As increasing numbers of Chinese laborers arrived in the South, planters soon discovered the newly imported men were deserting the fields. It quickly dawned on the Chinese that their social and economic position as foreigners left them unable to compete with the black labor they had been hired to replace. By the fall of 1871, one year after their arrival, most of the Chinese imported to work New Orleans’s Millaudon Plantation had left. Of the 141 originally brought there, only 25 remained.
Fleeing the plantation, many Chinese immigrants became itinerant peddlers, traveling to communities throughout the South, selling teas and trinkets. Others looked for work as house servants, farmers, storekeepers, physicians, clerks, and cooks. Ultimately, the Southern experiment to supplant slave labor was a failure. But what remained was a lasting sentiment against Chinese immigration, under the veil of national unity.
“When the paroxysm of humanitarianism which followed the abolition of slavery in this country had subsided,” read a 1905 editorial in the Washington Post, “and the Chinese problem arose to be reckoned with, our people began to realize that charity begins at home. . . . The exclusion policy is not based on race or national prejudices. It was established, after long and serious consideration and debate, as necessary to the peace and welfare of the nation.”
With the help of his relative, Jeu Gong found a job at a small general store, earning enough to send money home. Whatever success he found, however, he was never fully at ease. There would always be someone hunting him. So he strove to blend in, to draw no attention to himself. He dressed as the lo fan, the white men, dressed. He walked the way they walked and ate the way they ate. He learned to call them “sir” and “ma’am,” even the children. Yet as close as Jeu Gong came to the lo fan, he always lived at a distance from them. Chinese could not buy property to live as the lo fan lived, so they settled into the edges of lo fan towns, building homes in the backrooms of their businesses.
In his new life in Gam Saan, Jeu Gong did not forget where he came from. He found a community of Chinese men who were just like him, still connected to the abstract place that was their homeland. For although they had cut their queues, and changed their names to John and Charlie, and spoke of cotton as they once spoke of rice, these men shared the same ache for a nation that was swiftly drifting from memory. In this painful transition from Chinese to American, Jeu Gong found brothers.
J.K. Young ran a Chinese grocery just south of Memphis in a river town called Tunica in Mississippi. He was a slight man, just over five feet tall, with oversized glasses, boyish features, and abnormally large ears. J.K. could hardly be considered handsome, but he carried himself like a prince. On the occasion that someone of importance, or anyone with a camera, stopped by the store, J.K. outfitted himself in a white button-down shirt and a bow tie. This happened more often than one would expect, because J.K. was the regional expert on nearly everything and a leader within the community of Delta Chinese.
A self-taught scholar, J.K. could speak, read, and write English. He served as a kind of interpreter for Jeu Gong. There were many things about America that J.K. understood. Even J.K.’s name was telling of his wisdom. In fact, “J.K. Young” was not his real name. Believing that the lo fan would prefer to do business with a man named Young, J.K. never told the white merchandisers and bankers that his actual surname was Joe. He never explained that the Joes were the first Chinese in the Delta, that his ancestors had likely arrived long before those of the white men who called him a foreigner.
It was the language of unsaid things that J.K. knew best, the language that all Delta people spoke. Contracts were written in nods and handshakes, the correct gesture at the correct time. J.K. knew whom to befriend and whom to ignore. He knew how to find the things that Jeu Gong longed for from home: tea, soap, incense, dried fish, plums. J.K. knew where to go to treat a toothache or a backache. He knew how to sign his name in English with long, graceful strokes and read the labels on tin cans and boxes. J.K. was also the first to know about what was happening back home. He sat on a bench behind his grocery, reading the headlines, sharing whatever news the paper contained . . . REVOLUTION AGAINST GOVERNMENT GAINS HOURLY THROUGHOUT CHINA . . . DISLOYAL TROOPS MURDER HUNDREDS . . . MUTINEERS SHOUT VENGEANCE ON MEMBERS OF THE RULING FAMILY . . . DOWN WITH MANCHUS . . . 300 SUPPORTERS OF THRONE SLAIN IN HANKOW THIS MORNING . . .
Even as the old country fell into civil war, J.K. retained the sense that home would always be China. Because of this, he remained single. Like many of the young men who visited him, J.K. intended to wait and return to China to find a wife. Some men did not wait, and for this they paid a great price. There were laws in Mississippi that barred Chinese men from marrying white women. Yet no law prohibited marriage between Chinese and blacks. The men who married outside of their race, choosing to live with black women, were exiled by the Chinese community. Although blacks and Chinese were relegated to the same neighborhoods and each occupied a lower social status than whiteness, the few Chinese men to cross the color line were excommunicated, forgotten by the very people they once considered family.
Like every other immigrant group to arrive in America, the Chinese in Mississippi distanced themselves from blacks in an effort to better align themselves with the white power structure. They developed a double-edged identity, adopting the customs of whites while refusing to associate socially with blacks.
Despite their status as outsiders, the Mississippi Chinese were able to achieve a higher social standing than their black neighbors and customers. In fact, it was their outsider status itself that mitigated against their being classed as black in America. “They cling,” the novelist James Baldwin later wrote of immigrants, “to those credentials forged in the Old World, credentials which cannot be duplicated here, credentials which the American Negro does not have.”
For Jeu Gong, who by now was in his midtwenties, crossing the color line meant forfeiting all prospects of elevating his station in Southern society. He would have to find a Chinese wife, which would be harder for him than it was for merchants like J.K. Young. Jeu Gong came to America on foot, without papers or any semblance of citizenship. J.K. was successful and spoke English. He had all the money and expertise required to cross effortlessly into the United States. If J.K. wanted to go to China and return with a wife, he could. Jeu Gong was not so fortunate. He would have to find his bride in America.
There was talk of a servant girl who lived in Gunnison. She cared for the Wong family’s two young sons and worked in their grocery. Her name was Katherine, an American name, a name that did not spend its childhood barefoot, bent over rows of dry earth, harvesting sweet potatoes. In China she was Hang Toy, an orphaned peasant. In America she was Katherine Wong, adoptive daughter of a wealthy merchant.
Jeu Gong began courting Katherine shortly after her eighteenth birthday in December 1912. Within a few weeks, she was pregnant. Katherine was bound by Chinese custom to serve the Wong family until the age of eighteen, so with Jeu Gong’s promise of marriage and a child growing inside her, she left Gunnison.
Jeu Gong and Katherine married on the second Tuesday in June. They wed using their formal Chinese names and, in this way, Lum Dock Gong and Hang Toy Wong began their lives together. They opened a small grocery store south of Gunnison, in the plantation town of Benoit.
Although it was June, Benoit’s farmers had yet to sow their crops. The river had grown high with winter rains, and in January a levee broke ten miles to the north, flooding the town. Rooftops drifted from homes. Bloated cattle floated over fields. Negro tenant farmers, who lost everything, built camps along the levees. Even as the land dried out, water rushing down Benoit’s avenues in retreat, the destruction from the flood remained.
Still, Katherine and Jeu Gong fashioned a life for themselves in the small Delta town. Katherine was quick to befriend the lo fan. She seemed at home in their world, maybe because there was no home for her in China, no family to write to on thin sheets of rice paper the way Jeu Gong did. She prayed to a long
-haired god and read the King James Bible. She fried chicken and catfish. She smoked cigarettes and laughed at her own stories.
After the floodwaters receded, the shadows lengthened and the air grew colder. Bare branches thrashed against gray autumn skies and a child stirred in Katherine’s belly. Harvest came and Jeu Gong and Katherine worked until they were numb with exhaustion. When they fell asleep, side by side at the back of the store, they dreamed in different languages.
CHAPTER II
AUTUMN, 1913
BERDA WAS BORN IN the Year of the Ox, during the fall of 1913, in the months before Europe went to war with itself and drew the whole world in with it. She came into being at the back of a grocery, in a dark, damp cellar, between the storeroom of a Russian merchant and an Italian butcher.
The construction of her defenses began early, probably from the day she was born. Dr. Edwin Martin arrived on horseback from his home on the east side of the tracks. As one of only two doctors in Benoit, he had witnessed more death than birth given the region’s thick swamps and malaria-ridden bayous. Holding the leather strap of a medical bag, he sidestepped sacks of cornmeal, sugar, rice, and flour, making his way to the back of the grocery. He found Katherine, her short crop of hair damp with sweat.
Merely a child the year before, eighteen-year-old Katherine was now a mother. From his bag of instruments, Dr. Martin removed a sheet of paper. He noted that the child, a daughter, was born alive on October 22, 1913, and scratched out the nationality of the mother and father. Katherine told the doctor that she was from Canada. Jeu Gong said he was born in California. Each parent did this to protect the infant, upon whose future they rested their own. In the stillness between their child’s breathing was the urgency of all they would do for her, to give her a life they could not yet imagine. And so it was, the arrival of their first child, a daughter, an American.
They named her Berda after Berta Beadel, a young woman who lived in a mansion on Sycamore. Mrs. Beadel’s husband was a traveling salesman, and in his absence, during the long weeks spent alone, she devoted herself to the betterment of the community. The women of Benoit lauded her commitment to “charitable and worthy causes.” One such cause was bringing the word of God to the Lum family.
On Sundays, Mrs. Beadel accompanied the Lums to church, a one-room wood-frame structure that served the town’s Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, each pastor taking the pulpit in rotation. The Benoit Union Church, as it was called, was inconveniently located directly behind the town’s largest ginnery. In autumn, during the cotton harvest, the congregation was forced to sing over the clanging iron jaws of the gin. “Come home, come home,” Mrs. Beadel howled beside Berda on an old, splintered pew. “Ye who are weary come home.”
Katherine understood that the drafty shack of a chapel offered her family another kind of ascension—a baptism into high society. In naming her daughter Berda, Katherine laid claim to an aristocracy, one created by those of old Southern lineage, who for generations had prayed together in the same clapboard churches.
When it came time for Katherine to name her second child, she chose to call her Martha, after a kind woman who lived next door named Martha Bonds. When, a few years later, Katherine gave birth to a son, she would name him after the town’s mayor. And in this way, the Lum children were christened into a culture that was not fully theirs. Nor was it that of their parents. They were part of the first wave in a generation of Delta children born from immigrants.
They would learn English and speak with a Southern drawl. They would drink Coca-Cola and play baseball. They would attend school and pledge allegiance to the United States of America, reciting the words from memory the same tired way their parents recited stories from the old country. Their childhoods, unfolding in the tense space between two worlds, represented the end of one South and the beginning of another.
The change began during the first decade of the twentieth century, when plantation owners experimented with importing immigrant laborers to replace black sharecroppers, large numbers of whom were leaving the South to find work in Northern cities.
In 1905 as many as five hundred Italian immigrants worked on plantations in Washington County, Mississippi. In Bolivar County there was also an influx of Italians, as well as Chinese, Russians, Austrians, and Romanians. Yet the harsh conditions and poor pay proved to be unsustainable for the new immigrants. Like the black sharecroppers they had come to replace, the immigrants asserted their limited autonomy by moving from one plantation to another, jumping from place to place unpredictably and often without clearing up their accounts.
Many immigrants unwittingly found themselves among the swelling ranks of convict laborers in the Mississippi and Arkansas Deltas. In 1908 a German citizen named George Scharmer was arrested for trespassing when he jumped a train in Malvern, Arkansas. He was sentenced to four months of hard labor at a plantation in Drew County and was still there at harvest time nearly a year later.
The story of Joseph Callas, a Russian Jew arrested for vagrancy in Little Rock, drew national attention. Marched to a field at gunpoint, a burlap sack tied to his back, Callas picked his first boll of Delta cotton in the presence of an overseer with a three-foot-long whip and a pack of bloodhounds. “We were put to different works,” he wrote in Collier’s after his release in 1909. “We gathered cotton, we dug ditches, tilled the ground, built fences around the fields. . . . There was not one day in which someone was not flogged. Two or three were flogged each day, and sometimes the number rose to ten.”
In 1914 twelve unsuspecting Hungarian immigrants from New York City, who spoke no English, were taken from a train station in the Yazoo Delta, stripped of their belongings, and forced to work at a lumber mill. When several tried to escape, they were arrested and returned to the mill.
Although they spoke different languages and came from vastly different cultures, each immigrant group arrived in the Delta with the same stigma of subservience that adhered to the black laborer. For those who intentionally came to work on plantations, like the Italians of Washington County, the reality of their situation dawned on them quickly. “Realizing that such treatment was similar to that accorded blacks, they soon became resentful,” wrote the historian James Cobb, “having grasped quickly the mores of a society where the actual physical cultivation of cotton bore the stigma of ‘nigger work.’”
Some immigrants gave up plantation life altogether and opened businesses with the little money they had managed to save while sharecropping, or with the sale of stolen cotton bales to black market barges along the Mississippi. Their loss of immigrant labor rankled the Delta’s white planters.
In 1907 a plantation owner from Greenville named LeRoy Percy told the state bar association that white Mississippians might be caricatured “as standing with both heels firmly planted in the earth, and with both hands firmly clasping the coat tails of the fleeing negro, in one breath upbraiding him for worthlessness and inefficiency and in the other vowing that no other laborer should be allowed to replace him.”
It was this failed effort to replace the Negro workforce that created one of the most fascinating ethnic enclaves in America. Having left the cotton fields, dozens of Chinese laborers, the most sizable cluster of Chinese Americans anywhere in the nonmetropolitan South, opened groceries in small towns throughout the Mississippi Delta.
Their enterprise was a new one, created by the liberation of four million slaves. With the abolishment of slavery, and the advent of tenant farming, Southern blacks had newfound earning power, however small, and the ability to become a consumer market. Yet due to segregation, a white store-owner would not sell goods to black sharecroppers. The only way a sharecropper could purchase goods was through his local plantation commissary.
In an act of defiance toward plantation rule, black sharecroppers began asserting their liberation by purchasing goods away from the commissary, at groceries run by Chinese families in town. “It seems as if there was a ready-made niche for the Chinese grocer in the Delta,” wr
ote historian James Loewen. “A slot which existed for reasons intrinsic to the social system, and which for similar reasons could not be filled by persons produced by that system.”
While groceries provided black sharecroppers a new level of financial independence, the motives of the Chinese grocer, in most cases, were purely based on profit. He treated his customers equally, regardless of race, because they were paying customers. As one grocer recalled, “We have to treat colored and white alike. The American money, they don’t make special for colored, special for whites.”
In one respect, the Chinese were directly responsible for giving black sharecroppers the ability to live separately from the plantation. Yet, in another way, they profited from a highly stratified society, which placed their consumer base on the bottom rung. For better or worse, the blacks and Chinese had a symbiotic relationship within the segregated South.
Saturdays were the busiest day for the Lum family. The grocery served as a meeting place, where tenant farmers from nearby plantations gathered on milk crates outside the store to eat sardines and crackers, drink beer, and visit with one another. On Saturdays, the only day of the week they could rest, the sharecroppers came into town, loaded onto train cars and mule-drawn wagons.
As soon as Martha was talking, she was taking orders. Next she was opening soda bottles and cleaning spills. Sometimes, while running errands, parents would leave their children at the grocery, giving Martha and her sister temporary playmates. For a few precious hours, the shy, barefooted visitors gained entry into Martha and Berda’s world.
Water Tossing Boulders Page 4