The Celestials (4 page)

“We happy few, we band of brothers,” his sister's closest friend, Ida, sometimes said when he was heading off to a lodge meeting. He knew neither whose words she spoke
nor what intention she had, and he found himself, each time, unclear as to what his response should be.

Ida Virginia Wilburn was sixteen and already displaying the resolute density of the woman she would become. Her dress was practical, a gray muslin that wouldn't easily reveal wear. Her boots were black, purchased by her father in their hometown of Pine View, Virginia, several months back, yet they appeared as if just plucked by a salesman's clean hand from his store window. She stood across the street from the passenger depot at the side entrance to the Ballou House and could see Alfred, itchy with anticipation, growling and murmuring with those other boys.

Her mother had not been in favor of this trip. She had not been moved enough by the misfortune that dear Lucy Robinson, youngest daughter of neighbors and a friend for years and years, had suffered. Because, pray, what had Lucy expected? What had she imagined could have come of following that headstrong older brother of hers? (Alfred, Ida's mother insisted, had always had looks, but not much sense. Ida believed him to have neither, but Lucy adored him, so Ida tried to as well.) To work alongside foreigners in the wilds of that northern world, blasting their way through mountain rock that God had obviously not created for anything like a tunnel. It had been foolish.

But Ida's father had touched his beautiful wife with his farmer's hands and settled her as he would a horse, pointing out that Lucy and Alfred had taken the best option they'd had. There wasn't much else they could've done. No
one had to mention the sad and threatening fact of the death of the Robinson parents the previous year. And Ida had remarked that Alfred wasn't working in the tunnel anymore; he was a cordwainer now, in one of the biggest factories in North Adams. That showed some sense, did it not? Though, now, watching the jostling and jockeying of his thick-armed union brothers, she thought perhaps he had merely traded one kind of danger for another.

“When we're tested,” her father had said, “God hands us some of what we need, and it's up to us to mix up the rest.”

And his wife had retorted that God handed us
all
we needed and more, but she had allowed her husband's agreement with his daughter, whose independence and will he much admired, secretly believing it made her somehow more
his
, that in this time of need, sending Ida up North to do what she could in tending to Lucy was the right and moral choice. None of them believed that Alfred was likely to be up to the task of doing what was necessary in the wake of the violence suffered upon his younger sister. Left unspoken was the small but welcome relief to both parents of the prospect of having only nine rather than ten mouths to feed.

So communication had been struck between the Baptist church of Pine View, Virginia, and its sister church on Eagle Street in North Adams. An appropriate traveling chaperone had been secured, a rooming situation with one of the church's elder sisters arranged. And Ida had left, her heart pounding in her chest like hooves on packed dirt.

She had not intended to witness the advent of the Celestials. She was not one to seek out violence. She would have
preferred to remain in the stifling tenement apartment where Lucy, even several months after the attack, still lay on her single bed, sometimes working up the fortitude to cross the room and sit by the window. The diminishment of her friend filled Ida with impotent rage—at the man who had attacked her, at the inability of the sheriff to find him, at the other girls in town, who had stopped coming to visit and who seemed to Ida inadequate in every sense of the word.

But even this shadow version of Lucy was a joy with whom to share the days, and this caused Ida some considerable guilt. How did she gather such pleasure from being in the presence of one so clearly distressed? It struck an unforgiving blow to the image of herself that she hoped to hold. When Alfred had left that afternoon, secreting the rock he was sure neither girl had seen, Lucy had begged her to follow him. Who knew what would happen when the Celestials arrived? Keep him safe, Lucy had entreated, for me, and Ida had had no choice.

As the second whistle sounded, Ida stepped into the slant of shade provided by the porch of the Hoosac Tunnel offices. If Alfred or the others mixed in some unhappy business how was she to fulfill her promise to Lucy? Could she pull him from the crowd? She looked at her hands. They were broad and thick. One of her brothers had told her she looked as if she were wearing the mittens of Eskimos.

She wished for the shade and serenity of her father's workshop. She wished for the smell of his tobacco leaves in the rafters, the oil and sweat of his discarded work
gloves. She even wished for her brothers, paltry and deficient versions of her father, all elbows and fists, ignorance and temper. Even as a child she had understood that her father was an exception to a rule. His refusal to share in the temper of men was a rare and uncommon thing, and she began, even then, to think of him more and more as a species of one.

She had spent the war years in Virginia, daily astonished less at the lengths of violence to which men seemed likely to go and more at the relish with which they proceeded there. Indeed, if she'd been asked, she would have been obliged to say that the war had convinced her of a lurking suspicion: that violence against their own was something not that men avoided, but from which civilized society kept them. Men were, one and all, always at the precipice of a high cliff, waiting for an excuse to leap like savages into the air.

Sampson stood on the bottom step of the train, his head only inches above the tallest man in the crowd.

“Here it goes, friend,” Daniel whispered to Alfred, both of them trying to hold their ground against the surging of the press behind them.

Sampson put his hand on his hip, pulling his greatcoat aside to reveal the gold chain of a French-made pocket watch, a gift one year prior from Julia on the occasion of their twentieth anniversary, and the handles of three of the six pistols. “Make way,” he said, meeting Alfred's eye, holding it, and then moving on to Daniel and the rest of the boys.

The hired constables fanned out to his left and right. Behind the glass of the emigrant cars' windows, the Celestials peered at the crowd.

“Rats!” someone yelled.

“Yellow scabs!” someone added.

But the sight of those faces had already had some effect, their youth and utter strangeness taking even the angriest by surprise. Even Mr. Jasper Davenport—who only days prior had been assuring anyone who would listen in the smoking room of the Wilson House that the trade of their fair town would be ruined by the introduction of men with little money to spend and little disposition to spend it, that the community should be insulted and outraged by the importation of a nuisance such as this—was now quieted at the sight of these smart, alert boys.

The youngest was fourteen. Sixty-eight were under twenty. One of the oldest, at twenty-two, was the foreman, an English-speaking Methodist, in this country for eight years, having served his first five contract years faithfully as a house servant and cook, and the most recent three by some accounts as a miner in Weaverville, California, and by others as a store owner in Nevada or a partner in one of the large merchant houses of San Francisco. He was known even in his native community by several appellations, including his given name, Chung Den Sing, his common name, Chung Chung Bo, and others: Chung Tang Sing, Ah Sing, Chung Ding Sing. He would be known in North Adams as Charlie Sing. He stood behind Sampson, the only Celestial of the seventy-five in the garments of
American civilization, from his sensible black cap and his walking suit down to a remarkably natty boot fitting his broad foot.

He had in his baggage a letter of credit from his San Francisco pastor to the clergyman in North Adams in the approved way. And he would, the following Sunday, relate his experiences as a new member of the Methodist Church to a full congregation. Despite his Western costume, the traditional queue the color and texture of Persian lamb hung heavily against his back, and he carried within his case for use on special occasions Chinese black silk shoes embroidered with peonies and dragons and a coat of sea-otter skin lined with blue silk, for which he had paid a prodigious duty upon entering California. His black cloth work shoes were rolled tightly in his work tunic, his whittling knife safely inside the toe of one of the shoes.

He would be, for the seventy-four men behind him, bookkeeper and purchaser of goods, interpreter and arbitrator, as well as administrator of shirts and socks, rice and justice, and the gold coins with which the boys were to be paid. For these caretaking duties, he would be paid the immense (for a Chinaman) salary of sixty dollars per month, nearly three times what the workmen and the two cooks would receive for the first year of their three-year contract. A discrepancy that would, in certain cases, prove to be the cause of some resentment.

Neither the whites before him nor the fellow Chinese behind him knew that he had been born in the Gow Low How village of the Hoiping district, South Canton, China,
December 11, 1847 (an unreliable date, as he was even at this point in his life known to lie repeatedly about his age). His father was Hou Hah (or Chung Som Doy, depending on which of the few documents in his descendents' possession were to be trusted), and his mother was Moo Ten.

Was his father killed as a lance guard captain in the Opium Wars? Was he descended from mandarins? “An Asian royal equivalent,” Charlie would claim years later to his eldest son, “to a European duke.” As he told it, his parents were slaughtered by rebels before his seven-year-old eyes, and he had been fostered by the missionaries John and Mary Singleton and taken under their care to California. He passed on to his children a rice-paper portrait done in colored inks of an elderly scholar who he insisted was his grandfather, Chung Gow Doy. More likely, Charlie was what most Chinese boys in California in the nineteenth century were: poor peasants who had risked what they could to travel around the world to Gold Mountain, hoping to earn enough to make it home again, wealthier, safer, happier.

Second Brother, Chung Ding Toy, remained in China and would precede Charlie in death by a year. Third Brother, Chung My, embarked with Charlie on the ship across the Pacific, but never disembarked, having fallen ill a week from port, as good as dead by the time the ship docked.

Just east of Omaha the train had been met with protesting onlookers, and an Irishman had mounted the car and stared at the Chinamen for several minutes. They had stared back. And Charlie had said, “What you doing?”

The Irishman had answered, “I come to look at the Chinamen.”

“Well, look and go out,” Charlie had said.

In the back of the car, some of the workers paused in their eating of square crackers and bologna sausages. Others continued to sip their tea. From the middle of the car, George Chase wondered how and when to intervene. His employer had given him no instructions regarding such a situation.

The Irishman took a step toward Charlie, who was tall for a Chinaman, just over six feet, but even so, the Irishman had half a foot on him. “I'll go out when I damn well please,” he said.

Charlie said, “You will go.”

The other workers watched as one would watch animals in a zoo, drawn by the drama of gesture.

“I will not,” the Irishman said, presenting a revolver.

Chase stood, no less helpless than when seated, and thought how foolish his boss had been not to employ constables for the ride.

Charlie pulled his own revolver, and Chase watched him back the man out of the car as a boy playing Indians might back his surrendering father down a sloping front yard.

When the train was once again rattling along, he asked Charlie how he had been sure the man would withdraw, and Charlie replied that Americans always found it surprising to see an Asian man wielding a large gun. In those few seconds of surprise, much could be accomplished.

Yes, Chase agreed but, ever the pragmatist, added, “Yet it could've gone quite the other way.”

Charlie had tapped his chopsticks against his bowl, dislodging grains of rice. “Of course,” he said, not disrespectfully, and returned to his meal.

“Make way,” Sampson again insisted. “These men are free to pass.” He indicated the constables. “And these men are paid to make sure they do. They are being paid to use their weapons if need be.”

He signaled to Chase, who in turn whispered to Charlie, who made his way through the two cars, speaking quietly to the boys within, and the group commenced to file off the train.

They were dressed in blue nankeen blouses, fastened by frogs and small brass buttons up to the throat. Blue trousers, narrowed at the ankle. Wooden travel shoes or black cloth work slippers, the sole an inch of white pressed wool. White stockings that seemed remarkably clean given the journey. Common soft hats of American manufacture, a purchase Mr. Chase had found himself obliged to provide before quitting San Francisco. The tops of their heads shaved and oiled, their queues shiny and long against their backs. The hairstyles were evidence of the care they had taken to maintain their habits despite the rigors of the crossing.

They each carried a tight, efficient roll of bed, blanket, and clothing over the shoulder on a bamboo pole that swayed and sprung like a conductor's baton with their quiet steps as they followed Sampson onto the platform.