Water Tossing Boulders

by Adrienne Berard

  Out of the relatively diverse student body at Rosedale, only four Chinese pupils—the Lum sisters and two other girls—were summoned to Mr. Nutt’s office at noon lunch hour on the first day of class. Mr. Nutt had requested to speak with them in private. He explained in a conciliatory tone that an order had been issued by the school’s board of trustees, under the recommendation of the state superintendent of education, to bar all children of Chinese descent from the premises. The girls were colored, he explained, and therefore not welcome on school grounds.

  His words hung like smoke in a closed room. The backwater children, barefoot and illiterate, now crowded the halls of Rosedale Consolidated, while Martha, a straight-A student, was no longer welcome there. Quietly, the sisters collected their knapsacks and walked home along the same route they had always taken. On schedule, the twelve-thirty train, local from Vicksburg, roared past Bruce Street and the girls entered the grocery.

  Once safely inside the walls of the store, the sisters told their parents about the events of that morning. As they repeated the school board’s order, a stillness settled over the family. There was a decision to be made. Its outcome would alter the course of history. Within a Chinese grocery, next to a railroad track, on the colored side of a small Mississippi town, the seeds of a revolution were stirring. In the afternoon hours, one Monday in September, the Lum family decided to fight.

  PART ONE

  MEN WHO ENTER THESE PLACES

  MARCH 31, 1904

  Mr. L. T. Plummer

  Chinese Inspector in Charge

  2 River Street

  Chicago, Ill.

  Dear Sir:

  We have recently had information that Chinese smuggled into the country from Canada, and who were destined for Chicago, almost invariably went to either 296 or 299 South Clark Street, and there is another place in the same vicinity, in a basement, of which I have not the number. The modus operandi, as I understand it, is that they are smuggled across the river and then they either take a freight out on the Wabash as far as Montpelier, or they drive along that line some distance, and then get aboard of the Wabash trains. Their favorite route, I understand is the Wabash.

  These Chinamen are always accompanied by one or two white fellows, and sometimes a negro, and they get off the train at or near Ashley, where, I am told, the train is made up again for Chicago. Sometimes they go as far as the stockyards, but, as above stated, they ultimately work into one or the other of these places, and I believe they generally arrive in the early morning. I would suggest that you might shadow these places for some time, and if you ever see these Chinamen conducted through by the smugglers, arrest them on sight.

  There is no doubt but that you would be able to distinguish these newcomers from the frequent habitues of these places. This winter all the Chinamen whom we have caught—and there have been quite a few of them—have been most invariably dressed with caps, heavy rubbers or arctics, and overcoats, such as you would not see a Chicago Chinaman wearing. This might give you an idea of the green men who enter these places. All of the above is only offered as a suggestion for the good of the service, and for what action you may see fit to take in the premises.

  Respectfully,

  H. E. Tippett

  Chinese Inspector in Charge

  Port of Detroit

  CHAPTER I

  WINTER, 1904

  A THIN RAY OF light moved over the silent ice like a pendulum. Its motion was metered, and though it made no sound, the light left echoes of silver mist above the Detroit River. Jeu Gong Lum stood at the bank of the frozen causeway. Beneath his feet, winter mud splintered into needles. In China, rigid earth like this would grow nothing, but in Gam Saan, vibrant cities sprang up from hardened riverbeds. In constant rotation, the beam emanating from the Detroit River lighthouse stretched out over Lake Erie, then turned northward to the glimmering city of Detroit. From the city, the finger of light spun east across the river, illuminating where ice had buckled under itself, casting up walls of ivory.

  A furious wind ripped through the channel. Dressed in a thick wool cap, heavy rubber boots, and a large overcoat, Jeu Gong braced himself against a cold that he had never experienced in his twenty-odd years of life in southern China. In the distance, at the end of the canal, giant steamships trailed smoke over Lake Erie. The cold would not last much longer. Jeu Gong had only to make it to the other side of the river, across the ice, to America.

  In China they called it Gam Saan, Gold Mountain, where fortunes were as easily made as picking gold off the street. Under the shade of banyan trees, villagers told stories of a world where wealth fell into young men’s palms. Jeu Gong’s brother, Gow, had already made the journey. He was somewhere over the frozen river, in a city called Chicago.

  Jeu Gong waited for a signal. This was a new kind of waiting. A patience stronger than the wait that came for harvest, when the rice fields of Sun Wui ripened in succession, a patchwork of jade over forested hills. This wait was with him when he boarded a steamship in Hong Kong, when he crossed the Pacific Ocean, when he tasted nothing but waves while the moon waned twice. The wait was there when he arrived in Canada and moved from the dockyard to the freight train. When the train coughed and lurched forward, threading through mountainside tunnels, peak rising beyond peak as dark bands of forest fell below.

  The wait was with him as he passed sawmills, coal mines, and slate quarries. Each with its own town, a main street and a string of electric lights. Each with its own station stop, where worn men with rucksacks were waiting just like him. The wait crossed with him over ravines, walls thousands of feet high, angry rapids breaking below. The wait coiled through gorges and crops of rock with trees clinging to crumbling stone. The wait was there when the mountains gave way to a great plain of earth. The sky grew longer and Jeu Gong and his wait watched its ragged winter clouds. From the plains came the lakes, each one larger than the last. And Jeu Gong and his wait left the train and stood at the bank of a river, on the shores of America, ready to cross.

  Just over the water was a freight train bound for Chicago. Jeu Gong was to arrive at the city stockyards at dawn. He would leave the train and hide inside the pulse of a thriving city. He would fill his empty pockets with silver and become to his family a Gam Saan haak, a son of Gold Mountain. But first there was the ice. He had to walk quickly, so as not to be detected, but if he moved too fast he might fall through. Trapped under the water, Jeu Gong would sink deeper and deeper into darkness. A stone tablet, reserved for his grave in Sun Wui, would remain blank, his name unwritten in the land of his ancestors, all memory erased as his body turned cold and white like ash, disappearing at the border of Gam Saan. With one brave step, Jeu Gong moved onto the ice.

  The waters Jeu Gong grew up on were nothing like those he stood on now. Never still, the rivers were like veins that moved life in Sun Wui. The Xi River to the east and the Tan to the west wound southward through the narrow valley of Yinzhouhu, before reaching the sea through the Ya Men Inlet. Between the two rivers, an elaborate network of waterways and bridges connected hundreds of villages.

  Streams and tributaries, fed by generations of rain, linked together the threshing grounds and fishponds of ancient courts. The same waters connected the new shantytowns of migrant farmers, their straw huts strung along dikes where fan palms and citrus orchards grew. It was a vibrant place that stirred in Jeu Gong’s memory; one that smelled of tangerines and mandarin oranges, of mulberry shrubs and sugarcane, all feeding from the same rich soil.

  The rivers carried flower boats with blackwood tables and chairs inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The elegant rafts were home to haam sui mui, the saltwater girls, beautiful women who entertained only the wealthiest of men. At night the vessels drifted along the river, lit by a myriad of lanterns, casting reflections onto the churning water.

  There were the large junks that traded with Hong Kong, Macao, and the West, their decks laden with fine silks and woven baskets. There were the gunboats from Canton that protected the wh
ite men and traveled the river searching for pirates. There were the missionary boats that first arrived when Jeu Gong’s father was a boy. The sailors spoke in broken Cantonese and gave away pictures of a dying man hung from a crosspiece.

  Beside the large boats of the Westerners were the small boats of local fishermen, provision boats selling ginger root and melon seed, cakes and dried shrimp. There was the hot-soup boat with its raging fire and the boatman who carefully dipped his clay bowls into the river before filling each one with boiling water, rice, fish, and finely chopped carrots.

  There were the duck farmers who traveled in ships with large, overhanging sides that rattled with feathers. In daylight, the men let their merchandise off to feed. At dusk, the farmers released a bamboo gangway and the birds rushed back onboard, not wanting to incur a beating for being last in line. And all of the boats came and went from the dry docks at the mouth of the river, the great ports that sprouted from tiny fishing villages.

  On the riverbeds grew fruit trees and vegetables and beside them were rice fields that stretched as far as Jeu Gong could see. In the distance, the terraced hillsides of Wuchow lay barren, for there was no one left to work the land. When the rebels came they had moved on water. The river carried them down from the hills. They killed the men and their wives. They killed the children. The river, swollen from spring rains, swiftly lifted the bodies of Wuchow and the boats of the rebels who murdered there. For fifty years, the land remained uncultivated, the memory of massacre made visible with every empty harvest.

  These were the waters of Jeu Gong’s youth. Now they carried nothing but news of war and famine, of all that had been lost. The waters emptied into a sea that brought him to this frozen shore. One day Jeu Gong would return to them. He would come home to a towering mansion with hundreds of mou of fields. With this land, he would provide freely for his family, never again letting hunger gather in great knots in his stomach. All that was to be lay just across the river. With deliberate steps, careful not to break the ice, Jeu Gong walked between the past and Gam Saan.

  Between 1882 and 1920 an estimated 17,300 Chinese immigrants entered the United States by crossing the Canadian and Mexican borders illegally. The most numerous and earliest crossings occurred along the Canadian border, which proved the least expensive point of entry. In 1903 the Bureau of Immigration estimated that it cost Chinese immigrants $300 to sneak across the Canadian border into the United States. During the same period, it cost more than twice as much to purchase the identity papers and supporting evidence required to attempt entry through more official routes.

  While less expensive, crossing through Canada was much riskier. Charging little money up front, sometimes only twenty dollars, smugglers along Canada’s border catered to the poorest Chinese émigrés, often choosing profit over their clients’ safety. “Of all the contraband, it is quite possible that human beings are the most valuable,” read an article in the Vancouver Daily World detailing the smugglers’ tactics. “The greatest risk is taken to get them past the barrier of regulations which forbid their entry into other lands than their own.”

  When Jeu Gong took his first step onto Canadian soil, he placed his life in the hands of a smuggler, as hundreds of other Chinese immigrants had done. These strangers were fishermen, saloonkeepers, elevator operators, and pool sharks. They held unskilled, low-status, transient jobs that garnered little pay and even less respect. So the men moonlighted as human traffickers in a growing underground trade along the American border.

  They joined an existing network of outlaws who specialized in transporting drugs and liquor into the United States. New on this list of contraband was the Chinese immigrant. Stowed between chests of opium and stolen silks, thousands of Chinese immigrants found themselves on southbound freighters, headed for America.

  Low-skilled laborers were not the only ones tempted by the financial windfall that smuggling could bring. In fact, many smugglers were also immigration inspectors and policemen, double agents reaping the benefits of both a government salary and an illicit trade. The rewards could be enormous in an era when the maximum salary for a Buffalo police patrolman was $900 per year and an immigration agent made at most $17.50 per week. The world of smuggling was much more lucrative.

  According to newspapers from the Great Lakes region, smugglers received between $50 and $125 for each immigrant who successfully reached New York or Chicago. One immigration inspector, Thomas Thomas, estimated that individual smugglers brought five or six immigrants to the border once or occasionally even twice a week. Assuming Thomas’s information was correct, one smuggler could earn between $250 and $750 every week, and twice that on occasion. In one week as a smuggler, a police patrolman had the potential to make what it would take a year to earn as a cop.

  Immigration inspectors were more likely than police officers to be drawn into the world of illicit border crossings. This was likely due to the fact that inspectors had access to classified information regarding the US government’s antismuggling operations, making the job of outwitting the government relatively simple. Not all inspectors were crooked. There was a certain personality type drawn to the life of a smuggler, the type of person who embraced risk.

  Edward Baltz was a smuggler and inspector for the Great Lakes region between 1902 and 1904. Before working for the Department of Commerce and Labor, he performed in carnivals, parachuting from a balloon to thrill the “rubes at the county fairs.” In 1904 Baltz was implicated in a plot to traffic Chinese along the border and was dismissed from the service. Another inspector, David Hoover, was a deputy collector of customs stationed along the Montana boundary, when he was arrested in 1906 on the charge of smuggling Chinese into the States. A former police chief from Kalispell, Montana, Hoover had been a customs collector since his station was first established in 1901. During his five-year tenure, Hoover was said to have joined a “big organization to smuggle Chinese and opium” into the country. W. B. Greene, a former railroad conductor from Jamestown, New York, served as the immigration inspector for Montreal before he was charged with “conspiracy to smuggle Chinese” while acting as an employee of the immigration service.

  Such widespread corruption was due in part to the fact that border enforcement was a relatively new concept. Until the turn of the twentieth century, the US-Canadian border had existed as a kind of porous, suggestive demarcation between the two countries. That relationship changed with the advent of America’s restrictive immigration policies during the late nineteenth century. In 1894 the United States entered into a contract with Canadian transportation companies. Known as the Canadian Agreement, the contract granted US inspectors the right to enforce US immigration laws on steamships and passenger trains within the boundaries of Canada. The agreement effectively extended America’s anti-immigrant policies into the northern half of the continent. This meant that those wishing to bypass the border patrol had to evade not only US law enforcement, but hundreds of conductors, captains, and servicemen throughout North America’s vast transportation network.

  In many cases, corrupt agents were able to entice transit workers into becoming smugglers themselves. John Yanner and William Bies were working as cooks on the Rock Island Railroad when they were arrested in Chicago for smuggling Chinese immigrants in iceboxes installed on the line’s dining cars. “In many instances,” read an article detailing their arrest, “Chinamen had almost frozen to death in the refrigerators.” Yanner was a suspect in the murder of a Chinese man found dead near Kansas City whose nameless, frozen body, the prosecutors argued, had been tossed from a moving train.

  Crossing into the United States over a vast, unpatrolled border meant that there was little chance of rescue if a smuggling operation went wrong. Those Chinese who made the decision to immigrate during the turn of the twentieth century were taking an enormous gamble, one that could easily result in death.

  Every act of legislation aimed at restricting immigration only heightened the danger for Chinese immigrants. Smugglers were forced to take
greater risks with their human cargo and faced lesser sentences if something went wrong. Illegal Chinese immigrants were quite literally treated as commodities, both by the law and the smugglers who circumvented it.

  At the frontier along the shores of Lake Erie, where Jeu Gong attempted passage over the Detroit River, crossings typically occurred at night, when visibility was near zero. In spring and summer months, traffickers loaded the Chinese immigrants into overcrowded rowboats, dropping them at points along the American shore, a particularly hazardous operation given the river’s treacherous currents. In the winter, traffickers took an even greater risk, forcing their cargo to walk over frozen waterways.

  A 1912 report by one US immigration inspector details the harrowing journey a group of immigrants and their smugglers made across ice. “The first three Chinese persons named admitted to crossing from Canada into the United States by walking on the ice which covered the Detroit River,” the inspector wrote, after profiling six Chinese men held in US custody. “When arrested, the clothing of two of the Chinese persons was soaking wet, as well as the clothing of one of the whitemen [sic], showing that while crossing the ice, they had evidently broken through and fell into the water. This fact gave rise to a rumor that several of the party had fallen through the ice, and were drowned. After consulting with the District Attorney, it was thought advisable to investigate the rumor that certain Chinese had drowned.” Little came of any such inquiry, as no further reports were filed about the incident.

  Hundreds of Chinese immigrants sought entry in other ways that proved just as deadly. In 1909 the bodies of ten Chinese immigrants were delivered, sealed in barrels, to an address on Mott Street in New York. According to the report, “the trainman failed to give them water and food en route” and “they arrived to their destination dead.” A similar fate met four Chinese men found frozen in a boxcar in 1914.