The Celestials Page 7

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  What to do? What to do? This was the question the meeting was meant to address and dispatch. Though he did not like to pollute his lips with Sampson’s name any oftener than necessary, Cummings felt he must point out that of those who would test labor, Sampson was the champion. It was men such as he against whom the common laborer must protect himself as well as protect the Celestials, as they too were wronged by being forced to do work for fifty cents for which they ought to receive two dollars, and it was clear that John Chinaman was a gentleman far superior to Mr. Sampson.

  So what to do? What to do to resist this innovation that threatened to ruin their organization and put them beneath the concern of the capitalist? Violence must not be resorted to under any circumstances. They must seize the power at the ballot boxes next fall. In the meantime, cooperation was the call of the day, among Crispins and between Crispin and Chinaman.

  Alfred judged Cummings charismatic and compelling. He had pushed his way through the crowd to see a man strong-armed and sturdy-legged with a low center of gravity, as if when God had laid a hand to Cummings’s head, He had put a little too much weight behind the gesture.

  But as much as Alfred found himself wanting to believe, something kept him from handing over his full trust.

  After Cummings closed the proceedings, and the crowd finally grew tired of itself and dispersed, Alfred discovered himself in a bar with friend and brother Daniel Luther, the same brother he had stood beside on the depot’s platform ten days before, voicing what turned out to be mutual concerns, both of them knowing that they should keep their voices low.

  “If violence is our enemy,” Daniel wondered, “then whose suggestion were those rocks and bats? Were we meant to bang them together like a marching band?”

  Alfred stared at his beer and thought, first, that this was a drink he couldn’t afford and, second, that he must chew some mint on the way home.

  Daniel went on. “And what about throwing the train from the tracks? Seems like violence to my mind.”

  Alfred felt as if someone had taken him into his own backyard, lifted a board in the fence, and shown him that behind the yard, the home, the street, the town he’d known his whole life, there was a mirror version, yet populated by all different people getting up to all different things.

  “The train from what tracks?” he asked.

  “Between Troy and here,” Daniel said. “Some machinists in Troy and Eagle Bridge had organized, or been organized, to throw it at a dangerous point in the roadbed. Such of the Chinamen not killed or maimed were to be otherwise so disabled as to prevent them from engaging very actively in the shoemaking business.”

  Alfred’s surprise and sadness at being left out yet again were magnified by the fact that his friend seemed to take Alfred’s ignorance as utterly expected and, even worse, just.

  “Where’d you hear tell of all this?” he asked, trying to keep his voice from sounding like a child’s.

  Daniel said the point was that someone’s mouth was doing one thing while his hand another. Why was it that Cummings encouraged the formation of cooperative ventures as a remedy to this botched-up situation, but Daniel had to hear about their own Order’s co-op on the fly? And why cooperation in any case? You could say the only thing a course like that did was indicate that they’d given up all hope.

  Alfred thought about pretending he knew what his friend was talking about but calculated that he would uncover more by being honest. “What did you hear?” he asked.

  “A co-op is forming up Brooklyn Street,” Daniel said. “A pistol shot from Sampson’s.”

  “Smith and Company’s place?” Alfred asked.

  Daniel nodded. One question after another lined up in Alfred’s mind. “What happened to the plan for the train?” he asked.

  Daniel snorted. “It depends who you ask. Cummings and Troup say they frustrated it as soon as they heard of it. Jenny Gallagher says it was her brother what held up the telegram.”

  “Who’s she?” Alfred asked.

  “Just a girl,” Daniel said, sliding his second glass back and forth, watching the beer rock against the sides.

  Alfred hated that he had nothing but questions to offer. “Who’s her brother?”

  “Works in the telegraph office. She says it was him who got the message from the Troy machinists offering their services and him who held up delivery until the train was arrived.”

  Alfred went over the last couple of weeks. Had there been nothing but meetings secret only to him? “Where’s Smith going?” he asked.

  Daniel coughed. “Up the street even further. He and someone else have formed to build another factory. Don’t know where any of them think they’re getting waterpower.” The barkeep placed a third beer before Daniel and he lifted it in Alfred’s direction before taking a large swallow. Alfred noted that his friend had not offered to buy him a second one.

  “Who all’s throwing in for the cooperative, then?” Alfred asked.

  Daniel said he’d heard only a few names, twenty or thirty in all.

  Alfred had spent and would spend much of his life looking for the person who would take him into account, who would sit up and take notice of the slimly built boy in the corner. Everyone so far had let him down in this regard. His family, the Hoosac Tunnel manager, Mr. Sampson, Ida, and now, perhaps, the Crispins.

  “What do you suppose they’re up to?” Alfred asked.

  “Who?” Daniel responded.

  Alfred tilted his head in the general direction of Marshall Street. “The China boys.”

  Daniel shrugged, both of them agreeing there was no real way of knowing.

  The China boys were, at that moment, finishing up their dinner with their customary bowls of green tea. The two cooks were washing bowls and chopsticks in the makeshift kitchen. Some of the older boys lit pipes. Others fingered whittling projects in their pockets, trying to decide whether to work on them. The talk was of their days so far and the strange ways and sounds of the pegging machines, the peculiar smell coming off Mr. Sampson’s clothes, and the friendly girls in the sewing room with their strange hair and even stranger skin. When one called them White Devils, another responded, “White Devils I could get to know,” and the older boys laughed while the younger ones glanced around, too wary to ask for clarification.

  Charlie sat on a bench, his back against a wall. What had he been thinking, bringing these boys here? As consolation, he reminded himself that they would be living among whites in California as well. But he discovered little solace in this thought, since a small town such as this offered none of the anonymity or support of a city like San Francisco. He closed his eyes. What could come of this commingling of the races except for what his ancestors had warned?

  The cooperating Crispins actually numbered thirty-one, two of whom Alfred would have counted as near friends. The Brooklyn Street factory would be up and running by the end of the month. It would not be the first, as Crispin cooperatives dotted the eastern states from New Brunswick to Baltimore. By August, the North Adams group had applied for and received a charter from the state and had $6,000 in capital.

  The arrangement eliminated employers, and decisions on wages, hours, production levels, and other such matters would be collective ones. They employed women, all members of the Daughters of St. Crispin, though women were, by state law, forbidden to hold shares in their own names.

  When the November late-season slump arrived, only Sampson and the co-op would remain in operation. By December, newspapers throughout the Northeast would hail cooperation as the sure defense and protection of labor.

  Alfred would borrow money from Lucy and Ida and become a shareholder and bottomer at the co-op two days before they commenced manufacture. For close to three years he would make less than the non-Crispins working in other factories, but more than Sampson’s Celestials, and enjoy the risks and possibilities of self-employment. It would be the most satisfying time of his life.

  That summer, when the doors to the co-op op
ened, the newly purchased and piled hides sending their animal odors through the building, the kits lined up against the walls like girls at a church dance, the first thing the cooperating cordwainers did was stand for a photograph. They did not stand against the wall of their own building. They walked, spilling into the dirt street, the women—many of them in their Sunday best for the occasion—stepping carefully between the ruts of wagon wheels, down Brooklyn Street, across River Street to the north wall of Sampson’s factory. Word was that Sampson himself was in Boston and the only guard was posted to the office entrance on the south wall. A sewing girl, sister to one of the Crispin cooperators, leaned out the window, waving at her brother to indicate that she would be down in a minute to unbolt the gate.

  One by one, men helping the women, the group of seventy made it through the fence and grouped themselves in front of Sampson’s north wall, most of the original Crispins at the back entrance, the sewing girl hastily passing them a few wooden stools upon which to stand so their heads would be raised above the rest in the final image.

  It was evening, the sun beginning to lower itself behind the hills with the grace of an elegant guest lowering herself into a front parlor’s best chair. As Alfred was the only one among them who had witnessed the Chinese posing for their photograph, the workers arranged themselves according to his direction, which he offered in a manner he hoped would be understood as not filled with too much pride. It was he who insisted that the sewing girl who had signaled the all clear sit in the second-story window and that she secure a friend to join her. It had been that way, he remembered, in Sampson’s photograph. In every way, the photograph mirrored Sampson’s of the Celestials, the only difference being that the Chinese had been posed at the south wall and the cooperative at the north, as if one group had arrived only to push the other out the back. The photographer was William P. Hurd, using the same equipment he had used to document the arrival of the Celestials, all pulled in the same wagon by the same aged mare, who would manage to walk this earth for three more summers before folding her awkward legs and settling down for the last time in the far corner of her favorite pasture.

  Chapter Five

  Had Julia been at the Methodist church a week previous when Charlie had addressed the congregation, instead of still afraid to show her face, her failures painted there for all to see, she would have felt a kind of grace listening to his imperfect words, and she wouldn’t have known whether to attribute it to his speech or to the man himself. Either way, despite being a devoted churchgoer, she would not have been part of the small posse of women suggesting further contact and interaction with these Chinese boys. For although she welcomed grace in all its forms, beneath the calm it brought was something fluttering and alive, something that would have made it difficult for her to rise to her feet. Had she been there, the line of churchgoers in her pew would’ve grown impatient waiting for the woman at the end of the row to open her eyes and make her way out.

  So it was only at Sampson’s insistence that Julia volunteered for the Celestial Sunday school. His consultation with the pastors of the village had resulted in the call for volunteer teachers.

  It did not escape Julia that even before Sampson had laid eyes on them, the Chinese had seemed to transform her husband from the supremely pragmatic to the utterly paternal. He had never, as his peers had, offered his French Canadian employees schooling or stores, churches or homes. What he had wanted from them was hard work. What he gave in return was adequate pay. He had not felt they should expect his concern for their welfare to extend beyond that.

  The contract with the Celestials, on the other hand, stipulated “house, wood, and water.” Free house, wood, and water, Julia recalled, walking alongside her husband the day before Sunday school was to commence. He had asked her to accompany him on a stroll up the hill that George Chase and his wife had recently purchased. They were planning on making a home there, and Sampson hoped Julia might see the idea of home ownership as less frightening and more appealing. As lovely as the Wilson House was, Sampson had enough of the farmer left in him to value nothing more than land with a solid house upon it. He had always imagined himself on the wide porch of a sturdy structure, the land as far as his eye could see his own. Chase would end up building several structures, modest and grand, and the property, much to Sampson’s annoyance, would quickly and forever-more become known as Chase Hill.

  Sampson had already paid the Chinese workers’ railroad passage there, and if they fulfilled their contracts he would provide passage back. If his business experienced a downturn, he was obligated to continue to supply full pay. The big wooden storage bins that had once been used to sort the spools of thread for sole stitching and the wooden molds for uppers now contained laundry. It was easy to feel these boys were in some way his own. Seventy-five, where before there had been none.

  He was kind enough not to make this latter observation to his wife, though as they stopped at the crest of the hill to look back over the town and his factory, smoke pouring out of its central stack, he did suggest she might help them. A third of the Celestials had already completed their training and were at work. The cooperative, also visible from their vantage point, would be running in a matter of days. He must embark to Boston in the middle of the next week to meet with other manufacturers to discuss what course they would take to put an end to that Crispin enterprise. He held her elbow as they stood there. It seemed important that she feel about these boys as he did. Perhaps God intended for them to create what they could in this unusual way. “They are like children,” he said, brushing at her eyebrow with the side of his thumb. “You can help them.” And so she did.

  Lucy and Ida arrived at the Chinese quarters early, having left a pouting Alfred behind in the apartment. He didn’t see why they had to volunteer when from schoolchild to widow everyone else already had. “Be a Christian,” Lucy had said, kissing him on the top of the head as their mother used to when he was a child.

  The afternoon was clear, and the landscaping that Sampson had had laid in was in full health, and a few days later, when news of the previous day’s earthquake in New York City finally reached North Adams, the two girls would comment how strange it was to look back on that Sunday weather and think that mere miles away a whole city was recovering from such a phenomenon. “Did you know,” Lucy would ask, looking up from the newspaper, “that nausea is always experienced in earthquakes?” During the course of her recovery, she would develop a lifelong interest in natural disaster and extraordinary displays of wreckage. Ida would think it unhealthy, the focus on ruin rather than repair, but Lucy achieved solace from such stories, as if her own assault had been disaster to be sure, but natural nonetheless.

  They made their way down the graveled walk to the building’s rear, their conversation hushing as they entered the Chinese quarters, both of them aware this was not the sort of experience they would be having under any other circumstances. Ida thought of announcing to her mother that she was about to sit across from a foreigner who spoke not a word of God’s English and found her neck warming as she crossed the threshold.

  The Reverends Griffin, Sanford, Gladden, and Jennings were present. As was William Ingraham, Baptist Sunday school instructor of twenty years plus and Sampson’s sewing room foreman, and, of course, Sampson himself. There was an air of mild panic among the men, and Ida found herself guiding Lucy by the elbow to the other side of the room. Men in a state of unrest were in Ida’s opinion to be avoided. She had once, as a child, toured a gunpowder factory with her father. All the visitors had been obliged to slip off their shoes and don paper slippers, the powder dust on the floor too dangerous to come into contact with the hard soles of street shoes. At the end of the tour, they had disposed of their slippers in a wooden crate just inside the factory’s doors. She had yet to meet a man, other than her father, whom she didn’t believe to be the equivalent of flint and shavings, liable at the slightest provocation to ignite.

  It was to her surprise then that the large gr
oup of almond-eyed creatures gathered at the wooden tables lined up on each side of the room did not incite in her the usual response. They were smaller of stature and slighter than they had appeared at the station, most of them clearly possessing no more than her own sixteen years. None were very hardy-looking, and she could not imagine them doing the heavy work of farming and slating. Perhaps shoemaking, something she had always thought not particularly manly, would suit them.

  Their trousers looked excessively comfortable. As did their black cloth shoes. Their hats, common felt ones of black, hung above them on pegs situated in rows around the room.

  “Their heads are quite alarming,” Lucy said.

  Their pigtails were coiled around their crowns, putting to mind a fancy lady’s chignon. Ida found the whole thing charming. Their faces were plump and round and as smooth and destitute of beard as a woman’s.

  Actually, Lucy found their shaved heads more than alarming. They were so smooth, so clean-shaven that she couldn’t stop imagining what it would be like to touch one of them, slippery and viscous beneath her fingertips.

  One looked at her and with a pleasant smile that narrowed his already oblique eyes said, “How do?”

  Her attacker had bid her good afternoon as he had wrapped his arm around her from behind. The back of his hand had been hairless. She shook her head rapidly like a hound shaking a toy and the Chinese boy who had addressed her thought perhaps she suffered from the shaking disease he had seen in his grandmother. If so, she was harmless, he knew, and his heart warmed in her direction.

  But Lucy refused to think her repulsion at the sight of the bevy of smooth scalps had only to do with her assault. Was she to be as simple as that for the rest of her life? And so she swallowed to ease her stomach and inclined her head toward the boy. “I’m well, thank you. And you?” she asked, expecting and receiving no response.

  She would for the remainder of her life find her first and strongest reaction to the sight of human skin, especially male human skin, the same mix of unease and nausea that she experienced that first day of Celestial Sunday school. It would prove to be only one of the many ways that man had left his mark.