Haymarket (4 page)

“We need to go north,” Albert said as soon as the results of the state election became known. “And we need to go soon. With the Redeemers in power, things will go hard with people like us.”

“Don’t look at me. I’m packed and ready. Been packed ever since we got to Waco.”

Albert laughed, then drew Lucy into his arms. “I thought it would be easier than it has been. We can’t even touch on the street,” he said softly.

“Which, you may remember, is exactly what I predicted. The question is, where will it be any better?” She disentangled from Albert’s arms.

“Chicago.” He sounded emphatic, like he’d made up his mind long before saying so. “I’ve been readin’ up on it, Lucy. Since the Great Fire two years ago, Chicago’s become a boom town. A city. The ‘lightning city,’ they’re callin’ it. Within
one day
of the fire, the central post office was delivering mail, even to nonexistent addresses!”

“Well, that sounds pretty stupid. Could’a spent the money findin’ people homes.”

“And that’s not all,” Albert continued, ignoring her heckling. “They’ve made the Chicago River run uphill—and then for an encore, lifted the central business district out of the slime—I mean, literally!”

“What
are
you talkin’ about?”

“It was to improve the drinking water!” Albert said exuberantly. “I mean, that’s why they rerouted Lake Michigan and reversed the direction of the river. Plus they raised the business district sidewalks several feet to elevate them above the mud and ‘road apples,’ in local parlance.”

Lucy let out a whoop. “Road apples?” City folks sure are delicate! Why
not call a turd a turd? Never mind. Sounds to me like lots of headstrong ambition and theatrics. Is Chicago a place where folks can
live?
That’s what I want to know. Don’t need the heroics.”

“There are opportunities from top to bottom.”

“It’s the bottom I worry about.”

“Well, don’t. I’ve been makin’ inquiries. Lots of inquiries.”

Lucy raised her eyes in surprise. “Thanks for tellin’ me!”

He laughed. “Didn’t wanna worry your pretty little head more than I had to.”

“How about a few particulars, hmm? Like, say, somethin’ about jobs and money?”

“Can’t get
that
particular. Not yet, but I can tellya this: I’ve read the Chicago papers, and the dailies are boomin.’ They’re addin’ evening editions to morning ones, some are addin’ a woman’s page, sports coverage, even serializing novels. What they don’t have is near enough skilled hands, especially typesetters. I’ll have a job within a week. I’m sure of it.”

“No point wastin’ my breath, I can see. You’re fixin’ on us moving there, no matter what I might say.”

“That’s not true, and you know it.”

“All
I
know about Chicago is long, hot summers and dark, cold winters.”

“And so many muggers, Mrs. Parsons,” he whispered teasingly, “that folks don’t dare leave their homes at night—”

“Mrs
. Parsons? Aren’t you the optimistic one!”

Albert’s face sagged. “But Lucy, you
promised
. ‘Once we’re out of the South,’ you said—”

“Oh, my silly boy!” She rushed over to comfort him. “Silly, silly boy.
Of course
I still want to marry you. I just don’t know that it’ll be any easier gettin’ a license up north.”

“Interracial marriage is legal in Illinois. I know that.”

She shrugged. “Well, why should we care anyway … We don’t need no state to tell us we belong together.”

“Now you sound like Victoria Woodhull.” He felt exuberant again.

Lucy cupped his face in her hands. “The day we leave for Chicago, Albert, I intend to call myself Mrs. Parsons. Not just to speak the truth of my heart, but to soften our reception. No matter what, people’ll despise
us for bein’ a mixed-breed couple, but bein’ told I’m ‘Mrs. Parsons’ will at least prevent them from despising us for living in sin.”

Carrying their overstuffed, shabby valises, Lucy and Albert disembarked from the train at the dilapidated West Side station of the Chicago and Alton Railroad. It had been a grueling ten-day trip from Waco, involving multiple rail changes and maximum discomfort. Yet even as they stepped from the train, Albert—ignoring the peeling paint on the walls and the three-ply carpet of tobacco quids covering the filthy floors—lit up with excitement.

“My God, Lucy, look at all these people!” he shouted above the din. “I never seen so many people in my life in one place!”

“And we don’t know a one of ’em. Which I guess is just as well, given how bad they smell.” She wrinkled up her nose.

“They’re
runnin’
, not walkin’! Where they all rushin’ off to?”

“Albert, let’s just get
out
of here. My eyes are itchin’ so bad, feels like somebody blew pepper in ’em.”

Albert’s much traveled brother, William, had warned him in advance about the infamous “runners” who infested big-city railroad stations, men eager to steer unsuspecting newcomers to an overpriced hotel or to a “boardinghouse” invariably described as “elegant and inexpensive,” but which usually turned out to be a flophouse room with a single cot, locker, and screen. And just as William had predicted, no sooner did Albert lean down to pick up one of their boxes, then he and Lucy were surrounded by half a dozen men, elbowing each other out of the way as they grabbed for the valises and shouted their set hymns of praise about the virtues of this, but not that, place of lodging. Lucy, frightened at the sudden, noisy onslaught, froze, but Albert dealt authoritatively with the situation, shouting that they were already booked into a hotel, while shooing the runners out of their path.

They did in fact have a destination, if not a booking: William, whose factoring business had often taken him to Chicago, had strongly recommended the boardinghouse of a Mrs. Wright, on Harrison Street in the western part of the city. Moving as rapidly as their heavy load would allow, Albert guided Lucy, still a little dazed, out of the station and onto one of
the horsecars pulled up in front.

Just getting on board proved a considerable feat. All passengers had to enter through the new, rear-entry “bobtail” cars and then traverse the full length of the horsecar, from back to front, in order to hand the required fare directly to the driver—a difficult navigation, even without boxes, given the overcrowding. Built to carry some twenty riders, the horsecar held three times that number packed together during rush hours. The congestion was only part of the discomfort. The ventilation was poor, and some of the male passengers—especially if it was late in the day and they were headed home from work—would be drunk and think it the height of hilarity to blow cigar smoke in someone’s face as he passed by. Inching her way across the filthy straw covering the floor, Lucy was suddenly confronted by a besotted young man, his face and arms streaked with coal dust, who tipped his hat and loudly warned her to “step lively, miss, or the vermin’ll be crawlin’ up your coochie!” Astonished, Lucy stood stock-still, gaping at him—until the man behind her poked her sharply in the ribs and angrily barked, “Keep moving! Keep moving!”

What with the potholed streets and the frequent stops, it took a full hour for the horsecar to complete the six miles to Mrs. Wright’s. Forced to stand the entire trip, eye level with wooden stripping that made it impossible for them to see anything of the city as they passed through it, Albert and Lucy arrived at the boardinghouse utterly exhausted. Fortunately, Mrs. Wright remembered William Parsons well and treated them kindly, immediately ordering hot water for baths and telling the teenaged German boy who did odd jobs at the house to carry their boxes at once to their designated room. It proved pleasantly furnished, airy, and clean, their chief requirements for a planned stay of no more than a month. For three dollars a week, they got a comfortable bed plus breakfast and dinner (hot biscuits, cold meat, and pickles), which they shared with some dozen fellow boarders, mostly overdressed dry-goods clerks, dressmakers with unhealthy complexions, and one mysterious older woman gotten up in flounces and silks, with a fashionably braided chignon and rings on every finger. She held herself apart, never speaking unless the necessity of retrieving some condiment required it.

Thanks to carefully accumulated savings, Lucy and Albert had arrived with $265—the equivalent of half a year’s wages for most workers. They had hoped it might prove a large enough nest egg to buy a small house of
their own; William had sent them a flyer he’d somehow gotten from the Blue Island Land and Building Company, just south of Chicago, offering lots and houses at 10 percent down. But when they went out to look, on the very next day, they discovered—after trekking a mile on foot beyond the last horsecar stop—lots, not houses, available at
20
percent down.

The whole of the following two weeks was consumed in a discouraging search for housing. They turned quickly away from the rear-lot wooden hovels, without foundations or plumbing, of the Fourteenth Ward; briefly considered a furnished three-story “tenant house,” with a family on each floor, in an ethnic Czech neighborhood on the South Side—till they were told that only the cramped, dank basement was available; nearly moved into a neighborhood of unskilled German workers bordering the industrial belt along the polluted north branch of the Chicago River—until Lucy announced that she would have to stop breathing in order to live there. Finally, they decided to stretch their budget and rent a floor in a multifamily “railroad tenement” on the city’s central North Side, a district populated mostly by skilled workers and artisans. Three weeks after their arrival in Chicago, they moved into their new home.

During their search for a place to live, Lucy had found herself in a state of astonished indignation the better part of every day. Everything amazed, and much of it repelled, her. The fifteen-year project of raising street levels in the business district was still incomplete in 1873, and the accumulated debris, congestion, and potholes—cavities, really—meant that walking the Chicago streets could be hazardous. The city had given construction firms the right to fence off sidewalks in front of a work site, which meant that piles of stored equipment and materials cluttered or wholly blocked some downtown streets. Contractors were required to build temporary wooden crossing bridges around their work areas, but these were often insubstantial, narrow, cheaply constructed passages that packed pedestrians together and forced them to inch their way forward.

And this was during the
day
. When they first arrived in Chicago, Mrs. Wright had given them a stern lecture against ever going out at night. “The downtown streets,” she warned, “are infested with con men, brazen whores, drunks, and ‘footpads.’ ”

“Footpads?” Lucy had asked.

“Muggers so stealthy they move without a sound, silently grabbing you from behind.” Albert and Lucy felt sure that Mrs. Wright, who seemed
to have a decided theatrical bent, was exaggerating the city’s nighttime perils. But it hardly mattered; after trudging around the city all day, they were exhausted by evening and intent on retiring early.

One day, as Lucy and Albert were turning the corner at Haddock Place, they saw looming just ahead of them an entire four-story building being carted off on a jack down the street, with dozens of shouting workers tightening pulleys, adjusting cranes, and barking orders to the gathered crowd to clear the way.

Lucy let out a gasp and clutched at Albert’s arm. “It’s going to topple over!” she yelled, tugging him toward a nearby alleyway. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

Albert managed to reassure her that moving buildings, however unknown in Waco, had long since become commonplace in Chicago, with only an occasional mishap. “Try to think of it as an army of ants on the march, resettling their colony,” he said genially, wondering where this newly authoritative voice had come from.

“This city’s crazy! Everything’s unfinished, never will be finished,” Lucy said, trying to regain her composure. “You got me to move here by ravin’ away like some dry-goods salesman about ‘Chicago’s triumphant rebirth,’ or some such twaddle.”

“Well it
is
a rebirth, Lucy. Now be fair. The whole world’s agog at what Chicago’s managed to do in so short a time.”

“Right! Collect more filth, create more noise in less space than ever known to man. Not to mention producing a most remarkable stench!”

“Rumor is,” Albert said, trying to tease her into a better mood, “that the city fathers are plannin’ to attach ‘odor-cutters’ to the tugboat prows.”

“Ha ha,” Lucy said glumly.

“Plus the papers say that the surface grime on the river is so solid that builders are cuttin’ it into foundation blocks, preferring it to concrete.”

Lucy tried to conceal a smile. “But it don’t do a thing to get rid of the nausea in my stomach or stop the burnin’ in my eyes.”

“Oh, c’mon, sweetheart,” Albert said, putting his arm around her. “Everything you say about Chicago is true, absolutely true. It’s a foul place, no doubt about it. But here’s what I think: in no time at all, we’re gonna get so used to it, we won’t hardly notice any more—and then we’ll start seein’ some of the good things about the place.”