What if his brother had been followed? What if the inspectors came to the grocery? How could Jeu Gong protect his family? Who would care for them if he was sent back to China? If Jeu Gong were taken, he would likely be detained and questioned about his brother, how they came to America, if they were native citizens. He must know the answers to every question.
With a little money Jeu Gong managed to save, he purchased coaching papers. The papers provided a series of responses to questions that an inspector would likely ask during an interrogation. To protect his family and his brother, Jeu Gong memorized the details of an American childhood he had never experienced in a place he had never been.
Where were you born?
We were born in San Francisco.
Where were you born in San Francisco?
I was born at the corner store 803 at Grant and Clay Street, room 5, second floor, above the grocery and store Chang Jan. On the left, 805, was Chang Tai, a grocery and clothing store.
Where were you born?
We were born in San Francisco, 803 Grant Avenue, corner of Grant and Clay. Downstairs was the Chang Jan grocery store. They also sold books and metal utensils. We were born in room 5 on the second floor Chang Jan. On the left at 805 was Chang Tai, a grocery and clothing store.
Where did your father work in San Francisco?
He was manager at the Chang Tai store at 805 Grant Avenue.
Where did you go after the San Francisco earthquake?
We lived with our parents in Oakland at 31 Eighth Street, corner of Eighth and Harrison. On 4th month, 19th day, Kuang Hsu 15, my brother and I went to Chicago.
The list of questions ended with a warning, cautioning that the inspector would likely ask about Gow and what Jeu Gong knew of his activities in the North.
There needs to be remarks about you two separating in Chicago and your meeting again:
My brother and I were in Chicago barely a week when we separated. I went to the South to look for work. We did not communicate for many years because I worked at many different places. It was not until the end of the World War when he visited me that we met again.
“Further words of advice,” the letter concluded:
In case immigration officials were to investigate, be sure to memorize what we discussed above. . . . You can tell them what you did in the South after you and Gow Lum separated in Chicago. After you have read and committed to memory what’s in these papers, you should put them away in a safe place so they will not be seen by any white person. Otherwise, it could lead to serious problems.
Over time, Gow grew restless and returned to the North and Jeu Gong’s fear of deportation gave way to a new fear, the loss of his wife. Katherine had been in poor health during her pregnancy, but she’d survived Biscoe’s birth. Now many months had passed, and her condition only seemed to grow worse. Every remedy failed as her body grew weaker. One room was too small for a family. Katherine needed a new home.
Whenever Jeu Gong could get away from the store, he went to his small plot of land at the far end of Bruce Street, beside the train depot, in Rosedale. He cleared brush from the lot to lay the foundation, cutting back grasses and cane scrub that grew near the tracks. Over several years, gradually purchasing labor, mortar, and brick, Jeu Gong built a new home for his family.
The first floor included a cashier’s counter, behind which were rows of dry goods and farm supplies. At the rear of the grocery was a kitchen. In the yard behind the house, Jeu Gong planted a garden. There was an opulence in the kind of plants that Jeu Gong could coax from the soil, thick curls of longbean sprouts, glittering purple eggplants, green celery and bok choy, fragrant ginger root, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, and snow peas. Through his garden, Jeu Gong gave life to memory, now oceans and decades away.
Katherine designed the second floor of the house, which would serve as the family’s living quarters. It included eight rooms, far more than the family required, but Katherine wanted to be able to welcome guests. Hoping to spare visiting Chinese the humiliation of being rejected from local hotels, Katherine decided their grocery would be a place for all Chinese families, not merely her own. Finally, in 1923, four years after Jeu Gong signed the papers on his plot of land, the Lum family moved to Rosedale.
CHAPTER IV
SUMMER, 1923
BRUCE STREET WAS SO alive it had its own heartbeat. Its rhythm came from the fast crack of billiard balls at Charlie Green’s pool hall and the midnight laughter burning like pipe tobacco in Lottie Jeritt’s rooming house.
The street’s loudest pulse was the quaking meter of steel on steel, as the steam train known as the Owl shuddered to a stop in the dead of night. A handful of dedicated men, eyes blurry with either sleep or drink, would stand by the station, waiting for the next morning’s papers and news from Bolivar County’s great beyond.
The pace never slowed on the colored side of Rosedale. It was as if its very motion kept it alive. The Lums’ grocery was located on the corner of Bruce and Railroad Streets, next to the rail line. On one side of the grocery was the train depot and on the other side were two cobblers, a barber, a restaurant, and a laundry.
Just south of the train depot, a short walk along the tracks, was the town’s ice plant. There, great slabs of ice were loaded into insulated boxcars. Fishermen, boots caked with the mud of the Arkansas, White, and Mississippi Rivers, heaved crates of buffalo and catfish onto waiting trains. Packed tight with ice, the fish then shipped up to Chicago, as many as three express carloads a day.
Whether it was the vibrancy of the town or the new house, Katherine’s health began to improve almost immediately. By harvest season she was strong enough to work long hours at the grocery, from well before sunrise until long after sundown.
Throughout most of the year, the family’s customers came in from Scott Plantation, a cotton farm controlled by the Delta and Pine Land Company. The corporation owned eighteen plantations and most of the cotton land within the county.
During harvest, when the grocery was busiest, the Lums served new customers, day laborers who came looking for better wages from as far as the Red Clay Hills or plantations in distant Delta counties. The migrant farmers arrived with the first burst of the cotton boll and left immediately after the crop was collected.
By September, when harvest was well under way, Martha and Berda woke early each weekday morning to help in the store before walking to school. The girls were in Miss Rae’s third- and fourth-grade classroom at Rosedale Consolidated High School. The sprawling redbrick structure was an object of regional pride. The district had consolidated its education funds to construct the new facility.
The consolidated school was not designed for the city’s current residents, but rather the residents Rosedale’s leaders hoped to attract. With the exodus of thousands of black laborers, planters feared they would be unable to secure a strong workforce. By 1920 landowners began to consider recruiting white labor.
Mrs. Walter Sillers Sr. was one of the first in the Delta to suggest replacing black sharecroppers with white laborers from Mississippi’s Red Clay Hills. In an essay for the Bolivar County Daughters of the American Revolution, she advocated dividing plantations into thirty-acre plots and leasing the land to white farmers.
The survival of the region, Mrs. Sillers claimed, relied on recruiting “Anglo Saxon stock from the hill sections.” She insisted that such a project was essential to ensure that “this fine race of people may be kept in ascendancy in this nation.” Her son Walter served on Rosedale’s school board.
One of the chief ways to lure farmers from the hills to the banks of the Mississippi River, Walter Sillers Jr. and other Delta planters decided, was to build modern consolidated schools throughout the region. The beautiful brick buildings would impress poor yeoman farmers, whose children likely studied in one-room shacks, if they studied at all. After several county meetings, it was decided that Rosedale Consolidated High School would be constructed and serve as the district’s recruiting grounds for a new white w
orkforce.
Immediately following the school’s opening in 1923, Rosedale’s principal and board of trustees made an application to the state accreditation commission. If Rosedale received accreditation from the commission, its graduates would be accepted to state colleges without examinations, further increasing the district’s appeal for white farmers.
In order to meet the commission’s standards, the school was expected to fulfill a series of fourteen requirements, including maintaining a full library and a nine-month scholastic calendar, hiring teachers with four-year college degrees, and enrolling students who exhibited “good intellectual and moral tone with stability of character.”
Seeing as the school had opened just months before, it was unlikely that Rosedale would meet the stringent requirements of the accreditation commission with its first application. But on November 26, 1923, a few days before the commission met to decide the school’s fate, Walter Sillers Jr. sent a personal letter to Mississippi’s superintendent of education, Willard Faroe Bond.
“We of Rosedale are very interested in the progress of our school and in having it meet the standard of this Commission,” he wrote. “We trust that you will see that this gets due consideration at the meeting. . . . I assure you that [Senator] W. B. Roberts and the other good citizens of Rosedale will appreciate whatever you may do for us.” By springtime, Rosedale Consolidated was approved for accreditation.
On April 16, 1924, nearing the end of Martha and Berda’s second semester at Rosedale, Jeu Gong and Katherine ushered their daughters out the door for their first class photo. The event was particularly momentous, because it was the school’s inaugural year. The teachers led forty third- and fourth-grade students onto the front steps of the new building, filing the children into four rows, one for each step.
The boys sat in the back two rows, the older ones dressed in white collared shirts and neckties. The younger ones wore shorts, belted high over their waists, and long dress socks that covered their dust-scrubbed legs, an assortment of ruddy knees visible in the gaps between socks and shorts.
The girls wore loose-fit, hand-sewn dresses, some decorated with bits of lace around the neckline and cuff. Each girl sported the same boyish bob that seemed torn from the pages of Motion Picture magazine. Martha and Berda sat next to one another in the front row, Martha with her long arms dangling by her side and Berda locking her fingers impatiently over her lap. Wriggling in place, the children tried to remain still long enough for the photographer to take an image that would capture history.
As Martha and Berda posed on the front steps of Rosedale Consolidated High School, a thousand miles away, at the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, two cousins were locked in a battle that would determine the fate of every immigrant in America.
Inside the Senate chamber, Senator David Reed, a Republican from Pennsylvania, had just proposed an amendment to an act that he recently authored with Congressman Albert Johnson. The tentatively titled Johnson-Reed Act was the single most restrictive immigration legislation ever introduced to Congress.
The two men wanted to reform the country’s immigration system to operate strictly on the basis of quotas. The cap for the number of citizens admitted from each foreign nation would be determined based on the racial makeup of the United States in 1910. Using census figures, a national immigration bureau would determine how many countries were represented in the bloodline of “American stock.” Those figures would dictate the number of immigrants permitted into the United States from each foreign country. The goal was to preserve the nation’s current ideal of American Anglo-Saxon homogeneity while slowing the influx of migrants from southern and eastern Europe.
Congressman Johnson, chair of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, who helped draft the act with Reed, sought guidance for designing his quota system from a researcher named Harry Laughlin. A stolid man with a rare, faint smile, Laughlin was the nation’s leading eugenicist. He was the first and only director of the Eugenics Record Office located in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Frequently making trips to Ellis Island with his colleague Charles Davenport, Laughlin studied arriving immigrants to construct a hierarchy of national origins.
According to his findings, the unfit and insane constituted an excessively large proportion of the national populations of Russia, Poland, Italy, and the Balkans, which also happened to be the birth countries of an increasing percentage of America’s new immigrants. By drafting policy that reflected his research, Laughlin had the opportunity to legitimize the field of eugenics on a national scale. If the bill passed, it would give credence to Laughlin’s life work.
At noon on Wednesday, April 16, 1924, the bill was in its later stages of development, but still nowhere ready for a vote. What was up for debate was an amendment proposed by its author, David Reed, to include a provision that would exclude from entry any alien who, by virtue of race or nationality, was “ineligible for citizenship.”
The existing laws prohibited only people of Asian nationalities from American citizenship. This meant that if passed, Reed’s amendment would all but end immigration from East Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Asians as a whole would no longer be admitted into the United States as immigrants. Reed’s amendment was met with widespread approval as senator after senator took to the floor to support the new measure.
“Mr. President,” Senator Walter George, a Georgia Democrat, proclaimed in a lilting drawl,
when we think of the Chinese and the Japanese . . . we must think of them, Mr. President, as children of a very old civilization. . . . We have in America a peculiar government, a self-government that is peculiar to the people of America. That government has many great excellences, but it has no excellency that makes it fit and proper for every race of man. . . . So I think that in the broader question involved in this immigration measure before us, we must of necessity keep in mind the ease or difficulty with which separate races and the nationals of other nations can be assimilated. . . . I believe that amendment is a good amendment and it is a wise amendment.
Other senators joined in a chorus of agreement; one even suggested barring immigration altogether for a period of five years. As afternoon faded into evening and it appeared the amendment would pass, James Reed, a Democrat from Missouri, took the floor from his cousin David.
Described by those who knew him as “vigorous” and “alert,” with a bellowing voice and an “acid tongue,” James lived to wage wars no one believed he could win. He was a slender man, with a wide face and penetrating eyes that carried an unmistakable gravity. His cousin David was full of social graces, described by others as “charming, handsome and adroit.” As one writer recalled of David, “he came as close as any opponent ever had done to outwit” his cousin James.
James was the only senator to vote against the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which enacted strict limits on immigration. While James fiercely opposed every aspect of David’s bill, the fight was far more than political. It was personal. In a rivalry of kinship, James set out to dismantle his cousin’s amendment.
“Mr. President,” he began in a measured tone, “at this late hour in the discussion of the bill, with full knowledge that probably every Senator has made up his mind on the subject, and with but few members of the Senate in the chamber, I do not presume to think that I shall change a single vote, or that my remarks will have any other present effect than to register my own views regarding the character of legislation. I shall try to do that briefly.”
James then proceeded to break apart the logic behind David’s amendment, explaining the country’s history as an immigrant nation, that every person, regardless of origin, is both a physical and financial asset to the United States. He pointed out that every person in the room was in some way the descendant of immigrants, that he had known many immigrants in his life and seen their children grow into honorable citizens.
“They were regarded as a scourge,” James said, his voice thick with passion. “Yet I lived to see the sons and daugh
ters of those people enter the public schools and I entered with them. . . . The fact that a man happened to be born on the other side of the red line of the map does not make his presence here any less valuable. . . . I do not expect to stop this craze: I do not expect to arrest this movement: But I say that it is one of the narrowest and most contemptible movements that ever cursed the American people.”
As the sky grew darker and the sun began to set over the Potomac River, James turned to his colleagues and gave one final plea.
“This movement is but a part of a general swing. We are going to exclude everybody; we are going to keep this country just for ourselves, we think: But we are simply denying ourselves the wealth of the world, the splendid men and women who want to come to this country and live under our flag and become a part of this great people. You may do it; you doubtless will do it.”
Before the end of the session, a vote was taken. David’s amendment passed by a margin of 71 to 4. Then, a month later, the Senate passed the Immigration Act of 1924 in its entirety.
On July 1, President Calvin Coolidge signed the measure into law. With the act’s ratification, the country was set on a course to, by its own definition, “maintain the racial preponderance of the basic strain [of] our people” and “stabilize the ethnic composition of the population.”
The act proved so restrictive for Asians and eastern Europeans that in 1924 more Italians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Poles, Portuguese, Romanians, Chinese, and Japanese left the United States than arrived as immigrants. More than just crafting legislation, David Reed, Albert Johnson, the Sixty-Eighth Congress, and President Calvin Coolidge institutionalized America’s virulent nativism to an extent that would prove catastrophic for generations of immigrants.
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