The Celestials (5 page)

Two rocks were thrown, one landing without damage on the shoulder of the smallest boy, and the two guilty French
Canadians were put in the lockup at once, nothing more to transpire from them. Although the Crispins wished all kinds of bad luck to Sampson, their hands remained in their pockets, fingering the small few coins left from their last pay, and the crowd parted, a mix of curiosity and disappointment already washing away the dangerous anticipation like river water receding from a floodplain, and Sampson and Chase, followed by the five state policemen and the seven private constables, led their modest band through the crowd. The boys moved along in pairs arm in arm, and Ida's first sight of Charlie was of a neat, intelligent-looking man with full lips and sparse eyebrows, his slight hand against the well-stitched blue cloth of his fellow worker's shirtsleeve. He passed within four feet of her and the sight of his hand, soft-looking and mildly doughy, like a child's on the verge of leaving infancy behind, filled her mind. She lost track of Alfred. She was sure that if she touched the man's hand, it would be as it was to touch the muzzle of a horse. She had a partner thought of Lucy in her bed, waiting.

“Why're you
blushing
?” asked Alfred, pushing at her shoulder with the heel of his hand.

He looked as she remembered him from his games with her older brothers: willing for the lessons they were about to deliver.

She shook her head, hoping to free the heat from her chest and neck. “I'm sure I don't know,” she told him, taking solace in the fact that she was speaking the truth.

Julia Sampson heard the commotion of the crowd during its short time on Main Street. The white brick Wilson
House was to the right of the mob's turn, so even as she heard the crowd, it was already moving away from her.

She did not strain to make out the talk. She did not go to the window. She remained at her desk in the front room, her back to the windows and the street below. Before her was the writing slate she had used as a girl; she wet a fingertip dusted with chalk, wiped the slate clean, and made ready to mark some words across its surface.

The outside world alarmed her. She did not even like to leave windows open. Ailments of the head and the stomach plagued her. When she engaged in conversation of any kind, her fingers ticked quietly against her skirts. She was a tall woman, taller than her husband, a fact they colluded in hiding by way of smaller heels on her shoes and boots and one-inch risers in the heels of his, and the world was often surprised by the extent and persistence of her anxieties. And her husband, privy to the assertive and dismissive way she could have with him in the privacy of their own lives, felt somehow cheated of her delicacies. He had thought he was marrying an unassuming farm girl. They had been born within three days of each other, baptized on the same day in late March 1857, and would die within twenty-four hours of each other. He understood his love for her as part and parcel of his life's other ambitions. He would be a success for her and with her. But perhaps he had been too much of a success, creating a world of too much safety, a place where she felt strong and sure enough to vent the years of anger and resentment at her public frailties.

She imagined her husband at the head of that large crowd. She did not wonder what the Celestials looked like or in what manner they were dressed. Or how their strange words sounded coming out of their strange mouths.

In the bottom left corner of the slate, she wrote the word
husband
. In the bottom right, she wrote
child
.

A final cry from the crowd reached her ears, and then the world outside fell silent. At the top of the slate, she wrote
mother
and then drew the lines of an even triangle between the words. Without a child, she would never be at the head of her own humble crowd. Without a child, they would offend geometry; they would be a one-legged creature unable to stand or walk. The fierceness of her desire unnerved her. Dampness seeped through her dress under her arms. She wiped the slate clean with the side of her fist. It was not that she could not imagine losing this child. It was that she could imagine it too well. If she lost this one, something, finally, would break. She would become a stranger to herself. She understood this with a clarity that was equal parts dread and anticipation.

Two blocks away, Sampson was issuing more orders, this time to William P. Hurd, local photographer, who was setting up his glass-plate camera and heavy tripod on the factory's south lawn, making ready for a photograph for which Sampson had generated plans shortly after the Chinese had embarked from California. He stood in the evening sun, checking and rechecking the contents of his portable darkroom—chemicals, trays, and plates piled in
the back of a covered wagon led by his astonishingly aged chestnut mare.

Once the Celestials had disappeared into the factory, the accompanying crowd had, save but one or two lingerers, dispersed, and these last few took no note of the man poking around in the back of his wagon. They did not attend to his positioning of his stereo camera—two plate cameras situated on a single mount—or to his worried checking of the falling afternoon sun. Yet the lingerers were rewarded for their loitering when Sampson ushered the seventy-five Celestials out the back door of the factory and spread them across the south wall of his formidable brick building.

The boys were baffled. They had not even had time to change out of their travel clothes or wash their faces. The tea water had been put on but not poured, and more than one of the boys fretted as he was arranged among his fellow travelers that the cooks had forgotten to remove the kettle and the water was, at that moment, boiling away.

The photographer had placed his camera too close, and the group had to wait as he retreated in order to accommodate the size of the gathering. Sampson muttered that he had paid Hurd to be ready, not to watch him make ready, and Hurd, burdened with tripod and camera, promised to be as quick as possible.

“What are they saying?” the youngest of the boys asked Charlie.

“They are fighting,” Charlie answered. “It is not about us,” he added, and the boy seemed reassured.

The low light meant that the exposure time was long. Sampson paced behind the camera, and Hurd agonized that the man's tread was making the camera tremble in minute but disastrous ways.

The photograph would be, as most of Hurd's work was, lacking, and the many magazines looking for images of the Chinese in the months following their arrival would not choose this one, a fact that bothered not only Hurd but Sampson as well. What was the point of having gone to this expense to show the world what he was up to if the world would not look?
But the world is looking
, Julia would remind her husband, fanning the illustrated newspapers before him.
Just not at your photo
, she told him.
Exactly
, he replied, closing the discussion.

But the Chinese boys, stiff and tired from their journey, hot against the American bricks in their dusty clothing, would remember the photograph more than they would remember anything else from that day. For most of them, it was the first time they had sat for a photograph. There was confusion and wariness about their new employer's reasoning. Was there to be a display on the factory walls?

Alfred, one of the few loiterers peering through gaps in the factory's fence, thought he knew just what Sampson was doing. The man was saying, as clear as if he had written a letter, “Take note, Crispins. See here what I have done to you and yours.” A few weeks after the photograph, the caricaturists would agree.
Punchinello
would publish the cartoon “Yan-ki vs. Yan-kee,” in which the Chinese swarm across a shoemaker's dinner table, taking his bread
and cake, pulling a patty from his daughter's hand, stealing his pet dog.

As the years would pass, Ida would remember this day for Charlie's hands. Alfred would remember it as a symbol of all he was still yet to lose. Lucy as the first day in months she'd had an hour to herself. Charlie would remember it as yet another beginning, and Sampson would remember the weight of those pistols beneath his belt. And Julia, anxious blue-eyed Julia, would remember it as the day she lost her fourteenth child. And as the beginning of the small, hidden path to the fifteenth, the one who lived. And no matter where her mind traveled, it would always end in the same place: the smell of wet earth, the heft of something larger, the cousin sensation to the one she sometimes experienced in church. As if God's hand had reached down to lay itself across her brow. As if He were telling her to close her eyes, because He had for her a wonderful surprise.

Chapter Three

In 459 AD, five Buddhist priests arrived on the west coast of a country they called Fusang, planting as evidence of their presence seedlings of a particular species of cypress that some Californians still claim as indigenous.

On a chilly September morning in 1781, Los Angeles was founded with one Chinese inhabitant. Four years later, three Chinese sailors were stranded in Baltimore when the captain of their ship took off to wed his long-suffering fiancée. The sailors successfully petitioned Congress for the cost of their upkeep and lived for almost a year in the care of an American merchant in the China trade before returning home to report on the loneliness and isolation of American life.

From 1820 to 1830, three Chinese arrived in the United States. By 1850, their number was increased by forty. By the same year, North Adams had become the fourth-largest textile mill town in Massachusetts. It was a seven-mile ride through town.

In the 1860s, in some California industries, more than three-quarters of the workers were Chinese, and even the African American delegates at the first Colored National Labor Union convention in Washington, DC, in December of 1869 passed a resolution in favor of excluding the Chinese.

In early 1870, Charles Sumner, senator from Massachusetts, moved to amend a bill and allow the Chinese to be granted citizenship and voting rights. The legislation was defeated by a large majority.

The United States Census of 1870 would list 63,199 Chinese in America, 62,831 in the West and 368 in the East, which suggests that the seventy-five boys spending their first night behind the closed fence and doors of Sampson's shoe factory were nearly one-quarter of the Chinese east of the Mississippi. By 1875, there would be 201 Celestials in Sampson's employ, making North Adams home to the largest population of Chinese nationals outside of New York City in the eastern United States. By 1882, Congress would pass the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first exclusion act based on race to be passed in America. “He doesn't stand a Chinaman's chance” would become a commonplace saying.

But on the evening of the thirteenth of June, amid the unfamiliar smells of shoe production, Charlie was faced with quelling the anxieties of seventy-four boys still reeling from the news that they were strikebreakers. He appealed to their pragmatism and to their notions of duty—they had, he reminded them, signed a contract. He appealed to their lifelong training as good sons in the Confucian ways, and
this was the most successful, since in the absence of a father, even a foreman who spoke the language of the white barbarians would suffice as the recipient of whatever filial piety the boys had to offer, and he convinced them to busy themselves with their choice of bunks and the arrangement of their personal belongings.

He himself chose the first-level bunk closest to the door, as when dining in public he'd select the table and chair closest to the wall for an unobstructed view of what might be coming his way, and, crossing his legs at the ankles, closed his eyes for what seemed like the first time in days, unexpectedly summoning a vision of Third Brother flying a kite on the hill behind their childhood home.

Before George Chase left for San Francisco, Sampson had extended to him three-quarters of an hour of instructions. Chase was to seek the counsel of a shoemaker of the name Battles, a man who already employed Chinamen in his factory. If he could not get men experienced in making shoes, he was to engage those who had a natural turn for mechanism.

Chase said, “I am going haphazard, and don't know whether I shall accomplish anything or not.” To which Sampson replied, “Your time is paid, your expenses are paid, so go.”

But upon his arrival in San Francisco, Chase, perhaps too filled with the surrogate power granted him by his employer, did not seek out Mr. Battles and attempted to secure the labor himself. He was thus forced to wire to Sampson:
There are not Chinese to be had
. Sampson wired back:
Don't
question my instructions; follow them
, and Chase, confounded as to how his employer managed to know the things he did, swallowed his pride and sent his
carte de visite
to Mr. Battles, who introduced him to the house of Kwong, Chong, Wing & Co., which kept an intelligence office, sometimes known as an emigrant agency. Charlie Sing was a member of this house, and it was he with whom Chase initially met, a meeting about which Chase would have both fond and uncomfortable memories for years to come.

Charlie impressed him. His English was broken but clear, and he was already a Christian with a firm handshake. He was unusually tall, a fact that Chase hoped would not too much displease the short-statured Sampson, and his stare seemed to suggest both attention and a respect for privacy. Yet Chase was disconcerted. There was something blank about the man. Not a neutral blankness as one often saw in women of a certain kind, but something more fraught. Chase felt as if he were looking at a vast, uncultivated field, beneath which you might find resistant roots and formidable rocks.