The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  From childhood she is trained to efface herself in the presence of the male, whether father, husband, brother or son. In order to be accepted by men—as well as by other women—she must assume humility.

  And if this gentle femininity is so attractive to the woman-dominated Western man, it bores the Japanese husband silly. It is his prerogative to occupy himself as he chooses in the outside world, so long as he provides groceries for his family. If he buys her a TV and takes his family on an outing once a year, the other days are all his own. In fact, the businessman who goes home to his family immediately from work is regarded as lacking manliness. And while it is unthinkable that she should be unfaithful, it is assumed that he has the right to sleep around as his desires may take him. This leads one to suspect that the air of quiet contentment one finds so common among Japanese women—and so rarely among American ones—may camouflage resignation. Or even despair.

  Cabin B-52 is way way down in Mr. Tung’s ship. It has no porthole and the only sound is that of engines beating against the deep Pacific’s floor. It’s no larger than the room in which Miss Chan declined to over-crowd me. And there are a couple of unattached American women aboard eager to do some overcrowding. But no thank you—not that they’re middle-aged but that their eyes are round.

  The only passenger with whom I can conduct a sane and humorous conversation is an Italian whom I call Commandante. The Commandante is a strongly built, vigorous fellow of fifty-six, who commanded an Italian battleship in World War II. He accompanied the Italian naval brass to Japan to cement relationships with the Japanese naval brass. The Italian officers were given fantastically hospitable reception: the reception went on all night in the spirit of highest good-fellowship. Then word came that Italy had surrendered; and the Italian guests were pitched, directly from the banquet table, into a prison camp. Commandante was there two years but he has lived in Tokyo ever since.

  In my first letter to The Critic, written from San Francisco, I wrote: “Japan belongs to us.” Sorry about that. Japan doesn’t belong to us PLEASE INDICATE IN FRONTany more than she belonged to the Italian naval brass. And the Com-mandante, as Italianate a man as one could find, confesses that he, too, has gone bamboo.

  His transistor had kept us in touch with the moon-flight. The towers of San Francisco came into view, through a fog, on the morning of the day that the astronauts landed on the moon.

  I was leaning on the rail of the Oriental Rio when the sun dispersed the fog and I saw that wondrous city once again. Yet, the sight caught me feeling less elated than reminiscent.

  My father’s father was one Nels Ahlgren, bom to a shopkeeper of Stockholm. When his (Ahlgren’s) father died, the son found a much-marked Old Testament. He’d never read it. When he did, it drove him bonkers. He memorized The Book word for word, changed his name to Isaac Ben Abraham and adopted Orthodox Judiasm as his faith. That’s how it happened that my own father was bom, in 1868, in San Francisco.

  A hundred and one years to make the mind boggle: news of Lincoln’s assassination had not yet had full impact on this city then. Now I was sailing into it on a day when men were going to walk on the moon!

  San Francisco was my father’s birthplace because Isaac Ben Abraham (now ready for a funny farm for pseudo-intellectuals) was waiting for a ship to take him to The Holy Land. He, his wife and son caught the ship and he preached Zionism to Zionists, in Jerusalem, until his wife lost her job. She had to go to the American Embassy to get passage back to America.

  Isaac Ben Abraham came along. The family was so broke, coming back, that the passengers took up a collection for them. The mistake the passengers made was in giving the alms to the husband instead of to the wife. He brooded over the American bills for a while—then threw the money overboard because it had George Washington’s picture on the bills.

  George Washington was a man, was Isaac’s thinking; man is made in the image of God; and the Holy Book commands: Thou Shalt Make No Graven Image.

  Yet who am I to put that old man down? Haven’t I done the same thing with American bills, throwing them into mutuel windows instead of into the sea—and without so idealistic a justification? In fact, I’m not coming to an American shore any more affluent then he did in that long-ago year.

  And as for embracing Judaism so uncritically, wasn’t he doing the same thing the Commandante had done; and myself? Weren’t all three of us looking for hope to the East?

  Wasn’t it simply old Isaac’s way of going bamboo?

  To sum up, in one aphorism, all the wisdom I acquired in nine months in the Orient:

  Never eat in a place with sliding doors unless you’re crazy about raw fish.

  AFTER THE BUFFALO

  I. How Do I Look Boys Dead or Alive

  The North was one country and the South another. But the men of the wooded seaboard valleys said A Plague On Both Your Houses.

  These were slaveless yeomen who never saw the sense, with a continent of game stretching before them, in breaking their backs in other men’s fields. They were rifle-and-fishing-rod folk whom other whites called “white trash” and Negroes called “po’ buckra.” Seeking neither to bind the labor of other men to themselves nor permitting their own labor to be so bound, they came to town only now and then.

  Yet came often enough to perceive that the proscriptive rights of master over man had been transferred whole from plantation to mill. And when, between the landed gentry of the South and the proprietary interests of the North, war at last broke out, they didn’t come to town anymore at all.

  But went deeper and deeper into the forests until hiding became a way of life with them.

  Yet among red roses their women had planted about their cabins, a shadowed bloom sometimes gleamed whitely.

  They did not take it for a sign. They took it for a forest flower and paid it little mind. Not knowing that the soil upon which their cabins rested had been waiting, volcanic aeons gone, for a certain seed.

  The ultimate price the huntsman paid, for mistaking a field fiber to be a forest flower, was having to take what the cotton planter offered him for his trees and streams. Caught between the reaching greed of Northern industry and the equal greed of the planters, the slaveless yeoman was pressed from his woods into a wobbly old wagon piled high with the junk of a dying frontier.

  As the wagon began to roll, through woods once his, already ringing with axes in the hands of bound men, the sense of loss the huntsman endured must surely have been hard.

  The loss his descendants were to sustain would be yet harder. Unwanted by Southern agriculture and unneeded by Northern industry, he was taking his hunters’ skills to a frontier already lacking use for them. By the time his wagon ferried the wide Missouri, he was already a drifter of no trade: master of no man to be mastered by none. A landless illiterate; already a kind of outlaw.

  “I’ll bet you didn’t know the world was so wide,” he might have told his son when the wagon reached the Great Plains.

  “No,” the son might have replied, “but I always knew what I’d have for breakfast.”

  For though he might belong to a woman or a faith or just to his hounds; to a passion, an aspiration or a hope, after the buffalo the hunter would never again find his own true country.

  For what The West was all about was not whether Man should be free, but who should be Man’s master. The issues which were joined in The Making of the West were whether gold or silver should be the standard of money; whether timber or mining should own this or that range; whether oil or railroads should govern this or that state.

  After the buffalo, when the hands that had gotten the gold had gotten the silver and copper as well, when timber and railroads became single empires and governors found that there were enough mines and wells and rails to go around, the frontiersman was left with a couple hounds and a string-tailed mare in a shanty on a claim.

  The banks were now the hunters; the hunter was their prey. For the flower that was not a flower had severed him at his roots.

&
nbsp; Small wonder that the huntsman’s sons said a plague on all your houses.

  If the Border War didn’t, precisely speaking, breed bad men, it certainly turned them loose. “Jayhawkers,” “nigger-stealers” and “bushwackers” were commonly men whose skills in hunting game had been transferred, by the slave-vs.-free controversy, to hunting men:

  They rode in one morning at breaking of day,

  They came to burn Lawrence they came not to stay;

  With guns all a-waving and horses all foam,

  And Quantrell riding his famous big roan.

  The boys they were drunken with powder and wine;

  They came to burn Lawrence just over the line.

  After the buffalo, the frontier hunter might move from ranch to ranch; follow the oil booms or the wheat; drive spikes or mules. But he wouldn’t be banking the silver and he wouldn’t be riding in Pullmans. His name would be on no government contract for meat or wool. And all his songs celebrating the great outlaws of the Southwest would be variations of a sense of having been deeply wronged:

  Now as through the world I wander,

  I see lots of funny men;

  Some rob you with a six-gun,

  Some with a fountain pen.

  The trickle of wagons and walkers moving west became a dispersion.

  Came now the Sleep-by-day-fly-by-nighties, Get-rich-quickies with W’s on their foreheads, hiders, escapers and St. Louis whoremongers with many a lightfoot whore.

  The fugitive slave had headed north. The Bad Nigger fled west.

  John Henry was a Good Nigger because he died with his hammer in his hand; having nicely killed himself for a white section boss. John Hardy was a black gambling man but this didn’t make him a Bad Nigger. He didn’t make that till he shot a white man down on the West Virginia Line.

  Another black wonder was Po’ Laz’rus, who’d always been a Good Nigger. He was a Louisiana levee-camp big-timberman who endured being worked from dawn to dark. It was worms in the grits that cut it with Po’ Laz’rus.

  He came down the middle of the mess-hall table wielding a brace of blue-steel revolvers and taking care to put his big muddy boots in every man’s plate. Then, by way of saying good-bye to the white boss, he stuck up the commissary and got away with the payroll. When dem cot-ton bolls turns rotten you cain’t pick very much cotton in dem old cotton fields down south.

  When his face was posted in every post office—WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE—Laz’rus, pleased at his widening fame, sent one of the posters back to his levee-camp comrades inscribed: How do I look boys dead or alive?

  How do I look boys, dead or alive?

  How do I look boys, dead or alive?

  Dead or alive boys, dead or alive?

  It’s a hard road, dead or alive.

  * * *

  New sheriff sent me my pitcher,

  “Come up and see me, dead or alive.”

  “Come up and see me, dead or alive.”

  New sheriff sent me a letter,

  Said he’d clothe and feed me,

  Dead or alive, dead or alive.

  It’s a hard road, dead or alive.

  I’m sorry I cain’t come sir,

  Dead or alive, dead or alive.

  Got to go see my sweet little thing,

  Dead or alive, dead or alive.

  How do I look boys, dead or alive?

  Nobody knows who Po’ Laz’rus was any more than anyone knows who Jesus Christ was. All we know is that both were poor men who defied armed authority; were betrayed, taken; and died wounded in the side:

  O then they taken Po’ Laz’rus

  An lay him in the commissary gallery.

  He said, “my wounded side, Lord,

  Lord, my wounded side.”

  From Jesus Christ to Jesse James, an innocent insistence that the outlaw is a kind of saviour pervades the celebration of all their names. As in the song Woody Guthrie used to sing to the tune of Jesse James:

  When Jesus came to town,

  Poor workin’ people,

  They followed him around.

  He sent to the preacher;

  He sent to the sheriff;

  And told them all the same;

  “Take all your money

  And give it to the poor.”

  So they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.

  The people held their breath When they heard of Jesus’ death,

  And wondered how he ever came to die.

  Twas the landlords and the soldiers Who nailed him in the sky,

  And laid poor Jesus in his grave.

  Shades of great outlaws crossed the Atlantic to haunt the Appalachians and the Ozarks:

  A brace of loaded pistols,

  He carried night and day.

  He robbed not from the poor,

  But on the King’s Highway.

  Bold, gay and undaunted

  Stood young Brennan on the moor —

  Like John Henry, John Hardy, and Po’ Laz’rus, Young Brennan remained a shade. But the opening of the American Southwest brought the photographer to make shades tangible. Outlaws became living realities. The chronicle of the just man who, by stamina, guile and courage outwits authority armed in its hundreds, becomes tangible history with the flight and pursuit of Gregorio Cortez.

  II. So Many Mountain Rangers to Take One Mexican?

  On a summer morning of 1901, Sheriff Brack Morris, of Karnes County, Texas, rode up to the tenant farm of the brothers Romuldo and Gregorio Cortez, accompanied by two deputies. The brothers understood little English. What little they understood now sufficed: they were being charged with horse-theft. And Karnes County justice was served, when a Mexican was charged with horse-stealing, by hanging the nearest Mexican.

  And as the only crime the brothers had committed was that of being Mexicans, Gregorio said he would not permit himself to be taken.

  A deputy translated this as “I refuse to let a white man arrest me.” Brack Morris then shot down Romuldo and fired at Gregorio. Gregorio shot and killed Morris. The deputies fled.

  By the time they returned with a hanging posse, Gregorio had gotten his family and his dying brother off the farm and into the hands of friends.

  Thereupon began a chronicle of flight and pursuit sufficiently heroic to set a pattern for all subsequent manhunts in the Southwest. In all theannals of Texas there had never been a Mexican fugitive who hadn’t ridden hellbent for the Rio Grande. Gregorio Cortez headed straight north—walking! While Texas mounties were covering every three yards of the Rio Grande, Cortez was taking a leisurely breakfast in the dead sheriff’s home town.

  What methods Sheriff Bob Glover, of Gonzales County, may have employed in interrogating the women and children of Cortez’ family is not known; yet he learned that Cortez was hiding out at the home of one Robledo.

  Glover’s posse attacked the Robledo home from all sides, with the Napoleonic Glover leading the assault on horseback. Cortez shot him off his horse, cold-stone-dead, with a single shot. Then ran, barefooted, for the brush.

  Convinced that they were now engaged by a gang of banditi, Glover’s troops kept answering their own fire until one constable was dead and several wounded; as well as Robledo’s wife and one of his children. They then hanged Encarnación, Robledo’s thirteen-year-old son, and left the field triumphantly. Cortez came back for his shoes.

  He had walked a hundred miles in the two days since he’d killed Brack Morris. Now he borrowed a mare that he rode to her death; and carrying the saddle, continued walking north. Not until then did Cortez commit the crime of which he’d been accused. He stole a horse; and turned at last for the border. The law picked up his trail. Both bloodhounds and press began baying for blood.

  “Since Glover was killed,” The San Antonio Express complained, “Southwest Texas has swarmed with men in pursuit of him. Some of the best trailers in the country have been following him and he has thrown them all off. His methods are peculiar. He travels a great deal at night and never follows the trails. He stays in the bru
sh as much as possible. His trail runs along straight and smooth for several miles, convincing the trailers he is following a certain general direction, when the trail starts at right angles. Then it doubles back. Another trick of Cortez is to stop, walk around in a circle, then reverse, then cross his circle and stop in a grassy place. This trick gives the trailers the most trouble as they lose hours picking up the trail once more.”

  Special trains, bearing men, horses and bloodhounds, were now moving east and west across Texas, keeping in touch with one another by telegraph and telephone. Whenever Cortez was sighted, a posse with fresh horses would be transported by rail to the scene. The trail would be lost once more; the pursuers would board another train and resume the search. An anonymous guitarrero began singing—

  They let loose the bloodhound dogs;

  They followed him from afar.

  But trying to take Cortez

  Was like following a star.

  The Major sheriff

  said As if he were going to cry,

  “Cortez, hand over your weapons

  As we want to take you alive.’’

  Then asked Gregorio Cortez,

  His pistol in his hand,

  “So many mountain Rangers

  To take one Mexican?”

  Como decimos asi es,

  En mil novecientos uno

  El dia ventidos de junio

  Fue capturado Cortez.

  (As we say, so it is;

  In nineteen hundred and one,

  On the 22nd day of June

  Cortez was captured.)

  Otro dia por la manana

  El solo se presento:

  “Por la buena si me llevan

  Lo que es de otro modo no.”

  (He surrendered on the next day, in the morning

  He surrendered of his own accord;

  “You can take me if I am willing,