Water Tossing Boulders

by Adrienne Berard

  Despite the risks, a relatively low cost of entry and the convenience of Canada’s burgeoning transportation network provided incentive enough for many Chinese immigrants to cross along America’s northern frontier. In 1891 the Canadian Pacific Railway Company joined the Pacific Mail Steamship Company and assigned three steamers to sail between Hong Kong, Japan, Victoria, and Vancouver. The partnership created a pipeline between North America and the Far East. Through the Canadian Pacific Railway, Chinese immigrants could purchase one ticket for passage across the Pacific Ocean and the American continent, without ever having to navigate the transfer from steamship to train. Immigrants like Jeu Gong were able to ensure their journey from Hong Kong all the way to the northeastern coast of Canada under the umbrella of the CPR. The relatively unregulated transpacific network created a new brand of hysteria in the United States, fear of “the illegal foreigner.”

  The influx of Chinese immigrants did not go unnoticed by the American public. In 1891, the year of CPR’s partnership with the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, O. L. Spaulding, acting secretary of the Treasury, complained that “an increasing number of aliens are now landing at Canadian ports and then entering the United States by Rail, thus practically avoiding all effective scrutiny.”

  That same year, Harper’s Magazine published an exposé written by Julian Ralph, a tall, stocky thirty-eight-year-old reporter for the New York Sun. Titling the piece “The Chinese Leak,” Ralph, himself the child of immigrants, explained in detail the “wily” strategies used by Chinese to enter the United States from Canada. Citing figures even Ralph qualified as possibly being inaccurate, the article depicted the Canadian frontier as a region rife with illegal immigration—to the tune of fifteen hundred Chinese immigrants per year.

  “The prairie, the plains of the western provinces and the thick-clustered mountains of British Columbia are repeated in our Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Washington,” he wrote. “Geologically and naturally there is no difference between the countries; the boundary line is an arbitrary mark. . . . There is no part of it over which a Chinaman may not pass into our country without fear of hindrance; there are scarcely any parts of it where he may not walk boldly across it at high noon.”

  While exaggerated, Ralph’s assertion of a porous northern border spoke to national concerns about patrolling such a vast region. In 1902 the total force of immigration inspectors numbered only 66, which included inspectors for both the northern and southern borders. Even if the full immigration force were stationed near Canada, it would not be sufficient to protect an area 3,987 miles long. The next year, the number of inspectors was increased to 116, mostly along the US-Canadian border.

  Policing the border was not only a matter of manpower; there was also the logistical challenge of creating the government organizations and policies necessary to curb Chinese immigration, both legal and illegal.

  For the majority of Chinese immigrants seeking entry into the United States during the turn of the twentieth century, crossing the border illegally was their only option. On May 6, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur had signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act and with it fostered the creation of the nation’s first “illegal” race. For the first time, federal law proscribed entry of an entire ethnic working group, the Chinese, on the premise that their presence in America “endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory.”

  The act effectively halted all Chinese immigration for a minimum period of ten years, barring most Chinese from entering the United States and forbidding all federal, state, and local courts from admitting Chinese to citizenship. Only six categories of Chinese immigrants were allowed to enter the country: teachers, students, tourists, properly certified returning laborers, merchants and their family members, and diplomats and their families. These six categories were carefully crafted, designed by legislators to exclude the largest population of Chinese citizens, the working class.

  The sole voice in opposition to the exclusion bill was a Republican senator from Massachusetts named George Frisbie Hoar. Hoar argued that the act was nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination, a charge that would have resonated in a Senate that legislated the end of slavery.

  “The old race prejudice, ever fruitful of crime and of folly, has not been confined to monarchies or to the dark ages,” Hoar castigated his fellow senators. “Our own Republic and our own generation have yielded to this delusion and paid the terrible penalty. . . . What argument can be urged against the Chinese that has not been heard against the negro within living memory?”

  Hoar’s remarks fell on deaf ears and, with the passage of the act, America entered into the era of Chinese exclusion. The result of such restrictions, as historian Erika Lee noted, was that “Chinese border crossers became the public image of a new type of immigrant—the ‘illegal’ . . . merging the illegal aspect of their migration with coexisting charges that Chinese were either cunning criminals or ‘coolies’ whose immigration constituted a harmful invasion of inferior and unassimilable aliens.” The exclusion act, renewed and amended in 1892, 1902, 1904, 1917, and 1924, ushered in immigration restrictions based on race and nationality that would endure for more than half a century.

  Jeu Gong was crossing into an America that defined itself by what it was not, crafting its identity around those it excluded. The nation’s immigration policy created invisible borders, much larger than physical ones, that narrowed desirable races into subgroups eligible for citizenship. There was a new sense that the American identity deserved protection, that it was somehow under threat, and government agencies were created and funded to aid in such protection. The era, as historian Roger Daniels wrote, was “a time when nativism and racism gained strength and acceptance at all levels of society.”

  In the year following Jeu Gong’s departure from China, one million immigrants would leave their homelands for the United States, the most in the nation’s history. As America’s immigrant population grew, so did resistance. Murders of Chinese miners were frequent in the West during the late nineteenth century. In Wyoming, twenty-eight Chinese men were killed and fifteen injured in the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885. In 1887 a band of six white men gunned down thirty-four Chinese immigrants in Hells Canyon, Idaho. Greek immigrants were beaten and their homes burned by mobs in Nevada, Utah, and in Nebraska—the site of the most notorious of the attacks, the Greek Town Riot of 1909. During the riot, three thousand men set fire to the Greek enclave in South Omaha, resulting in the death of a child and displacing the city’s entire Greek population.

  In 1891 eleven Italian immigrants were murdered by a lynch mob in New Orleans. Dozens of Slavic and Polish coal miners were killed and wounded by a Pennsylvania militia during a labor dispute in 1897. In 1913 a Jewish man in Atlanta named Leo Frank was convicted, on dubious evidence, of raping and murdering a thirteen-year-old girl. After several appeals, the Georgia governor lowered Frank’s sentence from death to life in prison. On the night of August 16, 1915, white citizen vigilantes took Frank from his cell and hung him from an oak tree at sunrise.

  Each wave of violence unearthed something deeply troubling about American society. The country had developed a delusional self-image, one of racial purity and hegemony, an industrialist white nation destined for progress. In reality, the country was witnessing an unprecedented surge in diversity, as families from every corner of the globe flocked to the United States to supply its growing demand for labor.

  Throughout this period of heavy immigration, there was a second immigrant narrative, one hidden in boxcars and stowed in rowboats. The stories of these immigrants were not documented, even within families. Fathers never told their sons about the weeks spent in the dark cargo hold of a steamship, that they crawled for twelve hours along riverbeds, that they taught themselves not to be hungry, not to breathe, not to sleep. It was as if their gateway to America vanished upon arrival, as if history covered its tracks.

  As Jeu Gong set out for Gam Saan, a metalworke
r was engraving a bronze plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Fourteen lines of a sonnet, written by an American poet. Its tenth line would become an anthem: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

  Some thirty miles east of the statue, with much less fanfare, another monument was nearing completion. At Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, construction was almost finished on a new, state-of-the-art laboratory. Built with a hefty donation from Andrew Carnegie, the Station for Experimental Evolution was one of the first American institutions to study genetics. Heralded as the future of biological science, the laboratory would become the headquarters for the eugenics movement.

  A campaign to classify races by means of a hierarchy, eugenics would provide scientific justification for segregation, mass sterilizations, and the exclusion of an entire immigrant population. It would grow to influence all levels of society, from public policy to children’s books. A sanctioned form of racism, eugenics served as the scientific articulation of white supremacy and the politician’s strongest weapon against immigrants.

  In the forested fringes of Detroit, along the south shores of Lake Erie, Jeu Gong stowed himself on a Chicago-bound freighter. He had grown accustomed to the lilting groan of train against track, and although the country was new and exciting, the ride was quite similar to what he’d experienced over the past several weeks.

  Once in Chicago, Jeu Gong continued on. He could have stayed in the city, finding work in a Chinese restaurant or laundry, living with his brother or anyone else who would take him in. But there was a phantom that chased Jeu Gong from the moment he crossed the ice. It followed him the way shadows chase swallows at dusk. Jeu Gong had become a man he could no longer change or escape. He was a criminal, stealing a place for himself in a new nation.

  A city was too risky, too many ears listening and eyes watching. He would go south, to farmlands, timber mills, and cotton fields. He had a relative in Mississippi who ran a small grocery store. There would be work for him in Mississippi, and he would be free from the fear of detection. He would hide in a place where no inspector would ever think to look. And so, with only a vague idea about where he was going, Jeu Gong boarded a southbound train.

  Carved into frozen valleys, the tracks seemingly willed the land to wake in their path. As the train moved southward, giant snowdrifts turned to scant patches of ice on gray earth, and the drumbeat of the rails continued. Soon the tracks curved to meet a bend in a great river.

  When the natives spoke of this river, they talked about it the way the men of Jeu Gong’s village spoke of war. It was to be both feared and respected. If it was not seen, it was felt, an ever-present force shaping all it touched. Life survived beside it and beside it life would end. The river ruled its people, seething behind mounds of earth, remote and intimate all at once.

  From the flat land that spilled from its banks grew small towns with clapboard churches, central squares, and stone monuments to buried soldiers. The streets were christened with the names of fathers and grandfathers who followed those dead men into battle. Streams and creeks unfurled from the great river, with curious names like Tallahatchie, Sunflower, and Rattlesnake. Webs of pale moss hung from cypress trees that grew on their flooded banks. In a canopy of gray, the virgin swampland wore the veil of a widow, living and dying at the same time.

  Beside the tracks were the fields, dormant in winter frost, that still held captive the creatures who worked them. Their skin was as dark as the soil they tended, as if over years of sowing and harvest the earth had stained them. These were tenant farmers, who owned neither the fields they planted nor the narrow shacks they lived in.

  Though an ocean away, this world was ruled much like Jeu Gong’s. All wealth belonged to the men who owned the land, and they governed the society that drew life from it. In leasing the fields to farmers, the rich men gave up none of their power. They would always have the laborers, chained to the fields for them to control. With a rumbling cadence, the train growled to a halt beside a wooden platform. Jeu Gong had arrived at his new home, a place they called the Mississippi Delta.

  An alluvial plain, the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta was forged by the tides of the Mississippi River, its rich soil created from centuries of sediment. Throughout hundreds of years, the river deposited layers of silt over a stretch of land some seven thousand square miles in breadth, from Memphis, Tennessee, to Vicksburg, Mississippi.

  With slightly over 50 percent of the region’s rainfall occurring between December and May, when the river was at its highest, the flooding that created the Delta remained a part of the natural, recurrent life cycle of the land. For the people living along the banks of the Mississippi, high water was a season all its own. To them, the river was a swift, feral force that “coils and returns on itself in great loops and crescents,” as William Alexander Percy, the son of a Delta planter, wrote. “Every few years it rises like a monster from its bed and pushes over its banks to vex and sweeten the land it has made.” The Mississippi’s vernal ebb and flow gave birth to fresh silt and from it grew dense woodland and swamp. Percy called it the “land of unbroken forests,” a thick tangle of water oak, pecan, cypress, and sweetgum trees, whose roots clung to soil more valuable than gold.

  The Delta was settled during the 1830s, after the Choctaw Nation, under orders from President Andrew Jackson, was driven from its land. Forced from their home, the Choctaw left behind a vast territory of woods and undergrowth. Young sons of Southern oligarchs brought their slaves to the Delta to carve cotton fields from wild brush. Whole forests were leveled by thousands of slaves. By 1850, across the Delta, slaves outnumbered whites five to one.

  As a consequence of its creation, the Delta became a bastion for the institution of slavery—for slavery was the system upon which its economic foundation was laid. In his desperate search for liberty, Jeu Gong had arrived in a place still clinging to the memory of slavery. It was this very memory, the white man’s resolve to resurrect an antebellum South, that drew Jeu Gong’s forebearers, the Delta’s first Chinese immigrants, to Mississippi.

  At the dawn of the nineteenth century, enterprising Westerners, with the help of Chinese middlemen, began the importation of Chinese “coolie” labor to the Caribbean and South American regions of the plantation world. Serving as surrogates for African slaves, Chinese were first shipped to Trinidad in 1808 and then on to countries throughout Latin America.

  The so-called “coolie” market expanded rapidly, developing trade centers in major New World destinations such as Cuba and Peru. On vessels registered to the United States and modeled after the slave ships of the Middle Passage, American brokers in ports throughout southern China carried more than six thousand Chinese laborers, their bare chests painted with letters marking their destinations, to sugar plantations in Cuba or deadly guano pits in Peru.

  “It was a brutal and infamous system that in some ways was worse than slavery,” wrote the historian Roger Daniels. “Some employers literally worked their coolies to death.” Other Chinese slaves, often indenturing themselves for the price of passage, were transported to Chile, Ecuador, Panama, and Mexico. One United States congressional report noted that the “coolie trade . . . seems to have commenced about the time when the laws against the prosecution of the African slave trade were enforced with the greatest stringency.”

  Following the Civil War, Southern whites sought new ways to replace slave labor and ensure their economic, political, and social dominance of the South. As early as 1866, editorials in Southern newspapers discussed the possibility of importing Chinese as a source of agricultural labor in the region.

  On June 22, 1869, an editorial in the Memphis Daily Appeal proposed a meeting to discuss the means by which landowners could obtain Chinese laborers. Less than a month later, on July 13, about five hundred delegates from Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, and California, representing planting, railroad, and business interests, flocked
to the Greenlaw Opera House in Memphis for the inaugural Memphis Chinese Labor Convention.

  Isham Green Harris, a lawyer and former congressman from Mississippi, served as chairman of the convention. Under his guidance, the event generated widespread publicity and triggered a new national interest in importing Chinese labor. Following the convention, an American could scarcely pick up a newspaper without reading about some new plan to import Chinese workers into the United States.

  “A number of Chinamen have already been introduced to the South, and the planters are exceedingly well pleased with them,” read an article in the New York Times. “They are not only patient and faithful workers, but they seem well adapted to the climate and industries of the South. The Mississippi Valley could feed and pay a hundred million of these Mongolians, and China has a hundred million that she could very easily spare.”

  The notion of introducing an entirely foreign source of labor to replace slavery captivated industrialists and alarmed advocates for the working class. One month after the Memphis convention, American labor leaders such as Susan B. Anthony and William Jessup gathered in Philadelphia for the third National Labor Congress, where they discussed Chinese immigration for the first time in the congress’s history. The acting president, a New York tailor named Henry Lucker, condemned the coolie trade, calling it “a revival of the slave system.” The importation of Chinese workers, he argued, “is not for their advantages socially or morally, but has for its only object the damnable one of cheapening American labor and to eventually force the workingman into a condition worse than slavery.”

  Despite such concerns, efforts to introduce Chinese into the South increased between 1869 and 1871. Southerners deluged Chinese slave brokers with requests for laborers. Nathan Bedford Forrest, president of the New Selma, Marion, and Memphis Railroad, a former Confederate general and the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, offered $5,000 to procure a thousand workers from China to lay track across Tennessee.