The Talligewi once lived here. We felt their furtive ghosts everywhere. Near Peach Valley and River Avenue, right across from the Mill, is where you could dig up their broken arrow heads, some still so sharp you could cut your fingers on them, and this power to draw blood so many years later impressed us superstitiously. Their pottery, now in broken pieces with fragments of patterns painted on them–and, finally, yellow shards of bones that jutted up from the burial mounds that were the strange swellings of earth where everywhere the ground was flat. There were even such fragments to be dug up at the end of Oliver Hollow, or as we knew it now as Nick Lee Hollow, and in what used to be the old McElheny farm. But fragments of bone, pieces of pottery. What could you do with pieces of pieces of pottery and fragments of bones and flint heads that cut your fingers? You were a working-class boy whose always-breaking shoe laces you had knotted impatiently and reknotted dozens of times and which you bit at furiously at night to free your working-class feet.
They were long gone now, imprisoned by the strange historical past, these Indians who had lived and died here, leaving their homes and their memories to the games of boys. Their graves had to be excavated by Carnegie and U.S. Steel and bones and pottery mixed with blast furnace slag and melted into gravel to cover dirt roads. Some
escaped with their bones inside their bodies, like the Lenni Lenape who fled to join the Iroquois nation, which accepted them grudgingly, giving them “women’s work” to do. The Algonquins, from whom all the local tribes had descended, finally wound up–all 250 of themon a reservation in Oklahoma. The greatest of them all, Chief Pontiac, who had fought the British and imprinted his name on their hides, survived only as the name on your car and a city in Michigan. And on the coin of your childhood, the only Indian you took with you everywhere, to the candy store for a jawbreaker, or to be put into the collection box at church, was on the copper penny.
Those dead are always with us–as the name of the river, which ran “deep and still,” as the young George Washington would describe it: the Monongahela, named for the mysterious Indian tribe, the Monon, totally lost to history except for the name. As the name of another river, the Youghigheny, which flows past McKeesport English name).As where the two Indian-named rivers, the Allegheny and the Monongahela would meet the Ohio, also Indian, at Pittsburgh–not an Indian name–and flow down to the Mississippi and the warm Caribbean Sea.
Everything is history here. But it is a strange history we will be introduced to: a kind of zoo of the past–deeds and men imprisoned in books, to which we boys would come, as we would come to the animal zoo and stare at the fierce animals behind iron bars. The past had been captured and put on display: a trophy, dead. Who knew what history was encountering it behind bars and confined to a reservation.
What was that in our blood and needing to burst through the
skin of our ignorance, out by life to flow ever free?
In ten minutes–or a snatched squint at the sun–you could be out of town, beyond where the one-track Toonerville Trolley (a name taken from a comic strip) refused to go, ending civilization abruptly within a short jaunt of home. Blowsy spring would come reeling to us, battered by winter, hardly alive like the winter flies, touching gingerly these smoke-stained gardens in the back alleys, arriving through clouds of iron ore dust that painted our faces like the faces of Indians. March was gusty with homemade kites careening in the sky, or with store-bought Jolly Boy kites, gap-toothed and grinning. They pulled at the muscles in your arms, eager to abscond with your labor and wealth, free from you. And you held on like death.
In May you would be deep in hawthorn bushes splendid with blossoms and a perfume that made your winter senses reel–senses adapted to the odors of urine-stained beds (everybody slept with a younger brother) and sessions in outdoor privies, celebrated
later by Chic Sale who made important distinctions between one and two-seaters. There, anyhow, you continued your education reading from the pages of Sears and Roebuck.
Plunged a bit further into the woods, go down to the creek among skunk cabbage coming out of the snow wrapped in its own warmth, rancidly smelling; go thrusting up through last year’s partly-rotted almost humus leaves, half-eaten by worms and beetles, wet with clear spring rain–and then you will come upon virginal blood-root.
Here, before it, if you are a young boy, you will stop, overcome by a strange moment hitherto unknown to you except before the Virgin Mary in church. You had not come upon awe, as an emotion, anywhere before. It stood immaculate, and vulnerable, like a girl in her communion gown, pure as your own thoughts, as yourself about to be lost: a white blossom in early spring. You bent to pluck it, felt its cool stem in your fingers, and when you pulled, it pulled you back to it, for a moment, and then you broke it–and it bled.
Bled. Unwarned, knowing only awe and reverence, you had been drawn to it, you wanted its purity to be yours again, and you made it bleed. It bled through its roots out of an earth that still moved uneasily with the bodies of miners and Indians, who haunted these woods, of steelworkers and history, of proletarian innocence slain over and over.
You went back home then, overwhelmed by a mystery that could not be fathomed, a guilt that was not yours to exorcise, a blood that had no taste of salt. Blood too was on the Judas tree, that cursed tree on which Judas Iscariot, having betrayed Christ for 30 pieces of silver (you knew of his betrayal: you had denounced his monumental treachery beyond words often as you slept) had hung himself: his blood returning here in the cold windy days of early spring, arriving like the blood-root before the others, reminding you that once remorse existed even in the heart of a villain, and would not exist in the hearts of villains again. Thirty pieces of silver would become thirty millions and billions of pieces of silver and a kind of sanction for monumental treachery would be bought with them…
Never would you betray Christ (crossing yourself, a Roman Catholic boy) for anything, for all the money, you who were penniless, in all the vaults of all the banks of the world! Not for silver, and not for your heart’s blood! To betray a friend, your family, your people, and therefore your class–this you would never do: blood would pour over the hills streaming out of the stems of acres of flowers and out of Judas trees everywhere, and your own heart bursting like a bomb: but never!
East across the river rises the steep bluffs of shale blocking your escape (for long before you knew why you wanted to escape), not only physically but mentally as well: thought itself ended there. It is to the open West that you turn. There roll the hills of staghorn sumac and buttonwood, of maple, of the native tree of boyhood: the sassafras. It is for it that you carry your six-bladed jackknife, for you dig up its fragrant root from the spongy ground and suck (after impatiently rubbing the dirt off of your pant leg) the tart pungency out of it, shredding it with your nimble teeth (still growing), and then drinking it down with a big gulp of cold spring water smelling of clean worms and making your forehead ache.
Once an Indian hunting ground, most game are gone from near here: like the Indians they’ve disappeared into an inexplicable oblivion, fleeing before a shadow invisible to our eyes. There are rabbits, yes; you see their orderly little piles of berries everywhere. Chipmunks, too. Once in a while, but only for an instant, across the broken horizon flashes a whisk of gleaming light (was it a fox, that gleam of red?). There are, however, no squirrels to be seen, as there are no fir trees, though both were once here. Their absence leaves an inexplicable ache without being missed. As do the birds that once flew in these local skies as if they were at home in their own kitchen: bluebirds and cardinals. Only the proletarian sparrow is left. They are the gray color of winter and are the bird of winter. Only perhaps some cold, crisp winter day, when the mills have been stilled, you may see that crimson visitor, a red moment against the black trees and white snow; for it will also leave for places unknown, and go before you are gone: you will remember it as if you had imagined it, as if you had invented it in a dream of your childhood, as a known place you could come back to one day: crowded with cardinals and bluebirds and red winged blackbirds. Owls survive, crows, and in spring, the robin: they will fly in and out of your mind and peck at your nerve-ends that will ache with yearning without every telling you why or what.
These are the colors of spring. The hills smell all year round with the cloying, somehow sickly sweetness of bituminous coal burning in a thousand homes, of sulphur and mine-danp,–of bird-cherry burst open, spilling a wine on the air and the acid odor of coke.
Snakes! Evil incarnate–cursed, they thrill the senses with a foreboding of evil and vice. Eve shudders in you and Adam falls. Your soul stumbles in your bones and, blind with an ancient rage, you reach for a stick and pound it into a silent writhing death, splitting it along its middle and feeling your gorge rise as its secret insides come rolling out. Guilt assumed! Murder allowed! Vengeance permitted: a sanctioned violence that burns the senses red. They are everywhere you go when you leave the city. Hidden in the cracks of cliffs, curled in the crotch of a tree, tongue tasting the smell of your body as you blindly come near, it does its work in silence and with stealth. If you hear its rattle, it is already too late. Your hear the bells of glory calling too–as you furiously whip out your knife, open its blade with your teeth, slice your leg to the bone as the red blood rushes free, as you bend to suck it clean, as you cleanse your soul of a poison that is lodged there, born as you are in sin most grievous. God will suck that poison free, will he not?
But nevertheless, there is still one snake that will haunt you forever. It is that snake you suddenly come across in your wanderings, who measures you with malevolent eye, and then, as you start away from it down the hill, loosening a cascade of rocks behind you, it takes its tail into its mouth, and making a hoop of itself, goes after you. It will go after you to the ends of the earth, as you run from it, shedding your jackknife, those precious dog’s teeth, baseball cards, a crushed beetle, clay “commies,” shed your boyhood forever, as you simultaneously reached the end of your imagination, and ceased to be that boy in the census count.
The woods were alive–they were our flared-up imaginations, alive, and we felt that we crossed no border between our daydreams and their urgent privacy.
What they were we were in our heads. A two-lane tar road, Bull Run, twists and turns and loops around the hills that are formidable obstacles to men whose chief tools are still picks and shovels. One day, with the rest of the world, I will witness (as of the 20th century) big steel jaws rip the hill apart, expose its deepest secrets, and drive a road like a stake right through it! Roads will no longer amble along, curve and dip, rise and fall: they will be laid our in straight lines as if on a steel ruler, the laws of geometry becoming the rule of all: the shortest distance between our greed and our need. Up until now, hills had blocked our way out, and adventure was as far as we could walk and get back in time for supper. Hills had been the measure of not only distance but our minds: there were horizons then.
The automobile is on its way. They are boxes on wheels and for awhile dogs will bark furiously at them, and then will give up barking forever. You looked at their tin-can bodies and an ache for horses rose in you. And yet the horses were going. In town iron troughs still existed where horses drank (and you too snatched a mouthful of water), but their replacements had already appeared: gasoline stations. Though the streets still steamed from horse buns on which clusters of sparrows fed, more and more often one heard talk of cleaner streets. Cars were clean. Horses somehow know that they have been declared obsolescent and flare at you, snort when you come near, shy at those mechanical machines, whinny for some explanation that is in the hands of their masters. And one day your watch him die–this huge flesh writhing on the ground, tearing up the earth with his flailing feet, still iron shod, his huge eyes (seen one at a time) fixed in some paralysis of will that was death. You had seen the death of insects, small animals and an occasional person but you had never seen death so large. He would be replaced by a delivery truck.
Who knows that he’s part of the changing times? He changes with the changing and so seems not to change. He is more root than stalk. He observes, hoping not to be observed except on the appointed time. He watches his world slowly disappear thinking it was lasting forever.
In every bend of the loop of the road leading out of town, you will come upon what is now, but once was not, a little, somehow tidy farm, with hardly more than a garden left of that older, bigger farm that straggled away from the house and got lost in the woods. Now nothing is left of it but lined –off patches set apart to raise eating corn. Just a bit further on, beyond the split-rail fences, across the fieldstone heaps, fallen in now, and overgrown with blackberry vines, you may come upon the last of the coal mines worked by blind-folded donkeys, and down which miners carried canaries in little cages and carbide lamps on their hats smelling acrid and sharp, making you catch your breath, making your temples throb. Later, you will mix carbide with spit inside a can sealed tight, and at a hole at its bottom, you applied a match–and boom, it blew the daylights to pieces: jarred your ears, rearranged the bones in the cemetery…
Still, cows can and do fall into those camouflaged mine holes, break a leg, and lie in there dolefully bawling until the cursing owner arrives and puts it our of its misery with a shot not five feet away. Then he’ll attach a chain to its leg and back up a car (if he can do it) and drag the dead cow home, leaving a damp trail on the road, to roasts and steaks. During the Great Depression Thirties, these mines will be reopened, and reworked as “bootleg mines,” and the county sheriff would go scouting out at night (for the miners worked them in the darkest night) trying to catch them at it (stealing coal). More care was given to that coal than to the miners; it was not free coal anymore and his who had a pick and shovel and enough grunt to get it out of the hills. It was owned now: after lying millennia in the dark it had finally found its master. The mineral rights under your house could belong to U.S. Steel–to Morgan and Company, that is: you couldn’t build a privy without making sure it didn’t go too far down and poach on Morgan’s preserves…
But that kind of literary sarcasm fell on a boy’s deaf ears. Who cared about who owned the “mineral rights” under his house? You hadn’t told anyone yet, but the minute you could, you intended leaving that home and those mineral rights and striking out for good luck and “wild women”…one day…one day.
Meanwhile, there at the fork of the road (you never took the left fork for some obscure reason) stands the Neel stone cabin, now over 100years old. Bull Run road (named, no doubt, after the Civil War battle at another Bull Run) still ambles through the rolling hills, past Dutch Town, far on the way back into the unfolding hills where, becoming less traveled roads, it eventually reaches the settlements of the “plain people,” the Mennonite sect of the Amish, who never used electricity, nor nails, nor acknowledged the machines of the 20th century at all. Isolated, inbred, they lived in log huts, or somber-painted plane-wood houses of no particular style, and wore home-made clothes with wide-brimmed black hats as they rode into town behind a horse and wagon, or in a buggy, their women modestly slanting their eyes earthward, their children strange orphans of a sealed in world which they seemed to pass from infancy into old age without jarring a muscle as if under glass. As it turned out, their Spartan virtues were just the right qualities needed to make money. For they had no vices. Their whole life was a kind of denatured vice, but they prospered as farmers, and you heard them talk: “The baby is crabbit today,” or “He spritzed on me,” or “Throw the cow over the fence some hay”: all so funny you split your sides laughing.
But even further on toward Cumberland Gap, northeastward, if you stayed on the road going that way, you could come upon a colony of Shakers, still functioning then–a strange sect, indeed, which owned all things in common, but condemned themselves to extinction by forbidding marriage or “sexual congress,” surviving into our times only as curious relics of a theory gone literally to seed, whose success was its death.
Founded by a woman, Ann Lee (1736-1784), its ideas shook your bones, at the same time that you responded, if ever so remotely, to the yearning in their ideas for a world without rancor and disharmony. In fact, not too far from where you were born, the Harmony Society–its purpose revealed in its name–had established a utopian colony in 1805, among whose strange precepts was the idea, literally from the Bible, that Adam, “made in God’s image,” was androgynous–contained in himself both male and female.
Almost all such utopian communities believed in communal principles–sharing work and wealth– but all of them finally succumbed to the force of a system so voracious, so overpowering in its hunger to multiply itself that in the end, it ate them all up, as it had the social system of the Indians before them: wampum and feathers, pemmican and deer hide…
Utopianism had come to Pennsylvania with William Penn, as a “holy experiment,” which Penn felt certain God would “ bless and make it the seed of a nation.” “I shall have a tender care to the government,” he wrote a friend, “that it be well laid at first….” And, in planting the seeds of the future nation–of a new world, in fact–among the healthy seeds he also planted, all unknowing to himself (and to his times) the one seed that would grow, and devour all: and that was the “right and title in your own lives, liberties and estates. In this every man is a sort of little sovereign to himself.”
A man morally and intellectually above his contemporaries, it was the limits of the times itself that imprisoned his will. A Quaker who, having dispossessed the Indians, finally and completely when they signed away their lands to him (“buying, not taking away, the native land”) on October 23, 1784, he now reigned supreme (already sanctioned in his possession by the grace of his Majesty). Signing the paper was an absolute act, although, as one Indian would put it later, “the English don’t deal fairly with us, they are more cunning than we are: they get our names upon paper very fast, we often don’t know what it is for.”
Too bad. Illiteracy was not merely a matter of bad penmanship and bad reading habits: it was ignorance of the laws of social development. It was ignorance of the power of wealth, of both to religion, to ideology, that is: men shed blood of infidels to get their property from them in all good conscience. Their gods approved…
Not knowing on what anvil the class that wielded the hammer would shape its moral and civil laws was the root ignorance of the times. Men were neither self-aware nor aware of the world. Indians who did not understand even the concept of property were not conscious of what they were signing away when they signed away the land where the buffalo roamed so freely for eons before, and never again! All this was done in the name of the highest motives, of a utopianism which was part of America’s intellectual beginnings, and would run through its entire gaudy history as a mongrel morality begat of a dreadful need and the need not to dread it.
All utopian communities foundered, William Penn’s included. “Let men be good”, he had preached, “and the government cannot be bad…” A good man he was indeed, but at the end he would cry: “O Pennsylvania what hast thou cost me? Above thirty thousand pounds more than I ever got by it…” Proving he was more the American to be than he was the Quaker who quaked in the presence of God. He mourned that it had also cost “my child’s soul almost…” as it would cost the souls of many men’s children to come.
He had not foreseen, not could he, that at some point their frugality, industry, modesty and dress, their sense of responsibility to commerce and trade would prove to be precisely those qualities most needed for the primary accumulation of capital that would guarantee an America to come founded on the rock of Wall Street. Their very household virtues compromised their social future, and finally undermined their ethical and religious goals, and they all ended up as well to do martyrs to commerce, except, again those Shakers whose one-track will lead to the logical end: all died, and no Shakers remained. They spilled no seed and their souls turned to wasteland.
Dutch Town survives in the names on the road mail-boxes: Zewe, Goldstrohm, Libengoot (becoming Libengood), Yetter, Fey, Pirl,( who will be at my brother’s funeral in 1984). Farmers here are now part-miner, and later, will become part steel worker, dragged into the working class by sometimes stumbling, but certain, history. They would go to bed at night with steel dust in their throats, dreaming of fragrant hay in summer. Some of their log cabins still persist, like the Neels, and before electricity arrived along those slender, white-naked poles, stripped of their bark, tarred six feet high, those noblest of pine trees, you could see the family gathered around the kitchen table reading the Bible in the light of the kerosene lamp, following it word by heavy word, as the wick sputtered and curled beneath its flame like a flat snake inside the bowl holding the yellowed oil. It was a dimming reality, then; reappearing finally on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post painted by Norman Rockwell who stamped the pictures down as if with a heavy stamp.
But these originally one-room cabins now had extra rooms, added on by life. Babies kept a-coming. Lean-tos had been nailed on, and an extra room, too, and the attic finished. A root cellar was dug. One wall was made entirely of fieldstone harvested from the fields cleared for corn, becoming the fireplace and chimney. Real logs burned at night in a stone fireplace and around it the family gathered and kneaded their memories and hopes together, nobody aware that what God had joined man would put asunder, unable to say himself how or why.
Even now a country dog could smell a town boy, which he defined you as, and you resented that because you felt bonded to all dogs-boys and dogs are natural allies- and you had to make a big circle around him, hearing his hoarse voice relaying the news that a town boy was on his way. The dog in the next farm was already barking furiously when you appeared. It was a hard thing to be rejected by dogs, whom you would have liked to….
Still, there were compensations. Some long summer days that faded slowly into dusky evenings, all of you (your friends) would come rolling your home-made hoops (made from the wheels of discarded baby carriages) along those winding tar roads while fireflies circled your homemade bowl-shaped haircuts, turning you into instant working class saints, with their aureoles of winking fire. You batted them impatiently out of your way, or later caught them in a Mason jar and carried them, still sparkling, home to bed, to find nothing but dead little bugs there in the morning.
Your world was as far as your feet could go. But where was the rest of the world? Homestead lay due north: there the great Battle of the Barges (kept a dark secret from you) had been fought on the Monogahela shores where the embattled workers sent shot, and–from the brass cannon–shell, one shell anyhow, at the solid log sides of the barge in which the Pinkerton strikebreakers huddled, and bounced off like a rubber ball. That brass cannon had been a Civil War memento, left here in solitary reminder of a victory over the South: a Black striker thought to drag it off its pedestal and into action again, seeing in the Homestead strike(1892) against Carnegie and Frick the same battle for human freedom that had been fought not too many years before: (veterans of the Civil War were alive yet) against the slave-owners, who, led by that traitor Robert E. Lee, had actually reached Pennsylvania itself at Gettysburg, “fourscore and seven years ago…”
But that was history–those were events that had taken place long before, even before you were in short pants, and like the light of an extinct star reached you years after it itself had expired. And yet that long-traveling light, whose glimmer you saw in the surrounding dark, would light up your soul and, though at the moment few knew it then, had already set the world on fire…
South, now, if you were a growing boy wondering how you would go to meet the world, is where the Monongahela itself came from–back into the forbidding hills of the coal country, inaccessible to everything but pain and hunger, and suffering unchronicled and unnoticed: a pocket of human misery in the ocean of the world’s misery.
There, among the culm piles and ragged slag heaps, little coal-mining towns crouched in among the high hills, cut off from one another and from known America itself. The smell of spring there was the smell of acid: methane. If you were a yellow canary, like the ones miners took with them down into the mines, your head would reel, your eyelids would roll down like a window blind, and you would fall dead where you stood–sometimes the air was so thick with that deadly mine gas–and your thin little dickey-bird ‘s legs would shoot straight up and stiffen and its tiny orange toes would spread in four different directions–a kind of incomplete star.
Some hills burned day and night, becoming at last huge heaps of ash into which your shoes sank. They were hot to walk upon even with shoes: Hell gaped literally not too far below (as the Bible taught), and they persuaded us by the nearness and reality of the Biblical Hell more convincingly than any priest could or did. (And yet its very reality brought you nearer to doubt). That underground fire burnt its way for miles and whole villages woke up tilted north and south as the ground gave way beneath them. Gasses hissed like snakes from the cracks in the earth, and if you pushed away the overhanging vines and bushes, the way you push your hair out of your eyes, you could sometimes get a long look into the abandoned gallery of the shaft of an old mine, and if you listened, and listened with your heart, you could still hear the curses of the miners trapped forever there, biting rock with their teeth trying to get out.
Back in the blackened hills, you could come upon row after row of beehive ovens where the coal was burnt to ash (coke) for stoking up the flames of the blast furnaces. Later, these ovens would be abandoned for the coke ovens at Clairton Steel and remained overgrown and half-hidden as hideaways for rabbits and foxes, and snakes, and for moon shiners and random love, and in the Thirties, as homes for the homeless.
Coal miners were always fighting the company bosses, and the Coal-and-Iron police, always searching for a means to set up a union, starting as Hibernians or “Molly Maguires,” meeting in secret and plotting in secret, and ending so often, as did Alex Campbell and Peter Reilly, leaders of the militant miners’ union, ambushed by company thugs one dark night, as they came down a dark road. Miners died in the fight to force the companies to open up another exit to the mines, so that in times of disaster there would be more hope of escaping! The fight to get honest weight took the lives of uncounted and unnumbered men: drop a lily on their nameless graves now for your freedom’s sake.
You, a steelworker’s boy, ever so glad that you didn’t live there, in those mining camps, for though their battles and agonies and murders and deaths never broke your teeth, still they stained the air with their shed blood and unheard cries of pain and rage, and became part of the chorus of grief that you heard in your dreams at night, as though life had become nothing but a haunted house of tormented souls. Later, as a writer, I saw myself going out into the hills gathering pain out of the air, out of oblivion, before they had rotted entirely away into that lying past. You re-breathed their breath in the sulphur-saturated air from the Mills–hydrochloride acid, said the chemists (in league with the undertaker), which corroded your lungs ( and men died mainly of pneumonia here)–and when you heard of men who were waylaid by company thugs at night for no other reason than the reason you were told–they were Bolsheviks–you knew somehow that it was that choking of your own that was behind their desperation, that made them “Bolsheviks,” and no speeches from soap-boxes had to be hurled your way to “learn you…” And you made a vow that you could never red-bait their suffering.
There are sermons in stones and tongues in trees, and in the air the choked cries of the last breath of martyrs, which you take deep into your lungs, which will reappear as stories and novels.
Nevertheless, you are glad your father wasn’t a coal-miner, working from sun-up to sun-down in those damp, morbid mines–for you, too, would have had to go down into those mines as a breaker boy, or mule boy, and never gone to school–complaining instead all the time that you were being cheated by the weigh-master and told you didn’t know how to count.
But you did know how to count: you all did. You counted in another arithmetic. All day the miners breathed in coal dust, that much of it (they’ll show you by the space between two fingers–the size of a jigger of whiskey ), and all night they coughed it out again (do you want to see how much in the tin can they kept for a spittoon? too queasy?); they coughed it out in hunks and slivers into which bits of their lungs were shredded. Even so, when you went out early in the morning where you lived (for miners too lived nearby), you could hear them coughing up the night dust from their raw throats: from house to house down the whole block, through the valley for miles along the river, that sound of tearing lungs traveled like working class miners honking out their own misery.
But here before we go rushing on, let’s stop just an instant to take a quick look at the “water boy,” hurrying “along with his pail”–bucket, we’d call it; for as long as I was a boy (and in dreams later when I was not) it was always I who was that water boy–my greatest ambition then, to carry cool, quenching water to the thirsty throats (and souls) of working men!
No, you were glad you weren’t a miner’s son, for if you were a miner’s son, you would live in a company town in a company shack and never see cash money, never get the feel of live coins in your hands, nor hear them jingle in your jeans as you made tracks for the local movie, the Merlin, where you saw another installment of the Green Arrow on Saturdays. As kids whose fathers were paid in cash, you had some standing: you could buy anywhere, not just at the company store at company store prices. And not with scrip! You didn’t know then that it had been Mr. Frick, in cahoots with his Episcopalian God (who ranked far above your Lithuanian God) who, years before, short of ready cash, had introduced scrip to pay off his miners, scrip redeemable only in Frick’s stores (bread cast upon the waters), and the arrangement proved so convenient to Mr. Frick that it had
stayed on that way.
Thank God, you had cash! You wanted cash as telling you that you could decide how to spend your own money, though you seldom saw it often or more than a penny or a nickel at a time, so that you still don’t remember whose face was on the dime, though you do on a penny or a nickel. And you still stoop to pick up a penny from the street, though not even poor kids do today.
Still, the idea that your pay would come only in a piece of paper, redeemable in a company store, made you feel sorry for the miner’s kids, and it was they who established the idea of what being poor meant. We weren’t poor; miners’ kids were. We had cash; they had scrip. If you had known the word then, you would have called them serfs. But not knowing it, you called them poor and dirty.
But you were free: a steelworker’s son whose foreign-born, semi-literate father was paid in cash, and one day showed you a dollar bill and asked you whose face was on it, thinking it might be a king’s. After studying it for a long time, finally you cried out in pride and in the triumph of literacy: “George Washington, Pop! The father of our country!”
The water that came out of the mines and flowed down through the gulleys into the river left behind an orange stain on the creek bottom itself and on the Ice Age rocks, and absolutely nothing could live in it, not even the little crayfish common enough in other streams: it was pure acid better at home in a chemical lab. Dip your hand in it, it will come up orange; touch it gingerly with the tip of your tongue, you will make a wry face and spit and spit until your dried out your mouth.
You preferred where you lived. Though the Monongahela was stained with oil from the mills, and tar, and city garbage and free floating turds in a kind of jumbled democracy, still it was in its chocolate-colored waters that you learned to swim, though no fish swam with you. But like the fish who once swam in it, you swam naked. Only richer, snooty kids had bathing suits and had acquired shame at the sight of their exposed bodies. Our bodies were so ordinary that it never occurred to us to feel ashamed at anything in particular on them: everything was practical and in particular not pondered over. Our skin, however, must have been like armor.
As for yourself, you went into the Monongahela the way you came into the world: in your shivering birthday suit, looking like a plucked chicken. Once the notion was on you (and your friends) that spring had come, in a second you were out of your corduroy pants. You had already slipped out of your mother’s homemade shirt and as you unpeeled as if from a banana skin, you emerged from your “winter underwear,” a union suit, made of a Pillsbury flour sack that was like an outer skin, as white as an egg and as hairless as a mushroom. That little pile of clothing you had discarded in a shot lay on the sandy beach with a stone positioned on it, and you tied the strings of your shoes together to keep them from straying. The tiny beach, between the big dark walls made of slabs of granite kept the river out of the Mill grounds ,and sometimes a worker would lean over the iron railing and observe you as though he was looking back on his own boyhood: as you would yourself do years and years later. And you called it (when you acquired wit) Bare Ass Beach, but then only referred to it more circumspectly as “B.A.B.”–you had to be in at least second grade and knew your alphabet before you could gain entry into the realm of literacy and wit! For “B.A.B.” is how someone had spelled it out with whitewashed rocks and he who ran or flew could read.
You ran, then, into the lapping water, and the first mouthful of the river was like taking a drink from a beaker in the chemical lab: it tasted of rotten eggs. It killed all the germs in your mouth instantly and substituted some new ones. Ah, but thoughts of ecology and clean river water were not so much absent from us as not alive. To have a critical attitude toward polluted water was like calling for the destruction of the Jail House: it was there, not yours, but already given to you, and had nothing to do with rights.
But who cared? You either died immediately, or you lived forever. Quite possibly drinking that river water brought me to death’s door, later (and if so, I refused to answer its knock), but the perfect crime leaves no finger prints, no witnesses, no incriminating evidence, and even no agreement that a crime had been committed.
They came into our kitchen with their steaming and huffing, and when we looked out of the door, we could see them crossing the horizon of our hills, always pulling long strings of cars, always straining to get them somewhere. Work and the grunt of work was always visible. Out of the Mill chugged trains of bell-shaped ladle cars, their sides glowing red-hot, almost as transparent as your hand held up against the light. Iron reduced to soup! Frightening soup, for if it tipped over just a cupful, it could burn you down to your bare soul in an instant! Filled with slag that had crusted over–like a scab–these trains drilled out a long hot tunnel of heat through the air and made their charred way to the slag dumps where they dumped their contents over the side of a hill, burning rivers of slag, sending up smoke and flames which lit the valley for miles around at night with a vast arch of fire. Steel mill slag sends off yellow clouds of hydrochloride and acid that, in laboratories, killed rats, but in our valley killed only the babies of Hunkies, and not all of them at once, or who would be there to work the mines and mills?
Even deep in the secret woods (turning your back on the slag dumps), being Indian, or looking for General Braddock’s gold buried in the Kennywood Woods, the smell of burnt steel, of coke and limestone, would mix with the tart, winey odor of crab-apple, and the sweetness of the flesh of last year’s locust pods–Johnny cake, if you dried it. Over your head the smoke casts a gray roof: and when it rains, out of the black sky a miraculous black rain falls. That industrial miracle which rained coke ash darkens your mother’s wash hanging on a line in the back yard, and at the first sign of it you’ve got to run out and pull it, you pull it madly, even if it’s still wet, or your mother will have to wash it all over again (a whole day at it!), bending over the zinc washboard, her already cracked fingers turning rawer from more of the yellow eight-sided Octagon soap with its acid. (But you saved its coupons and when you had enough you redeemed them for a set of kitchen knives).
Sumac trees ( “shoeshine” trees you called them because you thought you could shine your shoes with their “fruit”) are rimmed with soot. Its amazing how soot saturates your life. Mornings come when no sun is visible in a sky roofed with smoke and smog. Morning glories open and reveal at their heart a pearl of ash. You walk outside to the privy and return to the house: your face has put on a black mask during the trip. You stare at that mask in the mirror, (and you seldom looked at yourself in the mirror) and you grin: you’ve become a Black boy. You wash it away and it’s still black around the eyes. To you it’s funny but old men and women gasp for the air that had jilted them, and some never see summer again and are carted off the cemeteries where the monuments over their graves misspell their foreign-born names. Slavic names.
But, just walk down the street to the first empty lot and there, as your feet quicken, Halleluiah cries ring from the Glory Barn! Those wandering messiahs came secretly at night (crossing the palms of the city fathers) and by morning they had put up a stage and had flung a canopy over it. So there you are watching–as the sick, blind and spastic suddenly materialize from the nooks and crannies in which they’d been hiding, or were hidden. They are now the whole world! All their secrets in the open. Suddenly!
There, in the wood shavings they will rassle sin out from between your teeth right there, as you spit the sawdust out; and get him down two times out of three and make him yell for mercy against the righteous wrath of the Almighty Lord, right there Saturdays on the side of the virtuous! And you will be saved for God a-mercy, the exalting thrill of it, for you who have never been saved and seem unsavable by the usual methods, too. What a tug there is in you to be cleaned inside out–to roll in the wood shavings, to shriek and flail and kick and bite the ground! To let go!
And the miracles take place in front of your amazed eyes. The halt do walk, the blind do see, and the deaf do hear. Lifelong cripples throw away their crutches and do a kazotsky right there on the stage. Dumb children, with big buck teeth, who breathed only through their mouths, cry out: “Mama!” And Mama falls over in a faint, writhing on the earth, her eyes fixed, dribbles of froth at the corners of her mouth as her teeth gnash each other in a savage delight. It’s shocking to see religion rolling on the ground, especially for you, a proper Catholic boy. But how can you explain these cripples dancing on the stage?
Disease, pain, suffering, the summer sickness of children, the dead winter crop: almost every other house where you live has, sooner of later during the winter, its square colored marker nailed up on the door with the word “Quarantined” in big black letters, and underneath, such fearsome words like “Scarlet Fever,” or “Pneumonia,” or “Measles,” or “Whooping Cough,” or “Diphtheria,” or–a word that improved our vocabulary, “Erysipelas, or pink eyes, as it turned out in our own language.
Children were a yearly death crop and tiny wreaths of white flowers appeared on the doors where the “Quarantine” placard had been, and inside, laid back against a velvet so soft their bodies seemed unrefined for it even in death, you met your playmate of the other week, his eyes closed, his face powdered and his lips rouged, dressed in his communion suit, and his tiny fingers grasping a rosary–all set for Eternity everlasting, though he hardly knew how to say Two times Two, and had not yet gotten to Three times Three.
If his going made a gap, it closed up quickly in the statistics, but remained forever an unhealed wound in your soul. Death had been what your delivered to cockroaches, bedbugs, flies and mosquitoes. To rats, if you could; to dogs that went mad. Death had come to you in the monstrous shape of a friendly horse who in his last throes, had dug up the landscape all around him, with flailing iron shod feet, and had fixed his eye on the surrounding public who had gathered to watch his gigantic dying as though to remember him forever. He went off to the glue factory–they said; really, it was to the garbage furnace near where I was born: and if I had been there then would have smelled him as his hairy soul ascended to heaven (for animals had souls, too), stinking up the valley in the process.
Death somehow one supposed didn’t come to your friends. It didn’t make sense for something so awesome to bother with them, to give them so much attention. It scared you to understand then that nobody was so unimportant, so inconspicuous, to escape the malicious eye of the Lord–for it was him, all right: they said it was, he wanted that little boy like all heck!
You shrank inside yourself even more than before to escape the Lord’s eye: it was a shocker to know that he was watching you!
Anyhow, Death brought with it all the beauty we were likely to see in our winter: lilies and white satin and a dead boy so clean and with such pink cheeks and red lips he seemed healthier in his coffin than you were in your underwear!
Big city sharpies arrive with a minstrel show. They put up their rickety stage in the same field where the Glory Barners had put up theirs, and sometimes enough sawdust was left over to be used for a second time around. Now, the sharp faces of the mendicants of glory were replaced by men in black face–their thick lips are rimmed in white, like our own on a smoggy day, and they wear what seems like immaculate white gloves and carry musical instruments, mainly banjos and tambourines and wood clackers.
Nobody knows anything about stereotypes of pride. All we know is that here’s a free show. The tall white man with the diamond stick-pin in his cravat is–you soon learn–Mr. Interlocutor, and that Black man in the stove-pipe hat, a purple coat with wide white lapels, a huge rabbit-eared tie, who comes strutting to the center of the stage, rolling his eyes and doing a buck-and-wing, shakes his “bones” (a tambourine), as the banjos behind him provide a mocking plink-plunking accompaniment. He is Mr. Bones, or course, the Mr. Bones. And as Mr. Bones, he carries on a dialog with Mr. Interlocutor where Mr. Interlocutor assumes the role of the white respectable world and Mr. Bones the world of the Black man, of the poor and the irreverent, of those woefully miscast in life but commenting on it slyly as he rolls his eyes and shakes his tambourine, and with a wink at us, checks us with his irreverence. As he lays the innocent groundwork for his question, Mr. Bones is backed up by a row of banjo and tambourine players sitting behind him, the Greek chorus in Blackface. They whang their banjos and rattle their tambourines, and get up and cake-walk–waving a white gloved hand–there and back here, and sing ragtime, and cast roguish and wide-eyed glances at the audience of hicks and small-towners who will not know that Mr. Interlocutor’s gleaming diamond stick-pin is no better than gleaming bottle glass.
Once the singing and dancing and joking are over, Mr. Interlocutor introduces a man from the wings who is the very essence of Respectability and steps–walks (not dances) like an ordinary citizen, recognizably your self, and after a few words in which he praises your town as if it were about to be buried and accepted to Heaven, produces a cake of soap.
It’s a surprise to see that familiar soap in these unlikely surroundings. Somehow you never connected so homely a fact of life as Saturday bath soap to their satin lapels and highly-polished button shoes. It brings you quickly back to reality, and you wonder why.
Now he holds it up between thumb and forefinger, then turns it all around to show you that it’s not been tampered with. You know the blue wrapper well. That’s the soap you bought at the store, and unwrapped it for your Saturday bath squatting in the wooden tub in the kitchen (not in summer: the you got your own baths wherever there was water). It smelled good. It felt good, too. It looked so pure. It made lots of white suds.
And now, there he was holding it up before you. Slowly he unwraps it, making you squirm a little as if the unwrapping somehow would bring something naked, private, a bit shameful to life before all this stripping. You connected that soap with your privacy, such as it was.
Once he gets it all unwrapped, he shows it to you again, still holding it, still squeamishly, between thumb and forefinger, and reminds you that it claimed to be 99and 44 one hundreds percent pure.
Purity of anything was an exotic thought to us. Still, pure it had claimed to be, and we were not acknowledged enough in the world to have an opinion other than the one handed to us. We never contradicted anyone in authority, nor thought to challenge the way things were. Nobody else did either. Authority was a given fact of life. And Authority showed itself not only in the police, teachers, the church, but also in normal facts of life–in what a loaf of bread cost, a pound of meat, and a cake of soap. They were already commodities and played a role beyond what they were–useful–facts of life like a butterfly or a running nose.
Pure? He had taken a small bottle out of one of his coat pockets, opened it, and–making sure we would see it all–poured it over the white cube of soap he still held delicately in his fingers and –great God Almighty–it turned red, began to ooze, and then flowed blood!
“Ninety-nine and forty-four one hundreds percent pure,” he said. “That’s animal fat. That’s blood. You wash your face in the blood of pigs!”
My God, you could die right there on the spot! Never had I before experienced any fact of life, so solidly established as Ivory Soap, exposed–proven to be a lie! My whole world began to move. What was solid now? What was safe? What was pure was truly only hidden pig fat? Where was the balm in Gilead when Gilead was only hidden pig fat?
That a respectable man had challenged authority right in front of witnesses and gotten away with it, amazed me. I didn’t understand how it could be, but I was impressed.
That finished Ivory Soap for me and tilted my view of other respectable facts in life slightly awry.
However, Mr. Respectable is not there to just expose Ivory Soap. He destroys your past only to introduce you to the new glorious, purer soap. He is not eliminating soap from the world: only bad soap. He had come with a soap that is good. He holds it up to your fascinated eyes as he did the other soap, and subjects it to the same acid (to coin a word) test as he did that other soap. And his soap does not bleed:
You can have for twenty-five cents.
You would be glad to have it, but, alas, you don’t have twenty-five cents. Anyhow, if you had, there would be other claims on your money. Was a soap that didn’t bleed worth two movies admissions and a candy bar? Would you rather see Hoot Gibson kill the rustlers or be clean?
There was no contest. Let the rain wash us. Let the sun dry us. Let the wind rough up our skin with its rough hand! Let the breezes comb our hair whichever way it liked, the wind a hair stylist. That was our way with nature. But you had to have a dime to get into the Merlin. In that darkness that smelled of boys and girls, working class boys and girls, smelling of Ivory Soap, you entered the world of your imagination as though there was no dividing line between what went on in your head and what went on on that screen with its wavering shadows of people whose lips moved but yet no sound came forth! They lived in silence (with captions for their thoughts) , they moved jerkily, and in their world good and bad had clear contours, and to make sure you could separate one from the other, the good wore white hats and the bad, black.
Fine. Essentially, this division into two opposites was true. The division between white for good, and black for bad, was also obviously right, and nobody, not even little Black boys, differed: they too, cheered on the white hats and jeered the black hats, sitting upstairs in the balcony in Nigger Heaven. (But it was a nickel cheaper.)
So be it. You had the world cut out for you pretty straight. In those days, too, the Catholic church awarded you a Guardian Angel who sat perched on your shoulder and whispered good advice into your ears, and though mostly you ignored it , still it was reassuring to know somebody was watching over you in case you were tempted to cross a railroad track when the train was coming. It was retroactively quite a blow for me–suffering it for that child’s sake–many years later when the Pope abolished angels altogether, presumably including one’s Guardian Angel. It left one feeling rather naked….
Then, however, angels danced around our heads and on the heads of pins and devils stuck pitchforks into our stomachs (which you exorcised with castor oil). Eating green apples preceded devils in your stomach: so much for Doctrine. Angels and devils kept one fairly well occupied as you too searched for the soul they were contending for. Where was it, your soul?
Pulling up your stockings, which almost always fell, especially when you ran, sometimes over your heels tripping you up, you now–away from the man with the purer soap–and still laughing at how sly Mr. Bones had been, at his funny dance, his way of rolling his eyes (as he winked at you)– on down to the “prayground” where your friends are already swinging on the swings. Nobody’s supposed to stand on the seats as they pump. Still, only sissies sat the way they were told to sit. As girls sat, primly, smoothingtheir dresses out before them, and squealing if you pushed them too high. You leaped on the seat, and with your best friend facing you, you started pumping away–he down, you up; you down, he up–and together you made that swing rise, and rise, and all the smaller boys and girls watched with open mouths, thrilled at your unbelievable bravery, shocked that you were violating the law of the playground–sit, don’t stand–and wondering if you would go over the top bar and break your neck. You knew then what it meant to be brave, to be an outlaw, to scorn laws and conventions, and transcend your limitations, not only of boyhood but of class (though you didn’t know the word with that meaning) by your own will! And yet, the objective fact remained that if you didn’t stop pumping at a certain point, you would go over the top bar, and you would break your neck, and your old man would break your ass, and the admiration and awe of the crowd wasn’t worth that much. So you learned that, too: where public approval ( or the applause of your friends) turned into a danger for yourself, and that vanity had its price. Even proving to be a male, macho could be costly!
Meanwhile, you rose “up in the sky so blue” (as that stuffy child in Stevenson’s poem put it so simperingly), and, though it might shock Teacher to say so, you simply didn’t have the kind of mind which then would cry, “Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing ever a child can do!”
Those children introduced to you by that book (A Child’s Garden of Verse) who had a shadow that went “in and out” with them, also seemed to be eternally ill, otherwise what accounted for the line, “I’d think shame to stick nursie as that shadow sticks to me!”?
Well, it took me years to catch on to the fact that though all English children seemed to have nurses, it wasn’t because they were necessarily sick–though their empire was. Nurses were there to take care of you, feed you, dress you, read to you–so your mother could be free for her work as a lady. The thought that you needed a woman, any woman at any age, to help you put on your clothes–that thought convulsed you with volcanic laughter! In summer you slipped into your pants, pulled a shirt over you, slapped your face with water, and away you went.
Meanwhile, you too are “up in a swing”, and when, rising on the powers of your haunches, your legs pumping, your arms pulling, you reached a crest, for that one delirious downpour moment hanging there in the, suddenly empty air, you, too, could see like Stevenson’s child, “so wide….” yes, but not “rivers and trees and cattle,” but, though it took your lifetime to realize it, the whole suffering world. For at the very peak of your swing you could now see the back windows of the jail, and sometimes glimpse behind the bars a face only barely visible, perhaps watching you watching him.
If you had been there, five or six years earlier, at the butterball, roly-poly age of three, that face glimpsed behind those bars might have been someone you would come to know quite well much later–William Z. Foster. Or perhaps a woman: Mother Jones. Or just one of the men your mayor, Mayor James S. Crawford, had thrown into prison when they had come to Duquesne to “speak” for the AFL–to ask the steelworkers to join the newly-set-up union, headed by William Z. and already on strike.
The mayor, confronted by them, and told they wanted to speak “for the AFL”, in the town I was born in, cried out, for the world to hear (and for me to hear too): “I wouldn’t give Jesus Christ himself a permit to speak for the AFL in Duquesne!”
But sailing “up in a swing” you knew nothing of these events, as events. You knew none of the names of living men and women, though you knew the names of strangers, Mother Mary was a good friend of yours, and you were aware that the Church had crammed three persons into one God, who also had taken up quarters in town. But the names of William Z. Foster you did not know; nor of Mother Jones.
You knew of no battles fought bitterly on Monongahela’s shores with state troopers, with Iron-and-Coal police, with the sheriff’s men attacking–you knew none of this though you were already in the first grade and knew your alphabet and how much three times three are likely to be in most cases.
And yet, somehow, nobody told you that men had bled and died only years before to save you from living inside a garbage dump and being raised inside a steel mill blast furnace, somehow the passion of their struggle had ignited the air and shared the oxygen which your breast had, and their blood oozed up through the stones on the hill, and in the faces of teachers and priests and mayors and librarians the evidence of their crime showed itself through their official smiles. Nobody had told you they were enemies. In fact, everybody, including themselves, told you over and over and over that they were your friends, and you had believed them with your shining eyes. But somewhere in your heart a deep distrust had taken root, and the tendrils of a class suspicion had begun to grow, and not only Ivory Soap would yield up blood, but everything else that you touched–their smiles, their books, their clothes, their Sundays in church.
Still, swinging so hard on the swings (the Mill had donated the playground to the city in lieu of paying taxes to it) you had worked up a thirst–the greedy thirst of childhood. And you ran to the fountain where a little line of other children was already assembled, and you took your place at the end of the line (though you could have pushed your way to the front, since at a certain point most of the boys were younger than you and the girls didn’t count). If you had been that kind of boy, you would have pushed your way.
But you weren’t that kind of boy. But there was that kind of boy there. He pushed you aside–you had already reached the fountain–and bent over and took his long, long drink from the fountain, and he had no right to it!
You screamed at him at the top of your lungs: “Scab! You dirty scab! Look”, you appealed to the others, “he’s scabbi