Haymarket (15 page)

Lucy snorted. “I’ve yet to get a referral from her. There must be a new ‘Creole genius’ in town. And don’t think that I couldn’t make tennis and riding outfits! I could copy them straight out of
Arthur’s Magazine
. In case you’ve forgotten, I happen to be a very fine seamstress.”

“I have no doubt on that score. It’s customers I worry about.”

“I’m going to charge very little. I can make a basic housedress for two dollars, and using decent material too—sateen at twenty cents a yard. I could remodel an older garment for even less. Working cheap, I’ll get some customers from the neighborhood. Then, if I get lucky, word’ll spread about ‘the wonderful seamstress who works for practically nothing.’ ”

“Oh Lucy, you are something!” Lizzie said, appreciatively. “Nothing can keep you down.”

“Nothing yet.” Lucy suddenly recalled the dread she felt during their first few years in Chicago whenever she had to go downtown. “Oh, and I forgot!” she said, brightly. “Albert says if I make up a flyer, he’ll distribute it at political and trade union meetings. The men greatly admire him. They know we’re in trouble. They’ll come forward.”

“I want to help, too,” Lizzie said evenly.

“You?” Lucy was taken by surprise, and touched. “But how can you help, dear Lizzie?”

“I’m
almost
as fine a seamstress as the world-famous Lucy Parsons.” Lizzie said with a grin.

Lucy smiled, some of the strain draining from her face. “You’re better than I am with buttonholes. And I might even give you the nod with linings. But, Lizzie dear, where could you possibly find the time?”

“I have my Sundays, and an hour or two in the evenings.”

“You don’t have a moment for yourself as it is. You need to go to more picnics and socials. You’ll never find a husband helping me stitch borders.”

“That will come when it will. I’m in no hurry,” Lizzie said firmly. “What matters now is making some contribution.”

“Do you want children some day?” Lucy abruptly asked.

“Why do you bring that up?”

“I very much want children,” Lucy said gently. “So does Albert. But we have to make sure we have enough food for two before we can add a third.” Her voice sunk to a confidential whisper. “That’s another reason for the shop …”

“Well then!” Lizzie said, her eyes widening with excitement. “You and I had better get down to work. I’ve already thought about approaching the widow Arnstein who lives over on Kinzie Street. With age, her eyes have gone bad and her husband left her comfortably off.”

“We’ll give an honest price for honest labor. We’ll never overcharge.” Lucy said, as if addressing a crowd.

Her solemnity somehow made Lizzie merry. “Speak for yourself,” she said. “I intend to charge you considerably more than the going rate for piecework. After all, I’m a white woman working for a
negress
. It’s unheard of!”

Momentarily stunned, Lucy burst out laughing.

“I want to offer a toast,” Albert said, lifting his draft beer, his face beaming. “Or, rather—if time and our bankrolls permit—a whole series of toasts.”

He was seated with Spies and Fielden at Mackin’s, the popular North Side saloon that drew a varied ethnic crowd. Not wanting their talk interrupted by the piano-playing at the back, the three men had taken a table close to the swinging doors at the entrance, near the front window, which was so clotted with advertising posters that the potted ferns, desperate for light, leaned perversely
into
the room. Directly opposite their table, Mackin’s famous mahogany bar stretched the full length of the room, with a brass footrail at the bottom.

“Yes,” Spies said, “there’s much to celebrate, at least for the moment.”

“Now Spies—no German pessimism tonight!” Albert noisily clinked his glass against Spies’, as if to insist that festivity would reign.

Fielden’s kindly eyes twinkled with pleasure. “I insist on my prerogatives,” he said, leaning into Parsons. “As the eldest person at this gathering, I claim the right of proposing the first toast. You must cede the honor.”

“But my glass is in mid-air!” Parsons said, instantly raising it into that position.

“Then hold it there,” Fielden said, quickly raising his own. Spies followed suit.

“Let us drink to the most momentous of all the momentous events of late,” Fielden toasted, “To the birth of Albert Richard Parsons! Let the world take note, a new generation of Parsons means a new generation of agitators!”

With a loud “Albert Jr.,” the three men drank. Then Spies, his tone characteristically wry, asked if Albert Jr. was enrolled yet in the recently formed Socialistic Labor Party. “Or are you and Lucy sticking with the Anglo-Saxon Knights?”

“Albert Jr.’s going to have a difficult time getting signed up for
any
group,” Parsons said, with a seriousness that surprised the others.

Fielden, puzzled at Albert’s shift of tone, tried to restore the comic mood. “Do you mean the lad’s turned his back?” he asked with feigned horror. “Imagine—two weeks old and already crossed over to the capitalists.”

“Very sensible of him,” Spies chimed in. “The child wants to eat regularly.”

“Truth to tell, my friends,” Parsons said, “Albert Jr. won’t have many options, as child or adult.”

“You’re talking in riddles, Albert,” Spies said.

“All right, then. To the point. At the Lying-in Hospital, Albert Jr. was officially registered as ‘a negro baby.’ As you may imagine, that’ll make it difficult to enroll him in a decent school, even.”

There was a stunned silence. Parsons felt it was up to him to ease the tension. “I’m exaggerating, of course. Not
every
door will be closed. Why, in these enlightened days he might even aspire to become a waiter. I hear the august Palmer House is now employing a few negro servers—what difference if they have to enter the hotel through a separate alleyway?”

“Was this Lucy’s doing?” Fielden asked hesitantly, unsure, after his earlier brush with her on the subject, whether to risk going near it again.

“You mean in creating a negro baby, or in registering it as such?” Albert said with a strained chuckle. “Lucy doesn’t register
herself
as ‘negro.’ You can be sure she wouldn’t put that label on her son. His complexion’s much like hers, tawny, bronze. But—” Albert stopped in mid-sentence; his mind had caught up with his tongue.

“That’s enough about Albert Jr.,” he said with finality. “He’s a fine, healthy baby and Lucy and I are thrilled to have him.” To forestall further discussion, he quickly raised his glass. “I have a toast of my own to propose: To Sam Fielden’s new team of horses—a self-employed stonemason at last!”

“And a leader of the teamsters’ union!” Spies added, raising his own glass.

From there the toasting proceeded to memorialize every imaginable instance of recent good fortune: a toast to Lucy’s double success in turning a modest profit on the dress shop even while helping to found the Working Women’s Union; a toast to the steady growth of the Knights and to the many semiskilled railroad workers who’d been signing up in the wake of the Great Strike; a toast to the appearance of several new labor newspapers, with a special toast to the
Socialist
and to Albert’s being named its assistant editor; and finally a series—a stupefying series—of toasts to the new Socialistic Labor Party for filling the shoes of the defunct Workingmen’s Party, to its willingness to accept negro members, to its active campaign to enroll women, and (eyes now blurry) to its promising foray into electoral politics with the recent election of Frank Stauber to the City Council.

Spies proposed the final toast, rising to his feet and speaking with solemn, if slurred, grandiloquence, of Albert’s own near-election, in his recent second run for office, to the Council from the Fifteenth Ward. “The whole city knows that the corrupt ward bosses had to stuff the ballot-boxes to count our comrade out, to cheat him from a victory he’d clearly won.”

Uncomfortable with the flush of pride he felt, Albert shifted the talk to the upcoming spring election. He spoke about it so coherently that Fielden accused him of having poured half the toasts down his shirt front instead of into his mouth. “Shucks, partner, we ain’t had more’n a couple pints,” Parsons replied, affecting his boyhood accent, “ ‘T’ain’t nuthin’, m’boy—not if you’ve had a proper Texas upbringing!” Mounting a figurative platform, he then announced, this time in textbook English, that “the coming election will prove once and for all that trade unionism and political action go together”—here he hiccuped loudly—“and pursued together will bring our people to power and put a, put a …” Albert suddenly went blank.

“Put a stop,” Fielden prompted.

“Yessir, yessir, that’s it! … Put a halt!”—his deliberate substitution made all three of them howl—“put a halt to turning this country into a land of paupers, tramps, and menials.”

Fielden and Spies loudly applauded, startling the tables around them. All three were now well on their way to being drunk, since they’d shifted, after the first few rounds, from nickel beer to the rare extravagance of
ten-cent whiskey. And they’d drunk it down straight, followed by a chaser of water—except for Spies, whose delicate stomach dictated a buttermilk substitute.

And it was Spies’s stomach, as the evening careened to a close, that displaced politics as the consuming topic of discussion. “You care too much—that’s the cause of nervous indigestion, m’lad,” Fielden said affectionately. “It overexcites the nerves.”

“No, no, no!” Albert laughingly insisted. “It’s because you live with your mother and sisters. Just how old are you, Spies?”

“I’m twenty-four.”

“Good lord, Spies, you’re practically middle-aged—you must marry at once, before your loins give out! The trouble is, you’re too dashedly handsome. With so many to pick from, you can’t pick at all.”

They went on teasing Spies as if he wasn’t there, while he basked in the warmth of having doting older brothers. “You’re wrong, Parsons!” Fielden roared happily. “Spies’s nature is
much
too delicate to bear up under the strains of marriage. Why, look at me,” he said, pounding his chest and breaking into a broad grin, “an ox of a man, yet old before my time thanks to the loving ministrations of the wife and kiddies. Take it from me, lad,” he said to Spies, trying to look glum, “stay single, that’s the ticket. You’re an intellectual, you need your time to yourself for reading and such matters.”

“ ‘Delicate’ is he? Now that’s a joke!” Albert laughed. “This man is vicious, he, he’s joined the wicked Lehr-und-Wehr Verein, believes in armed revolt! I read all about it in the
Chicago Tribune.”

“When you’ve sobered up,” Spies said, trying, with marginal success, to sound pulled together, “I’ll explain—yet again, since you native Americans are so
thick
—that the Verein views armed struggle as a disservice to the workers’—cause—yes, rejects all talk of class war—”

“Yet drills with fancy Remington and Springfield rifles,” Albert threw in. “And those cost a pretty penny. Bet the money’s comin’ straight from Karl Marx and his gang in Germany.”

“Karl Marx lives in London,” Spies said, grinning broadly.

“Same thing,” Parsons said with another loud hiccup, which they all found hilarious. “It’s foreigners what’s ruining this country,” Albert yelled, briefly silencing the tables nearby. “All these filthy anarchists piling up on our shores!”

“And what about those uniforms?” Fielden demanded, spittle trickling down his shirt front. Not even the ladies of Prairie Avenue spend as much on finery as the Verein does!”

“Just so you know,” Spies said, “our money comes from fund-raising balls, picnics and voluntary contributions.”

“My God, he’s still talking in full sentences,” Albert said loudly to Fielden. “Uncanny. It must be that buttermilk.”

Spies laughed. “Tonight is obviously not the night for any—” He pushed his chair back and started to rise.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Fielden bellowed. “I haven’t even toasted the queen—to say nothing of Uriah Stephens!”

“Both of them will forgive you,” Spies said. Going around to the other side of the table, he helped Albert and Fielden stand up, then managed to propel all three of them out the door.

“As we agreed, I’ll give you thirty minutes of my time,” Parsons said, sitting down opposite Richard Andrews in his office at the
Chicago Tribune
.

“That should prove more than enough, Mr. Parsons. And let me thank you for coming.” Andrews’s meticulous courtesy was undermined by the sing-song insincerity of tone. When he’d initially asked for the interview, Albert had dismissed the idea. But Spies had convinced him that the risk should be run: “If only a few half-truths make it into print,” he said, “that would be an advance. Besides, you yourself worked for the villainous
Times
. Perhaps Andrews, too, will turn out to be a secret sympathizer.”

Andrews turned out to be primarily interested in the upcoming Socialistic Labor Party rally at the huge Exposition Building to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the Paris Commune, a rally that had already prompted alarmed editorials demanding that the National Guard be called out. Andrews approached the subject circuitously, however, complimenting Albert on his growing prominence in, as he put it, “the struggle against capitalism.”

Ignoring the remark, Albert chose a generalized reply. “I believe in the importance of unifying the working class through both economic and political means. Organizing trade unions and voting to elect
SLP
candidates are two means to the same end.”

“Then I take it you disagree with Paul Grottkau, at least as he’s expressed his views in
Der Vorbote
.” Confident that the depth of his information would take Albert by surprise, a smug blush suffused Andrew’s face.

“I see,” Parsons said evenly, “that you follow our internal debates and publications with some care.”

“Yes, yes, we must keep abreast of the competition,” Andrews said
with a chuckle.

Annoyed at Andrews’s condescension, Albert felt determined to stay focused on the issues.