The Celestials

by Karen Shepard

  Sampson was quite delighted with the assortment of cartes de visite and tintype portraits with which his wife presented him on a warm night in October of 1870. Of the seven copies of each printed by Hurd, she gave each Chinaman six and then, knowing it would please her husband, collected one copy each in the most expensive album Mr. Hurd had in his display. It was of handsome burgundy leather with relief work of a pattern of fleur-de-lis on front and back, the edges of the pages embossed in gold, the spine hinged in brass, the whole treasure box snapped shut with an elaborate and fussy lock.

  Sampson would tend to leaf through that album much less than would his wife. Perhaps because Julia’s own world was so inward-turned, she found herself much more interested than her husband in the world outside their own. But that night he set aside his after-dinner cup of hot milk to further examine her gift. No matter the weather or his physical condition, Sampson finished each evening with a cup of hot milk. It was a habit that Julia had initially found charming but now, standing by the chair in which he sat, watching the milk’s surface cool into a gray skin, her stomach turned and she removed the cup and saucer to the mantle, out of her line of vision.

  Thankful joined her at his chair and the two women watched him browse the album. Julia reached down to demonstrate how the cards could be removed from the heavy card stock leaves. In this way, she explained, her husband could order and reorder the pictures at his whim.

  All of the prints were of head and shoulders circled in an oval window. Most of the boys wore traditional Chinese clothing, the same nankeen blouses from their first day in town. One, whom Sampson did not recognize, wore a quilted jacket with brass frog buttons at the throat and collarbone. The boys seemed to be sharing the same mandarin hat. With a small exclamation of surprise, he noted that several of them had signed Sampson beneath their images. Julia told him that the boys had agreed it was a sign of necessary respect.

  “Well,” he said, “that really is most pleasing.”

  He could not have named a one of them save for his foreman, who he noted had not signed Sampson’s name to his card. And as Julia pointed to one and then another, telling him some small thing about the boy’s family, likes or dislikes, and aspirations, it was as if she were telling him that it had been discovered that crows had hopes and desires. One might marvel at the surprise of such a thing, at the mysteries of the animal world, but one would not run out into the meadow trying to ascertain the particulars. He was glad she was doing so. He was glad she seemed to be pleased at her activities. He felt as a good shepherding dog must at the end of a day’s work: all his charges safe and sound for the night.

  Thankful made a small sound. “Having them all together there,” she said, wrinkling her nose slightly. “It is unpleasant, don’t you find?”

  “I do not,” said her brother, running his hand over the bumps and ridges of the album’s cover. “I like it completely,” he said, reaching over to rub Julia’s hand as he had rubbed the album. “Thanks to my dear wife for collecting them here for me to have and see. And further, for working hard to make these boys feel as if our streets are theirs to be traveled.”

  Thankful was unconvinced. “All together they are most like some kind of swarm,” she said, more to herself than to her brother. She gave her shoulders a mild shake. “I suppose, though, a little discomfort is worth the financial sense they make. What European or Canadian do we know who can live on ten cents a day?”

  Silence hung in the room for a moment, husband and wife acutely aware that Thankful received the benefits of her brother’s business enterprises without taking any of the risks.

  “I think,” Julia said kindly, “that the ten-cents-a-day theory is but a theory fabricated by anti-Chinese alarmists. I’m sure they endeavor to make their tomorrows better than their todays. As do we all,” she added equally kindly.

  “Well, if that is the case, dear sister, then my brother best take care. Whatever they have been compelled to endure in overpopulated China, they must have no intention of repeating here. It won’t be long, if you are right about their goals—and for sure you must know more about that than I—before they learn to demand higher wages.”

  If Sampson had allowed the conversation to continue, Julia would have tried to conceal her fluster by arguing that any good Christian would be in complete and utter support of labor justly compensated.

  Sampson, however, having the male distaste for a disagreement between women he loved, and having noted himself on some level those same implications, patted them both on the hand and declared that Thankful had no cause for worry. No good, he understood in some vague way, could come of continuing this line of conversation. So he told the women that it was clear from this very gift how happy these boys were to be here, housed and fed and working under his protection. When looking through this album, he saw a passel of happy boys. Like schoolboys. Or family, he added, touching Julia on the arm again, and she found herself on the edge of tears and wondered whether her husband brought her there with or without thought, and which was worse.

  The task of those initial photographic sittings proved to be overwhelming for Julia, and she had been obliged to recruit the help of her Baptist sisters. Young Ida Wilburn, though not a village native, had always struck Julia as capable and sure. Whom else did Julia know who at that girl’s tender age had had the courage to travel so far from all she knew and loved? Ida had been only too happy to grant help. Julia had also appealed to shy Clara Cuddebank and sweet Pauline Horner, and of course to Fannie Burlingame, whose support of the Chinese carried perhaps the greatest weight among the town’s women. The citizens of North Adams grew familiar with the sight of these odd flocks making their way in and out of the studios, communicating with each other in broken English and enthusiastic gestures. The most withdrawn of the village girls seemed in particular to flourish with the Celestials, the boys’ shyness and reserve somehow sparing the girls the usual problems they feared encountering with large groups of boys. It was as if they had been asked to tend to a herd of well-behaved farm animals.

  During the ten years that North Adams would be home to the Celestials, the boys would return of their own accord, supported by their own pockets, to the studios of Henry Ward and William P. Hurd. They made presentations of copies of the photographs to “their girls,” as they had come to speak of them in the privacy of their sleeping quarters. But beyond that first album, the images for which they paid dearly served not to reinforce their sameness but to highlight their differences, not only from the town’s opinion of them but also from each other and from what they had been and what they now were.

  The boys’ uniforms of pegging smocks and black felt work hats were left on the hooks by their bunks in the factory sleeping quarters, as were their South Chinese peasant tunics and trousers. In the prints, hymnals, Sunday school primers, and other books began to appear on knees. In one, a gold ring and gold trimmings on mandarin slippers were painted on after the fact, as was a red pom-pom the size of a penny plug of taffy on top of a skullcap of black silk.

  Head-and-shoulders bust portraits gave way to full views. They sat with their legs spread in the way of mandarin aristocratic power, or relaxed casually against the back of uncomfortable chairs. Legs began to cross ankle to knee. Heads began to tilt; hands draped casually across laps; mouths remained, with one exception, set in sober lines.

  In October, Alfred noted a portrait of Ida with four of the Celestials and Charlie propped on the front table. A gift for Lucy, apparently, from Ida.

  “Why would she figure you’d want this?” he demanded of his sister as he studied the full lips, the wide noses, the large ears of the image in his hand.

  Lucy looked up from the sock she was mending. “They’re our pupils,” she said.

  “This one’s not,” he said, pointing to Charlie.

  She went back to the sock. “Mr. Sing is the foreman, their leader. It’s like he’s everyone’s pupil,” she said.

  He glanced around the room and wondered a
t further surprises that the innards of drawers and cupboards, lockboxes and closets might hold. His sister regarded him and then asked him to pass her the scissors.

  “Is this it, then?” he asked. “No others?”

  She snipped the thread and turned the sock right side out, stretching it, testing her handiwork. “Do you wish she had given me more?” she asked. “You seem riled enough as it is.”

  “I don’t care,” he said, though his eyes continued to glance here and there.

  Lucy rolled the socks into a ball. She looked at her brother. “You’re all red,” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “So what?” he said.

  She took a breath to try and gentle her emotionally tongue-tied older brother into being a little easier in the world, but by the time she had exhaled she realized she no longer had any patience with the particular obstacles her brother was negotiating. It did not make her feel unkindly or impatient, just weary and removed, and when she stood, she patted him gently on the cheek before silently retiring to her room.

  Did it not bother his fellow Crispins? Alfred demanded of Daniel Luther later that night. Daniel answered that he imagined Alfred’s fellow brothers had larger worries. Alfred had felt a certain coldness from his friend for the past several months. Alfred worried that pursuing the problem in any direct manner would further decrease the time and attention Daniel was expending on him, and so he took note of the distance and tried to pretend he had not.

  As the months passed through fall and winter, class sessions expanded. Village families were now inviting individual students to their homes for private lessons or, even more disturbing, supper. Girls everywhere were doing nothing but balancing gifts in their small hands. Ida and Lucy had so many that they appealed to Alfred to build them a corner shelf for the display of the carvings, boxes, inkstones, and teacups. And didn’t he think they might be able to hang the kite somehow from the ceiling? It was, he noted, the kite he had seen Ida carrying with the Celestial boy all those months ago.

  “I will,” he told her, “for trade.”

  She was so immediately wary that Lucy laughed and said, “You should see your face.”

  “What’re you after?” Ida asked him.

  He found it hard to speak and realized that he had no answer in mind. What did he want?

  Lucy was tickled by his awkwardness. Perhaps, she thought, there would be happiness enough after all.

  “A photograph,” he managed.

  Ida caught Lucy’s eye and raised an eyebrow at her. “Of what?” she said.

  Alfred knew what she was doing, and he hated her for it. “Never mind,” he said, lifting his hat from the peg by the door. “I’ll make your shelf.” And he was gone, his footsteps echoing behind the closed door.

  “Oh, Ida,” Lucy said. “Don’t be cruel. It’s sweet what he wants.”

  Ida stared at her, her most lovely, generous friend.

  “Go on,” Lucy said. “Go after him.”

  And Ida rolled her eyes, sighed, gathered her bonnet, and went quickly down the stairs.

  Their photograph was a strange affair: Alfred on the left, his gaze like an arm across Ida, whose eyes held the camera defiantly, as if registering her protest with it. Neither looked particularly happy. Ida’s hair had been misbehaving that morning, and she had solved the problem by wetting it severely against her head.

  They left the studio with three prints, one of which they gave to Lucy, who framed it and kept it, wherever she lived, on her bedside table. Alfred never framed his copy, and over the years its corners frayed, the image suffered from stains, and the card stock eventually thinned, collapsing this way and that whenever he handled it. Ida put her copy in her travel trunk, where it remained until, in 1897, the undiagnosed pain in her side growing more and more vast, she was moved to sift through her trunk’s contents, a display of the same instinct that had moved her before the birth of her first child, though this time, she knew, the nesting was in preparation not for arrival, but for departure. So a week before her death, she found herself holding the print and was grateful for Lucy’s stubborn insistence, because it was nice after her complicated, though not unhappy, life to see an image of two people who matched in simple, easy ways. It was nice to feel as if the life she’d had had been her choice, and not merely the only option available.

  The photographer, Mr. Ward, felt the portrait more than adequately displayed many of the effects his studio could produce, and he chose it as part of his window display for several weeks at Christmastime. It was in this way that Alfred’s Crispin brothers came to the desire to sit for their own photographs. Perhaps the brothers speculated that if the rat eaters and young Alfred could do it, then why not the rest of them? Perhaps those of a more generous mind toward Alfred thought, too, that he had done a good and smart thing by sitting for a photo with one of the most active volunteers of the village. He might, some of them may have thought, be leading the way in reclaiming the proprietary hold on the village girls that the Chinamen seemed intent on maintaining.

  And so, before the year’s end, the Crispins too were making their way to the town’s two studios, sitting for their own photographs, saying with their own images what the Chinamen and Sampson were saying with theirs: See here. Look sharp. Take note of what we are made.

  By November’s end, all shoe factories in the village, with the exception of Sampson’s and the cooperative, would suspend operations until January, when the trade would open up once again.

  At the October 1870 fair in Pittsfield, the fruit display would be uncommonly large and fine.

  On a Wednesday evening in early November, when unseasonably warm weather had taken off the last of the previous Saturday’s fall of snow, the American Bible Society would present to the Chinese at its headquarters copies of the New Testament in the Chinese language. Charles Sing responded on behalf of his countrymen very happily, and all present seemed much pleased.

  For Thanksgiving, Charlie would order turkeys for each of the Chinese pupils to present to his Sunday school teachers. He would not, until the following Thanksgiving, think of including other prominent and influential members of the community on the list of those to receive the poulterer’s best birds.

  By year’s end, one half of the slate pencils used in the world would come from Vermont, and the same state would have a man with a beard seven feet long.

  The new year of 1871 would arrive and would, for the most part, be greeted with a certain wary optimism. The citizens were, by and large, willing to grant the peaceful incorporation of Sampson’s Celestials into the town’s workings. Alfred felt his position with his brothers, if not to have improved, then certainly not to have worsened. Ida felt Lucy to be sturdier and more capable every day and her mind turned, with some trepidation, toward her own inevitable return to Virginia. Charlie felt confident that the boys were doing what they had been brought there to do. The boys themselves, even the most homesick of them, felt that with seven months of contract labor under their belts, they could manage two and a half years more without much damage. Soon enough they would be home, enjoying their families’ congratulations and gratitude. Sampson felt he could now perhaps breathe easier, and could even afford generous thought to be sent the way of the cooperating Crispins. He said as much to Julia, who complimented him on his Christian spirit and said, meaning it, that she was much pleased by his change of heart.

  And in the following year, on a late winter day, Charlie would tell Julia about Third Brother. In return, Julia told Charlie that she had lost fourteen children, something she had confessed aloud to no one save Sampson.

  He regarded her for so long and so well that she feared she had not made her meaning clear. Poor, unhappy children, he finally told her, his arms useless by his sides.

  1873

  Chapter Eight

  The year was 1873. The final day of July. An oppressive ninety degrees in Sampson’s office, even with both window and shade pulled
against the sun. Sampson had to twice be reminded to lay his work aside and make ready to meet the 4:15 from Troy. Chase was gentle in his prompting, successful at keeping impatience from his voice, equally successful at instilling a sense of urgency. Mrs. Sampson had been at her sister’s in Michigan for nearly six months, and before that with her husband vacationing in Florida for several weeks. She hadn’t been in residence in North Adams since early January.

  The town had thought it strange enough that the Sampsons had taken that unprecedented trip south; it was unlike him to leave the business in anyone’s hands but his own, and unlike her to venture outside the village lines, let alone to the wild and unfamiliar Florida. The quiet speculating had continued when, in February, husband had returned without wife. This had not, the Baptist sisters assured each other, been the original plan. They tried to imagine the Julia they knew traveling by herself the rest of the long way to Michigan and announced that they could do no such thing. The fact that they knew her not well at all did not enter their minds.

  In the strong current of whispers such as these, Chase thought it neither appropriate nor kind for the woman to descend from the train only to find herself alone on the platform. He understood her to be one of the two most important women in Sampson’s life. Miss Thankful Sampson had been the other, and Chase had spent much of the week previous imagining the shock that it must have been for Sampson to discover his sister’s still body Monday morning last. It was his task, Chase had felt and would often feel, during the years of his employ to Sampson, to allow the man’s best foot to come forward, to encourage somehow his employer’s true heart and mind to reveal themselves in his behavior, and so now, for the second time in the hour, he bent at the waist and reminded Sampson that he would be wanting to meet Mrs. Sampson at the train.