by Jamie Ford
American Zen, Ernest thought, as he paid to go inside.
He passed a few tourists who were leaving as he followed the girls, who clip-clopped in their geta footwear into the heart of the Japanese Pavilion, where a hidden garden was nestled beyond tatami mats and behind shoji screens. In that quiet, serene space, far from the whirl and bustle of crowds and carnival rides, he finally found Gracie, kneeling at a small table with a lacquered tea set, the box partially open in front of her. She looked at the cups, the teapot, and held the ladle as though trying to remember the proper order of the ceremony she had once been so proud of.
Ernest thanked the hostess and approached Gracie, who smiled slightly, seemingly confused.
“Hello, Gracious.”
She looked up, surprised to see him.
“Oh…didn’t you get my message?” she said. She touched her pockets as though she might have misplaced it somewhere. “It said that you’re supposed to go to the Space Needle—up there, where I’m…too afraid to go.”
“I went,” Ernest said. “And then I came all the way back down to find you.”
“Was Maisie there?”
“Maisie has always been there,” Ernest said. “But she’s not who I’m looking for.”
Gracie gazed back at him. “Are you mad at me?”
“Of course not.”
She straightened the collar on her blouse and checked her pearl buttons. Then she noticed her mismatched shoes, one blue, one brown. “I’m still a foolish old woman,” she said, shaking her head. “I just wanted you to be happy.”
“I am. You’ve always made me that way. From the day we first met.” Ernest removed his jacket and sat down across from her. “Can I help you with this?”
Gracie set down the ladle. “Please.”
Ernest regarded the elegant tea set, then looked around and spotted a stout earthenware bottle with a wide mouth on a nearby table. He reached over and retrieved the carafe, then gently moved the tea box aside. He sat upright and softly, reverently placed two wide cups in front of them.
“But that’s…not tea,” Gracie protested. “That’s…” She touched the bottle as she remembered. “That’s sake. Rice wine. That’s used for…”
“Weddings,” Ernest whispered as he offered her a teacup with both hands.
She took the cup in hers, fingers trembling. “You…still want to marry me?”
Ernest nodded and began to pour.
CLOSING CEREMONIES
(1962)
Two months later Ernest and Gracie went back to the world’s fair, on the night of the Century 21 Exposition’s grand finale. They weren’t among the thirteen thousand lucky men and women who squeezed into Memorial Stadium to hear the mayor give his closing ceremony speech, or watch the Police Department Drill Team, or listen to every high school band in the city perform. Instead, they arrived just before sunset, well after the record-breaking crowd had thinned—eager people who’d packed the fairgrounds on this last day, hoping for one more ride on the Space Wheel, one antipodal sermon of science, one final taste of a strawberry waffle cone, or one more last-minute bargain-priced, half-off, souvenir statue of the Space Needle.
“Maybe they’ll raffle you off all over again,” Gracie teased as they walked slowly, hand in hand, along a row of transplanted cherry trees. The blossoms, like her memories, had returned in fits and starts since the opening of the fair. Some fresh and lovely, others fallen, swept up, or blown away.
“Doubtful,” Ernest said. “They already had to shut down one of the concessionaires on the Gayway for giving away poodles. Too cruel, they said. Besides, who would want me? I’m just a consolation prize at best.”
She squeezed his hand.
“I remember you as much more than that.”
Gracie’s memory was like a jigsaw puzzle with parts that didn’t always fit, but she’d found the all-important edge pieces. She was beginning to reframe her life—their life. It was a work in progress, but the image was coming together.
“It’s too bad Juju didn’t write her story,” Gracie said.
Ernest laughed. He thought about the old typewriter in their apartment. Maybe he’d write their story. Then he thought about his other daughter.
“It’s too bad Hanny returned Rich’s ring,” Ernest said, though he was far more relieved than disappointed.
“True.” Gracie smiled. “She should have pawned it.”
As they walked near the monorail terminal, they examined each tree, searching for a loosely carved heart, etched with their initials fifty years ago. Pascual thought he’d seen it and had told them where the tree was. Ernest and Gracie finally found it as the streetlamps flickered to life. Their remembrance, etched in sakura bark so many years ago, was now just one of many, as dozens of other fairgoers had added their names, their initials, their professions of undying love.
“I can’t believe you finally married me, young Ernest.”
“And I’d do it all over again,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow, or yesterday.”
A week after their impromptu tea ceremony, their daughters had found a simple wedding gown, and done their mother’s hair and makeup. Pascual had stood at Ernest’s side, his best man, in a modest service held at Kobe Terrace Park, with a handful of old friends from the neighborhood. Ernest didn’t care what anyone thought about his spur-of-the-moment nuptials. Nor did Gracie as she proudly carried a bouquet of roses—white and lavender—when she strolled down a simple aisle of silk and gave herself away. Ernest had beamed with happiness as he did the same.
Pascual had finally won the neighborhood lottery, Ernest thought, but he was the one who felt like the luckiest man alive.
“It’s almost time,” Gracie said. “I can’t wait to see her.”
Ernest blinked and looked up the avenue, searching for Maisie, who’d been unable to attend their wedding. But she’d told them that she would meet them here, tonight. That she’d be able to leave the closing ceremonies and join them as soon as she’d made a final appearance, shaken the governor’s hand, introduced some dignitaries.
Madam Flora would be pleased, Ernest thought.
Then he saw Maisie turn the corner. A long-lost love. A living, breathing embodiment of what might have been. She stood apart from the remaining tourists in an elegant dress. He watched as she and Gracie embraced, without hesitation, or restraint, or regret. They held each other, smiled and laughed, wiped the corners of their eyes.
Then the three of them lay on the cool grass and waited, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, children again. They watched the crackling, cascading fireworks as a band played Tchaikovsky, as another twenty-one-gun salute boomed. As bells rang, bagpipers piped, and a light rain began to fall, gently washing away the past.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Someone recently asked, “Do you have a muse who inspires your writing?” This immediately conjured images from the movie Xanadu, where Olivia Newton-John played a glittering, roller-skating, disco-singing muse who falls in love with a struggling artist on the verge of giving up.
Needless to say, I wish I had a glittering, roller-skating, disco muse.
Instead of Terpsichore, the goddess of dance as played by Olivia, my de facto muse seems to be a never-ending appetite for lost history—the need to constantly turn over rocks and look at the squishy things underneath.
One of those metaphorical rocks happened to be the great Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909—Seattle’s forgotten world’s fair. I stumbled upon an old article about race and the AYP and how China had declined to sponsor an exhibit because delegates had been harassed at previous world’s fairs, and how ethnographic displays were immensely popular, like the Igorrote exhibit, a mock village of grass huts, which was basically a human zoo.
As I kept digging, I was intrigued to learn that 1909 was also the height of Washington State’s suffrage movement. Both the Washington Equal Suffrage Association and the National American Woman Suffrage Association held conventions in Seattle to take advantage of the p
ublicity of the AYP. And a large group of suffragists climbed Mount Rainier. Led by Dr. Cora Smith Eaton, who flew a “Votes For Women” pennant atop the 14,409-ft. summit, alongside an AYP flag.
But curiously, 1909 was also the peak of Seattle’s social evils—described as “dance halls, bagnios, crib houses, opium dens, and noodle joints…openly advertised in the full glare of electric light”—a major concern for the host city.
But what haunted my imagination more than anything, among articles about a “world of wonder” with a wireless telephone, incubators for premature babies, and a machine that could butcher salmon (patented as the Iron Chink) was finding a Seattle Times clipping that proclaimed SOMEBODY WILL DRAW BABY AS PRIZE and a sad 1909 follow-up in the Kennewick Courier, where a man who was in charge of the giveaway said, “No one had claimed the baby (yet).”
Much to my authorly delight (and parental mortification) that story turned out to be true.
The Washington Children’s Home Society did indeed donate a baby boy to be raffled off. And yes, his name in all the newspapers was Ernest. Ironically, he was offered up under the auspices of then-director L. J. Covington, who fought tirelessly against the moral plagues of his time but apparently had no problem giving away a child.
Oddly enough, I also found a letter in the Leavenworth Echo from July 10, 1910, with the headline WANTS TO ADOPT UGLY BOY. A woman named Anna M. Sampson wrote, “You may send me the ugliest, biggest, most ungainly looking boy you have. I think I know how to bring out the best that is in such a lad.”
The letter was received by M. A. Covington, superintendent of the Spokane district of the Washington Children’s Home Society, who responded: “I have a boy who is not the ugliest and who is only ten-years-old, but I believe he will suit.”
This begs the question: Were there two different Covingtons giving away children? Were they related? Or was this perhaps the same person, confounded by a typographical error? I’m still not sure.
But what I am certain of is that all of this happened during the tail end of the orphan train era, when children were given away with aplomb. And while it’s clear that a baby boy was offered as a prize at the AYP, it’s likely that no one claimed him, and his subsequent fate is unknown. And I like the unknown.
That’s when I decided to write this story.
Because of mysteries like these, Ernest became yet another one of my imaginary friends. And on the blank canvas of his life, I set off to render his tale, which in my world begins in Southern China during a time when workers were being smuggled into North America despite the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Young women were still being sold as Mui Tsai in China, or Karayuki-san in Japan, often ending up in the United States, where they worked as slaves or indentured servants, more than fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Due to prejudice, and perhaps barriers of language and culture, the plight of these girls was ignored by all but the most intrepid of heroes, like Donaldina Cameron, who rescued more than three thousand Asian girls in San Francisco. The “Angry Angel of Chinatown” would remain busy until 1910 when the Mann Act made it a crime to transport white women across borders for the purpose of debauchery.
In reality, the Mann Act was used to prevent interracial relationships. World champion heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson was prosecuted under the Mann Act for dating white women.
Sadly, only after the Mann Act did women of color catch a break.
The tragically true stories of these women inspired Fahn and Gracie. Together they represent a lost generation of women who endured unspeakable hardships.
Someone braver than me should kick over that particular rock and write a novel about this darker side, the one explored in the play Broken Blossoms, or the powerful Japanese film Sandakan No. 8.
I’m afraid my heart’s not up to the task.
Instead, I went down the velveteen-rabbit hole of Seattle’s Garment District, where the confluence of an early suffrage movement and the lifestyles of high-paid sophisticates created a river of new possibilities.
Seattle’s red-light district was a gray area of morality and economics, as elite companionship was somewhat acceptable, while a four-hundred-room crib joint built by Mayor Hiram Gill and his chief of police, Charles “Wappy” Wappenstein, was not.
Or as the great Western philosophers Cheap Trick once sang, “Surrender, but don’t give yourself away.”
These are the murky waters where Dame Florence Nettleton came to life, loosely based on the notorious Seattle madam Lou Graham, who, for decades, occupied a special rung on the ladders of business and governance.
I had a vague understanding of the red-light district, mainly from taking a tour of the Seattle Underground—a network of old tunnels and basements—and hearing stories about Seattle’s most famous madam.
I’d later read how Madam Lou, known as the “Queen of the Lava Beds,” had created “a discreet establishment for the silk-top-hat-and-frock-coat set to indulge in good drink, lively political discussions, and, upstairs, ribald pleasures—all free to government representatives.”
Madam Lou, along with her “housekeeper,” Amber, held court in a lavish brothel in the heart of Seattle’s Pioneer Square. They also had a daughter, Ulna, who was left behind when her guardians moved to San Francisco. When Madam Lou died a month later of a mysterious ailment (rumored to be an occupational disease), the absence of a will meant that Amber got nothing, and Ulna ended up in a convent. Meanwhile, Lou’s entire fortune, estimated at $200,000—roughly $5 million today—was donated to the King County school system.
You’re welcome, kids.
That’s the legend, and the stories about Madam Lou tend to focus on her wealth, her connections to banks, and her propriety—if you will—in that she supported the continued education of the women who worked for her.
But in general, the stories were all about Madam Lou.
What I hadn’t explored were the social conventions that might lead a woman (or young girl) into the employ of a place like the Tenderloin, or the Tangerine, beyond the stereotypes of addiction, abuse, or mental illness, which are often exaggerated for effect as much as the tall tales of Madam Lou’s vast financial empire.
In reading The Story of Yamada Waka: From Prostitute to Feminist Pioneer, and also Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed, the autobiography of Mrs. L. P. Ray (a former slave who ministered to the homeless in Seattle), it’s clear that there’s no definitive answer. But instead a rogue’s gallery of societal pressures that contributed in varying proportions to the difficulty of simply being born without a Y chromosome in the early twentieth century—abject poverty, lack of education, an appalling age of consent (as low as ten years old), religious condemnation, tribal shaming toward unmarried women who dared to (gasp) be sexually active, illegality of information pertaining to birth control, vicious wage gaps.
Oh, and racism.
While Madam Lou made a killing in the stock market, the Japanese and Chinese cribs often worked their girls, literally, to death—and local police looked the other way.
But beyond the peculiar and glamorous world of Madam Lou Graham and the red-light district was a revelation and a question. Why did frontier cities in the West have the most successful suffrage campaigns while also being hotbeds for vice?
It’s a challenging, mind-bending question.
While you’re thinking about that, I should mention that I once had a job interview in the Washington Court Building, the brick establishment built by Madam Lou and the physical blueprint for the Tenderloin.
It’s a nice place, but it could really use a piano.
Finally, there’s the metaphorical moon-rock of the Century 21 Expo, which featured the likes of Elvis, Bobby Kennedy, Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling, and John Glenn.
Both fairs heralded a new economic age: the Gold Rush in 1909 and the Jet Age in 1962. Both showcased the latest technology of their times, from dirigibles and aeroplanes, to satellites and cosmonauts. Both events attracted politicians (Taft, Nixon), ce
lebrities (Buffalo Bill, John Wayne), foreign delegations and visitors from around the world. Both were sources of national pride, and each served as a coming-out party for a humble city tucked away in the great northwest.
But the AYP was starkly different in that there was an undeniable aspect of exploitation that boggles the mind by today’s standards. The AYP sensationalized humans—Igorrote villagers—whose attire drew the ire of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The WCTU asked Reverend Mark Matthews, a Presbyterian minister known for his moral crusades, to look into the matter. The concern was not that there were fifty villagers being exploited for their strange ethnicity, but that their loincloths might be inauthentic, designed for titillation.
There were exhibits of Siberians, Flathead Indians, Arabian women—not showcased to celebrate their cultures as much as to gawk at their otherness. Plus there were Eskimo children on display and, of course, the raffling off of a boy named Ernest.
By comparison, the Century 21 Expo gave away poodles, and even that was met with harsh criticism.
Though the Century 21 Expo was not without its own strange wrinkle—an institutionalized sexism that would make Don Draper twitch.
At Seattle’s second showcase to the world, the demonstrators at the National Science Pavilion were all women, were required to have a certain look, and included five Seafair princesses and a former Miss Alaska. They were given a quick course in biology to provide them with enough information to answer questions from guests. The Library of the Future exhibit sent out a call for the sexiest librarians. (Hey, Batgirl was a librarian.) And the elevator operators at the Space Needle were all female, required to be at least five feet six inches, Junoesque in proportion, and possess “the kind of personality that typified Seattle girls.”
While AYP organizers worried about the city’s red-light district and banned alcohol, the Century 21 Expo allowed libations to flow freely, and a bottle of Jim Beam in the shape of the Space Needle was quite popular.
