Sons (30 page)

I worked fifty-four hours a week, from eight o’clock in the morning to six o’clock at night. It took me almost an hour and a half to get to the mill in Joliet, which meant that I had to get up at six in the morning, wash and dress, go into the kitchen for breakfast with Nancy, and then run down to catch the #88 streetcar to Archer Avenue, where I transferred to the #74 to Cicero Avenue, and then caught a train. The train was run by the Chicago and Joliet Electric Railway, and the trip was thirty-one miles each way, morning and night. I would not get back to the apartment until close to eight o’clock. It was a long, grueling noisy day, broken only by the pleasant lunch-hour conversations I had with Allen Garrett. I naturally looked forward to my Sundays with Nancy.

It was therefore disheartening to wake up to a ninety-one degree heat that Sunday, and the promise of another suffocating Chicago day. We packed a picnic lunch, much as we might have done back in Eau Fraiche, took two streetcars to Twenty-ninth Street, walked the three blocks to the beach, and tried to enjoy ourselves despite the rising temperature and the throngs of people.

I was exhausted when the trouble started.

Nancy was lying beside me on the blanket, her blond hair curled into a bun at the back of her head, her black bathing costume striped horizontally at the skirt-hem and on the mid-thigh pants showing below, wearing black stockings that must have been unbearable in this heat, a fine sheen of sweat on her face and on her naked arms. A ukulele started someplace, and a man with a high whiny voice began singing all the old war songs, “Good Morning, Mr. Zip-Zip-Zip!” and “I’d Like to See the Kaiser with a Lily in His Hand,” and finally got around to some of the newer stuff to which he didn’t know the words, “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home,” and “Let the Rest of the World Go By,” Nancy trying to hum along with him, but the heat defeating everything, a stultifying crushing heat that made movement and even conversation too fatiguing to contemplate.

With considerable effort, I had raised myself up on one elbow in an attempt to locate the ukulele player with the nasal voice, scanning the beach and only chancing to look out over the water where I saw first a small raft, and then noticed that the person on the raft, paddling it toward the beach, was colored. New to Chicago, I did not know at the time that the Twenty-ninth Street Beach was considered “white” territory, an improvised adjunct to the Twenty-fifth Street Beach which bordered the black belt, the section of Chicago known as Douglas. I only learned that later. What I realized now, signaled by the sudden cessation of the ukulele and a hush so tangible it sent an almost welcome shiver up my back, was that something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong. A man was running down toward the lakefront. Another man was shouting, “What’s that nigger doing here?”

“Get back where you belong!” someone yelled.

“Get him out of here!” a woman screamed.

I rose to my feet and with my back to the sun (this was close to five o’clock, I suppose, but the sun was still strong behind me), I looked out over the lake and saw that the intruder was just a boy, fourteen? fifteen? it was difficult to tell from this distance, but a boy certainly enough, judging from the slenderness of his body and the quick eager way he lifted his head and broke into a grin that flashed white across his black face. Perhaps he had not understood the consternation he was causing here on this white beach, perhaps he had assumed the men and women running down toward the shore were there to greet him after his exceptional and extraordinary navigational feat, the brave sailor who had come halfway around the world, or at least the several hundred yards separating the white beach from the black beach beside it, he had surely misunderstood because he was still grinning when the first stone struck him.

“Get the little bastard!” someone yelled (they
knew
he was little then, they
knew
he was only a boy) and another stone struck the raft, and the grin vanished from the boy’s face, he knew now that the people on this discovered shore were unfriendly, were perhaps even hostile, a volley of rocks and stones falling upon the raft and upon his shoulders now as he frantically paddled in an effort to get out of range, “What is it, Bert?” Nancy said, and I moved off the blanket and began running toward the shore as a rock struck the boy full in the face and he fell into the water.

And now, now a hush fell over the beach again, deeper than that initial shocked silence that had marked the boy’s approach, expectant now with an almost theatrical suspense. Would the boy surface, had the rock stunned him, would his grinning black face pop suddenly out of the water to the cheers of the onlookers and the applause of a crowd mollified by his moxie, would he climb once more onto his flimsy raft and paddle his way back to those African shores from whence he had come? The question hung suspended in stifling heat and tempers stilled but only for a moment. There were colored men on the beach now, “Let us through,” they were saying, three or four brave scouts probing this humid white no man’s land, “let us
through,
goddamn it! The boy’s drowning!” and I thought, Let us
through!
but we were not being let through, the boy had not yet surfaced, the raft rotated in aimless circles on the lake as still as death. A policeman appeared, I heard a Negro say, “Officer Logan, there’s the man there who threw the rock,” and a white man whispered, “Logan, the Cottage Grove Station,” and I thought, The boy is drowning, let’s get to him.

But the motion of history moves away from minor events toward those of succeeding importance, the minor event here being an adolescent Negro who had paddled in too close, who had invaded too deeply, drowning now perhaps as some other Negroes still tried to get past the barricade of white men who prevented them from entering the water, while behind them and slightly removed, the voices continued in rising argument, the colored men insisting that Officer Logan of the Cottage Grove Avenue Station arrest the man who had thrown the rock which had knocked the boy from the raft into the water where he was now perhaps drowning as the voices continued their tedious assault, Arrest him, arrest him, and the white men complained that the boy had merely slipped off the raft, and the debate went on, it being the major issue now, and the boy did not surface, and Officer Logan did not take action. The white man who had thrown the possibly fatal rock stood apart from the angry bubble of dissent, wearing upon his face the proud look of an acknowledged marksman, knowing he was the center of a debate of magnitude, the eye of the storm, basking in his newly earned celebrity until suddenly the colored men whirled upon him in fury (He’s drowning out there, I thought, O lord Jesus, he is drowned) and began to hit him.

If one can say when any war begins, it was then that this war began, this was the firing of the first shot, so to speak. Forget the ancient festering ills, discount them as a possible cause — the 50,000 Negroes who had been coming from the South over the past two years, moving into previously white neighborhoods, crowding into already crowded sections of the city where the rents were lowest and the anti-black feelings were highest, taking jobs that white men felt were rightfully their own, often working for lower wages, many of them bringing back from the war a new sense of maleness — had they not slept with the same French girls, had they not drunk the same French wines, had they not faced the same German bullets? — forget all this, discount whatever
real
reasons existed for this war, discount even the minor incident of a stray rock causing a boy to drown out there on the lake, and mark the
true
starting time of this war as seven minutes past five o’clock on the afternoon of July 27, 1919, when a crowd of angry indignant Negroes attacked a white man.

There were slats on the beach, pieces of weathered wood, rocks, empty bottles, all sorts of weapons for a ragtag army suddenly called into front-line action, whites and Negroes, all of them sweltering in the same Chicago blast furnace. Reinforcements were coming now from the Twenty-fifth Street Beach, black men running over the blistering sand to join the fray, driving the white men into the water where the drowned boy was all but forgotten now and the raft still drifted in idle circles, and then turning on Officer Logan himself to chase him off the beach and onto Twenty-ninth Street.

I tried to break away, to get back to Nancy. I saw a knife suddenly appear in a Negro’s hand, I felt the same sense of futile confrontation I had felt in that Marne wheatfield so long ago, was I now to face another stranger, was I now to kill for another meaningless piece of real estate? The shouting, the noise, the insane chatter of sweaty combat filled the gravid air, a wooden club came down upon the man’s brown forearm, a gash of bright red blood ran from his elbow to his wrist, there were other men upon him now, and more running from every corner of the beach, a white man’s face pressed into the sand, a Negro stepped upon, a kick, more blows, cursing, I thought only Nancy, I must get to Nancy. I shoved my way through. She was on her feet when I readied her, I had never before seen a look of such utter disbelief on her face as I seized her hand and yanked her to me and, leaving our blanket and our picnic basket behind, rushed her away from this frightening mass of struggling humans.

“Meanwhile, the fighting continued along the lake,” I read to Allen Garrett from the Chicago
Tribune
on our lunch hour the next day. “Miss Helen Mehan and her sister, Marie, had been bathing with a friend, Lieutenant Banks, a convalescing soldier. A colored woman walked up to the trio and made insulting remarks, it is said. Banks attempted to interfere, but the colored woman voiced a series of oaths and promptly struck the soldier in the face. Negroes in the vicinity hurled stones and rocks at the women and both were slightly injured. In less than a half hour after the beach outbreak, Cottage Grove Avenue and State Street from 29th South to 35th were bubbling cauldrons of action.”

That cauldron was still bubbling and would continue to bubble until the end of the week, when 6000 troops of the state militia and 350 °Chicago policemen managed to restore order. By that time, 23 Negroes and 15 whites had been killed, 537 people had been injured, and 1000 more had been left homeless.

The militia was withdrawn on August 8.

When Dana and I got off the ferry at Fire Island Pines, my mother was waiting on the dock with a little red wagon upon which was painted the name of the people from whom we had rented for nine summers, ROSEN, the lettering expertly rendered, not for nothing was Sid Rosen an art director at Doyle Dane Bernbach.

My mother looked terrific.

She would be thirty-eight years old on the tenth of the month, Tuesday in fact, but summer did something for her each year, and from a distance I could visualize her as she must have looked as a young girl. She was wearing faded dungaree shorts and a blue tee shirt, her grin white against a deep tan, her brown hair windblown and curling somewhat from the salt air, legs and breasts still good (those
never
change, King Oedipus, sir, Your Majesty), moving swiftly toward the gangway with a nervous quick energy that made every step she took seem impulsive, almost impetuous. Summer robbed her of ten years each year; rob her of another ten gratuitously, and you had the eighteen-year-old girl Will Tyler, the returning lighter pilot ace, met in New York City in the spring of 1945. Not quite eighteen actually. I looked out over the dock. Will Tyler, ex-Air Force
Wunderkind
and current somewhat aging
enfant terrible
of the publishing world was nowhere in evidence. Home sulking, I thought, ruminating in his martini about the tastelessness of only sons who bring home girls with whom they are undoubtedly sleeping, for shame.

My mother embraced us both, lifting her cheek for Dana’s kiss.

“You brought the sun with you,” she said. “We’ve had nothing but rain for the past five days. Dana, you look lovely.”

“Thank you,” Dana said. She always seemed a bit shy in my mother’s presence. I suspected she didn’t like my father at all, but I knew she was genuinely fond of my mother, and I could never understand her reserve. We were coming away from the slip now, walking past the plumbing supply store, threading our way through the swarms of bicycles, wagons piled with luggage and groceries, summer people in shorts and swimming suits, all scattering off the dock and onto the narrow wooden walks. The Pines, when we had first begun coming to it in 1956 had been a quiet family community with one or two fags living in blissful silence far from the gay hectic life at Cherry Grove. It was now, I would guess, fifty per cent queer and fifty per cent straight, which was at least giving everybody a fair shot at equal housing opportunities.
I
still felt a little strange, though, whenever I was candidly appraised, as now, by a mincing boardwalk stroller (“Never take candy from strange men,” my grandmother had told me in the fastnesses of her Tudor City apartment, she being my only living grandmother, a spry old dame of sixty-six, with the same quick energy as her daughter Dolores Prine Tyler), but the discomfort wasn’t anything like what I had felt the first time my father took us to visit Cherry Grove. My embarrassment then, of course, had been caused only by deep insecurities about my own manhood, I being all of ten at the time. But I had not dug the scene, and I had never gone back.

My mother seemed excited to see us. She immediately told us all about the cocktail parties we’d been invited to during the next week (“Everyone’s dying to see you, Wat, and of course to meet Dana”) and the surprise birthday party being given for her on Tuesday night, and the possibility that we might be able to borrow a boat for a sail on Wednesday, but then assured us we could be by ourselves whenever we wanted (I thought at first she meant something other than she did) and that we were under no obligation to trail along with her and Dad.

“Where
is
Dad?” I asked.

“Back at the house,” she said. “He’s looking forward to seeing you both.”