunday I sat in an overcoat at the north window of our third-floor garret and read the book. The next week I did the same with the second volume. I had heard about Napoleon so often I wanted to see what kind of fighter he was. I got a picture in my mind of what Napoleon was like and I buckled a leather strap around my middle, ran where the strap would hold it a sword I whittled from a lath, and walked from garret to cellar and back giving orders to my marshals like Napoleon.
In the sixth grade Miss Goldquist kept at us about getting “the reading habit,” saying, “You don’t know what good friends books can be till you try them, till you try many of them.” One of her favorite words was “ed-u-ca-tion,” and she said you could never get enough of it. I read a row of history books by Jacob Abbot and John S. C. Abbot, J. T. Headley’s Napoleon and His Marshals and Washington and His Generals. I found Thomas W. Knox’s Boy Travellers in different countries a little dry and not up to Hezekiah Butterworth’s Zigzag Journeys over the world. What time I could steal from lessons I turned the pages of Champlin’s Young Folks’ Cyclopaedia of Persons and Places, and Young Folks’ Cyclopaedia of Common Things from the school library.
Best of all was the American history series by Charles Carleton Coffin. The Boys of ’76 made me feel I could have been a boy in the days of George Washington and watched him on a horse, a good rider sitting easy and straight, at the head of a line of ragged soldiers with shotguns. I could see Paul Revere on a horse riding wild and stopping at farmhouses to holler the British were coming. I could see old curly-headed Israel Putnam, the Connecticut farmer, as the book told it: “Let ’em have it!” shouted Old Put, and we sent a lot of redskins head over heels into the lake . . . A few days later . . . the French and Indians ambushed us. We sprung behind trees and fought like tigers. Putnam shot four Indians . . . one of the Frenchmen seized Roger’s gun, and the other was about to stab him, when Put up with his gun and split the fellow’s head open.”
I met General Nathanael Green and watched him fight and in the nick of time draw off his soldiers and then come back when the time was right to win. He was a whiz at retreating and then, when the enemy didn’t
expect him, making a comeback and crippling the enemy or breaking him. I read about Lord North, the British Head Minister who ran the war. I saw a picture of the fathead and agreed with another boy, “I could cut the guts out of him.”
The Boys of ’76 had me going through the book just for the pictures. Whoever drew them was as good for the book as the author, but all it said on the title page was ILLUSTRATED.
I was thankful to Mr. Coffin for other books like Old Times in the Colonies. You were right there with those people building huts and cabins, clearing timbers, putting wooden plows to new land and plowing around the stumps while keeping an eye on the shotguns ready for the Indians. In The Story of Liberty he tried to tell what went on over in Europe that sent people heading across the ocean to America. You learned about “tyrants” and “tyranny” and people slaughtered in fights and wars about religion.
When I took home Mr. Coffin’s The Boys of ’61 and two or three more on the Civil War I found they were dry compared with The Boys of ’76 and his earlier books. I couldn’t understand this because I read that Mr. Coffin had been a war correspondent in the Civil War, went with the armies and was on the spot when some of the hottest battles were fought. When he wrote about a war he had seen, it wasn’t worth reading. I puzzled over this: “It was a bigger war in ’61 than ’76 and maybe so big he couldn’t get his head around it. Or maybe following the armies he got sick of the war, so disgusted that when he started writing about it he tried to hide his disgust but it got into his book without his knowing it.”
Every boy except the dumbest read those two books by James Otis, Toby Tyler; or, Ten Weeks with a Circus and Tim and Tip; or, The Adventures of a Boy and a Dog. The library copies were ragged, dog-eared, thumb-and-finger dirtied, and here and there a pencil had written, “Good” or “Gee whiz.”
The detective-story books of those school days were mostly Old Cap Collier at a nickel apiece. We read them in the schoolroom behind a geography, and traded with each other. But soon I went back to Champlin’s Young Folks’ Cyclopaedia of Persons and Places. Later came Nick Carter and his sidekick Chick, keener than Old Cap Collier. The year came, though, when I decided that detective stories were mostly tricks.
We read Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain but they didn’t get the hold on us that other books did. They seemed to be for a later time. It was the same with the novels of Charles Dickens.
We had a first book in physiology in school and then one or two more. We read about alcohol and saw what happens to a drunkard’s stomach. But I wasn’t worried about my father’s stomach because never did he go into any of the town’s dozen saloons. When on a cold winter night Papa took down his pint bottle of pure grain alcohol and poured a spoon or two into a cup of black coffee, we knew the bottle would be finished that winter and there wouldn’t be another till the next winter. The Kranses, the Holmeses, and the Swedish Lutherans we knew kept away from beer, wine, and whisky if only for the money it wasted that they could spend for things they liked better.
There came the day I entered a declamation contest to speak a piece against the evils of alcohol. On Seminary two blocks south of Berrien Street an afternoon Sunday school named the Mission drew boys and girls, about a hundred, from Berrien and other streets. The frame building, painted brown but with the paint peeling away, stood across the street from the Q. machine shop, next to the Peoria branch of the Q. The meetings ran through the fall and winter, and the teachers were mostly students from Knox College. We had good times at the Mission. As a member of the Mission’s Junior Epworth League, I was once a delegate to a convention in Monmouth, sixteen miles from Galesburg, the farthest I had ever been away from home. And we put on “entertainments.” After rehearsing a program three or four times, we gave it of an evening for grownups and children. I sang once in a quartet and once I took the part of a tramp in a one-act play.
But it was the Demorest Silver Medal Declamation Contest that had all of us at the Mission buzzing. Mr. Demorest, a rich man in the East who had made his money getting out a magazine giving women ideas and patterns for dresses, was “a total-abstinence man.” He never drank a drop of liquor himself and he wanted to see every saloon in America put out of business. So he had thought up the Demorest medal contests in which the young people of any school or neighborhood would speak pieces against alcohol. Mr. Demorest sent us each a book to pick out the piece to speak in the contest. I picked the shortest piece in the book, and the last line was: “The world moves!” I practiced many ways to say it and couldn’t decide whether to give it slow and drawn out or fierce and fast like a shot in the dark.
It was all very exciting, because whoever won the silver medal in our contest would go into another contest with other silver-medal winners. Then whoever won that contest would get a gold medal. Then the gold-medal winners would go into a contest for a diamond medal. We talked about it and agreed that if any of us won a diamond medal that would be high enough and we would be satisfied.
The night of the contest came and there was the biggest crowd the Mission had ever seen. There we sat, a row of us on the platform looking at the audience and the audience looking at us. We picked out faces from them and they picked out faces from us. They smiled and we tried not to smile. When there is a silver medal hanging over you, you don’t smile, or anyhow we thought you’re not expected to.
Four boys and four girls stood up one by one and gave their declamations. About the middle of the program my name was called. I walked to the center of the platform feeling good that what I had to remember was only half as long as some of the others. I blurted out my opening sentences wondering how it sounded to the people out there. Near the middle of my declamation I had to stop.
I didn’t know what was coming next. I reached up and around and somehow my mind pulled down what I wanted and I went on to the end and gave “The world moves!” fierce and fast like a shot in the dark and saw more faces laughing than sober.
The judges didn’t make us wait long to hear who was the winner. I knew I had done a little worse than any of the others on the program, and I didn’t expect to be excited or proud about whoever got the prize. But when one of the judges stood up and told us who was the winner, there I was, excited and proud. The judge was saying, “It gives us great pleasure to announce that the winner of the Demorest Silver Medal is Miss Mary Sandburg.”
A book we owned each year till it got lost was Hostetter’s Illustrated United States Almanac, given away every New Year’s Day. Half the almanac was filled with good words for Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters. There was advice too on how to get rid of warts, corns, boils, how to get a ring off a swollen finger, what to do about a rusty nail in the foot and other ailments. Five pages had funny drawings with jokes under them. We read Hostetter’s out loud in the kitchen and talked over the points of the jokes and what the “wise sayings” meant.
We didn’t know we were getting education while having fun, Mary, Mart and I, in that crowded kitchen when we read Hostetter’s Almanac to each other. It was crammed with all sorts of facts new to us and interesting—the morning and evening stars from any month in the year, the ocean tides, the velocity of the earth, eclipses, and so on. We were hungry to learn.
The first biography I owned was of a size I could put in one of my vest pockets. I was going along to the Seventh Ward school when I found it on a sidewalk. It had been rained on and I brushed the dirt off and smoothed it where the top corner had been scorched. When I measured it later it was two and three-fourths inches long and one and one-half inches wide. The front cover had gloss paper and a color picture of the head and shoulders of a two-star general in a Confederate gray uniform. The title read A Short History of General P. T. Beauregard.
There were thirteen pages of reading in fine print. Inside the back cover was a list of a “Series of Small Books,” histories of Civil War generals, fifty of them, with a notice of “other series in preparation.” And here you learned how to get these books. It said “Packed in Duke’s Ci
garettes.”
I couldn’t think of buying ten-cent packages of Duke’s Cameo or Duke’s Cross-cut cigarettes for the sake of filling my vest pockets with histories, nice as they were. Cigarettes had a bad name among us kids; we believed only “dudes” and “softies” smoked them. Our physiology books had warned us that tobacco had nicotine in it and nicotine is a poison. And with cigarettes you were supposed to inhale and take the poison straight into your lungs. This could lead you into consumption, or anyhow it would weaken your wind and slow you down as a runner or ballplayer. When we bought Virginia Cheroots at five for a nickel or the ten little “cigaroos” for a nickel and smoked them, we were like strong men ready to take a chance on what real tobacco could do to us.
I scouted around and found three men who smoked Duke’s Cigarettes “once in a while for a change.” One of them was saving the books for himself. The other two saved them for me. After a while I had the histories of Beauregard, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Sarah Bernhardt, The Life of T. De Witt Talmage, and the lives of George Peabody, James B. Eads, Horace B. Claflin, and Robert Ingersoll. They changed from History of to Life of.
In the list I noticed John Ericsson, the inventor of the Monitor, the Swede who helped the North win the war. I tried but couldn’t scare up a copy of the Ericsson. A Swede boy pulled one out of his vest pocket one day and grinned at me. He knew I wanted it. I offered him a penny for it and went as high as a nickel and he shook his head. Then he let me borrow it and I let him borrow my Sarah Bernhardt. He had heard she kept a coffin in her bedroom and liked to stretch out in it to rest. I showed him where the book told about that. “Gee!” said the Swede boy, “I sure want to read that book.” I offered to trade him the Sarah Bernhardt for his John Ericsson. He said maybe and next day told me he had talked it over with his Swede father and mother and they said, “No, you keep the John Ericsson.”
The Sandburg Treasury Page 27