Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Downstairs Mr Perez and I stopped in a fried-fish café for a cup of coffee. I asked him how Calypso originated, and he quoted a song written by the Lord Executor:

  Would you like to know what is Calypso?

  It was sung by the Creoles years ago.

  It was danced by the African drums in a bamboo tent

  And sung in patois for amusement.

  Now it is played in tone

  On a gramophone.

  Mr Perez said that Calypso is probably an old patois word meaning ‘work song.’ There seems to be no connection between Calypso songs and the Calypso of the ‘Odyssey.’ Historians on the island believe the institution had its origin when slaves, recently from Africa, would divide into competitive groups and sing ribald songs of derision at each other as they worked in the fields. In their huts at night, however, they directed the songs against their masters. A few Calypsonians still sing in this tradition. When Sir Alfred Claud Hollis, once governor for the Crown in Trinidad, returned to England, a Calypsonian sang:

  I must be very frank and say

  I was glad when Sir Hollis went away.

  He cared only for his own enjoyment

  And did nothing to help us find employment.

  The Growler and Attila the Hun have often been jailed for criticism of the colonial administration. The Crown officials evidently have mixed feelings about Calypso; at Mardi Gras they put up $500 in prizes for the best songs, yet they exercise a strict and sometimes stifling censorship over the singers. Mr Perez must submit any song he wishes to record to the Colonial Secretary. Many of the most inspired songs are turned down because they are considered indecent, sacrilegious, or ‘detrimental to the Government.’ Some Calypsonians get in trouble with the administration by writing blackmail songs. Such a singer will learn an embarrassing fact about a prominent Trinidadian and write a song around it; then he will go to the man and offer to forget the song for a few dollars. Sometimes, after he has been paid off, he will sing it in the cafés and rumshops anyway, just for the hell of it.

  The principal benefactor of the Calypsonians is a Portuguese businessman named Edward Sa Gomes, who operates a chain of music stores on Trinidad and Tobago, a nearby island. He lends them money, bails them out when they land in jail, and arbitrates their incessant disputes. He helps Mr Perez round them up to make records. Mr Perez pays the Calypsonians ten dollars a song and royalties. On one trip he recorded three hundred. When the singers get paid, they promptly spend their money for clothes and liquor. They are constantly fighting with each other, sometimes for a sly business reason. For example, Houdini once made an insulting record called ‘Executor, the Homeless Man.’ The Lord Executor answered with an equally insulting record, ‘My Reply to Houdini.’ People in Trinidad bought both records, just to see whose reputation was damaged more. The Lord Executor is dean of the Calypsonians. He is old and wizened and touchy. He walks the streets mumbling to himself. He says he is composing, but his colleagues say, ‘The Executor’s got a mumbling jag on.’ His songs are all gloomy, such as ‘Seven Skeletons Found in the Yard’ and ‘I Don’t Know How the Young Men Living.’

  Few of the Calypsonians can read or write, but they are able to keep hundreds of songs in their heads. Even so, no Calypsonian ever sings a song the same way twice; that would bore him. They are contemptuous of each other. The hungrier they get the haughtier they get. It is characteristic of a Calypsonian to sing about his colleagues like this:

  Walking with a toothpick between their teeth,

  Making people understand they just done eat,

  Crediting beds from the stores in town,

  But the agents coming and unmount them down.

  The Calypsonian is highly ethical in his own fashion. He will steal a bottle of rum from a colleague, or a pair of shoes, or a girl, but never a song. ‘The Executor would damn near cut his throat before he would sing one of Houdini’s songs, and vice versa,’ Mr Perez said. All Calypsonians believe that women are powerless to resist them. King Radio, a small, one-eyed man who wears dark glasses, boasts that he is supported by fifty women. Mr Perez quoted one of Radio’s songs:

  They can’t find a lover like me again.

  I’m the only lover in Port-of-Spain.

  Fifty women now supporting me

  And all of them belong to high society.

  I even got a boy to tend the phone

  In case you should ring me up at home.

  Many of Radio’s songs contain advice about women. One song is ‘Man Smart, Woman Smarter.’ Another begins:

  If you want to be happy and live a king’s life,

  Never make a pretty woman your wife.

  That’s from a logical point of view,

  Always love a woman uglier than you.

  The best-selling Calypso records in the United States are those based on the adventures of Nettie, Nora, Lizzie, and other loose girls. Those concerning the womanly qualities of Mrs Simpson and the abdication of King Edward VIII also sell well. The abdication was the most popular subject in the history of Calypso; every singer had a go at it. It is generally conceded that the Caresser did the best job. He had an idea that ‘old Baldwin’ kept the King imprisoned in England, preventing him from crossing the sea and marrying Mrs Simpson in New York. This is the chorus of the Caresser’s song:

  It’s love, it’s love alone

  That cause King Edward to leave the throne.

  Some of the verses are:

  Oh, what a sad disappointment

  Was endured by the British Government.

  On the tenth of December we heard the talk

  That he gave the throne to the Duke of York.

  Am sorry my mother is going to grieve,

  But I cannot help, I am bound to leave.

  I got the money, I got the talk,

  And the fancy walk just to suit New York.

  And if I can’t get a boat to set me free

  I’ll walk to Miss Simpson across the sea.

  He said my robes and crown is upon my mind,

  But I cannot leave Miss Simpson behind.

  If you see Miss Simpson walk down the street,

  She could fall an angel with the body beat.

  Let the organ roll, let the church bell ring,

  Good luck to our second bachelor King.

  The Gorilla, in his abdication song, was more defiant. He sang:

  Believe me, friends, if I were King,

  I’d marry any woman and give her a ring.

  I wouldn’t give a damn what the people say

  So long as she can wash, cook, and dingo-lay.

  (1939)

  The Mohawks in High Steel

  THE MOST FOOTLOOSE Indians in North America are a band of mixed-blood Mohawks whose home, the Caughnawaga Reservation, is on the St Lawrence River in Quebec. They are generally called the Caughnawagas. In times past, they were called the Christian Mohawks or the Praying Mohawks. There are three thousand of them, at least six hundred and fifty of whom spend more time in cities and towns all over the United States than they do on the reservation. Some are as restless as gypsies. It is not unusual for a family to lock up its house, leave the key with a neighbor, get into an automobile, and go away for years. There are colonies of Caughnawagas in Brooklyn, Buffalo, and Detroit. The biggest colony is in Brooklyn, out in the North Gowanus neighborhood. It was started in the late twenties, there are approximately four hundred men, women, and children in it, it is growing, and it shows signs of permanence. A few families have bought houses. The pastor of one of the churches in the neighborhood, the Cuyler Presbyterian, has learned the Mohawk dialect of the Iroquois language and holds a service in it once a month, and the church has elected a Caughnawaga to its board of deacons. There have been marriages between Caughnawagas and members of other groups in the neighborhood. The Caughnawaga women once had trouble in finding a brand of corn meal (Quaker White Enriched and Degerminated) that they like to use in making ka-na-ta-rok, or Indian boiled bread; all the grocery stores in
North Gowanus, even the little Italian ones, now carry it. One saloon, the Nevins Bar & Grill, has become a Caughnawaga hangout and is referred to in the neighborhood as the Indian Bank; on weekend nights, two–thirds of its customers are Caughnawagas; to encourage their patronage, it stocks one Montreal ale and two Montreal beers. A saying in the band is that Brooklyn is the downtown of Caughnawaga.

  Caughnawaga Reservation is on the south shore of the St Lawrence, just above Lachine Rapids. It is nine miles upriver from Montreal, which is on the north shore. By bus, it is half an hour from Dominion Square, the center of Montreal. It is a small reservation. It is a tract of farmland, swamp, and scrub timber that is shaped like a half-moon; it parallels the river for eight miles and is four miles wide at its widest point. On the river side, about midway, there is a sprawled-out village, also named Caughnawaga. Only a few of the Caughnawagas are farmers. The majority live in the village and rent their farmland to French Canadians and speak of the rest of the reservation as ‘the bush.’ The Montreal-to-Malone, New York, highway goes through Caughnawaga village. It is the main street. On it are about fifty commonplace frame dwellings, the office of the Agent of the Indian Affairs Branch of the Canadian government, the Protestant church (it is of the United Church of Canada denomination), the Protestant school, and several Indian-owned grocery stores and filling stations. The stores are the gathering places of the old men of the village. In each store is a cluster of chairs, boxes, and nail kegs on which old men sit throughout the day, smoking and playing blackjack and eating candy bars and mumbling a few words now and then, usually in Mohawk. In the front yards of half a dozen of the dwellings are ramshackly booths displaying souvenirs – papoose dolls, moccasins, sweet-grass baskets, beadwork handbags, beadwork belts, beadwork wristwatch straps, and pin-cushions on which beads spell out ‘Mother Dear,’ ‘Home Sweet Home,’ ‘I Love U,’ and similar legends. In one yard, between two totem poles, is a huge, elm-bark tepee with a sign on it that reads, ‘Stop! & Pow Wow With Me. Chief White Eagle. Indian Medicine Man. Herbages Indiens.’ Except on ceremonial occasions and for show purposes, when they put on fringed and beaded buckskins and feather headdresses of the Plains Indian type, Caughnawagas dress as other Canadians do, and if it were not for these front-yard establishments, most motorists would be unaware that they were passing through an Indian village. A scattering of Caughnawagas look as Indian as can be; they have high cheekbones and jut noses, their eyes are sad, shrewd, and dark brown, their hair is straight and coal black, their skin is smooth and coppery, and they have the same beautiful, erect, chin-lifted, haughty walk that gypsies have. White blood, however, has blurred the Indianness of the majority; some look dimly but unmistakably Indian, some look Indian only after one has searched their faces for Indian characteristics, and some do not look Indian at all. They run to two physical types; one type, the commoner, is thickset, fleshy, and broad-faced, and the other is tall, bony, and longheaded. Some of the younger Caughnawagas have studied a little of the Indian past in school and they disapprove of the front-yard establishments. They particularly disapprove of Chief White Eagle’s establishment; they feel that it gives visitors a highly erroneous impression of Caughnawaga right off the bat. First of all, the old Mohawks did not live in tepees but in log-and-bark communal houses called longhouses, and they did not make totem poles. Also, there haven’t been any chiefs in Caughnawaga, except self-appointed ones, since 1890. Furthermore, while all Caughnawagas have Indian names, some much fancier than White Eagle, few go under them outside their own circles, and those who do almost invariably run them together and preface them with a white given name; John Goodleaf, Tom Tworivers, and Dominick Twoax are examples. Caughnawagas discovered long ago that whites are inclined to look upon Indian names, translated or untranslated, as humorous. In dealing with whites, ninety-five per cent of them go under white names, and have for many generations. Most of these names are ordinary English, Scotch, Irish, or French ones, a number of which date back to intermarriages with early settlers. The names of the oldest and biggest Caughnawaga families are Jacobs, Williams, Rice, McComber, Tarbell, Stacey, Diabo (originally D’Ailleboust), Montour, De Lisle, Beauvais, and Lahache. The most frequent given names are Joe, John, and Angus, and Mary, Annie, and Josie.

  On each side of the highway there is a labyrinth of lanes, some dirt, some gravel, and some paved. Some are straight and some are snaky. The dwellings on them are much older than those on the highway, and they range from log cabins to big field-stone houses with frame wings and lean-tos; members of three and even four generations of a family may live in one house. In the yards are gardens and apple trees and sugar-maple trees and piles of automobile junk and groups of outbuildings, usually a garage, a privy, a chicken coop, and a stable. Large families keep a cow or two and a plug horse; the French Canadians who rent the reservation farmland sell all their worn-out horses to the villagers. The dwellings in Caughnawaga are wired for electricity, just about every family has a radio and a few have telephones, but there is no waterworks system. Water for drinking and cooking is obtained from public pumps – the old-fashioned boxed-up, long-handled kind – situated here and there on the lanes. Water for washing clothes and for bathing is carted up from the river in barrels, and the horses are used for this. They are also used for carting firewood, and the children ride them. Most mornings, the cows and horses are driven to unfenced pastures on the skirts of the village. A few always mosey back during the day and wander at will.

  The busiest of the lanes is one that runs beside the river. On it are the reservation post office, the Catholic church, the Catholic schools, a parish hall named Kateri Hall, and a small Catholic hospital. The post office occupies the parlor in the home of Frank McDonald Jacobs, the patriarch of the band. A daughter of his, Veronica Jacobs, is postmistress. The church, St Francis Xavier’s, is the biggest building in the village. It is a hundred years old, it is made of cut stone of a multiplicity of shades of silver and gray, and the cross on its steeple is surmounted by a gilded weathercock. It is a Jesuit mission church; at its altar, by an old privilege, masses are said in Mohawk. In the summer, sightseeing buses from Montreal stop regularly at St Francis Xavier’s and a Jesuit scholastic guides the sightseers through it and shows them its treasures, the most precious of which are some of the bones of Kateri Tekakwitha, an Indian virgin called the Lily of the Mohawks who died at Caughnawaga in 1680. The old bones lie on a watered-silk cushion in a glass-topped chest. Sick and afflicted people make pilgrimages to the church and pray before them. In a booklet put out by the church, it is claimed that sufferers from many diseases, including cancer, have been healed through Kateri’s intercession. Kateri is venerated because of the bitter penances she imposed upon herself; according to the memoirs of missionaries who knew her, she wore iron chains, lay upon thorns, whipped herself until she bled, plunged into icy water, went about barefoot on the snow, and fasted almost continuously.

  On a hill in the southern part of the village are two weedy graveyards. One is for Catholics, and it is by far the bigger. The other is for Protestants and pagans. At one time, all the Caughnawagas were Catholics. Since the early twenties, a few have gone over to other faiths every year. Now, according to a Canadian government census, 2,682 are Catholics, 251 belong to Protestant denominations, and 77 are pagans. The so-called pagans – they do not like the term and prefer to be known as the longhouse people – belong to an Indian religion called the Old Way or the Handsome Lake Revelation. Their prophet, Handsome Lake, was a Seneca who in 1799, after many years of drunkenness, had a vision in which the spirits up above spoke to him. He reformed and spent his last fifteen years as a roving preacher in Indian villages in upstate New York. In his sermons, he recited some stories and warnings and precepts that he said the spirits had revealed to him. Many of these have been handed down by word of mouth and they constitute the gospel of the religion; a few men in each generation – they are called “the good-message-keepers” – memorize them. The precepts are simply stated. An
example is a brief one from a series concerning the sins of parents: ‘It often happens that parents hold angry disputes in the hearing of their infant child. The infant hears and comprehends their angry words. It feels lost and lonely. It can see for itself no happiness in prospect. This is a great sin.’ During the nineteenth century, Handsome Lake’s religion spread to every Iroquois reservation in the United States and Canada except Caughnawaga. It reached Caughnawaga right after the First World War and, despite the opposition of Catholics and Protestants, began to be practiced openly in 1927. Handsome Lake’s followers meet in ceremonial structures that they call longhouses. The Caughnawaga longhouse is on the graveyard hill. It resembles a country schoolhouse. It is a plain, one-room, frame building surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Several times a year, on dates determined by the phases of the moon or the rising of sap in the sugar maples or the ripening of fruits and vegetables, the longhouse people get together and hold thanksgiving festivals, among which are a Midwinter Festival, a Thanks-to-the-Maple Festival, a Strawberry Festival, and a String Bean Festival. In the course of the festivals, they burn little heaps of sacred tobacco leaves, eat a dish called corn soup, make public confessions of their sins, and chant and dance to the music of rattles and drums. The smoke from the tobacco fires is supposed to ascend to the spirits. The sacred tobacco is not store-bought. It is a kind of tobacco known as Red Rose, an intensely acrid species that grows wild in parts of the United States and Canada. The longhouse people grow it in their gardens from wild seed and cure the leaves in the sun. The longhouse rattles are gourds or snapping-turtle shells with kernels of corn inside them, and the drums are wooden pails that barn paint came in with rawhide or old inner tubes stretched over their mouths. The Catholics and Protestants complain that for several days after a longhouse festival everyone on the reservation is moody.

  The Caughnawagas are among the oldest reservation Indians. The band had its origin in the latter half of the seventeenth century, when French Jesuit missionaries converted somewhere between fifty and a hundred Iroquois families in a dozen longhouse villages in what is now western and northern New York and persuaded them to go up to Quebec and settle in a mission outpost. This outpost was on the St Lawrence, down below Lachine Rapids. The converts began arriving there in 1668. Among them were members of all the tribes in the Iroquois Confederacy – Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. There were also a few Hurons, Eries, and Ottawas who had been captured and adopted by the Iroquois and had been living with them in the longhouse villages. Mohawks greatly predominated, and Mohawk customs and the Mohawk dialect of Iroquois eventually became the customs and speech of the whole group. In 1676, accompanied by two Jesuits, they left the outpost and went up the river to the foot of the rapids and staked out a village of their own, naming it Ka-na-wá-ke, which is Mohawk for ‘at the rapids’; Caughnawaga is a latter-day spelling. They moved the village three times, a few miles at a time and always upriver. With each move, they added to their lands. The final move, to the present site of Caughnawaga village, was made in 1719. Until 1830, the Caughnawaga lands were mission lands. In that year, the Canadian government took control of the bulk of them and turned them into a tax-free reservation, parcelling out a homestead to each family and setting aside other pieces, called the Commons, for the use of future generations. Through the years, grants of Commons land have grown smaller and smaller; there are only about five hundred acres of it left; according to present policy, a male member of the band, after reaching his eighteenth birthday, may be granted exactly one-fourth of an acre if he promises to build upon it. A Caughnawaga is allowed to rent his land to anybody, but he may sell or give it only to another member of the band. Unlike many reservation Indians, the Caughnawagas have always had considerable say-so in their own affairs, at first through chiefs, each representing several families, who would go to the Indian Agent with requests or grievances, and then through an annually elected tribal council. The council has twelve members, it meets once a month in the parish hall, and it considers such matters as the granting of Commons land, the relief of the needy, and the upkeep of lanes and pumps. Its decisions, when approved by the Indian Affairs Branch in Ottawa, are automatically carried out by the Agent.