by Lyndsay Faye
You just coughed, loud as a rooster crowing, and it made me smile. You feel better, I know you feel better. I just finished your get-well gift, after all—tomorrow morning I’ll write a prologue, a bit of an introduction, a letter of sorts, and then c’est tout. And none too soon, because Evelina is going to visit her alma mater in Menlo Park to run a massive charity drive next week, and before she pays us a call, I admire for you to perk up a touch.
Yes, I know all about you. But now we’re even. And I don’t think you’re a monster any more than I think I’m Nobody anymore. You taught me that. Even though you didn’t realize you were doing it.
So here’s to the saps and the sinners. To survival of the fittest and the terribly unfit. To the paragon of animals in all our many forms. To you, friend Blossom, every piece of you. It mystifies you sometimes, that I can still say that after you’ve railed at me for half an hour or woken up in a haze of Scotch and sorrows. But I can’t change it any more than I can stop liking the color violet. I do like it. Awfully much. You’re just going to have to accept the fact.
Let’s mourn only for our losses. And never for the things we haven’t lost quite yet. We already have an entire language that would be dead if you were.
Let’s make it last.
◆ Historical Note ◆
I grew up in Longview, Washington—about an hour’s drive north of Portland, Oregon, through lushly forested countryside—but I was born in San José, California, into a thriving multiracial community. Children only notice things by contrast, so at such a young age, I didn’t realize that my birthplace and my parents’ social circle comprised such a broad color spectrum. But when we moved to the Pacific Northwest (I was six), I famously asked my mom where “all the tan people” had disappeared to; I couldn’t seem to spot any. She admitted to me that they didn’t appear to live hereabouts. Longview, it seemed, was preternaturally pale save for a smattering of taquerias and a Thai restaurant run by a wonderful Cambodian family. The event that really drove this point home, however, was when my bronzed California complexion and I sat down in a church pew at Vacation Bible School, and the kid next to me stared in unvarnished horror into my very, very dark brown eyes.
“Eeeeeeew,” he said with conviction. “I don’t want to sit next to a Japanese girl.”
Granted, I was only six, but I was old enough to know three things. First off, that I wasn’t Japanese. Second, that anyone who was in fact Japanese must have been having a tough go of it. And third, that something was seriously amok with racial perceptions in my new town.
The first Oregon settlers envisioned an unspoiled paradise free from strife, crime, and poverty—and from racial diversity. As early as 1844, prior to statehood, the Legislative Committee thought it prudent to pass a provision sentencing any blacks who refused to leave the territory to a flogging every six months until they found the environment inhospitable enough to vamoose. Oregon’s founding ideal was that of an all-white utopia. When it came time to write a constitution, it forbade blacks from living or working in the state. And it would be easy to just cluck ruefully at the fact that Oregon was the only state among the fifty ever to explicitly deny blacks the right to live and work there if the effects of such sweeping intolerance weren’t still being felt. Oregon was also one of only six states that refused to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment (which guaranteed people of color the right to vote) when it passed in 1870. Thankfully, they quickly saw the error of their ways and ratified blacks’ voting rights on February 24, 1959, a mere eighty-nine years later. According to a July 2016 article in The Atlantic titled “The Racist History of Portland, the Whitest City in America,” at the time of its publication, Portland was 72.2 percent white and only 6.3 percent African American. I grew up thereabouts and, while I can’t claim to have counted heads, I can attest this is accurate. And that statistic is the direct result of oppressive policy and culture, not of random accident; during the 1920s, when The Paragon Hotel takes place, Oregon boasted the biggest Ku Klux Klan organization west of the Mississippi River.
Americans enjoy pretending that the KKK has always been a predominantly Southern problem, breeding only where slavery once thrived. Nothing could be further from the truth. In 1924, a Dartmouth sociologist named John Moffatt Mecklin wrote in The Ku-Klux Klan: A Study of the American Mind, “The Klan draws its members chiefly from the descendants of the old American stock living in the villages and small towns of those sections of the country where this old stock has been least disturbed by immigration, on the one hand, and the disruptive effect of industrialism, on the other.” The principle holds true to this day; of the people I know who are mistrustful of all Muslims, for example, most of them have never met one.
This rampant national paranoia all too often led to violence, and Dr. Doddridge Pendleton’s fate in this novel is based on two real accounts. In the first place, in 1902, a black man named Alonso Tucker who was shot while trying to escape a lynch mob accusing him of rape in Marshfield, Oregon (now Coos Bay), died while being dragged to the scene of the crime, and his body was hanged by the neck from a bridge. In the second, in 1924, another black Marshfield citizen by the name of Timothy Pettis was murdered and tossed into the bay. It was only after the black community insisted on a second autopsy that the public learned the testicles had been stripped from Pettis’s body. Such atrocities are often glossed over as “unthinkable” aberrations, when their roots can be traced all too clearly. Following World War One, America experienced rapid societal shifts, as well as a recession and plentiful race and labor riots, and the Klan reacted by entrenching themselves implacably against feminism, Catholicism, Judaism, and “racial amalgamation”—proving once again that, when in doubt, it’s much easier to be against something than it is to be for something else.
The Paragon Hotel is, in every particular, patterned after Portland’s historic Golden West Hotel, a haven for people of color from 1906 to 1931. The descriptions herein are as accurate as I could make them, from the dining room’s decor to the ground floor’s business directory, and while it hasn’t been a hotel for many decades, you can still visit the Golden West Building at 707 NW Everett Street. An African American businessman named William D. Allen saw the urgent need for housing to serve the employees of the transcontinental railroad following the completion of Union Station in 1896, and his hotel became not merely a successful investment, but a center of the black community until it was finally felled by the Great Depression. The first hotel in Portland to accommodate colored guests, the only hotel open to traveling railroad porters, cooks, and waiters, and by far the preferred lodgings for famous black politicians and entertainers passing through town, the Golden West was one of the strongest cornerstones of African American society in the entire state. Naturally, people being people, it also housed a gambling den in the basement.
One of the themes I thought worth exploring was the ways in which communities—white and black—deal with racial violence and oppression. Alice James finds herself weirdly adapted to battling the KKK after surviving the Mafia, and in some minor ways the Italian American and African American experiences possessed common ground. Both communities were forced to live outside what was considered the respectable Manhattan city limits, in dire poverty, in Harlem. Both were ostracized for assumed moral inferiority, Italians because they were Catholic, and blacks simply due to their skin color. They lived in close quarters, surprisingly harmoniously, for some decades. But in other aspects, the two populations’ stories could not have differed more widely. Italians were immigrants by choice, never by indenture. African Americans faced a system that had enslaved them and continued to terrorize them, day in and day out, without respite. And while blacks were being persecuted by the KKK and myriad other forms of racist oppression, Italians found themselves in the bizarre position of being bullied by their own people. The prejudices of their Old World carried over into the New—the Mob almost exclusively, both as a means of playing to their strengths and avoiding th
e ire of white law enforcement, preyed upon their fellow Italians.
The New York Mafia, even in its earliest incarnation, was a terrifying organization despised for its ruthlessness and cunning. It had already perfected its techniques in the Old Country: destroy all perceived enemies, strike horror into the hearts of commoners, and above all, work closely enough with politicians and landlords to get away with it. The average Italian American at the turn of the century would have had no recourse among the NYPD’s three-quarters Irish ranks when threatened by the Family. Many of the events in this book are set in motion due to the gruesome murder of a local Italian shopkeeper; the real victim of the so-called Barrel Mystery was Benedetto Madonia, a vendor of Morello’s counterfeit currency, and he had arrived in America only the week before. A stiletto was thrust above his Adam’s apple, a slash with another knife nearly severed his head, and, after dumping the corpse into a barrel, Boss of Bosses Giuseppe Morello—known due to his deformity as the “Clutch Hand”—left the body to be found on a public street with its limbs dangling over the rim. Such techniques were far from subtle, but they were effective. His cruel syndicate would blossom into the Genovese crime family, the oldest of the Five Families of New York. Aspects of Mr. Salvatici’s character—the sinister but kindly man who becomes Alice’s guardian—were borrowed from the historical mobster Owney Madden: founder of the world-renowned Cotton Club, avid pigeon fancier, passionate philanthropist, and vicious cutthroat.
A very great deal has been written about Prohibition, and much of that generalized, but it seems fair to conclude that its enforcers owned a talent for extortion. Positions as dry agents, particularly in New York, were passed out to men with no interest in the teetotaler cause itself but instead a keen affection for lining their pocketbooks. All one required to land a job defending the Volstead Act at a local level was to possess the right political connections. The Bureau of Prohibition thus swiftly earned its reputation as a corrupt body employing a small army of thugs, based on scandals ranging from widespread bribery to an agent who shot a cabdriver point-blank in the back of his head during a shady liquor deal gone fatally awry. The general public, even those in favor of dry laws, could not condone such tactics, and therefore scofflaws and rumrunners became populist heroes in the eyes of many. Otherwise upstanding citizens turn a blind eye to liquor consumption in this novel because much of the country felt that way, even when they realized that liquor could be dangerously addictive. At the same time, while Bayer stopped marketing heroin as a drug in 1913, addiction to its popular cough suppressant had already soared, and cocaine was still readily available in tablet form until the Jones-Miller Act of 1922 finally limited its manufacture.
“Nobody” Alice James and the other female star of this tale, Blossom Fontaine, are creatures of fiction. But the women of the Prohibition Era empowered themselves more rapidly than their foremothers might have dreamed possible. The Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was ratified on August 18, 1920. Once alcohol became illegal for everyone, the playing field was in many senses leveled, and hitherto “respectable” women found themselves quitting their drawing rooms in favor of speakeasies. And the binary roles of mother and maiden, so desperately defended by the Klan, began to crumble. Being female no longer depended so entirely upon virginity, or on a ring on one’s finger; strength, style, wit, grace, and charm began to be prized beyond technicalities of reproductive status. In his September 1925 article for The New Republic, “Flapper Jane,” Bruce Bliven wrote of modern women, “They don’t mean to have any more unwanted children. They don’t intend to be debarred from any profession or occupation they choose to enter. They clearly mean . . . that in the great game of sexual selection they shall no longer be forced to play the role, simulated or real, of helpless quarry.” I therefore set out to make Alice and Blossom anything but helpless, in honor of those daring females who decided to bob their hair, find employment, pour themselves a drink, and change the world.
◆ Acknowledgments ◆
This is the most difficult book I have ever written. It began with the mental image of a critically wounded gun moll fleeing Harlem and the Mob, ending up in Portland fighting the Klan, and emerged as you see it. May it serve the reader well! But between those brackets were about two and a half years, maybe a hundred thousand deleted words, plentiful tears, and enough liquor to floor Ernest Hemingway.
Thank you to the Key West Literary Society for giving me a monthlong writer’s residency during the balmy month of February 2016. During that time, I wrote copious words, met chickens, reclined on beaches doing research, made friends with holy vagrants, quaffed beers with colleagues, and threw out my entire first draft. There’s a first time for everything! When I went into hysterics about having wasted my residency to my husband, he said, “But how long would it have taken you to throw it out if you hadn’t been in Key West?” I’m grateful to Arlo, Nancy, Mark, Ian, Carla, Miles . . . I could go on endlessly.
During the research process for this novel, I tackled the history of Prohibition, the Family, the Klan, Portland, Harlem, and the vernacular of the early twenties. As you can imagine, this was a piece of cake. When I had torn out most of my hair and decided I could never learn enough about Portland history for the world to feel real, I went on hands and knees to a librarian, seeking help. There’s a first time for everything! To Emily-Jane Dawson and the Multnomah County Library, bless you and bless your advice and bless your microfilm department. So many historians’ work was invaluable, but thanks especially to Carl Abbott, with whom I corresponded, and to publications by the likes of Elizabeth McLagan, Kimberly Mangun, Ellen NicKenzie Lawson, David A. Horowitz, Kenneth T. Jackson, Michael A. Lerner, Finn J. D. John, Stanley Walker, and Mike Dash.
When I was two-thirds finished with the book you’re holding in your hands, I had a meltdown over whether it was entirely guano, so I showed an incomplete draft to my editor. There’s a first time for everything! Kerri Kolen, we’ve been together for three books now, and I’ll never cease to be in awe of your work ethic, graciousness, brilliance, and caring. You told me I could do it, and I didn’t believe you, but look—I did. This novel is here because of you. Thank you. Thank you also to the absolutely lovely Sara Minnich for your passion, meticulousness, and for championing my new baby like—well, a champion. Hey Katie McKee, Alexis Welby, Ivan Held, and about a dozen others, did you know you are full metal badasses? ’Cause it’s truth.
After that, when my manuscript was due and it was still dropped-spaghetti levels of hot mess, I went sobbing to my agent about it. There’s a first time for everything! My people at William Morris Endeavor are all the veriest feline pajamas, as Alice would say, and at the top of that list is Erin Malone. If we are on the subject of cats and nightwear, she is absolutely the Coco Cody Silk Shirt Pajama Set by Olivia von Halle (Google it). But seriously: she takes care of me, she makes me better, and I adore her. Thank you also to Tracy Fisher, Anna DeRoy, and all the other tireless kitty jammies at WME.
Throughout this process, when I was weary and angry and about as cheerful as Mitch McConnell at an LGBTQ rally, my friends were always there for me. And not for the first time either! Thank you to every author, neighbor, actor, saloon keeper, and Sherlockian who kept me afloat. Also I want to acknowledge that first, I’m grateful for the eternal devoted support of my family; and second, thanks Mom and Dad for moving to the Pacific Northwest—it gave me lifelong friends, endless creative space, an affinity for blackberries, my matchless husband, my brilliant high school English teacher Jim LeMonds and therefore this career, and so much more. Bethy, thank you for your faith in every version of me, and for ruthlessly shutting me down every time I even mentioned giving up on this book, and for the encouragement that always comes straight from the left side of your chest. Gabriel, you watched this process turn me into a headless chicken, to put it kindly, and you stapled my noggin back on hundreds of times. Every day your strength and courage astonish me. You are my rock.<
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To my readers, as ever: I’m forever grateful. I think of you all as people who, to quote Blossom, love dreams or dream about love. Thank you for taking this journey.
About the Author
Lyndsay Faye is the author of five critically acclaimed books: Jane Steele, which was nominated for an Edgar for Best Novel; Dust and Shadow; The Gods of Gotham, also Edgar-nominated; Seven for a Secret; and The Fatal Flame. Faye, a true New Yorker in the sense she was born elsewhere, lives in New York City with her husband, Gabriel.
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* Get out of here—literally “go to that country.”
* Little mouse.
* Sicilian phrase meaning everything in moderation: “Don’t be too sweet lest you be eaten, don’t be too sour lest you be shunned.”
* “Love of one’s fate,” or contentment with the inevitable.
* Little sparrow.
* “Wild dogs,” or Mafioso in training required to prove themselves with violence.
* I know what’s true, literally “I know my chickens.”
* Of course he did.
* “You’re breaking my balls.”
* Son of a whore.