Somebody in Boots

by Nelson Algren

  But they all booze, they all fight, and there are a thousand Finnegans. With so many dollar-women there couldn’t be less. Even a mayor has to pimp a little now and then to make ends meet: for the Chrysler outfit, or Standard Oil, or any other big-business scurve who has the money to pay. You understand. That’s what the mayor was doing over on that platform three blocks east. That’s what he was doing there all the time he was talking. Pimping for the old whore called Chicago Business, painting her up for her last big Saturday night. Sure the mayor’s a pimp: a pimp for Big Business. Ask the city-hall bunch, they’ll tell you things.

  “There is not a business which will not profit by this colossal event. There is not a business . . . profit . . . colossal event . . .”

  Sometimes visitors to the Fair saw puzzling incidents on the way back to their hotels. Late at night, after a day spent on the grounds, they saw old men, like unclaimed curs with tentative claws, pawing in garbage barrels or ash cans; or they heard voices of children begging from some unlit doorway. The Tribute had nothing to say of this, for the Tribute was owned by the pure-in-heart, and the pure-in-heart averted their eyes. They were good Christian editors proud of their paper, of the greed-inspired lies and the sweet christfablings and the star-spangled spew that they termed “editorials.” They were proud of their souls, for their souls were clean; and proud of their churches, for their churches were large; and proud of their schools, for their schools taught conformity; but proudest by far were they of their Fair, their great Century-of-Progress slut stretched out on a six-mile bed along the lake with Buicks for breasts and a mayor standing up to his neck in her navel making a squib-like noise.

  (Be pure in your hearts, be proud yet a little while, wave your flags, sing your hymns, close your eyes, save your souls, go on grabbing. Get all you can while yet you may. For the red day will come for your kind, be assured.)

  The women who walked the World’s Fair streets lived with two dark fears: the fear of disease, and the fear of police. Of these the latter was often the larger, for illness gives warning where police do not. And the police beat the women as well as the men; the police-women beat them.

  Fear of hunger, fear of cold, fear of blows, fear of men; fear of health officers, fear of jail, fear of hospitals, fear of sudden raids in the night. “But say—ain’t the enchanted eye-lund pertier this year than last, dearie?” Around the World’s Fair grounds that spring prostitutes walked the streets all night. From all over the stricken land they came, in the wake of the great exposition of progress. (Flies to the dungheap, women to the Fair, and the star-spangled banner will make a soft wipe-rag soon.) Of these women and girls there were some few who secured employment on the Fair grounds as waitresses, as “sticks” for gyp gambling joints, or as dancers in peep-show houses. But these were only the few and the highly fortunate. Others spent their days in Grant Park lying about among old men and boys, like men mooching nickels and dimes down South State, like men sleeping in louse-ridden charity flops when a night was cold or rainy. Thus there sprang up a jungle in the depths of Chicago’s rumbling gut, a charnel-dump next to Donnybrook Fair; the city fathers could not heal this condition, howsoever they tried. Their jails were already overcrowded with petty-larceny thieves, vagrants and beggars. When a few were driven off or jailed the ranks were shortly replenished with new hordes of incoming transients; there was little to do but to let them stay and pretend in the papers that they were not there. Yet these were women who might have been mothers, and these were men who might have been men. Over their heads as they lay in the grass nightly a red, white, and blue sign flashed above them:

  A CENTURY OF PROGRESS. BIGGER AND BETTER THAN EVER.

  One Sam Philips, black as ink and Alabama-born, was in Chicago only two days when he got picked up on South Prairie Avenue by Sergeant M——of the South Park Police. Sure the boy looked suspicious—he was in rags, and had no place to sleep, and he was a nigger. So what? So M——says, “Run, eight-ball, or I’ll put you in for vag.” Sam Philips didn’t know very much, he’d only been in town two days. But Sam did know that he didn’t like jails, and that he could run pretty fast all right. “Two hundred yards I’ll give you,” the sergeant offered—and black Sammy Philips just took it on the lam. He ran twenty feet; M——dropped to one knee in the proper manner and let her flicker, one through the legs and five through the belly—but he got his promotion, so I guess it’s all right.

  Bill Becker got married in ’26. One kid. Two kids. Bill’s wife’s name was Katy, her folks didn’t like William. Three kids. Four kids. And sure enough, in the week that Cermak was shot in Miami, Bill lost his job at the Western Electric. Eighteen months later, on the day that President Roosevelt asked a microphone, “Aren’t you better off this year than last?” Bill went into the bathroom and opened both wrists with Katy’s best sewing scissors. “Look, Katy hon,” Bill woke her at three in the morning and turned on the light so that she could see better, “Look, hon—now why don’t you do it too?” Katy said afterwhile she didn’t blame him a bit, it was all mother’s fault, Bill had always been good to her.

  When the Italian girl came up the steps the woman in white said she didn’t remember. “I come for the job you promised last fall. Papa says I can take it now. I’m almost nineteen now you know, so I guess I can take it now all right.” The woman in white could tell sixteen and a half at a glance, but the girl did look like she could take it all right. “O.K., dearie, hang the old skirt there. Keep the foot-pad straight and get two bits for the towel. Put the dough in your slipper, don’t take off your apron till you got your money, and when the big bell rings get out through the back. Tony’ll show you where.”

  Well, let’s forget it. Let’s listen to the mayor, that’ll make us all feel better. Let’s just not look around. Let’s just look at the flags and the purple totem-poles and the ritzy red roadsters going straight up and down in the Nash tower on the boulevard. Let’s listen to old Sam Insull telling how much he loves his country, or to Charley Dawes how much he loves it too. Well, old Sam can start all over now, and Charley can keep right on goin’. You know, for a while there some of us thought Sam Insull had really done something wrong in using the mails that way, but of course we just didn’t know. We know now that he didn’t do anything wrong at all, that he had our country’s best interests at heart all the while. We know now, since the courts freed them both, that Sam and Martin aren’t just two smart fellows who took so much that lots of other smart people felt that Sam should have a little help. No, really, Sam ran off to Turkey because he likes Turks.

  Cass McKay barked beneath a World’s Fair banner all that spring and summer. One evening he went to the Fair. He went because it was his evening off, and because Dill Doak asked him to go.

  Dill Doak was an unusual Negro in several respects. He never spoke to a white man with servility, and he could not be patronized. He addressed Herman simply as “Hauser,” and Herman called him “Doak.” He was a far shrewder showman than Herman, and Herman knew this well. But that Dill was anything more than a shrewd showman Cass had not known. It was not until after he had spoken a number of times with Dill that Cass began to realize that Dill was somehow wiser than himself. He read much. Often Cass saw him backstage between performances, seated on a prop, brooding over the foreign-news page of a daily paper. Cass could not understand a Negro who became heated over a war being fought in South America. Daily he sought to prove to Cass, with newspaper clippings, that in South America the United States was at war with England “by proxy.” Cass didn’t know what “by proxy” meant; but nevertheless he listened to Doak, and sometimes read the clippings. Cass felt a need of companionship that was almost like a hunger; inwardly he was grateful to Doak even for speaking to him. This, however, Cass would never have admitted to himself. On the evening that Dill proposed walking over to the Fair it did not occur to him to refuse to go because Dill was a Negro. When white men gave him a passing glance as they passed down the street together Cass had a tug of conscience
, which he allayed by assuring himself that “Dill ain’t jest a plain every-day nigger. Even Herman has to do what Dill says sometimes.”

  That evening at the Fair remained in Cass’s mind as one of the most chaotic of his memories. Later on he recalled only a topsy-turvy confusion of color and sound: houses, radios, lights, smells, voices.

  “Holy sneakin’-Moses,” he exclaimed as soon as they were inside, “ain’t this somethin’ bee-yootiful?”

  “Looks all kind of mixed up though a little, don’t it?” Dill asked doubtfully.

  For the first time since he had come out of County, Cass forgot himself for a few minutes.

  Sally Rand

  Lost her fan,

  Give it back,

  You nasty man.

  Dill sang.

  But that evening ended abruptly, as others of his evenings had. They came to a concession where three Negroes were perched in cages; for ten cents anyone could hurl a baseball at them. If the ball struck the proper mark the Negro was automatically dumped into a tub of water beneath the perch. Dill walked by without stopping. Cass paused, and had to walk fast then to catch up to Dill. A few minutes later Dill said he wished to leave. Cass was still eager for sights, but his companion’s sudden lack of enthusiasm dampened his own spirits. After they were out on the street once more Dill seemed reluctant to converse. But Cass chatted on about everything that came into his head.

  Cass fancied himself an unusual fellow, because he was from Texas and had been in jails; he sought to impress the fact of Cass McKay’s uniqueness in the world upon Dill.

  “Ah’ve sho’ seen a heap o’ these United States in mah time,” he boasted. “Have a cig’rette, Dill? Yeah, ah’ve been inside more jail-houses than ah got toes, ah reck’n—Oney don’t never tell Herman ’bout that, ah never mention jail to him. Jest the same, in mah time ah carried a rod. Y’all didn’t know that, did yo’, Dill?”

  Dill hadn’t known. Cass whispered confidentially: “Real reason y’all see me standin’ out front every day is to keep crooks from hoppin’ the ticket-cage. That’s what Herman hired me for in the first place, y’ know. That megyphone is oney a blind. Herman don’t care if ah never bark, jest so long as ah don’t go strollin’ away an’ give that John Dillinger a chanst at the ticket-box. That’s what Herman’s payin’ me ten bucks every week fo’.”

  Cass fancied too, since he was white and Dill black, that Dill must be a little flattered at his company. Dill would sometimes come out of the show just as Cass was bringing in the signs for the night, and then Cass would call out, “O.K., Mist’ Hauser, if ah leave now?” Herman would usually nod, and Cass would be released. He would have Dill’s company for two blocks, up to Van Buren. On that street Dill turned west and Cass continued north.

  In their brief walks they spoke of many things. Once Cass said, “Noo Awlins—that’s mah town. Lots of life, lots of pep, an’ that’s what ah go for. Ah kin have a bigger time on six bits down there than ah can on two bucks up here.”

  Dill became angry that time, so that Cass never mentioned New Orleans to him again.

  “New Orleans,” Dill answered, “is a sewer. The South is a sink, and cities like that are its sewers. The South is rotting. Wherever you go, in any large city, there are thousands of stalls with women and girls in them,” he glared accusingly at Cass, and it was in that glare that Cass read his anger—“Don’t you think it’s a sign of decay when women can be bought?”

  Cass said, “Course it ain’t right, Dill. But it’s that way all over, North an’ South. An’ ah reck’n there al’ays was stalls everywhere an’ likely al’ays will be.”

  Dill spoke confidently. “It hasn’t always been, and it won’t always be, and it isn’t all over. In Russia this is already a thing of the past. We must change the order of things here too.”

  Cass did not know whom Dill meant by “we,” and he lacked the curiosity to ask. He was thinking of Norah Egan, and he was growing sicker every minute.

  “Ah wish ah hadn’t spoke so to sister that time,” he said to himself.

  Back in his Ontario Street room that night he stood looking down at the street betow. The lake wind was whisking papers along the dark curbs. A policeman passed twirling a nightstick, and a streetcar crept like a cat down State. And as he stood so an old memory returned: he seemed to smell, faintly and far off, the odor of burning punk, and to see again white sunlight across a dusty road. And then the bitter face of his brother tooking down.

  “Nothin’ but lies they told. An’ they won’t speak truth to you-all neither.”

  That was true, of course, he knew now. People atways lied, he had learned that. They lied to get even, or they lied to live. Almost everyone had to lie, one way or another, just to live. For someone kept cheating all the time, you had to cheat back or be robbed. As Bryan had been robbed. As Nancy and his father and Norah Egan and himself had been robbed.

  There was someone who cheated, and all men were robbed.

  •

  On one of the first warm evenings in June Cass went with Dill Doak to a gathering of white and Negro workers in Washington Park. Riding South on a State Street car, Dill spoke to Cass of his own people. He disliked Negro ministers, he said, because they preached humbleness to his race.

  “These ministers use religion to stabilize things—and things are so rotten they ought to be dumped in the nearest garbage-can, ’stead of bein’ perfumed. To hell with humility, meekness—I believe in fightin’.”

  Cass remembered a little of the Negro’s lot in the South, and he understood something of Dill’s resentment. Down South, he remembered, it was always as though the black folk were thinking quietly to themselves, but saying nothing. He remembered Negroes speaking among themselves on boxcars and becoming suddenly silent at the approach of any white. Sometimes Cass had had the feeling that Negroes, everywhere, were listening to some strange new thought, sometimes half-unwittingly, sometimes eagerly. They were hearing strange words, yet half-feared to look where the speaker stood. With eyes straight ahead, they feigned for a white not to see, not to hear. Yet the whispers persisted, always true, always counseling; and in the end, they knew, they must listen.

  When they reached the park it was night. The trees stood bowed over two thousand human heads, and above the trees slant flood-beams spilled. The heads were black or the heads were white; flood-beams lit fair hair or hair that was kinky. It was night in the park, and these were the people. Overalled workers, with wives looking worn, formed a great listening circle on the grass. Behind them, on benches, sat a thousand more; behind the benches workers stood ten deep. And all eyes were on a platform built among the trees from which a Negro was speaking.

  Cass and Dill spread their coats on the grass and leaned back, listening. Cass cocked his head a little to the side to hear better. The speaker was saying that he was sixty-eight years old, and that he was the son of a slave. So, too, had he been a slave, he said, for he too had worked all his life for nothing. Into the world with empty hands his father before him had come; with empty hands he had died. So too had himself come, so too would he soon die. He had nothing left but his children now, and these he did not wish to live and die as his father and himself had lived and died. Bosses, black and white, had stripped him of all he had earned in a lifetime of toil, he said.

  “Even the old must revolt! Join hands with white workers in the fight for unemployment insurance—forget them little ministers who tell you ‘be humble,’ ‘be humble.’”

  Cass heard the crash of applause about him like a sudden hail-storm through the trees. Dill’s big hands seemed bent on breaking themselves against each other. Then fists shot upward into light—black fists, white, and brown—and everyone was standing up and singing. Cass did not quite understand all this.

  After the singing and hand-clapping had died a young white man came to the platform. He spoke in a quiet, well-modulated voice, and said that he too believed in revolution . . . so long as it was bloodless.

  “I bel
ieve in that bloodless revolution which for almost three years now has been swinging the country steadily toward permanent recovery. There is no need of bloodshed . . .”

  “What of San Francisco?” someone up near the speaker shouted, “What about Minneapolis?”

  The speaker answered glibly. “Unavoidable,” he said, and a low booing began before he could say more. The booing persisted until the speaker held up his hand in a plea for silence. Then he invited anyone who disagreed with him to come up to the platform if they wished to refute him. A young Negro girl passed through the light and stepped onto the stage. The speaker assisted her up and stepped aside. The girl spoke briefly.

  “Ah’ve worked in sweatshops since ah been twelve,” she said in a high firm voice. “Since ah been twelve ah’ve worked in ’em, an’ that’s eight whole years. Ah nevah got a chance to go much to school because of ’em, so ah nevah learned to use big words”—she glanced at the white man standing beside her. “Ah nevah went much to school, but ah did learn one thing this gen’elmen here nevah did,” she paused for breath and went on “—What’s good fo’ the bosses ain’t no good fo’ us!”