The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  Religion has been holding the Negro back for many, many years. The Negro has been taught to sing the Lord’s praises, you understand. And he’s been left with an understanding that whatever his shortcomings are, the good Lord will compensate for them. Or the talents he refuses to use. He can’t expect God to solve his problems for him.

  I tell you for every ounce religion has served, it held man equally back as much. To me the biggest sin has been committed by religion itself. Number one: instilling fear in men. Fear is the biggest killer of all. It doesn’t always completely kill, but it can slow a man down. Every time I turn around, they tell you you should do things because in fear of God. It’s how wrathful He is, how much He can be, how He can punish an eye for an eye and all these sort of things. And then in the same damn breath they tell me that God is Love. I can’t reconcile the two, I can’t. You understand what I mean?

  They tell me about the omnipotence of God. He is all things, on heaven and earth, He is all things. And then in the same breath, they tell me about the Devil. Now if God is all things, there is nothing that exists outside of God. Where do you place the Devil? Where is he, in God? I can’t conceive of the Devil being within God. Does He embody the Devil, too? I don’t believe this stuff, I can’t...can you?

  Man is a creature of habit. He gets something, he grows to like it, he possesses it, he hates to give it up. Sometimes he’ll defend a thing to the death rather than give it up and it actually may not be worth anything. You’ve got to release some of the old ideas. If something’s going to live, you’ve got to let something die, too. I mean, you can’t have life without death.

  Yesterday was Good Friday. Tomorrow is Easter Sunday. What do you think would happen to Jesus Christ if He returned to earth tomorrow?

  If Jesus returned to earth tomorrow and the average person were to see Him on the street, they would look at Him, point a finger and say, “You lousy bum, why don’t you go back to Old Town? Why don’t you shave? Why don’t you take a bath? Why don’t you wash the garments you’re wearing.” You better believe it. I think He’d be crucified, condemned as being some kind of crackpot. This I’m sure of.

  197748

  He has since moved to a new home on the city’s northwest side. A blue collar community. “Call it middle-working class. The other neighborhood where I lived for eighteen years was changed by the new bread coming in with their rehabs. These quite clever young people. Intellectuals they were not. [Laughs] Pseudo-intellectuals, yes. We didn’t speak the same language. But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

  During the sixties, I used to talk to my boys a lot. At the time, they took issue with me, especially when it came to race. I thought they were trying to turn the world upside down. Now, strangely enough, I see a lot of what they had to say come about. I lived to see the change. Now, they’re for law and order at any price. They’re for hit ’em over the head if there’s no other way.

  I guess they’ve become adults. In our society when you become an adult, you stake you become an adult, you stake your claim. They have property now. They both have homes. They’re doing fine. Once my sons called me a bigot, narrow-minded. I said, “Fifteen years from now, you’re going to be a different person.” I was right, but I am the one that changed most dramatically.

  Twelve years ago, I didn’t understand things in light of what I see today. I’m surprised at myself. I feel I could live with black people now. Yes, I still worry about violence. But I’m sure the black man has the identical worry, even more so than I have. So we’re sharing something in common, see?

  I have learned you better not become too attached to anything, so attached that you can’t let go. You understand what I mean? My boys have reached the point where they’re accumulating things.

  The foremost thought in their minds is to protect it. They have to look for someone to protect it from. All right? So God help the first one who gets in their path. And you know what that is? They have become what they once called me. I have gone on to another plateau. I can’t explain it, I mean the change in me.

  I wish I lived in a world that didn’t know what money was. I wish I lived in a world where I didn’t guage the worth of a man’s life by the color or shade of a man’s skin. I wish I could live to see the day where Washington enacted a law that made man, once a month, come to a common meeting place and give him a lesson that forced him to think, to exercise his brain. Just to get a man used to it and find out how delicious it is.

  My sons tell me I’m too soft for this world anymore. And I tell’em, “Thank God.”

  EVA BARNES

  It was dark. There were dim lights and vague television noises in the one-family frame dwellings; off the highway, on the far southwest side of the city, recently incorporated as part of Oak Lawn. Dogs barked along the unpaved roads. Nobody seemed to know where Eva Barnes lived.

  At the tavern, a barmaid, a weary forty, mumbled sullenly, “I dunno.” A man and a woman, on adjacent stools, vaguely pawed at each other. They were out of focus. In the process, a bottle of Hamms was toppled onto the bar. The other man abandoned the shuffleboard and, after a rough sea journey across the room, found us, at last. Genial, he offered directions: a graceful wave of the arm out toward the scattered dim lights. On the TV set, above and behind the bar, a Western with a high Nielsen rating was on. Nobody watched.

  Eventually, we saw her, hugely silhouetted against her doorway.

  Yeah, just a few yards away. And they sit. If you go in there and talk, they don’t talk nothing but sex. Sex. I won’t even go in there. I rent the tavern out. That’s mine. I go in there a coupla times, and the kind of people that hang around, I don’t have no use for. She probably don’t know because she never seen me.

  It’s a league of nations. But as far as Negro, not in this section here. There is in Oak Lawn, I don’t know where. We have truck drivers, I think the majority are truck drivers, drivers for newspaper companies and drivers for big oil companies and building trades. All ages. You can find from newlyweds just married months up to married fifty years, or I guess more.

  I don’t go in their homes visiting them. But I know them. We meet at the mailbox, say hello. We meet in the store, say hello. I don’t go to church, so I won’t lie and say I meet ’em in church. Maybe that’s one reason, too, that there’s a little resentment, because I don’t go to church and they know it.

  The biggest change I saw? Oh gee, supermarkets. [Laughs.] And it seems like people are more afraid of talking to anything to progress us, you know. If you talk about improvements, your neighborhood or anything, right away they’re afraid of being called a communist. That this is the word they’re afraid of.

  I remember in 1951, when my husband was paralyzed and our septic system got clogged up in the tavern over there...if it wasn’t true, it would be funny. I couldn’t get anybody for any money to open the tiles up. ’Cause the water was backing up in the tavern. And I was working out there and you know how the tar is out from the sewer, and it clings to your skin. [Laughs.] My poor nine-year-old son was up to his elbows, he was all covered with that black tar. And myself.

  I had the tavern closed up that day. Because I couldn’t go draw a glass of beer with these dirty hands, run and wait on people. So then my neighbors came in, Mr. Hanson and a couple of other neighbors, walking down the street, saying, “Look at her, working like a communist.” I thought to myself, Gee whiz, why do they have to say I’m working like a communist? I’m tryin’ to keep this goin’ myself. I can’t get nobody to work. Why do they brand me like that?

  She was born in Riverton, Illinois, near Springfield. Her father was a miner. “We moved like gypsies from one town to another. I would go crazy mentioning all of them.” She scores off the names of ten mining towns. She remembers a girl friend who was widowed seven times in mine disasters, as well as losing a father and two brothers; company, stores and scrip; five brothers and sisters dead at infancy; babies’ nipples out of cheesecloth; hired out for housework at nine; going
to seventh grade at school.

  I came to Chicago all by myself, two months before I was twelve. And it was wintertime in 1923, and I had sixty-five cents in my pocket. And the next day, girl friends that I had gone to school with, older than me, they come over and they took me to look for a job. So I got one at Omaha Packing, piecework. And I don’t think I’d ever got the job, but I was an overgrown girl then and I looked big for my age then.

  And I got in line there. I think there was about two hundred and fifty people, Negro and white. Standing on the platform waiting to be picked up for a job. There was no union in those days. And this employment manager comes out and he says, “Hey, you big one over there”—he points his finger at me. “Hey, you big one.” I turned around and he said, “Don’t turn around, I mean you. Come here.” And I says, “Me?” And he said, “Yeah, you. How old are you, about nineteen?” I says, “Mmm-hmm.” [Laughs.] I was afraid to open my mouth. I was only twelve years old. They hired me as a nineteen-year-old.

  He says, “You know how to sharpen a knife?” Well, back in the coal mines, we used to butcher our own hogs and our own beef, and I said, “Sure, I know how to sharpen a knife.” And he hands over a knife to me and I start sharpening. So he says, “Okay, go to work.” So I worked Omaha Packing Company for quite a while, piecework. I was making good money. My first paycheck, I made so good, I don’t remember exactly how much it was, but it was an unusually big check. And I got scared. I thought the company made a mistake, so I quit the job.

  I done practically everything in the stockyards. I worked till they started organizing the CIO. They took us off piecework and put us on bonus, which we didn’t like. Because bonus you had to work harder than you had to work piecework. Nobody represented us. So the men were organized, but we women weren’t. So there was a fella, Bob Riley, he come up and he asked me, “Eva, how would you like to organize your women?” By then I was about twenty-one years old.

  Oh, in those nine years, I was married and divorced before I was eighteen. And married a second time and I had two children. My first husband was a coal miner and he was an alcoholic...how can you build a home when the man is not responsible?...

  My first wedding, I’ll never forget as long as I live. Went back, married this coal miner from Bullpit, and we got married in St. Rita’s Church, that’s just a few miles near where I was born. I was sixteen. Of course, I won’t go into the ages of the man. But the wedding we had in those days was more than a week long. The neighbors all pitched in. We went to the farm and bought a whole calf and a whole pig. I think it was 150 chickens and homebrew and homemade wine. Everything was homemade. And we got married in church with everything, bridesmaids and High Mass and everything. The whole works. In fact, even the coal company superintendent, he brought silver for a present for us. And because I danced with him, he gave me thirty-five dollars if I would sell him my wedding shoes. I sold him my wedding shoes, everything was sold. [Laughs.] I was sitting in only my slip, even the dress was sold for me. Just to raise money for the newlyweds in those days. This was 1925. And of course there’s a lot of pictures taken, we were in the State Register in Springfield, paper there.

  The shivaree, I don’t think they do this no more. But we had shivaree every night. Maybe two, three o’clock in the morning, they would be banging cans and making all kinds of noise. The rule was you couldn’t sleep at all. And the next morning, you go around and you figure you won’t be able to face these people. You know you’re ashamed, the wedding is still on. I think there was more fun in the wedding then. Nowadays they go with cars around tooting the horns and everything, but I still think 1925 was natural wedding days.

  It was different then. Sure, miners lived poor and the only ones that really had money is the woman that has lotta boarders and women that bootlegs, this is prohibition time. But the woman that didn’t bootleg and had boarders, she just lived from hand to mouth, like here in the city from pay to pay. But I remember we’d go out picnics, we’d go out fishing, all families. Everything for the picnic. And then when you went to the picnic, there was no money exchanged, no commercial, everything like one big family. They’d cook a pot of mulligan stew and everybody’d share out of that. That was a picnic. Today you go on a picnic, what is it? It’s commercial. You buy your ticket, you buy your popcorn, you buy your beer. If you haven’t got a fistful of money, you haven’t got no picnic.

  Anyway, my wedding was the biggest wedding in Sangamon County in 1925. They said that nobody has a wedding like St. Rita’s, the church was dressed up real beautiful. These were the days when I was a very religious woman. And not long after that, when the priest told me to hit my husband with a skillet in the head because he asked for meat on Friday, I thought, well, bad as he is, I still loved him. I didn’t think it was right for the priest to tell me to hit my husband in the head with a skillet. [Laughs.] I didn’t go for that very much. I thought, what the heck kind of priest is he? So right there, I didn’t believe in fighting or hitting. I said, no. So I better don’t go to church, I just quit going altogether. But my children were Christian-raised....

  I think they put me to work at every job in the stockyards Pork trimmer. I worked in the laundries. I even worked in the offal. It’s where all the guts and everything come in there. This is Depression time now, it’s in the thirties. This is when they bumped a Negro girl to save me a job, ’cause I had two sons. And I didn’t like the idea, but then there was a fella named Dick White, he was cutting the pigs’ heads and he says, “Don’t worry about it,” he says, “we’re used to it already.” He was colored.

  And working on these guts, you know, open, and I had to sterilize and wash them. And the ones that were condemned you couldn’ t touch it, if you did, you would get a hog itch. And you had to keep your hands in a cold shower on them all the time because to get that hog itch off you. I was sick to my stomach and my children used to say when I got home, “Mommy, we love you but you smell awful.” But you get used to it. [Laughs.] You work in it so long, you can’t smell nothing no more.

  But this I’ll never forget, this colored boy—not boy, man—Dick White, I’ll never forget his name. I don’t know what happened to him but he saved my job. And he says, “You’ll get used to this job. Just don’t think that that’s what it is, pretend it’s some flowers or something.” [Laughs.] And I got used to it....

  And then we started organizing the women in there because the men were organized. And then this Bob Riley said, “Don’t organize so fast.” I had forty women the first day I went out. I said, “They all want union, they want to get better wages.” I said, “We’re doing the same kind of work men are doing, trimming meat, sharp’ning our own knives, why don’t we get paid the same like the men?” They’re only paying us, I think, twenty-eight cents an hour. Identical work. And the men were getting fifty-nine cents an hour. So I told him, I said, “When we get union in, we’re gonna get the same wages.”

  That’s Depression time, then Roosevelt came in. And I was carrying the biggest Roosevelt button. I was working for a radio company then. Assembling radios. I go to the job, and didn’t know that the company was for the opposition. A big Roosevelt button, they told me to take it off. I said, “No, I’m for Roosevelt.” They said, “You’re for Roosevelt, you get out, you don’t get a job.” So I got laid off.

  And this is election day, the day Roosevelt’s election day, I just got through voting for Roosevelt and I lose my job. I had a job all the way through the Depression, and now the first day Roosevelt gets elected, I lose a job. So this is when I met my second husband. He died.

  And both of us were looking for a job. He got a job himself as a beef lugger. A man that carries half a steer or quarter, hind or front, from these hooks that are in the freezers and puts them in the truck. It’s heavy work and my husband was a pretty strong guy. But it took him. Later on it come up on him.

  And then it was funny again. All the time after we got married, we’re looking for a job. He’s too old and I’m too fat. I was young e
nough, but too heavy. So what are we gonna do? So we went into the tavern business.

  John Woods, he heard me singing in a Legion club, and he says, “Eva, you’re singing for somebody else making money. Why don’t you open your own tavern?” I said, “I haven’t got the money.” He said, “You find a place, I’ll back you up.” And I said, “Well, I got a place on 31st and Halsted, my old neighborhood, lot of people knew me there.”49 He said, “Fine, as long as you know the people. Give me two days, I want to look over the place.” He says, “Fine, good location.”

  So we got everything practically. All the beer, all the liquor, everything. New Year’s Eve, we want to open, no electric, no gas, we’re in the dark. [Laughs.] And I called him up, I says, “John, they need fifty-dollar deposit for gas and electric and I haven’t got it.” He says, “Jesus Christ, you woman, you got everything, over a thousand dollars worth of equipment in that place and you forget a measly fifty dollars.” So we opened the tavern on candlelight. We had candles all over the place.

  Those days, I don’t know...today, I don’t think I know anybody who would do that, the cooperation of people. And here this big manager of a brewery company helps me out. And then the whiskey houses, they brought in all the whiskey and wine and liquors and everything. And the lady across the street, the tavern lady, she closed her own tavern up. She knew we were new, we didn’t know how to mix drinks, we didn’t know how to make a highball, we didn’t know nothing. [Laughs.] She closes up her tavern, takes her bartender, takes all the glasses, we run out of glasses, she comes across the street, put her bartender behind the bar. Frank from 24th and Halsted, he brings his two bartenders, Steve on Archer Avenue, he’s got a tavern there today yet. Steve, Frank, Rudy, the three of them behind the bar, they told us to get out and go with your guests. They took over the bar.