Ragtime (10 page)

16

This same winter found Tateh and his daughter in the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. They had come there the previous autumn, having heard there were jobs. Tateh stood in front of a loom for fifty-six hours a week. His pay was just under six dollars. The family lived in a wooden tenement on a hill. They had no heat. They occupied one room overlooking an alley in which residents customarily dumped their garbage. He feared she would fall victim to the low-class elements of the neighborhood. He refused to enroll her in school—it was easier here than in New York to avoid the authorities—and made her stay home when he was not there to go out with her. After work he’d walk with her for an hour through the dark streets. She became thoughtful. She held her shoulders straight and walked like a woman. He was torturing himself anticipating her maturity. At such time when the girl becomes a woman she needs a mother to instruct her. Would she have to go through this difficult change alone? Alternatively, if he found someone to marry, how would she take to the new person? It might be the worst thing in the world for her.

The dismal wooden tenements lay in endless rows. Everyone from Europe was there—the Italians, the Poles, the Belgian, the Russian Jews. The feeling was not good between the different groups. One day the biggest of the mills, American Woolen Company, gave out envelopes with short pay, and a tremor went through the workers in the plant. Several Italian workers left their machines. They ran through the mill calling for a strike. They pulled out wires and threw lumps of coal through the windows. Others followed them. The anger spread. Throughout the city people left their machines. Those who couldn’t make up their minds were carried along in the momentum. In three days every textile mill in Lawrence was virtually shut down.

Tateh was overjoyed. We were going to starve to death or freeze to death, he told his daughter. Now we’ll be shot to death. But people from the I.W.W. who knew how to run a strike quickly came up from New York and organized things. A strike committee was formed with every one of the races represented and the message went out to the workers: no violence. Taking the girl with him Tateh joined the thousands of pickets encircling the mill, a massive brick building that went on for blocks. They trudged under the cold gray sky. Trolley cars came down the street, the drivers peering at the sight of thousand of marchers moving silently through the snow. Overhead the telephone and telegraph wires drooped with ice. Militia with rifles nervously guarded the mill gates. The militia all had overcoats.

There were many incidents. A woman worker was shot in the street. The only ones with guns were the police and the militia, but the two strike leaders, Ettor and Giovanetti, were arrested for complicity in the shooting. They were put in jail pending their trial. Something of the sort had been expected. Tateh went down to the train station to be on hand for the arrival in Lawrence of replacements for Ettor and Giovanetti. There was an immense crowd. Out of the train stepped Big Bill Haywood, the most famous Wobbly of them all. He was a Westerner and wore a stetson which he now removed and waved. A cheer went up. Haywood raised his hands for quiet. He spoke. His voice was magnificent. There is no foreigner here except the capitalists, he said. The place went wild. Afterward everyone marched through the streets and sang the
Internationale
. The girl had never seen her Tateh so inflamed. She liked the strike because it got her out of the room. She held his hand.

But the battle went on week after week. Relief committees had set up kitchens in every neighborhood. It’s not charity, a woman told Tateh when, after the child received her portion, he refused his. The bosses want you weak, therefore you have to be strong. The people who help us today will need our help tomorrow. On the picket line each cold day they wrapped their scarves around their necks and stamped their feet in the cold snow. The girl’s little cloak was threadbare. Tateh volunteered for service on the strike display committee and got them off the cold streets by designing posters. The posters were very beautiful. But the man in charge told him they were not right. We don’t want art, the man said. We want something to stir the anger. We want to keep the fires stoked. Tateh had drawn pickets, stark figures with their feet in snow. He had drawn families huddled in their tenements. He switched to lettering. All for one and one for all. He felt better. At night he took home scraps of paper, oak tag, pens and India ink, and to take the child’s mind off their troubles he began to entertain her with silhouette drawing. He created a streetcar scene, the people getting on and off. She loved it. She leaned it against her bed pillow and looked at it from different angles. This gave him an inspiration. He did several studies of the streetcar and when he held them together and flipped the pages it appeared as if the streetcar came down the tracks from a distance and stopped so that people could get on and off. His own delight matched the girl’s. She gazed at him with such serene approval that he had a fever to create for her. He brought home more scrap paper. He imagined her on ice skates. In two nights he made a hundred and twenty silhouettes on pages no bigger than his hand. He bound them with string. She held the little book and governed the pages with her thumb and watched herself skating away and skating back, gliding into a figure of eight, returning, pirouetting and making a lovely bow to her audience. Tateh held her and wept to feel her frail body, her soft lips on his face. What if the truth was that he could do nothing more for her than make pictures? What if they just went on this way in varying degrees of unrealized hope? She would grow up and curse his name.

Meanwhile the strike had become famous. Reporters arrived daily from all over the country. Support was coming in from other cities. But there was a growing weakness in the unity of the strike front. A man with children found it difficult to keep his courage and resolve. A plan was put into effect whereby children of strikers were to be sent to other cities to board with families in sympathy with the strike. Hundreds of families in Boston and New York and Philadelphia offered to take them in. Others sent money. Every family was carefully checked by the strike committee. The parents of the children had to sign permission forms. The experiment began. Wealthy women came up from New York to escort the first hundred on the train. Each child had had a medical examination and wore a new outfit of clothes. They arrived at Grand Central Station in New York like a religious army. A crowd met them and for a moment everyone held the picture of the children hand in hand staring resolutely ahead as if toward the awful fate industrial America had prepared for them. The press coverage was enormous. The mill owners in Lawrence realized that of all the stratagems devised by the workers this one, the children’s crusade, was the most damaging. If it was allowed to go on, national sentiment would swing to the workingmen and the owners would have to give in. This would mean an increase in wages that would bring some workers up to eight dollars a week. They would get extra pay for overtime and for machine speed-ups. They would get off without any punishment for their strike. It was unthinkable. The mill owners knew who were the stewards of civilization and the source of progress and prosperity in the city of Lawrence. For the good of the country and the American democratic system they resolved there would be no more children’s crusades.

In the meantime Tateh debated with himself: Clearly the best thing for this girl would be to have a place for a few weeks with a settled family. She would be properly fed, she would be warm, and she would get a taste of a normal home life. But he couldn’t bear to part from her. The thought gave him forebodings. He went down to the relief committee, a storefront not far from the mill, and talked to one of the women there. She assured him they had more good working-class families who had volunteered to board a child that they knew what to do with. Jewish? Tateh said. You name it we got it, the woman said. But he couldn’t bring himself to sign the papers. Every family is investigated, the woman told him. Could we be careless about such things? I’ve been a socialist all my life, Tateh assured her. Of course, the woman said. A doctor will listen to her chest. For that alone it’s worthwhile. She’ll eat hot meals and know her father has friends in the world. But no one’s pushing you. Look, look at the line behind you, plenty of customers.

Tateh thought Here I am in the middle of brotherhood in action and I’m thinking like some bourgeois from the
shtetl
. He signed the permission papers.

One week later he took the girl down to the railroad station. She was in a contingent of two hundred going to Philadelphia. She was wearing a new cloak and a hat that kept her ears warm. He kept stealing glances at her. She was beautiful. She had a naturally regal posture. She was enjoying her new clothes. He was casual with her and tried not to be hurt. She had accepted the idea of leaving him without one word of protest. Of course, this was good for all concerned. But if she found it so easy, what would the future bring? She had reserves of character he did not elicit from her. She attracted people. Many of the mothers stared. Tateh was proud but frightened too. They stood in the waiting room, a pandemonium of mothers and children. Someone called Here it comes! and the crowd surged to the doors as the train slid in chuffing and hissing great clouds of steam.

A car reserved for the children was attached to the end of the train. This was the Boston and Maine line. The engine was a Baldwin 4-6-0. Everyone moved down the platform, the registered nurses from the Philadelphia Women’s Committee at the head of the procession. Don’t forget your manners, Tateh said as they followed along. When people ask you a question answer them. Speak up so they can hear you. Once past the corner of the station he noticed out on the street a line of militia with their blocked hats. They held their rifles across their chests. They were facing away from the platform. The procession stopped and backed up on itself. There was some sort of commotion at the front of the line. Then he heard a scream, police appeared everywhere, and suddenly the crowd was in a terrible turmoil. While amazed passengers looked out from the windows of the train the police started to separate the mothers from their children. They were dragging the mothers kicking and screaming to trucks at the end of the platform. The trucks were army Reo’s with pagoda hoods and chain wheel drive. Children were being stepped on. They scattered in all directions. A woman ran by with blood coming from her mouth. Steam drifted back from the engine like patches of fog. The bell quietly rang. A woman appeared in front of Tateh. She tried to say something. She was holding her stomach. She fell. Tateh lifted his daughter bodily and swung her up on the platform of the nearest car, out of harm’s way. Then he turned his attention to the fallen woman. He picked her up under the shoulders and dragger her through the crowd to a bench. As he was sitting her down he came to the attention of one of the policemen. The policeman cracked him on the shoulders and the head with his stick. What are you doing, Tateh cried He didn’t know what the maniac wanted of him. He moved back into the crowd. He was followed and beaten. He stumbled away from the crowd and was still beaten. Finally he fell.

The authority for this police action was an order issued by the city marshal prohibiting all children from leaving Lawrence, Massachusetts. It was for their own good. They were on their knees, holding the prostrate forms of their bloodied parents. Some were in hysterics. In a few minutes the police had swept the platform clean, the trucks were driven off, the militia were marched away, and only a few sobbing battered adults and weeping children remained. One was Tateh. He leaned against a pillar to regain his strength. His mind was not clear. He began to hear sounds that had been made minutes before. He heard the little girl’s voice: Tateh, Tateh! At that moment it occurred to him that the station platform was unnaturally bright. The train was gone. The realization struck his heart like a chord. He was now completely alert. Still he heard the voice. Tateh, Tateh! He looked down the tracks and saw the last ca of the train to Philadelphia some yards beyond the end of the station. It was not moving. He started to run. Tateh, Tateh! As he ran the train slowly began to move. He ran onto the tracks. He ran, stumbling, with his arm out. His hands caught the guardrail of the observation platform. The train was picking up speed. His feet were coming off the ground. The ties began to blur under him. He clung to the railing, finally hoisting his knees to the platform overhang and clinging there with his head pressed against the bars like a man in prison begging to be set free.

17

Tateh was rescued by two conductors who lifted him by the arms and the seat of his pants onto the observation platform. First they had to pry his fingers from the railings. He found his daughter on the train and ignoring everyone around her, conductors, passengers, he gathered her in his arms and wept. Then he noticed that her new cloak was bloody. He looked at her hands. They were smeared with blood. Where are you hurt! he shouted. Where are you hurt! She shook her head and pointed at him and he realized that the blood all over her was his own. It came from his scalp, blackening his white hair.

A doctor who happened to be on board tended Tateh’s injuries and gave him an injection. After that he wasn’t too clear about what happened. He slept lying on his side across two seats with his arm for a pillow. He was aware of the motion of the train and his daughter sitting in the seat facing him. She looked out the window. They were the only passengers in the special car for Philadelphia. Sometimes he heard voices but he could not bestir himself to understand what they said. At the same time he clearly saw her eyes with hills of snow proceeding slowly, in a curve, over the pupils. In this way he made the trip south to Boston, then to New Haven, through the Westchester towns of Rye and New Rochelle, through the train yards of New York, across the river to Newark, New Jersey, and then to Philadelphia.

When the train arrived the two refugees found a bench in the station and spent the night there. Tateh was not entirely himself. He had in his pockets, fortunately, that part of his week’s wages he had set aside for the rent: two dollars and fifty cents. The girl sat beside him on the shiny bench and watched the patterns made by the people moving through the station. By the early morning hours there was only one porter pushing a big broom across the marble floor. As always she seemed to accept totally the situation in which she found herself. Tateh’s head ached. His hands were swollen and scraped. He sat with his palms cupping his ears. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t think. Somehow they were in Philadelphia.

In the morning he picked up a discarded newspaper. On the front page was an account of the police terror in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He found his cigarettes in their box in his pocket and smoked and read the paper. An editorial called for an investigation of the outrage by the Federal Government. So that was it, the strike would be won. But then what? He heard the clacking of the looms. A salary of six dollars and change. Would that transform their lives? They would still live in that wretched room, in that terrible dark street. Tateh shook his head. This country will not let me breathe. In this mood he slowly came to the decision not to go back to Lawrence, Massachusetts. His belongings, his rags, he would leave to the landlord. What do you have with you, he said to his daughter. She showed him the contents of her small satchel—things she had taken for her trip away from home. Her underthings, her comb and brush, a hair clasp, garters, stockings, and the books he had made for her of the trolley car and the skater. From this moment, perhaps, Tateh began to conceive of his life as separate from the fate of the working class. I hate machines, he said to his daughter. He stood and she stood and took his hand and together they looked for the exit. The I.W.W. has won, he said. But what has it won? A few more pennies in wages. Will it now own the mills? No.

They cleaned and refreshed themselves in the public lavatories. They went to the station café for breakfast of rolls and coffee and spent the day walking through the streets of Philadelphia. It was cold and the sun was shining. They looked in the windows of the stores and when their feet began to ache from the cold they walked into a department store to warm up. It was a vast emporium, every aisle crowded with shoppers. The girl noticed with interest that wire baskets swung from moving cables over the counters. They carried the money and receipts back and forth from the counters to the cashier. The sales clerks yanked on wooden-handled rope pulls to bring the baskets down and pulled on other ropes to get them back up. Mannequins, like grown-up dolls, sported satin toques and broad-brimmed hats plumed with egret feathers. One of these hats is more than a week’s wages, Tateh said.

Later, on the street again, they walked past iron-front buildings where trucks were pulled up to warehouse platforms. The windows of supply companies and wholesalers offered little of interest. But then her eye was attracted to the dirty window in which were displayed all the gimcracks of a mail-order novelty company. At this time businessmen were discovering the profit in practical jokes and parlor magic tricks. There were exploding cigars, rubber roses for the lapel that squirted water, boxes of sneezing powder, telescopes that left black eyes, exploding card deck, sound bladders for placing under chair cushions, glass paperweight with winter scenes in which snow fell when you shook them, exploding matches, punchboard, little lead liberty bells and statues of liberty, magic rings, exploding fountain pens, books that told you the meaning of dreams, rubber Egyptian belly dancers, exploding watches, exploding eggs.

Tateh stared at the window long after the girl’s interest had waned. He led her into the store. Tateh removed his hat and spoke to a man in a striped shirt with sleeve garters who came forward to meet them. The man was amiable. Sure, he said, let’s see it. Tateh took the girl’s satchel, put it on the counter and, opening it, withdrew the book of the skater. Standing next to the proprietor he held the book at arm’s length and expertly flipped the pages. The little girl skated forward and skated away, did a figure of eight, came back, went into a pirouette and made a graceful bow. The man’s eyebrows went up. He stuck out his lower lip. Let me try that, he said.

An hour later Tateh walked out of there with twenty-five dollars in cash and a letter of agreement which he had signed calling for four more books at twenty-five dollars each. The company—its name was the Franklin Novelty Company—would publish the books and add them to its line. For purposes of the contract they were called movie books. Come, Tateh said to his child, we’ll find a boardinghouse in a good neighborhood and then we’ll have ourselves a meal and a hot bath.