An Introduction to The Secret War: Washington’s First Invasion of Afghanistan

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

We first acquired Phillip Bonosky’s book, Washington’s Secret War Against Afghanistan shortly after its original publication in 1985. Back in those days getting any information about life in Kabul that didn’t emanate from “anonymous government sources,” was a major undertaking.

As the Moscow correspondent for the Daily World, Phillip Bonosky was a witness to one of the most pivotal events the 20^th century¾the first days of the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan. He reported the official words from the Afghan participants themselves and learned details about the military action first-hand from those who had survived the slaughter of the Hafizullah Amin regime. As a seasoned reporter he expressed the sincerity in the survivors’ voices and the pain they felt for their country, while witnessing the Western-media-circus that fluttered and swirled around the incident without ever touching down. But Phillip Bonosky did much more than just report events. In his telling of the secret war against Afghanistan, he approached the subject like a detective while employing the abilities of a novelist trying to unravel an historical plot that had yet to fully play out.

Was Hafizullah Amin a CIA mole, recruited as a young and ambitious student for the purpose of undermining Afghan communism and drawing Afghanistan tighter into an American orbit? Were the Carter administration and its national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski sincere in their estimation of the Soviet assault as the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War? Or was the rhetoric merely a cover for a callous plot to undermine détente and set the U.S. on track for its own long-range plans for conquest of the region? At the time, suggestions like this were dismissed as Soviet propaganda, especially coming from a reporter for the Daily World. Today we know that Phillip was reporting the untold story, employing hard-nosed journalism to dig away at the evidence that a grand and global scheme to control Central Asia was in the works.

We know this because in the spring of 1981 we lugged a fortune’s worth of camera equipment into Kabul for a “first look” at life under the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and their Soviet backers as independent journalists under contract to CBS News. Going to Kabul was highly controversial, dangerous and backbreaking work. It caused CBS News no shortage of anxiety before and after when we revealed that life in Kabul did not fit the pre-ordained structures imposed by America’s Cold War bureaucracies in the government and the media. Despite a U.S./Pakistan/Saudi and Chinese backed insurgency in the countryside that was toppling power lines, burning down schools and assassinating officials, Kabul and Jalalabad were calm. The Soviet backed government of Babrak Karmal had pulled the country back from the radical practices of his predecessor Hafizullah Amin and was winning religious moderates to his side. Mosques were being rebuilt and well cared for, women were being educated, and state-supported Mullahs found few if any conflicts between the goals of the government and those of Islam.

This was not the prevailing wisdom of the day in the United States, and although our story aired on the CBS Evening News, a few months later we were warned by no one less than a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan that our view of life in Kabul was bringing us very close to being conduits for Soviet propaganda. According to the rules of the day, and as every school boy and girl growing up in the 1950s should have known, the wars that America and Britain fought were in the defense of freedom. What the Soviet Union and its allies did were naked acts of aggression. According to this simple logic, occupying a country with a hundred thousand or so troops who were bent on conquering the Middle East exemplified the latter category to a fault. So what was going on in Afghanistan that would dispute it?

Of course, the answer was everything. Afghanistan had been the victim of a very calculated plot by a handful of seasoned geopoliticians and financiers in Washington, Paris, London and Wall Street to rekindle the Great Game for Central Asia by getting the Soviets to do something they themselves knew would bring them nothing but grief. But that was a story you were not going to hear. In the United States, Afghanistan was Rudyard Kipling, tales of the Khyber rifles and Kim, pith helmets, Cary Grant and fiercely religious freedom fighters. America’s perspective on Afghanistan in the 1980s was a 19^th century British imperial vision and there was nothing anyone could do about it. That’s where Phillip Bonosky’s work was so important.

For centuries, Afghanistan has been a unique environment for intrigue. Both the Czarist and British empires met their match there in the 19^th century. Now the Soviet and American empires were reliving that history. But the resemblance was only superficial, and even then not fully understood.

The competition went as far back as the year 1600, when Queen Elizabeth I of England chartered the East India Company and granted it a monopoly on trade with India. But the more the “Company” expanded into the interior of India, the more it took on the trappings of a powerful, renegade state. In 1757, the Company transformed into something new and unusual when one of its private military officials, Robert Clive, defeated the prince of Bengal.

Clive then proceeded to use his private army, generous bribes and fraudulent schemes to loot Bengal. A few years later the Company gained control of the Mughal Emperor’s tax system and used it to systematically drain the wealth from the formerly prosperous Indian province, leaving it destitute.

But controlling Afghanistan had been the long sought goal of the East India Company, and in 1839, using the threat of a Russian invasion as a pretext, the Governor General of India, Lord Auckland, mounted an elaborate plan to seize it. Known as the first Anglo-Afghan war, the expedition ended in disaster. Even at the time the growing danger that the Company represented to British democracy was recognized.

A report by the East India Committee in London written as the war was taking place stated, “This war of robbery is waged by the English Government through the intervention of the Government of India (without the knowledge of England, or of Parliament and the Court of Directors); thereby evading the checks placed by the Constitution on the exercise of the prerogative of the Crown in declaring war. It presents therefore a new crime in the annals of nations- a secret war!” (emphasis original)

From the outset, the East India company’s success was a source of devastation for Afghanistan by isolating it from its neighbors, undermining its role as a transit route for trade and consequently forcing it backwards in time. A second Anglo/Afghan war in 1879, again justified by fear of Russian expansion, only furthered these trends while a third Anglo/Afghan war in 1919 succeeded in driving Afghanistan and Russia into a closer relationship.

But what of that relationship? In 1888, a young Tory politician named George Nathaniel Curzon (one day to become Viceroy of India) traveled on a reconnaissance tour of Central Asia and was forced to admit that the Russian expansion and the social modernization that came with it, had greatly benefited the Muslim people of the region. Following Afghanistan’s declaration of independence from Britain in 1919 by the Afghan King Amanullah, Lenin praised Afghanistan as “the only independent Muslim state in the world.” According to American experts, the most thorough research to date on nomadic tribes and migrations in Afghanistan were done by Soviet anthropologists, while Soviet archeologists assisted their Afghan colleagues in the discovery of the long lost horde of Bactrian Gold and the cultural heritage that came with it.

The Afghans came to the U.S. in the late 40’s and early 50’s asking for help. They needed basic infrastructure development, a cement factory, paved roads, a hospital and some city buses. They needed advanced military training and weapons to secure their border with Pakistan. They didn’t get them. Kabul finally got the message and turned to Moscow. It was only then that Washington got interested, but not very. Prior to the war, from 1973 until 1978, during the Daoud presidency, the Soviet bloc put many times more aid into Afghanistan than that of Iran, other Muslim countries, and the West combined. During the war they supported Afghanistan to the tune of billions of dollars. By 1983 the Soviets were making efforts to negotiate their way out. But instead of welcoming the opportunity for a Soviet withdrawal, a coalition of forces led by the United States used Afghanistan to hold them there and break them down. The U.S. then walked away, leading the country to a civil war and the depredations of drug traffickers, terrorist cells and the most extreme forms of Islam.

This was a story whose ending almost no one could have anticipated. But the incredible story of how it all began was told honestly and in depth by a veteran journalist named Phillip Bonosky whose work today remains a vital historical account of one of the most pivotal events of our times.

Copyright © Gould & Fitzgerald 2010 All rights reserved

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of. Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights. They can be reached at www.invisiblehistory.com

Author Biography

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began working together in 1979 co-producing a documentary for Paul’s television show, Watchworks. Called, The Arms Race and the Economy, A Delicate Balance, they found themselves in the midst of a swirling controversy that was to boil over a few months later with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  Their acquisition of the first visas to enter Afghanistan granted to an American TV crew in the spring of 1981, brought them into the middle of the most heated Cold War controversy since Vietnam. But the pictures and the people inside Soviet occupied Afghanistan told a very different story from the one being broadcast on the evening news.

Following their exclusive news story for the CBS Evening News, they produced a documentary (Afghanistan Between Three Worlds) for PBS and in 1983 they returned to Kabul for ABC Nightline with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher. They were told that the Russians wanted to go home and negotiate their way out. Peace in Afghanistan was more than a possibility. It was a desired option. But  the story that President Carter called, “the greatest threat to peace since the second World War” had already been written by America’s policy makers and America’s pundits were not about to change the script.

As the first American journalists to get deeply inside the story they not only got a view of an unseen Afghan life, but a revelatory look at how the US defined itself against the rest of the world under the veil of superpower confrontation. Once the Soviets had crossed the border into Afghanistan, the fate of both nations was sealed. But as Paul and Liz pursued the reasons behind the wall of propaganda that shielded the truth, they found themselves drawn into a story that was growing into mythic dimensions. Big things were brewing in Afghanistan. Old empires were being undone and new ones, hatched. America had launched a Medieval Crusade against the modern world and the ten year war against the Soviet Union was only the first chapter.

It was at the time of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 when Paul and Liz were working on the film version of their experience under contract to Oliver Stone, that they began to piece together the mythic implications of the story. During the research for the screenplay many of the documents preceding the Afghan crisis were declassified. Over the next decade they trailed a labyrinth of clues only to find a profound likeness in Washington’s official policy towards Afghanistan - in the ancient Zoroastrian war of the light against the dark - whose origins began in the region now known as Afghanistan. It was a likeness that grows more visible as America’s involvement deepens.

Afghanistan’s civil war followed America’s Cold War while Washington walked away. A new strain of religious holy warrior called the Taliban arose but no one in America was listening. As the horrors of the Taliban regime began to grab headlines in 1998 Paul and Liz began collaborating with Afghan human rights expert Sima Wali. Along with Wali, they contributed to the Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future book project. In 2002 they filmed Wali’s first return to Kabul since her exile in 1978. The film they produced about Wali’s journey home, The Woman in Exile Returns, gave audiences the chance to discover the message of one of Afghanistan’s most articulate voices and her hopes for her people.

In the years since 9/11 much has happened to bring Paul and Liz’s story into sharp focus. Their efforts at combining personal diplomacy with activist journalism is a model for restoring a healthy and vibrant dialogue to American democracy. Ultimately Invisible History Afghanistan’s Untold Story lays bare why it was inevitable that the Soviet Union and the U.S. should end up in Afghanistan and what that means to the future of the American empire.

           War had been declared in September, 1939–but a most peculiar war, it turned out to be.  After having served up Memel, the Sudatenland, the Rhineland, Czechoslovakia itself to Hitler, egging him on eastward, Chamberlain had cried betrayal when Poland was attacked and subdued in a few weeks, and wept–or seemed to weep–much like the Walrus in Through the Looking Glass:

                        “I weep for you,” the Walrus said:

                         “I deeply sympathize”.

                        With sobs and tears he sorted out

                        those of the largest size,

                        Hiding his pocket handkerchief

                        Before his streaming eyes.

            Still Europe was at war, even if a strange war–a war that would be tagged “the phony war.”   Behind the supposedly impenetrable Maginot Line, some 110 French and British divisions sat and waited, sometimes peering across No Man’s Land, to the German’s Siegfried Line where some 23 Nazi divisions also sat and waited.  They stared at each other with binoculars.  Meanwhile, everything else remained normal.  While

Great Britain faced Germany behind the Maginot Line it would see to it that the Germans were regularly supplied with needed raw material and war supplies through Italy, not yet officially at war but already a junior partner to Nazi Germany.  Thus, through “neutral” Italy, Britain continued to supply the country it was presumably at war with everything the Germans needed to fight them.

            Strange.  But nobody budged from behind their respective lines.  The French were complacent.  They waited.  And in November that same year, it seemed that what they were waiting for–a real war–was literally dumped into their laps.  The Soviet Union invaded Finland.  Now the Allies–here meaning France and Great Britain–had the war they had longed for–against the USSR.

            For three months efforts to switch the war from Germany to the Soviet Union raged.  Denunciations of the Soviet Union far exceeded any hard words for Hitler.  Money poured into Finland, “volunteers” recruited from the inactive soldiers making faces at the Germans were ready to march, embargoes were declared and the news prints teemed with derisive stories about Soviet military clumsiness and Finnish courage.

            Did it matter that “little” Finland, under Baron Mannerheim,  the “butcher” of the Finnish working class in the early 20s, was joined to Nazi Germany in secret and public treaties?  Did it matter that the Mannerheim line (the equivalent in Finland of the Maginot) faced the USSR’s second most important city, Leningrad, only some 20 miles away–well within range of powerful artillery?  Did it matter that the Soviets had begged the Finns to push their line back out of artillery range in return for which the Soviets would compensate them with money and land?  Did it matter that, though the Soviets had signed a non-aggression pact with the Germans in August, 1939, not a day went by that the Soviets didn’t expect a Nazi attack?  Did it matter that when the Nazis actually did attack, they were joined by the Finns, and if Leningrad was never taken,

 in 1941, it was partly because the Mannerheim Line had been destroyed  by the Red Army in 1940?

            In any case, what mattered was that war–the war that millions had sworn would never be allowed to happen again–had happened, and that the USA, officially neutral, actually was already committed to the allied side.

            But nobody wanted to go to war, even to save “poor little Finland”.  That war had ended after three months: the Mannerheim Line was dismantled.  Now the Germans and the British and French resumed staring at each other.  What to do?

            While they were staring at each other in Europe, plans were forming on crinkling map paper in a number of widely separated situation rooms which, when unfolded, covered a whole wall, or a large table.  On one such map the Japanese were entering the final touching-up details for a daring, massive attempt at knocking out America’s ability to fight them in the Pacific at one blow.  They had the approval of Hitler–and through Hitler of Baron Mannerheim.  The date on the first one was December 7, 1941.  For it: Tora, tora, tora!  In Berlin another map was being drawn up with red arrows all pointing east.  The date stamped on it was June 22, 1941.  Its name: Barbarossa.

            Before the attack on Pearl Harbor–“date that will live in infamy”(infamy lasted just a few years)–there was one powerful organization in the USA whose spokesmen crossed and criss-crossed the country touting one message: no war with Germany.  It had a very famous spokesman, a genuine hero, the man who was the first to cross the Atlantic by plane in 1927: Charles A. Lindberg, son of a maverick legislator, but no socialist himself.  The son’s exploit had made him world famous, and the tragedy of the kidnap-murder of his son in the early 30s re-echoed around the world.  Taciturn, a loner, the lean, frontier type (archetype), he nevertheless managed to marry and heiress, Anne Morrow, who was something of a writer–in any case, she saw in fascism the Wave of the Future.  Standing aloof from the sweaty, squalid reality of grunt-and-groan politics, and confining himself (or so it seemed) to the clean impersonal technology of aeronautics, it appeared that this man was truly removed from the gritty realities of daily life and communed, like a kind of priest, with ascetic comprehension, seeing the world from above.

            Shy, not given to public statements, yielding only to the solitary pleasures of aerial flight, alone and awake above the sleeping world, how could anybody imagine  what really cooked in his brain?  For finally, challenged to confront the country directly, as it hesitated on the brink of war, he would cry out that the war was a conspiracy of “the British, the Jews and the Roosevelt administration.”  It was Germany about to be victimized–that Germany, in its Nazi manifestation, which had already awarded him, on October 19, 1938, an honor he shared with Henry Ford, who also received the Nazi “Order of Merit.”

            The man who never joined anything now found himself the head of a movement called America First.  True, it had many powerful supporters, not least of them William Randolph Hearst Sr., whose newspapers would inform their millions of readers, three days before Pearl Harbor that “Japan is not threatening us with war. We are threatening Japan.”

            As for Europe, the Sage of San Simenon would in 1941 opine: “Is not the situation in Europe very much the same as it is in Asia?  It not Europe wary of war, and have not the allied anti-Cominform nations desired peace with England and America?”  Ill-timed indeed–these prescient words were spread coast-to-coast on December 3, 1941–the Japanese were already en route to Pearl Harbor.

            Hearst was well aware of the fact that the real enemy–for his class–was the Soviet Union, and he opposed any alliance, on any level, with The Beast. Along with him was Senator Robert Taft.So,to, did Lindberg, who had made a quick trip to the USSR in the late 30s, and in Berlin had announced that in his opinion the Soviet air force was so incompetently run that it would pose no barrier to any invading force.  The Nazis listened

and heard.

            But behind all the front personalities who exploited the genuine fear of war shared by most Americans in 1940-41, there were two men, brothers, whose influence on American politics would grow enormously like a monstrous tumor that almost went out of control.  One would become Secretary of State under President Eisenhower, and the other would mid-wife and then head an organization whose entry on the scene was almost casual, later however to be known for its deeds that spread a malignancy over large parts of the world: the CIA.  The CIA was the corrupted heir of a wartime organization that had really fought the Nazis: the OSS (Office of Strategic Services).  But as the CIA, it brought upon the world a force that pledged loyalty not to a government but to a class, and not to the class as a whole, but to only the hard-core and introduced to the world the idea that crime could be should be unhesitatingly use to promote class power.  That in the process the entire inherited concept of western civilization was a rational and moral force was scuttled did not seem to bother either the architects of the CIA nor those in whose behalf it lied, murdered, stole, and destroyed.  In fact, a certain portion of the population reverberated with a strange new thrill: at last crime was made legal!

            John Foster Dulles’ contribution to political foresight was made in a speech before the Economic Club in New York in 1939 when he declared that “there is no reason to believe that any of the totalitarian states either collectively or separately would attempt to attack the United States.  Only hysteria entertains the idea that Germany, Italy or Japan contemplate war against us…”.

            Laughable today, one must not suppose, however, that such confident opinions concerning the motives of Germany, Italy, and Japan were based on no solid (or what appeared to be solid) grounds.  Dulles was a corporation lawyer whose services to his corporations were easily confused with his services to his country.  As senior partner to Sullivan and Cromwell, whose representatives sat on more than 40 other corporation boards, banks and utilities, with international connections, particularly with Germany, but also Italy and Spain, before and after Mussolini and Franco, Dulles’ tentacles reached far.  Through the magic of interlocking directorates, Dulles–as director of the Canadian Nickel Corporation–was brought into a price-fixing alliance with Germany’s I.G.

Farbin.  I.G. Farbin would be an industrial mainstay of Hitler’s Reich.  Among its contributions  to the war were a number of “experiments” its representatives conducted in various German death camps.  No matter. Such misalliances were the rule: by the break-out of war in 1939, and America’s involvement in 1941, most of America’s major corporations had some kind of agreement with the “enemy”.  Henry Ford, for instance, already awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938, was assured by his German agents that no harm would come to his works in Cologne as well as in Vichy France.  Indeed, no ever did, and every pfennig of profit was meticulalously entered into the well-kept books by Ford’s German director, Dr. Heinrich Albert, who, during World War I,  had (not coincidentally) been in charge of  blowing up American ships, infecting American cattle with diseases and spreading some 400 million dollars among “publicists” in the crusade to undermine anti-Kaiser sentiment in the country.

            No matter.  When in 1940,  Dr. Heinrich Albert was exposed by the New York Herald Tribune as running a spy ring, now for Hitler, it was Dulles who stoutly came to his defense.  Said he of Dr. Albert: “I don’t believe he has done anything wrong.  I knew him in the old days and have a high regard for his integrity.”

            That “integrity” in a Nazi had to be looked for in an altogether separate code governing ethics in our times.  This “code” had little to do with normal honesty and truth: it had everything to do with class.  For Dulles and his brother, no such thing as a Nazi really existed, nor mattered: what mattered was German finance-capital, which transcended Kaisers and Brown Shirts and,  in one form or another, both brothers could claim to be part of with full justice.

            But this too was no real distinction and certainly did not imply moral turpitude.  For the fact was that the connection between American and German finance-capital, before, during and after the war, was so general that by that very fact it escaped indictment as criminal–to indict them was to indict a good part of American capitalism itself.  “By the time the present war broke out,” Sims Carter, Asst. Chief of Economic Warfare Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, told the Kilgore Committee in September, 1944,  “most of Germany’s leading industrial,  commercial and banking firms had American connections.  Even after hostilities had begun, key figures continued to arrive in the United States and other parts of the hemisphere from Germany.”

            “Within a single week of May, 1942, the U.S. Department of Justice uncovered no less than 162 cartel agreements between the German I.G. Farben trust and American business firms.  Cartels which remained operative during the war years, or were temporarily ‘suspended’, covered chemicals, rubber, magnesium, zinc, aluminum and many other vital products.  Some of these cartel contracts were legally valid until after 1960.”

            Standard Oil’s deal with I.G. Farben prevented the U.S. from developing synthetic rubber for four years.  Why not go on and develop anyhow, you ask? And you would be answered, what and violate a sacred business contract with a partner temporarily engaged in killing your sons?  Only a Communist was capable of such vile thoughts!  Anyhow, Farben needed untrammeled rights to formulas by which rubber could be manufactured–including making truncheons to beat up recalcitrant prisoners in Nazi concentration camps!  If such  toard an enemy was possible it was only because Dulles (echoing an entire class) was well aware of European politics and did not misunderstand Hitler’s basic intentions–to destroy the German working class first and then to move on to destroy the land of the working class, the Soviet Union.  At no time did Dulles (himself an anti-Semite) nor any personality high in the echelons of power ever raise the question of the fate of the Jews, though the existence of death camps and an extermination policy, “The Final Solution” was well-known to key figures and policy-makers in the west.  In any case, extermination of the Jews was not Hitler’s priority: it was exterminating Marxism that took over his days and nights.  And this aim, above all others, recommended him to the Dulles brothers.

            The perspective with which corporate America looked upon Hitler was put with military bluntness by General Hugh S. Johnson, “czar” of the National Recovery Act (NRA, the Blue Eagle) as early as 1938.  Said “blood and guts” Johnson:

                        There is only one comforting thought in the whole dark future–

                        Hitler, at least, seems to be headed in the other direction–toward

                        the East and away from Britain, France and eventually us…

                        If Hitler continues his charted course as advertised, sooner or

                        later he must collide with Russia and perhaps even with his only

                        ‘friend’ (Italy).  It might possibly be that the salvation of the democracies            

                        will be the tactics of the Chicago police when ganghood was in flower,

                        to let the mobsters kill each other off.  (NY World-Telegram, Oct. 11,

                        1938).

            This already anticipates the Senator from Missouri, Harry Truman’s statement when the Nazis finally did invade the USSR in 1941:

                        If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia

                        and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that            

                        way let them kill as many as possible.

Fine.  But don’t complain when the Soviets look on you with less than brimming-eyed gratitude that you didn’t actually join up with the Nazis to finish pulverizing their country and putting the entire population underground!

Nevertheless, the reason Dulles and General Johnson (and others) could speak so confidently in 1938-39 about Hitler’s real intentions was because in 1936,(it must be remembered that Hitler and Japan had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact (joined one year later by Mussolini).  Proving how profoundly the “West” of Daladier (France) and Chamberlain (England) with the watchful “neutrality” of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (USA) believed in the reality of Hitler’s drang nach osten (drive to the East), England and France put their kiss of approval on the idea by adding their own signatures to it as a kind of codicil in Munich in 1938.  There, Chamberlain, Daladier, Mussolini, and Hitler met and signed a document which (as the whole world now knows but only a few said then was a passport granted by the West for Nazi passages to the East  (swallowing up Czechoslovakia and Poland in the process). This signing has gone down in history as the “appeasement” of Hitler.  It was not.  It was feeding him bits and portions of bloody meat to entice him further along to the East.

With this as background no wonder Dulles could tell his audience of bankers and financiers in 1939 that they had nothing to fear from that man Hitler, an Austrian failed housepainter and social drifter.  He was in their pocket.  But he did have one talent  which was worth a great deal. An anti-communist fanatic, he had studied mass psychology  and set out to turn Communist doctrine and tactics against the Communists themselves, and this dedication, to which he remained true to the day he put a pistol to his head, was his main recommendation to both German and international finance-capital.

And, indeed, he seemed to justify international capital’s trust in him. He did move East.  Going into Poland was still acceptable to the West, despite a required declaration of war, which was immediately put on hold.  But there was a miscalculation in the board rooms ad cabinet rooms of England, France and the USA, nevertheless.  They underestimated the depth of German World War One humiliation and pride.  And to the ambitions of German finance-capital.

The victors in World War I had carved up the markets of the world to suit their appetites,

including taking Germany’s modest colonial empire away from German finance-capital and putting it on their own imperialist plates.  Germany never forgot what it “lost”, nor did its politicians or fiscal theorists ever accept the dominance of British power over the markets of the world (grudgingly ‘shared’ with France and even more grudgingly shared with the USA). The humiliating peace treaty imposed on defeated Germany at Versailles in 1919 was nothing but a time bomb which awaited only the hour when the Germans were ready to light the fuse…

            Allowing Hitler to rise to absolute power in Germany – for Hitler was handed power by that fortress of German class solidity, Marshal Von Hindenburg (with the approval of the key politicians in the West) – was a calculated risk, but the times were perilous and the hour seemed late.  To the bankers and financiers of Europe, reeling from a breakdown of their economic system, and listening to the ever-crescending roar of the millions of unemployed workers, it seemed that the tumbrils were being readied for their last ride to the contemporary guillotines. Russia had already broken free and the czar was no more. Hungary had had its 100 days of “socialism” before succumbing to white terror. But most impressive of all, Mussolini had “saved” Italy from a fate worse than death – the closing down of the Italian stock market. “Stout fellow” – you could hear the praise echoing down all the corridors of power in some variation of Winston Churchill’s gushing praise after having had the incredible experience of meeting in 1927 “Signor Mussolini” in the flesh: “I could not help being charmed by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing (Matteoti would be murdered, Gramschi would be confined to prison for the rest of his life, the trade unions would be destroyed, “dissenters” would be given the “castor oil” treatment). And here is the meat of what Churchill found so “charming” in Mussolin: “Italy had shown that there is a way of fighting subversive forces which can rally the masses of the people…” (that is what they wanted: some demogogue who could “rally” the people…”to value and defend the honor and stability of civilized society.” And, the man who had mourned that the “civilized world” had lost its golden opportunity to strangle the “Bolshevik baby in its crib” in 1920-23, now enthused: “she (fascism) had provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison.  Hereafter no nation will go unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism.”

            Here was Churchill making his March 6, 1946 speech at Fulton, Missouri, 19 years earlier…

            The role, which Western finance-capital had assigned to Hitler, was well-known to Hitler himself. But he had no intention of being bought cheap.  The original idea was that in return for destroying working class power in Europe he would be allowed to expand eastward, clearing the pathway to land through the masses of people to Moscow with crematoria and tanks…

            Nevertheless, no puppy born in an oven comes out a hot bun! What was unknown to the West’s schemers was not so much Hitler’s own ambitions or their own designs, nor the extent to which they were willing to make room for Hitler, but how profoundly the ideas of Socialism, the need for Socialism, had sunk into the minds and hearts of the Soviet people.  Here, too, as events would prove later a profound miscalculation was to be made.  Socialism was not something alien thrust upon an unwilling populace.  When in 1919, standing at the podium Lenin said: “Let us proceed to build socialism” the masses of Russia and large sections of the world responded: “yes”.

            From “Framed: From the Smith Act through Cointelpro and the Patriot Act.”

              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 20^th 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 20^th 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 scabbing!”

            He doesn’t care.  He’s big.   But he is scabbing, and everybody knows what scabbing is–it’s stealing something of yours that you worked for, sacrificed for, bought with the money you had.  You didn’t know, as history, that hundreds of scabs had been brought into the mills to take the jobs of our fathers away from them just a few years before.  Many had been Blacks recruited directly off the plantations in the South, packed into boxcars and delivered, a strange cargo, days later, tired, confused, frightened, into the middle of class warfare, a strike.  Still, to be a scab was to be counted among the lowest of the low.  To be called one was a challenge to your manhood and humanity.  Nobody could survive that charge–live as a scab.

            It was then the Mill whistle blew.  You could hardly hear it, normally, for it has swallowed your mother’s melodies into its own hoarse throat.  But it marks the day out for you in stretches of time, in workers’ shifts, and most often, hearing it meant you had to scoot home to be there when your father got home from the Mill.

            “Don’t you hear your mother calling you–you better get home!”

            “Don’t talk to me, you scabber, you rotten scabber!”

            A dull flash rises into his cheeks, and the trouble is he knows it.  You nudge him out of the line and stick a piece of wood on your shoulder.  He knows what that means.  It’s the ultimate challenge, no boy would dare show his face in town again if he refused your “dare”, or worse, “double-dare”.

            He’s low.  He’s mean. He’s big but rotten.  He’s the scum of the earth, and you assume that what’s rotten is bad and can’t effectively resist virtue and justice–your justice.  He should be ready to kill you for calling him a scab, but you notice a flicker of uncertainty, even of fear–or moral doubt.  Oh, to be on the right side!  Oh, to know that God is with you, as you invent him on the spot!

            But he knocks the piece of wood off, and gives you a punch in the nose and you yell–as a matter of fact, you happen at that moment to be Dempsey against Carpentier–and forgetting the boxing skills you had learned from your brother on the back porch, you lowered your head and became a ram and hit him in the belly!

            Wow!  Was virtue ever more satisfyingly rewarded?  He can’t stand up against you; he knows, in fact, that he’d better not win–for if he takes advantage of his height and weight to win against virtue he will multiply his enemies on the spot.  By this time, there is a ring.  The ring is made up of older boys, even older than the scab, and he can see he’s doomed, and backs up and tries to shield his stomach, and after getting a few blows on the head, turns and runs–followed by jeering, laughter, triumph!  Scabs! They’ll always lose!

            And yet, if he happens to be in your class and looks over your shoulder and copies down answers which he has not earned the right to, but hisses: “Don’t blow on me!”–He places you in a moral dilemma and locked in a disadvantage out of which you cannot climb.

            You don’t like him, but on the other hand, nothing in you will permit you to blow on him–tell on him–inform on him!  Perhaps you can fight him later in the schoolyard, and swear at him and tell him to keep his nose out of your work, but you cannot blow on him!  Teacher is Authority, “boss”, representing in her deprived way the society that functions at that level.  But you are a member of the society of children and your code forbids informing!     Even on people you don’t like!

            You don’t know where these codes came from.  They are as organic with your soul as the color (blue-gray) is with your eyes.  They are as commonplace to your sense of being as are your eyelashes and fingernails to your sense of being a person.

            Years later you will look for that little boy who had fought so fiercely against the odds, tucked like a crooked gene inside the social system, who could see the jail where other boys with nurses could only see the British empire, who could see in that jail men and women who wanted to save him, precisely him as he sailed high in the sky and touched the head of Karl Marx.

            You searched for him, and for the jailed men and women, for that boy who would rather take the teacher’s rattan across the palm of his hand or on the tenderness of his behind than blow on him–search for that boy who would die rather than scab, than give in to a scab, for that boy and those scenes and those words and those moral struggles, for that code of honor that did not know it was a code of honor–search for him through all of American literature past and to come–in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, in Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Addams, in Booth Tarkington’s Penrod,  in Hamlin Garlin on the frontier, in Faulkner and O’Neill, in Jack London,  too–not identifying with Martin Eden–but did not find him.

            I would set out in life to forge the conscience of my class, and my weapons would not be “silence, secrecy and cunning”(James Joyce), but class truth, the knowledge gained on the picket lines of struggle, the truth embedded in the cry: “Don’t scab on me!”

            I wanted to know what it was that Jesus Christ might have said–speaking through the mouth of Mother Jones–if our mayor had allowed him to speak in Duquesne.

I looked for that Hunky boy who was shocked to discover that flowers bled and that soap bled, too, and miners bled, and that the bread I ate also bled, and would not blow on his worst enemy, nor scab on Satin himself, and I did not find him in all of  literature.

I would have to find him in life.  I would have to create him myself.

As I look back to that period after all these years, I’m amazed at the courage with which these people conducted their struggles.  A typical worker was legally eligible for full-time work at the age of fourteen.  Rare was the man who remained free for long.  He was more likely to be married or as they put it hooked by the time he was old enough to vote.  And his first child would be an early one.  And the children kept on coming. His work was hard.  Physical labor was more typical than working with machines.  In the 1920’s he still worked a twelve-hour day with no days off.  He seldom lived to see 50.

Pensions were practically unknown, especially for ordinary laborers.  When the work slackened, he slackened—without pay.  Every so often he had to submit to a physical examination by the company doctor.  Very often he would be found unfit to continue working, not out of consideration for his well being but to refuse him work, thus denying him a pension.  After 40 years in the mill, my father was deemed unfit to work, but they did pay him a minimal pension.  He was an exception.

Hard as it was for men, it was even harder for women.   There was no greater tragedy than to be widowed.  A widow had to depend totally on charity.  Jobs were scarce for women.  Many widows became midwives.  You didn’t go to a hospital to be born.  You were born at home, you grew up at home and your funeral took place at home. At fifty you looked and felt like 80.

Summer was liberation to children, particularly boys.  All unnecessary parts of clothing went, starting with shoes.  Visitors seeing so many boys shoeless might think they were they were so poor that they didn’t own shoes, but the boys just wanted to get rid of their shoes.  The typical boy under twelve in the summer ran around in his bare feet, a pair of trousers, maybe a shirt, and uncombed hair.  The last time he had a bath was when he got caught in the rain.

“My country tis of thee, I come from Germany, my name is Fritz. Give me some sauerkraut, don’t leave the weenies out…”

Does anyone know what comes next?

There was another song we used to sing: “Keep your head down, Fritzie boy. Keep your head down, Fritzie boy, If you wanna see your fadder in the fadderland…” It’s curious that there’s a note of kindness in this little dittie.

I would appreciate it if readers could help me by giving me more information on both of these songs.

      See the first press coverage of my new website: http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/7006/1/339/