Читать книгу Left of the Left - Anatole Dolgoff - Страница 5

I’m seventy-nine years old and remember clearly the joy I felt as a small boy when my father, having decided “to give the old woman a rest,” announced it was “time to visit the Five-Ten Hall.” When the three of us—my father, my brother Abraham, and I—survived Mother’s loving last-minute attentions, and escaped onto the still Sunday-morning street.

The Five-Ten Hall was at 134 Broad Street, a short block to Battery Park and South Ferry. We lived across town on the Lower East Side, in whichever tenement was cheapest, but as close as possible to the water; mother insisted on light and air. So, poor as we were, from our high bedroom window on Cherry Street, just a few hundred yards from the antiaircraft gun battery that commandeered a chunk of park along the East River, Abe and I could see clear across the flat water to the mysterious Brooklyn Navy Yard, where ant-like men labored over mountainous battleships.

Mother’s restrictions ensured that the straightest route to the Five-Ten Hall, the one we always followed, was west along South Street. Those Sunday mornings we were the only things moving. South Street belonged to us. At times Abe and I would forage ahead independently, secure as puppies on a long leash, only to fall back to our father’s side. If we listened carefully we could hear a soft melody exhale from deep within his chest: over and over, private, in step with his stride. There was no FDR overpass to divide us from the water then, and no thump of overhead traffic. The timber piers groaned and creaked in the waves.

We had our rituals. We never crossed extra wide, cobbled Pike Slip without paying homage to the raised stone vat in the center of the street. Too large for a bath tub, too small for a swimming pool, it was filled with the clearest, most bubbling water I had ever seen. I can still feel the delicious shock of that water as I dipped my face into it, eyes open.

“Why?” I asked the first time we stopped there.

“For the horses,” father said. “This is where the horses drink.”

But I did not see many horses, mostly cars and trucks.

“Think about Moishe’s horse!” Abe said.

And he was right. Moishe, the last true teamster, delivered massive blocks of ice from a horse-drawn cart to economic laggards like us who lacked refrigerators. At this late date of my life I can still see the steam rising from the exhausted animal’s hide as it drew to a slow halt in front of our building. I’d bolt down the stairs in time to catch Moishe lifting the ice block from the back of the cart onto his burlap-covered shoulder, using huge tongs, and then I’d follow him as he trudged the five flights to our kitchen, where, grunting, he fitted the block into the back of our ice box. The effort required skill and no small grace. Mother always had a few kind words in Yiddish for Moishe, and a glass of homebrewed tea, so he could catch his breath.

“The ice is heavy,” I said on Pike Slip to my father, who knew what I meant.

“You get used to it if you start young.”

Eight years old is young enough, which is the age my father began his working life, a few blocks from where we presently lived, delivering milk in the pre-dawn from a horse-drawn cart like Moishe’s. The driver needed a nimble kid to lug the full bottles into the dark hallways before the customers woke up and to haul back the empties of the previous day. That was 1910. Child labor was the norm. There were five children. The oldest son had to work.

A few years later grandfather Max delivered my father to his friend and fellow house painter with the following instructions, in Yiddish.

“This is my son Sam. Make him a painter. If he gives you trouble, kick him in the ass.”

My father told this story many times, never neglecting to add the little coda, “That was my life adjustment.” He had a deep voice that wheezed around the edges from emphysema—Paul Berman in his tribute to him upon his death called it a “broken cello”—and the ironic shading he gave it never failed to get a laugh.

He was eighty-six years old the last time I heard him tell that story. “He jokes about it!” I exclaimed to Mother.

“Yes, he’s eighty-six years old and he still jokes about it!” She understood him completely and had that way of cutting to the bone.

Early on he rebelled against the life arranged for him. When he was thirteen he left for work one day and simply vanished. Searching turned up nothing and the family was forced to assume him dead, lost to the Calcutta streets of the Lower East Side. Until the following postcard arrived months later: “Dear Ma, I’m in China, Shmuel.” China! Family lore has it she fainted on the spot. Turns out he had hopped freight trains across the country to San Francisco, got a job shoveling coal on a ship to Shanghai. How he survived he never told us; the hobo jungles of the time were filled with runaways.

“Came back the sensation of the neighborhood!” Father would recall with a wry smile. “Wore a money belt!” His celebrity lasted about a week, about as long as his cash. But he was not proud of the escapade in the telling. The grief he caused my grandmother, who died three months before I was born, stayed with him.

Weaned on oil-based paint, turpentine, thick brushes, and dust, he remained a house painter fifty-five years until hernias laid him low and he rasped for breath. He had a special way of running his fingertips appraisingly across the wall of any room that was new to him. Yet he was fundamentally untamed.

I knew none of these stories of my father’s early life those Sunday mornings on the way to the Five-Ten Hall, nor would it have occurred to me he was my age when he worked the milk carts. What held me in awe was the immensity of the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges as we passed under them, and in a different way, the stench of the oncoming Fulton Fish Market. The main pier was closed for the day, as were the stalls of the wholesalers on our side of the street. But the rotting fish stained the air.

“It smells! Are we there yet?” I would whine in small-boy disgust. Secretly I liked the smell.

My complaint was ignored. This too was part of our ritual.

Recently I took the old walk down South Street and found the mood, the sense of place, completely transformed. The FDR Drive traffic pounds over head. The Fulton Fish Market is closed for good. The red-brick eighteenth-century buildings—home to the warehouses, the workshops, the converted stables, the flea bag hotels, the twenty-five cent haircuts, the secondhand trouser and boot shops, the cheap eateries with the salt and pepper in one shaker and the steamed-over windows—they are all gone, gone with the merchant ships and tug boats that plied the harbor. Gone, as well, are the clattering, clanking overhead train lines, the “els” that branched from South Ferry like the tentacles of a gigantic iron squid, shedding rust and dust to the far reaches of Manhattan and the Bronx. Except for the faux South Street Seaport, which preserves a few of the old buildings as a stage set, the route is lined with monolithic housing projects and the cold towers of the financial district.

134 Broad Street, home of the Five-Ten Hall, was one of those ancient brick buildings in the permanent shadow of the “el” that has long since been demolished. I remember my sense of triumph as I turned right on the intersection of Broad and South, and let my tired legs propel me the last short block. I loved to climb the rickety stairs to the second floor loft ahead of Abe and my father. Climbing the rickety stairs of ancient lofts would turn out to be a staple of my childhood.

The loft was a simple spare rectangle, colored white. A polished timber floor creaked like the piers when you walked across it. Above your head loomed a dark, pressed-tin ceiling. At the far end, close to the naked windows, were two round poker tables of the kind you might encounter in the saloon of a Hollywood western—although the preferred game was pinochle. There was a leather couch along the wall opposite the door, some chairs, a table with literature arranged in scrupulously neat stacks, and behind it an equally neat, full bookcase. There were scrupulously detailed miniature ships—architects models, not toys—and all kinds of nautical things, knotted ropes and stuff: manly things that went straight to a boy’s heart.

What gave the place distinction, though, and what burns in my memory still, was the single decoration that hung flat against the long wall to your right as you entered. It was a ship’s steering wheel in solid mahogany red, nearly the size of the wall itself, gleaming in the morning light. Solid mahogany cylinders, spaced at regular intervals, radiated from its perfect rim. The center of the wheel challenged you with the following blunt message:

Industrial Workers of the World

I*W*W*

Marine Transport Workers

IU 510

These words, this hand-stenciled challenge, arose in shining red splendor above a simplified black globe: one world, the IWW logo.

This was the place our father walked us across town for—to 134 Broad St, the home of the IWW—the Wobbly Hall. It was also known as the Five-Ten Hall, after Industrial Union (IU) 510, the Wobbly name for its merchant seamen’s branch.

The IWW was a revolutionary labor union dedicated without apology, without obfuscation to the overthrow of capitalism, to the abolition of the wage system, to the world-wide solidarity of all labor, to the complete democracy of its internal affairs, to the building through the institutions of labor “the new society within the shell of the old.” It is the only such union in the history of the United States. The IWW, the Wobblies! This was the place—and now I am not speaking of 134 Broad Street, that had my father’s heart. To quote a song he sang in good moods, he “wore that button, the Wobblies’ red button and carried their red, red card.” Proudly. From 1922 until his last breathe in 1990.

The IWW was formed by revolutionary unionists and progressive activists who convened in Chicago in 1905. The pejorative “red”—as in despicable-flag-hating-revolutionist-less-deserving-of-life-than-a-cockroach—was originally directed at its members, the Wobblies, and not at members of the Communist Party, which did not exist until more than a decade later. No, the Wobblies were born of the American experience: Big Bill Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners; Mother Jones of the Pennsylvania soft coal fields; Eugene V. Debs, leader of the Pullman railroad strikers and later of the Socialist Party; Father Haggerty, the defrocked priest and union organizer; Lucy Parsons, a black woman and the widow of Albert Parsons, the anarchist—and before that Confederate Civil War veteran—who was lynched by the State of Illinois following the Chicago Haymarket bombing of 1886.

The aim of the Wobblies was to “fan the flames of discontent,” to organize the poor, the oppressed, the people of no account in society into an effective fighting force. That many of the strikes they led were successful in the teeth of the entrenched power of mine owners, lumber barons, and textile manufacturers, who had at their disposal the goons, the police, the state militia, the press, the clergy, and the Federal Government is a tribute to their skill and bravery. You must not confuse a typical Wobbly-led strike of a century or so ago with today’s tepid union affair, top heavy with lawyers and professional bargainers. A Wobbly strike was a localized revolution. The old-time Wobblies I knew as a boy would tell of these struggles that raged across the American landscape—in the mines, lumber camps, factories, wheat fields, and waterfronts of a tooth-and-claw nation. The recitation of these forgotten battles, unadorned and at random, can bring a lump to the throat in the manner of a Whitman poem.

I go into this history because the Wobbly glories were a distant thunder by the time the three of us entered the Five-Ten Hall those sleepy Sunday mornings when I was a boy. Outright murder, state sponsored persecution and imprisonment, induced mass hysteria, internal dissension, mistaken tactics, the rise of the Communist Party, the Roosevelt New Deal with its social programs and favored treatment of “responsible” unions, and, above all, WWII and the general modernization of American life—these things conspired to bring the Wobblies low. The Five-Ten Hall was little more than a social club: a place for seaman who shared each other’s values to spend time together, to play silent games of pinochle, to gossip, to discuss the latest outrage, to speak of the past as if it were still happening. All this while waiting to “ship out.” The sea was their true home.

They were lonely men for the most part, childless, so they made a fuss over Abe and me. Huge shiny packages labeled Baby Ruth and Hershey would magically appear to my delight. Abe, who has four years on me, would immediately make a bee line for an empty card table, where waiting for him was Nick the Greek: a thick, powerful, middle-aged man in a turtle-neck sweater, with a skull bald as a turtle’s. They would lay out the chess board without exchanging a word and play for hours in silence.

Abe had another game going with a seafaring Wobbly named J. B. Chiles. Chiles made it a point to send him a postcard from every port he visited. Each morning Abe would race down stairs to the front of our building and wait for the mailman to deliver his card.

Ah, Abe, you are lucky. One arrived today, and Abe clutches it to him. On the back of the card: “Dear Abe, Here I am in Valparaiso, J. B. Chiles” On the front: a grainy black-and-white photograph of the harbor of Valparaiso, Chile.

The cards did not arrive on a regular basis. But Abe stuck with it and in time he filled a shoe box with cards from all the exotic places of the world: cards that were sent to him alone in an age devoid of TV, computer, and iPod. It was a collection he prized beyond value. He had a large map of the world taped to the wall beside his bed. Valparaiso, Chile? There it is! Abe stabs Valparaiso with a pin, like an insect, and stands back to admire all the pins scattered across his map.

I had my game, too—checkers, with a short, wiry ex-prize fighter known, perhaps insensitively but nevertheless accurately, as Punch Drunk Morse. His mashed in face fascinated me: flattened nose, unnaturally thick brow, scar tissue, pinned back ears, tight curly hair. It was hard to tell how old he was. But he was obviously an adult and I was able to beat him every time! Probably that was the best Morse could do, although now that I am old it pleases me to think he let me win because he enjoyed seeing a small boy happy, for he was a kind and gentle man.

Though Morse wouldn’t swat a fly in anger and certainly not a “civilian,” his face was an advertisement for trouble. Everywhere the poor fellow went he encountered an ass spoiling to prove his “manhood” in public by punching him out. There was the night my father loved telling about when a drunk they encountered in a bar gave Morse no peace. He taunted him, interrupted him when he was in conversation with other people, shoved him on the shoulder. Finally it became intolerable. So Morse stepped to the center of the saw-dust floor.

“You want to hit me? Here, hit me,” he says to the guy, sticking out his chin. The bar grows silent as a church.

Morse weighs maybe 140lbs. His tormentor is a lumbering water buffalo with a huge gut. He proceeds to swing a round house right at Morse, then a round house left, a right again, and so on, huffing and puffing. All of them fan the air, of course, as Morse stands in one spot with his hands in his pockets and weaves side to side, at times crowding and nudging the drunk off balance with his shoulder.

“Here I am. Hit me. Hit me. Get it out of your system.”

The drunk swings himself to exhaustion, red faced, gasping. Morse leaves him stationary as a confused bull amid-the sawdust. It is a Buster Keaton farce come to life.

“Remember Sammy Weinstein?” my father would call out to Morse across the silent Five-Ten Hall.

Weinstein, I learned later, was a small-time “club fighter,” a lightweight from the early 1930s, when a Jewish boxer was not an oddity. He was also a Wobbly and proud of it, so he had “IWW” sewn in red letters onto the back of his black trunks. The crowd would roar when they saw it.

“In the long run it wasn’t good propaganda” was my father’s growled appraisal. “Poor Sammy spent too much time on his ass.” Morse would nod in sad agreement.

That was how I remember talk went at the Five-Ten Hall. Spare. Ironic. Things heated up, however, if the talk turned to political philosophy, literature, history; seafaring Wobblies were generally far better educated than mainstream college folk. They took advantage of their years of confinement on the high seas to read, read, read. They would not parrot what a literature professor might say about Dickens, for example; most never saw the inside of a college classroom nor benefited from the guidance of the learned man up front. Instead they actually read Dickens, maybe five of his novels, and formed their own opinions. I can remember more than one Wobbly quote verbatim long passages of Marx, of Shakespeare, of Whitman, of the Old Testament. There was a savage quality to their learning.

The Wobblies would not let the expectations of others define them. A migratory farm worker was called a “bindle stiff” because he carried his bed on his back. He rode freight trains, dodging the brutal railroad “bulls” and murderous “hijackers,” to get to the vast grain fields, where he and his fellow stiffs harvested the nation’s bread for a pittance. Decades before the world heard of Cesar Chavez—before he was born—the Wobblies led thousands of these homeless men in a series of violent strikes that raged across the American West. Many were imprisoned. Around our dinner table I heard stories of how their jailers observed them conduct disciplined meetings inside their crowded cells, according to Robert’s Rules of Order—and from then on treated them with respect.

I loved the Five-Ten Hall for reasons that ran deeper than a boy can express. It was there that my father introduced me to the adult world of men, and that I began to learn the importance of honor and bravery in this world. I also learned as I grew older that the Wobblies had their share of bad actors. But, taken as a whole, they were men who sacrificed in the just cause of others without expectation of reward or fame, which meets my definition of nobility. With the passage of time, I have come to realize how privileged I was to know these men, albeit from a boy’s perspective. There was a certain dignity to the best of them, a certain grace. Their speech, their bearing, carried echoes of a lost nineteenth-century America. All of them were poor, long forgotten, if ever known. They were the best of America, although America largely spat upon them.

In the broader sense, there is no such thing as a foreigner. We are all native born members of this planet, and for the members of it to be divided into groups or units and to be taught that each nation is better than the other leads to clashes and the world war. We ought to have in place of national patriotism—the idea that one people is better than another—a broader conception, that of international solidarity.… The IWW believes that in order to do away with wars we should remove the cause of wars; we should establish industrial democracy instead of commercialism and capitalism and the struggles that come from them. We are trying to make America a better land, a land without child slaves, a land without poverty, and so also with the world, a world without a master and without a slave.

James P. Thompson, a big, square-shouldered man and a co-founder of the IWW said this at a trial in the run-up to World War One. For this and similar statements he was sentenced to ten years in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary—his wife and two small children left destitute. I would come to know many such men—aged men who had paid a hard, heavy price.

Indeed, the reward for many a Wobbly was a tragic life. I think of J. B. Chiles, the lonely man who sent Abe postcards from around the world when he was a boy. He was Secretary of the Five-Ten Hall, which in reality meant he slept there in return for managing things and keeping the place clean. Chiles’s skull had been cracked open in the 1920s by California prison guards in whose loving care he had spent five years for fomenting strikes. Slowly, gradually, Chiles went mad and as he grew old found himself committed to an upstate “nut house.” Abe would take the long train ride to visit him there, until one day he was told that his old friend had wandered off the grounds. He was never heard from again.

There is an old Wobbly song that comes to mind as I write this: My Wandering Boy (A Mother’s Lament), to the tune of the famous Offenbach aria. The author of the lyric is unknown, which seems altogether fitting. The elderly men I remember at reunions sang it sardonically, with a cruel edge, perhaps to ward off messy emotions. But I never took it that way.

Where is my wandering boy tonight?

The boy of his mother’s pride?

He’s counting the ties with his bed on his back,

Or else he is bumming a ride.

Oh, where is my boy tonight?

Oh, where is my boy tonight?

He’s on the head end of an overland train,

That’s where your boy is tonight.

Oh, where is my boy tonight?

Oh, where is my boy tonight?

The chilly wind blows, to the lock-up he goes,

That’s where your boy is tonight

As a child I was of course unaware of the sad, glorious history of the Wobblies. In truth, with no one remotely my age, time dragged at the Five-Ten Hall after an hour or two. What rescued the afternoon was lunch at the Bean Pot Cafeteria around the corner, which faced South Ferry, Battery Park, and the Statue of Liberty which was the size of a toy far out in the harbor. Grease all over the place, dirty plates—the decrepit Bean Pot catered to seamen, floor moppers, and various others who sweated for their money. A nice contrast to this description would be that the food was hearty workingman’s fare. In fact it was terrible. What did I know or care? The chunky soiled man behind the counter ladled me a bowl of split pea soup and white bread. For dessert—always dessert!—there was lemon meringue pie so gritty you spat out the sugar grains.

Nevertheless, I stood at the side of my father, my older brother Abe, and the Wobblies at the Bean Pot. It was as if I had been initiated into an exclusive club. After the Bean Pot, tired now, came the long walk back to Cherry Street in the fading light.