Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  ‘I had a sandwich and some coffee on the ferryboat coming over,’ I said.

  ‘Now, you know, I like to do that,’ Mr Hunter said. ‘I never go cross on the ferryboat without I step up to the lunch counter and buy a little something – a sandwich, or a piece of raisin cake. And then I sit by the window and eat it, and look at the tugboats go by, and the big boats, and the sea gulls, and the Statue of Liberty. Oh, my! It’s such a pleasure to eat on a boat. Years and years ago, I was cook on a boat. When I was growing up in Sandy Ground, the mothers taught the boys to cook the same as the girls. The way they looked at it – you never know, it might come in handy. My mother was an unusually good cook, and she taught me the fundamentals, and I was just naturally good at it, and when I was seventeen or eighteen there was a fleet of fishing boats on Staten Island that went to Montauk and up around there and fished the codfish grounds, and I got a job cooking on one of them. It was a small boat, only five in the crew, and the galley was just big enough for two pots and a pan and a stirring spoon and me. I was clumsy at first. Reach for something with my right hand and knock something else over with my left elbow. After a while, though, I got so good the captain of the biggest boat in the fleet heard about my cooking and tried to hire me away, but the men on my boat said if I left they’d leave, and my captain had been good to me, so I stayed. I was a fishing-boat cook for a year and a half, and then I quit and took up a different line of work altogether. I’ll be through with this cake in just a minute. I make my icing thicker than most people do, and I put more on. Frosting. Speaking of wild flowers, do you know pokeweed when you see it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Did you ever eat it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it supposed to be poisonous?’

  ‘It’s the root that’s poisonous, the root and the berries. In the spring, when it first comes up, the young shoots above the root are good to eat. They taste like asparagus. The old women in Sandy Ground used to believe in eating pokeweed shoots, the old Southern women. They said it renewed your blood. My mother believed it. Every spring, she used to send me out in the woods to pick pokeweed shoots. And I believe it. So every spring, if I think about it, I go pick some and cook them. It’s not that I like them so much – in fact, they give me gas – but they remind me of the days gone by, they remind me of my mother. Now, away down here in the woods in this part of Staten Island, you might think you were fifteen miles on the other side of nowhere, but just a little ways up Arthur Kill Road, up near Arden Avenue, there’s a bend in the road where you can sometimes see the tops of the skyscrapers in New York. Just the tallest skyscrapers, and just the tops of them. It has to be an extremely clear day. Even then, you might be able to see them one moment and the next moment they’re gone. Right beside this bend in the road there’s a little swamp, and the edge of this swamp is the best place I know to pick pokeweed. I went up there one morning this spring to pick some, but we had a late spring, if you remember, and the pokeweed hadn’t come up. The fiddleheads were up, and golden club, and spring beauty, and skunk cabbage, and bluets, but no pokeweed. So I was looking here and looking there, and not noticing where I was stepping, and I made a misstep, and the next thing I knew I was up to my knees in mud. I floundered around in the mud a minute, getting my bearings, and then I happened to raise my head and look up, and suddenly I saw, away off in the distance, miles and miles away, the tops of the skyscrapers in New York shining in the morning sun. I wasn’t expecting it, and it was amazing. It was like a vision in the Bible.’

  Mr Hunter smoothed the icing on top of the cake with a table knife, and stepped back and looked at it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I guess that does it.’ He placed a cover on the cake, and took off his apron. ‘I better wash my hands,’ he said. ‘If you want to see something pretty, step in the dining room and look on the sideboard.’ There was a walnut sideboard in the dining room, and it had been polished until it glinted. On it were two lemon-meringue pies, two coconut-custard pies, a pound cake, a marble cake, and a devil’s-food cake. ‘Four pies and four cakes, counting the one I just finished,’ Mr Hunter called out. ‘I made them all this morning. I also got some corn muffins put away, to eat with the chicken fricassee. That ought to hold them.’ Above the dining-room table, hanging from the ceiling, was an old-fashioned lampshade. It was as big as a parasol, and made of pink silk, and fringed and tasseled. On one wall, in a row, were three religious placards. They were printed in ornamental type, and they had floral borders. The first said ‘JESUS NEVER FAILS.’ The second said ‘NOT MY WILL BUT THINE BE DONE.’ The third said ‘THE HOUR IS COMING IN WHICH ALL THAT ARE IN THE GRAVES SHALL HEAR HIS VOICE, AND SHALL COME FORTH; THEY THAT HAVE DONE GOOD, UNTO THE RESURRECTION OF LIFE AND THEY THAT HAVE DONE EVIL, UNTO THE RESURRECTION OF DAMNATION.’ On another wall was a framed certificate stating that George Henry Hunter was a life member of St John’s Lodge No. 29 of the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons. While I was looking at this, Mr Hunter came into the room. ‘I’m proud of that,’ he said. ‘There’s several Negro Mason organizations, but Prince Hall is the biggest, and I’ve been a member since 1906. I joined the Masons the same year I built this house. Did you notice my floors?’ I looked down. The floor boards were wide and made of some kind of honey-colored wood, and they were waxed and polished. ‘Virgin spruce,’ he said. ‘Six inches wide. Tongue and groove. Built to last. In my time, that was the idea, but in this day and time, that’s not the idea. They’ve got more things nowadays – things, things, things; kitchen stoves you could put in the parlor just to look at, refrigerators so big they’re all out of reason, cars that reach from here to Rossville – but they aren’t built to last, they’re built to wear out. And that’s the way the people want it. It’s immaterial to them how long a thing lasts. In fact, if it don’t wear out quick enough, they beat it and bang it and kick it and jump up and down on it, so they can get a new one. Most of what you buy nowadays, the outside is everything, the inside don’t matter. Like those tomatoes you buy at the store, and they look so nice and shiny and red, and half the time, when you get them home and slice them, all that’s inside is mush, red mush. And the people are the same. You hardly ever see a son any more as good as his father. Oh, he might be taller and stronger and thicker in the shoulders, playing games at school and all, but he can’t stand as much. If he tried to lift and pull the way the men of my generation used to lift and pull, he’d be ruptured by noon – they’d be making arrangements to operate. How’d I get started talking this way? I’m tired, that’s why. I been on my feet all morning, and I better sit down a few minutes.’ He took a tablecloth from a drawer of the sideboard and shook it out and laid it gently over the cakes and pies. ‘Let’s go on the back porch,’ he said.

  There were two wicker rocking chairs on the back porch, and we sat down. Mr Hunter yawned and closed his eyes and slowly lowered his chin to his chest. I looked at his back yard, in which there were several rows of sweet potatoes, a row of tomatoes, a weeping willow, and a feeding table for birds. Mr Hunter dozed for about five minutes, and then some blue jays flew into the yard, shrieking, and they aroused him. Pressing his elbows against the chair, he sat up, and followed the jays with his eyes as they swooped and swirled about the yard. When they flew away, he laughed. ‘I enjoy birds,’ he said. ‘I enjoy their colors. I enjoy the noise they make, and the commotion. Even blue jays. Most mornings, I get up real early and go out in the yard and scatter bread crumbs and sunflower seeds on the feeding table, and then I sit up here on the porch and watch. Oh, it’s nice out here in the early morning! Everything is so fresh. As my mother used to say, “Every morning, the world anew.” Some mornings, I see a dozen different kinds of birds. There were redbirds all over the yard this morning, and a surprising number of brown thrashers and red-winged blackbirds. I see a good many I don’t recognize; I do wish I knew their names. Every so often, a pair of pheasants land on the feeding table. Some of the old fields around here are full of them. I was picking
some tomatoes the other day, and a pair of pheasants scuttled out from under the tomato bushes and flew up right in my face. Whoosh! Up goes the cock bird. A second later – whoosh! Up goes the hen bird. One of her wings brushed against me. I had my mind on something else, or I could’ve caught her. I better not get on the subject of birds, or I’ll talk your ears off. You said on the phone you wanted to know something about Sandy Ground. What do you want to know? How it began?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

  ‘Oysters!’ said Mr Hunter. ‘That’s how it began.’ There was a fly swatter on the floor beside Mr Hunter’s chair, and a few feet in front of his chair was an old kitchen table with a chipped enamel top. He suddenly reached down and grabbed the swatter and stood up and took a step toward the table, on which a fly had lit. His shadow fell on the fly, and the fly flew away. Mr Hunter stared wildly into space for several moments, looking for the fly and muttering angrily, and then he sat back down, still holding the swatter.

  ‘It’s hard to believe nowadays, the water’s so dirty,’ he continued, ‘but up until about the year 1800 there were tremendous big beds of natural-growth oysters all around Staten Island – in the Lower Bay, in the Arthur Kill, in the Kill van Kull. Some of the richest beds of oysters in the entire country were out in the lower part of the Lower Bay, the part known as Raritan Bay. Most of them were on shoals, under ten to twenty feet of water. They were supposed to be public beds, open to anybody, but they were mainly worked by Staten Islanders, and the Staten Islanders considered they owned them. Between 1800 and 1820, all but the very deepest of these beds gradually petered out. They had been raked and scraped until they weren’t worth working any more. But the Staten Islanders didn’t give up. What they did, they began to bring immature oysters from other localities and put them on the best of the old beds and leave them there until they reached market size, which took from one to four years, all according to how mature the oysters were to begin with. Then they’d rake them up, or tong them up, and load them on boats, and send them up the bay to the wholesalers in New York. They took great pains with these oysters. They cleaned the empty shells and bottom trash off the beds that they put them on, and they spread them out as evenly as possible. Handled this way, oysters grew faster than they did all scrouged together on natural beds. Also, they grew more uniform in size and shape. Also, they had a better flavor. Also, they brought higher prices, premium prices. The center of the business was the little town of Prince’s Bay, over on the outside shore.

  ‘At first, the Staten Islanders used sloops and bought their seed stock close by, in bays in New Jersey and Long Island, but the business grew very fast, and in a few years a good many of them were using schooners that could hold five thousand bushels and were making regular trips to Maryland and Virginia. Some went into inlets along the ocean side of the Eastern Shore, and some went into Chesapeake Bay. They bought from local oystermen who worked natural beds in the public domain, and they usually had to visit a whole string of little ports and landings before they got a load. At that time, there were quite a few free Negroes among the oystermen on the Eastern Shore, especially in Worcester County, Maryland, on the upper part of Chincoteague Bay, and the Staten Island captains occasionally hired gangs of them to make the trip North and help distribute the oysters on the beds. Now and then, a few would stay behind on Staten Island for a season or two and work on empty beds, cleaning them off and getting them ready for new seed stock. Late in the eighteen-thirties or early in the eighteen-forties, a number of these men left their homes in and around Snow Hill, Maryland, the county seat of Worcester County, and came up to Staten Island to live. They brought their families, and they settled over here in the Sandy Ground section. The land was cheap in Sandy Ground, and it was in easy walking distance of Prince’s Bay, and a couple of Negro families were already living over here, a family named Jackson and a family named Henry. The records of our church go back to 1850, and they show the names of most of the original men from Snow Hill. Three of them were Purnells – Isaac Purnell, George Purnell, and Littleton Purnell. Two were Lambdens, spelled L-a-m-b-d-e-n, only their descendants changed the spelling to L-a-n-d-i-n – Landin. One was a Robbins, and one was a Bishop, and one was a Henman. The Robbins family died out or moved away many years ago, but Purnells, Landins, Bishops, and Henmans still live in Sandy Ground. They’ve always been the main Sandy Ground families. There’s a man from Sandy Ground who works for a trucking concern in New York, drives trailer trucks, and he’s driven through Maryland many times, and stopped in Snow Hill, and he says there’s still people down there with these names, plenty of them, white and Negro. Especially Purnells and Bishops. Every second person you run into in Snow Hill, just about, he says, is either a Purnell or a Bishop, and there’s one little crossroad town near Snow Hill that’s named Bishop and another one that’s named Bishopville. Through the years, other Negro families came to Sandy Ground and settled down and intermarried with the families from Snow Hill. Some came from the South, but the majority came from New York and New Jersey and other places in the North. Such as the Harris family, the Mangin family, the Fish family, the Williams family, the Finney family, and the Roach family.’

  All of a sudden, Mr Hunter leaned forward in his chair as far as he could go and brought the fly swatter down on the table. This time, he killed the fly.

  ‘I wasn’t born in Sandy Ground myself,’ he continued. ‘I came here when I was a boy. My mother and my stepfather brought me here. Two or three of the original men from Snow Hill were still around then, and I knew them. They were old, old men. They were as old as I am now. And the widows of several others were still around. Two of those old widows lived near us, and they used to come to see my mother and sit by the kitchen range and talk and talk, and I used to like to listen to them. The main thing they talked about was the early days in Sandy Ground – how poor everybody had been, and how hard everybody had had to work, the men and the women. The men all worked by the day for the white oystermen in Prince’s Bay. They went out in skiffs and anchored over the beds and stood up in the skiffs from sunup to sundown, raking oysters off the bottom with big old clawtoothed rakes that were made of iron and weighed fourteen pounds and had handles on them twenty-four feet long. The women all washed. They washed for white women in Prince’s Bay and Rossville and Tottenville. And there wasn’t a real house in the whole of Sandy Ground. Most of the families lived in one-room shacks with lean-tos for the children. In the summer, they ate what they grew in their gardens. In the winter, they ate oysters until they couldn’t stand the sight of them.

  ‘When I came here, early in the eighteen-eighties, that had all changed. By that time, Sandy Ground was really quite a prosperous little place. Most of the men were still breaking their backs raking oysters by the day, but several of them had saved their money and worked up to where they owned and operated pretty good-sized oyster sloops and didn’t take orders from anybody. Old Mr Dawson Landin was the first to own a sloop. He owned a forty-footer named the Pacific. He was the richest man in the settlement, and he took the lead in everything. Still and all, people liked him and looked up to him; most of us called him Uncle Daws. His brother, Robert Landin, owned a thirty-footer named the Independence, and Mr Robert’s son-in-law, Francis Henry, also owned a thirty-footer. His was named the Fanny Fern. And a few others owned sloops. There were still some places here and there in the Arthur Kill and the Kill van Kull where you could rake up natural-growth seed oysters if you spliced two rake handles together and went down deep enough, and that’s what these men did. They sold the seed to the white oystermen, and they made out all right. In those days, the oyster business used oak baskets by the thousands, and some of the Sandy Ground men had got to be good basket-makers. They went into the woods around here and cut white-oak saplings and split them into strips and soaked the strips in water and wove them into bushel baskets that would last for years. Also, several of the men had become blacksmiths. They made oyster rakes and repaired them, and did all kinds of ironw
ork for the boats.

  ‘The population of Sandy Ground was bigger then than it is now, and the houses were newer and nicer-looking. Every family owned the house they lived in, and a little bit of land. Not much – an acre and a half, two acres, three acres. I guess Uncle Daws had the most, and he only had three and three-quarter acres. But what they had, they made every inch of it count. They raised a few pigs and chickens, and kept a cow, and had some fruit trees and grapevines, and planted a garden. They planted a lot of Southern stuff, such as butter beans and okra and sweet potatoes and mustard greens and collards and Jerusalem artichokes. There were flowers in every yard, and rose-bushes, and the old women exchanged seeds and bulbs and cuttings with each other. Back then, this was a big strawberry section. The soil in Sandy Ground is ideal for strawberries. All the white farmers along Bloomingdale Road grew them, and the people in Sandy Ground took it up; you can grow a lot of strawberries on an acre. In those days, a river steamer left New Brunswick, New Jersey, every morning, and came down the Raritan River and entered the Arthur Kill and made stops at Rossville and five or six other little towns on the kill, and then went on up to the city and docked at the foot of Barclay Street, right across from Washington Market. And early every morning during strawberry season the people would box up their strawberries and take them down to Rossville and put them on a steamer and send them off to market. They’d lay a couple of grape leaves on top of each box, and that would bring out the beauty of the berries, the green against the red. Staten Island strawberries had the reputation of being unusually good, the best on the market, and they brought fancy prices. Most of them went to the big New York hotels. Some of the families in Sandy Ground, strawberries were about as important to them as oysters. And every family put up a lot of stuff, not only garden stuff, but wild stuff – wild-grape jelly, and wild-plum jelly, and huckleberries. If it was a good huckleberry year, they’d put up enough huckleberries to make deep-dish pies all winter. And when they killed their hogs, they made link sausages and liver pudding and lard. Some of the old women even made soap. People looked after things in those days. They patched and mended and made do, and they kept their yards clean, and they burned their trash. And they taught their children how to conduct themselves. And they held their heads up; they were as good as anybody, and better than some. And they got along with each other; they knew each other’s peculiarities and took them into consideration. Of course, this was an oyster town, and there was always an element that drank and carried on and didn’t have any more moderation than the cats up the alley, but the great majority were good Christians who walked in the way of the Lord, and loved Him, and trusted Him, and kept His commandments. Everything in Sandy Ground revolved around the church. Every summer, we put up a tent in the churchyard and held a big camp meeting, a revival. We owned the tent. We could get three or four hundred people under it, sitting on sawhorse benches. We’d have visiting preachers, famous old-time African Methodist preachers, and they’d preach every night for a week. We’d invite the white oystermen to come and bring their families, and a lot of them would. Everybody was welcome. And once a year, to raise money for church upkeep, we’d put on an ox roast, what they call a barbecue nowadays. A Southern man named Steve Davis would do the roasting. There were tricks to it that only he knew. He’d dig a pit in the churchyard, and then a little off to one side he’d burn a pile of hickory logs until he had a big bed of red-hot coals, and then he’d fill the pit about half full of coals, and then he’d set some iron rods across the pit, and then he’d lay a couple of sides of beef on the rods and let them roast. Every now and then, he’d shovel some more coals into the pit, and then he’d turn the sides of beef and baste them with pepper sauce, or whatever it was he had in that bottle of his, and the beef would drip and sputter and sizzle, and the smoke from the hickory coals would flavor it to perfection. People all over the South Shore would set aside that day and come to the African Methodist ox roast. All the big oyster captains in Prince’s Bay would come. Captain Phil De Waters would come, and Captain Abraham Manee and Captain William Haughwout and Captain Peter Polworth and good old Captain George Newbury, and a dozen others. And we’d eat and laugh and joke with each other over who could hold the most.