It helped that it was always open. Seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, Khan began prepping at ten, opened the window at eleven, and served food until midnight or one or whenever the last of the bar crowd went home. It also helped that he would serve anyone. Sheridan in 1919 was still the kind of place where businesses posted signs saying NO DOGS OR INDIANS ALLOWED, but Native Americans were welcome at Louie’s. Some of them, in consequence, became strikingly loyal customers. Joe Medicine Crow, the scholar and Second World War hero, who died this past April, at 102, loved Khan’s burgers so much that, on his way home to Montana after the war, he hopped off the train during a thirty-minute stop in Sheridan and was still down at Louie’s eating when it pulled out again—much to the dismay of his mother, who had organized a town-wide celebration at his home station.
Kids were welcome at Louie’s too, as were the women who worked at the nearby brothels and people who were too broke to buy a meal. Khan would hand out a tamale anyway, although the next time he saw you he might say, “Hi, Mr. Ten Cents,” and if by then you had a dime you’d pay him back. The only people he refused to serve were the drunk, the foulmouthed, and the brawling, whom he personally threw out on their ears. He was five feet six and weighed 120 pounds, but nothing and no one intimidated him. For one thing, he had got himself all the way to Sheridan from the Khyber Pass. For another, he was the one holding the foot-long knife. Also, he had good aim with an onion.
Khan’s egalitarian attitude raised eyebrows among Sheridan’s snootier citizens. In the end, though, no one could stay away from the food, and so Louie’s gradually became its own little Equality State—an American kind of place, diverse and democratic, where the staff of the newspaper wolfed down post-deadline burgers elbow to elbow with society ladies, and schoolkids counted out their nickels next to stockbrokers ordering large. Meanwhile, Louie himself had gradually become American as well, and in 1925, after nearly twenty years in the United States, he decided to make it official. The town fathers, all of them Louie regulars, were happy to help; when Khan filed his naturalization petition, it was witnessed for him by the general counsel for the city of Sheridan and one of its former mayors.
The citizenship hearing was held on November 6, 1925. Because naturalization examiners showed up in Sheridan only once a year, the event was crowded with would-be Americans from around the county: seventeen from Poland, six from Austria, four from Czechoslovakia, two each from Greece, Scotland, Hungary, and Montenegro, one from Russia, one from Sweden, and one—Hot Tamale Louie, né Zarif Khan—from Afghanistan. On February 2, 1926, the paperwork came through, and Louie became a citizen. Five months after that, he received a subpoena from the U.S. Attorney for the district of Wyoming, ordering him to appear in court in the matter of the United States of America v. Zarif Khan.
The first naturalization law in the United States was passed in 1790, one year into George Washington’s first term as president. It established that only “Free white persons” were eligible to become citizens, a constraint designed to exclude Native Americans and slaves. After the Civil War, that law was changed to extend eligibility to people of African descent. As a result, beginning in 1870, those petitioning for American citizenship had to be either black or white.
That left immigrants from Asian nations in the lurch—deliberately, as Congress soon made clear. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act prevented anyone born in China from becoming American. The Immigration Act of 1917 established an “Asiatic Barred Zone”: a region, encompassing dozens of countries, from the Middle East to Melanesia, whose native citizens could not be naturalized. In theory, such laws were plenty clear. In practice, however, Asians petitioning for citizenship simply contended that they were white. Whether that was true was a matter of heated dispute among ethnologists, anthropologists, political scientists, policymakers, and government officials around the nation.
The courts, brought in to clarify the issue, made a mess of it instead. In White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race, the Berkeley law professor Ian Haney Lopez provides a tragicomic list of court rulings on racial identity, together with their legal rationales. Among those rulings: that Hawaiians are not white (based on scientific evidence); that Mexicans are not white (based on legal precedent); that Burmese are not white (based on common knowledge); that Japanese are not white (based on legal precedent); that people who are one-quarter Japanese are not white (based on legal precedent); that Syrians are white (based on scientific evidence); that Syrians are not white (based on common knowledge); that Arabs are white (based on common knowledge); that Arabs are not white (based on common knowledge); that Native Americans are not white (based on nothing).
That is the kind of wild inconsistency that eventually compels the Supreme Court to weigh in, and in 1922 it agreed to do so. Instead of resolving the muddle, however, the Court issued two rulings in under a year that made matters worse. In the first, Ozawa v. United States, a Japanese man brought up and educated in Berkeley argued that, for naturalization purposes, he was white. The Court acknowledged that Ozawa’s character was irreproachable, and also that he had a paler complexion than many people whose whiteness went uncontested. But it denied him citizenship, ruling that “the words ‘white person’ were meant to indicate only a person of what is popularly known as the Caucasian race.” A year later, the Court took up the case of Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian man who was, as the justices reluctantly conceded, technically Caucasian. This time, however, the judges ruled that “white persons” was “synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly understood.”
Like Zarif Khan, Thind had already been naturalized; upon ruling against him, the Supreme Court stripped him of his citizenship. For most of U.S. history, that process, called denaturalization, was used to revoke citizenship that had been fraudulently obtained, or to remove from the ranks of Americans felons, traitors, and war criminals. The former Auschwitz guard Jakob Frank Denzinger was denaturalized, as was the anarchist Emma Goldman and the alleged Communist spy Solomon Adler. But, beginning in the early twentieth century, the Naturalization Bureau (later the Immigration and Naturalization Service) sought to denaturalize Asians who had been granted citizenship by courts that were either ignorant of current immigration law or deliberately defying it. According to the legal scholar Patrick Weil, this process was so far from systematic as to be scattershot. In effect, it came down to chance: an Asian citizen who’d had the good luck to find a lenient representative of the Naturalization Bureau then had the bad luck to be found by a strict one.
No one knows exactly how such a person found Zarif Khan. Perhaps he tried to obtain a passport, or perhaps he was summoned for jury duty, or perhaps someone read about his citizenship ceremony in the local papers and decided to tip off the authorities. Whatever happened, on August 12, 1926, U.S. Attorney Albert D. Walton—best known for helping to represent the federal government during the Teapot Dome scandal—filed a suit alleging that Khan’s naturalization was “illegally procured.”
Khan’s case arrived at a curious moment in immigration history. The year before, an Indian man from San Francisco named Vaishno Das Bagai had been stripped of his citizenship, as had his wife and children—a particularly dire development for a California resident, because, by state law, those ineligible for citizenship could not own property. Sometime later, Das Bagai told his family that he was going on a business trip, booked a hotel room in San Jose, and killed himself. In the note he left behind, he described his suicide as a political protest. “I came to America thinking, dreaming, and hoping to make this land my home,” he wrote. “But now they come to me and say, I am no longer an American Citizen . . . Now what am I? What have I made of myself and my children?” Das Bagai addressed the note to the San Francisco Examiner, which published it.
Das Bagai’s death marked the beginning of a gradual shift in both public opinion and official policy on denaturalization. In 1927, the Supreme Court refused to hear a case against a naturalized Indian man, thereby sending a
message to the lower courts to stop revoking citizenship on the basis of race. By then, it was clear that, as a practical matter, no good would come of judicial wrangling over whiteness, and also that attempting to maintain a white population through naturalization policy was a losing battle. Moreover, immigration laws were rapidly becoming ideologically untenable as well. At the start of the Second World War, the United States was the only developed nation other than Germany to explicitly restrict citizenship on the basis of race—a common ground that became increasingly uncomfortable as Nazi atrocities came to light. Midway through the war, Congress repealed the Chinese exclusion laws. Immediately afterward, it lifted all race-based citizenship requirements.
But all that came too late for Zarif Khan. His citizenship was challenged at a time when the courts had consistently held that whiteness was a requisite quality in a new American, and one that Afghans lacked. At some point, his cause must have seemed hopeless; when his case came to court, Khan did not contest it. On December 30, 1926, a judge declared him “forever restrained and enjoined from setting up or claiming any right, privilege, benefit, or advantage whatsoever” of U.S. citizenship. All told, Khan had enjoyed those rights for under a year. Then his naturalization was canceled, and the form on file with the court was emended to read “member of the yellow race.” He was ordered to pay the cost of the lawsuit, plus tax.
If Khan was bitter about his loss of citizenship, he didn’t show it. He may never even have mentioned it; no one I talked to, including his children, knew that it had happened. Instead, he set his sights on that most American of goals: making money.
It began in the 1920s, with the wealthy men who settled into the stools at Louie’s and studied their newspapers. What’s so interesting in there? Khan wanted to know. They laughed at him, but they told him. He began buying the paper every day and asking whichever kid was working for him to take a break from peeling onions to read the business pages aloud. Khan couldn’t read or write English. He had no formal education to speak of. But he was frugal, focused, patient, and, as it turned out, exceptionally good at picking stocks. The rumor around town was that he’d already made a million dollars by 1929.
Whatever his earnings were, they were wiped out in the Great Depression. But he still had the restaurant, and now he had experience. He began buying up stocks made cheap by the crash—General Motors, for instance, which was then trading at eight dollars a share and had hit ninety by 1960. Also General Electric, Standard Oil, Union Carbide, Northern Pacific Railway, B. F. Goodrich, International Telephone and Telegraph, and Texaco. He favored utilities, the energy industry, and mining companies. He bought thousands of shares in Lucky Friday, a silver and zinc mine in Idaho, for thirty cents each, and sat on them as they rose to thirty dollars.
In 1944, he hired a woman named Helen Ellis as a combination bookkeeper and all-purpose assistant. She worked for him for twenty years, doing everything from handling his correspondence to tying the strings on the ends of his tamales. When his finances got more complex, he hired an accountant—Bill Harrison, of the presidential lineage—and Ellis began working exclusively in the restaurant. Khan himself kept working there too. Very few people knew that he had any other source of income, and his day-to-day life betrayed no signs of improved financial circumstances. He still rented the same house on North Scott Street that he’d moved into in 1909. He still rented the same tiny restaurant space on Grinnell Avenue. He still walked everywhere, and he still worked eighty hours a week.
The only way Khan ever displayed his wealth was through his generosity, which had always been remarkable and eventually became legendary. In the 1920s, for instance, a country kid named Archie Nash began boarding in Sheridan so that he could attend high school there. In the long gaps between visits from his parents, when his money and his tolerance for loneliness ran out, Nash would go to Louie’s to soak up the company and gratefully accept free food. After graduation, he took a job at the Sheridan Press, and began buying a whole lot of meals at Louie’s. Eventually, he and a local woman fell in love; too poor to afford a wedding, they decided to elope. Nash told no one except Louie, who had only one question. As Nash’s daughter later told it: “You got ring for dat girl?” Nash did not. Louie opened his register, took out some cash, and told him to go buy one. That girl wore it for nearly forty years.
Stories like that abound. Khan knew everyone’s name, never failed to ask after sick children or aging parents, never forgot anyone on a birthday or Christmas. The hungry could count on him for meals, kids could count on him for jobs, overseas service members for money and gifts. Yet, as open as he was toward others, Khan was reserved about his own life, almost to the point of shyness. He was professionally close to Bill Harrison, Helen Ellis, and his lawyer, Henry Burgess. Beyond that, he had no known friends.
Perhaps for that reason, no one ever seems to have asked Khan many questions about himself. Any information that circulated about him was largely rumor and often wrong. He was from Greece; he was from Turkey; he was from Mongolia. He was Buddhist; he was Hindu. He had spent some time in Texas; he once owned a grapefruit farm in Arizona. But, of all the questions that went unasked, the most glaring omission was the obvious one: Why was an Afghan man named Zarif Khan making a small fortune plus a whole lot of Mexican food under the name Louie Tamale?
People floated theories, of course. Some thought that Khan, before arriving in the United States, had worked as a cook in Mexico, then gradually made his way north to Wyoming. Others claimed that he first arrived in San Francisco, where a Latino immigrant taught him to make tamales. In reality, Khan never went to Mexico and was not taught his trade by anyone from Latin America. Instead, in becoming Louie Tamale, Zarif Khan also became part of a curious piece of culinary, labor, and immigration history: an entire network of Afghan tamale vendors who, from roughly 1900 to 1920, sold their wares on the streets of nearly every city in the West, from small-town Wyoming all the way up to Alaska.
Tamales are old, as food goes; they preceded Columbus, and possibly Christ. They originated in Mesoamerica, likely courtesy of the Maya, and were the carryout food of their day, much prized by soldiers, hunters, and other hungry people on the go. By the time Europeans got to the New World, tamales could be found, at a minimum, in much of Central America and throughout Mexico. As late as 1884, however, they were sufficiently unfamiliar in the United States that the Associated Press felt compelled to refer to them thus: “A queer article of food, locally known as ‘tamales.’”
Ten years later, tamales were the nation’s hottest new food trend, the cronuts of fin-de-siècle America. According to Gustavo Arellano, the author of Taco USA, the craze began in 1892, when a San Francisco man named Robert H. Putnam started the California Chicken Tamale Company. Putnam took his culinary cue from the city’s popular Mexican tamale peddlers and his fashion cue from, apparently, pharmacists: the vendors he hired wore white from head to toe, with the company’s brand emblazoned on their hats and their buckets—mobile chafing dishes, basically, with fire below, boiling water in the middle, and steamed tamales above. Putnam then took his tamales to Chicago, where they became the hit of the 1893 World’s Fair.
Like other forms of peddling, the tamale business required relatively little up-front money, which made it attractive to immigrants and the poor. In New York City, tamales were sold chiefly by Irish and Italians, while in the South and the Midwest most vendors were African American. But in the Rocky Mountain West the tamale trade was dominated by men from Afghanistan.
Specifically, it was dominated by men from Afghanistan with the surname Khan. (The men were generally unrelated; the name is extremely common.) In the first two decades of the twentieth century, tamale-selling Afghan Khans could be found in Deadwood and Fargo and Reno; in Seattle and Spokane and Wenatchee, Washington; in Butte, Montana, which boasted eighteen such tamale men by 1913, and all over the rest of the state as well—in Flathead, Fort Benton, Silver Bow, Anaconda, Havre, Great Falls, Red Lodge, Miles City, Chinook, Bi
llings. Starting in 1908, you could buy tamales in Alaska from a Buhadin Khan, a Habib Khan, an M. Khan, and a guy called Tamale Joe, whose real name was likely also Khan.
Not every tamale vendor in the West was from Afghanistan, of course, and not every Afghan vendor sold tamales. A smaller but still significant group, for instance, sold chili, as Zarif Khan later did in his restaurant. (One such vendor, Dollha Jaffa Khan, got his start with a pushcart in Seattle, in 1916, before opening a successful chili parlor there. Later, Jaffa Khan changed his name to Joseph Joffrey; his son Robert went on to found the Joffrey Ballet.) But it was the Afghan tamale vendors who were so common as to become a stereotype—akin to Turkish coffee-shop owners, Syrian rug dealers, and Jewish pawnbrokers.
With that stereotype went another; that tamale sellers were constantly at one another’s throat. There was some truth to that, but the problem was not limited to Afghans. Throughout the country, for the duration of the culinary craze, headlines about “tamale wars” were comically abundant. “The hot tamale war which has been raging in this city for the past few weeks reached a climax last evening,” the Colorado Springs Weekly Gazette reported in 1895: gunfire had broken out between rival vendors and a boy named Harry Risner was shot in the arm. In Montana, in 1901, a man named Joseph Marino was killed by Salvagora “Bull Dog” Demicilli over “a rivalry in the tamale business.” Among the Afghan vendors, the worst of the tamale wars took place in Seattle, where the trade was dominated by a Khan with a mafioso reputation: mean, mendacious, scary as hell. Eventually, he was shot in the back, presumably by one of his fellow-peddlers, but, if the murder was meant to ease tensions in the tamale scene, it failed. Nearly a decade later, the Seattle Star was still reporting on “the vendetta of the hot tamale men.”
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