by Mary Burns
When we reached the Loop once again a pall of soot layered everything beneath the elevated tracks. It was there he took both my hands. Would he kiss me right there on the corner of Adams Street, with the world and all going by? I feasted on the sight of him, my Desmond Malloy—a man taller than me by half as much again, shirt open at the collar, jacket loose, too, and trousers wrinkled as they might be from any activity on a day like that one, even from sitting at the ballpark. His brown hair combed back, he’d seen to that, and his boater at a cheerful angle covering his head.
Despite the hat, his face’d gone red from the sun and the heat and the whiskey he’d been sipping, and the regret he felt for me, that my debut should be on such a hard bed. Debut, he’d said, as if he’d been after introducing me to society at a fancy dress ball. Gave me power, that, so it was me who said, “If you’ve got to get down to your barn, go ahead then. I’ll just continue on to Bridey’s. Margaret will be looking for me. And you’ve your future to think about.” Our future.
Him holding my hands still, then pursing his lips in such a way deepened that dimple. Staring into my face, the eye drifting off. But he never kissed me, no, not there at the streetcar stop where his workmates might have seen him. I could understand him not wanting to be teased and it having happened fast, him and me. Presto! But why not fast? Packy gone so sudden, and people dying here and there, unpredictably. Irene Miles, and little Janet maybe sleeping, but not in the sun, with it fallen, and maybe a sleep she’d never wake from, and all them didn’t come back from the war. I never even stopped at St. Patrick’s to beg forgiveness because, like I always said, if God didn’t want us to feel like we did, why had he given us those feelings?
Monday, July 28, 1919
We never heard anything that night. Nothing like the screams going on less than five miles away, not the clubbing, the hollering, the mean words spit from thin-lipped mouths, broad-lipped mouths. Never knew of the men dragged off the streetcars. No, not them killed neither, until the Monday morning, me as fresh as I could make myself, my hair washed and still damp, the Jap Rose soap smell rising off my skin and my clothes aired and them stained drawers hidden where I hid all my material secrets—my writing book, the bathing costume. There was me marching towards the stop full of happiness as if going to a party, not another day at my job. Margaret urging me to slow down, shouting, “So he’s there at the office is he, and that’s why you’re hurryin’ so.” She didn’t know it would be even before then I saw my man if the right car came along, and so I skipped a little until I heard the voice of the little newsie hollering, “Getchyer paper and read all about it!”
FULL CONFESSION!
JANET’S SLAYER TALKS!
People gathered round him, and plenty too across, where the smaller fellow yelled.
LITTLE GIRL’S BODY UNDER COAL
IN VIRGINIA HOTEL BASEMENT!
and the papers after flying off the stacks, the blaring headlines multiplied in the hands of men and women whose faces you couldn’t see for them gobbling up the news.
TWO KILLED, FIFTY HURT IN RACE RIOTS!
BATHING BEACH FIGHT SPREADS TO BLACK BELT
CAR PEACE NEARER
FARES TO GO UP TO 7¢
So her, the sweet child, sleeping yes, but under coal dust not the sun, despite himself tried to comfort me with that image of her, tried to make me believe everything’d be all right. But her sleep eternal and him, Fitzgerald, guilty as everyone’d thought from the beginning. Oh, if it had not been so, if some kind of miracle’d come to reward all we who prayed for one. Better if she’d fallen under one of those fits could take people, amnesia or something, only to have the spell pass and her wake smiling to the relief of her family and of us all.
But how to properly feel the sadness owed the event when another tragedy competed? It took your breath away, it did. Riot in Chicago? Dead? Injured? Shivering, looking around like the trouble stood next to me, meeting the eyes of others lifted away from a hum of opinion more than actual sensible words, to see who stood near. Yet the cars were still running and we could hear the clack-clack of the one meant for us.
The world had not stopped, and some colored folks—ones I hardly noticed on regular days—lined up along the rails like always. A woman held her head up, her chin pointing out. Her in a stylish suit of white clothes, her hat just as white, with a single feather pointing out. Never directed her eyes anywhere but straight ahead. A gentleman in his summer seersucker, a bow tie, him carrying a case could be a lawyer or a businessman. Some younger, not dressed so well, pearl divers they might be at one of the big downtown hotels. I’d got used to them there, never appeared unusual at the stop, but only fanned themselves and yawned and shooed away flies rose up from the horse droppings, like all the rest of us did.
The same today, except I was not the only one glancing over at them. All of a sudden we were noticing differences we’d been living right along. All the races and people from every nation on earth mixed up. You could feel wobbly, not sure of the ground you were standing on, and it was best—sure easiest—when we kept with our kind. But how could a body manage that in a city like this? My own Margaret about to graft herself onto a Polack?
As the streetcar clacked up, my mind was split between anticipation of who I’d see craning his head out the door of the car, sadness about little Janet, and some fear concerning the riot started at the beach just a few miles away from where we—Desmond and I—were after knowing each other in the way the nuns used the word. A Negro boy stoned as he swam across the invisible dividing line in the lake marked where whites should swim on one side and colored on the other. His pals challenging the men threw the stones and then the riot began, said the papers.
A colored rioter is said to have died from wounds inflicted by Policeman John O’Brien, who fired into a mob at Twenty-ninth Street and Cottage Grove. The body, it is said, was spirited away by colored men. Minor rioting continued through the night all over the South Side. Negroes who were found in streetcars were dragged to the street and beaten. They were first ordered to the street by white men and, if they refused, the trolley was jerked off the wires.
Yet, not a sign of any thugs there at the Halsted stop on the Madison line, only we weary ones beginning our week, suddenly anxious at what all the news could mean. Riots spreading, but how far? Would we be safe? Would Margaret be, walking her way to the shirt factory? And if safe from the rioters, then from the Bolsheviks sent bombs in the mail, and airships that fell from the sky, and morons like Fitzgerald free to work in a building where normal folks lived? And if safe from those, then starved because of labor trouble at the Union Stock Yards, or forced to walk to the Loop because of the strike on the cars?
But, no, the car men were not striking today, maybe not at all, only the fares going up by nearly half, and how would Margaret and I manage, with me paying equal to the price of lunch in a café just to get to work and back? Still, there was Desmond, yes, and the promise he represented. Not only the tendency he’d developed to keep that hand touched me in such secret places, that same hand of his over the fare box, but more, the moment when he would ask me to become his wife.
Desmond was not on the car stopped first, and the colored kept to themselves, and Clyde said good morning same as always when I bustled past his desk in the Marquette Building on my way to the cages to ride up with the other workers. A thinner group that day, and when I walked into Mr. R’s magic shop, didn’t it seem like I entered a different age? Sure a different world, yes, where people believed they could get out of any mess same as the master himself, as long as they possessed “The Sensational Handcuff Act,” available by mail order only, for thirty-five dollars.
Mr. R startled me by greeting me himself, from behind the counter Florence generally presided over.
“Morning, Miss Curragh, any trouble up your way?”
“Not to my eyes, though the papers say it’s everywhere.”
> “You’ve got the Trib I see. Well, there’s trouble here. Our Florence, who is always prompt, is missing today. George and Eveline, as well. Frightened, I suspect. You’re the brave one, Miss Curragh, to ride the cars today. Your face shows it though, particularly rosy this morning.”
“Already roastin’ then, isn’t it?”
He’d seldom spoke to me as long, Mr. R, not since the moment he hired me and showed me to my desk at the back. Directions came through Florence, while Mr. R held himself apart, half hid by the cigar smoke clouds puffed around him.
“City’s considering barring coloreds from the cars altogether till things settle.”
Did he expect me to stay and chat? Me, the quiet one? When nothing more came out of his mouth I continued on as always to my place where, true enough, only me and Ruth would occupy our desks that day. No Florence, no George, and no Eveline. Her, oh, I could only imagine, and with dread, where she might have found herself. Her with her light-skinned dark fellow, the mulatto, and wasn’t she the brazen one? But in times like this I hoped they’d gone home to where they each belonged. Where that was I didn’t know, but I found out soon enough.
Midway through the morning Mr. R asked me to cover the front while he stepped out to take care of some business. Didn’t say how long he’d be nor what the nature of the business was and I never asked, for it was a novelty to be standing somewheres I’d only passed through before then. I planted myself behind the counter as Mr. R and Florence would do and imagined a conversation with one of the magicians might come in looking for supplies. Puffed me up it did to picture how I’d slide open a case lined with velvet, where crystals said to have magic powers nestled around a set of magician’s cups looked like they were made of real silver. It wasn’t long before the door opened a crack and I straightened up for a potential customer. But wasn’t it Eveline herself.
Finger to her lips, whispering “shh,” she beckoned me into the hall where her fancy man stood waiting in that same outfit I’d seen the day before. Ice cream suit and straw fedora, which he took off and tipped when Eveline introduced us. “Mr. Robert Jordan, I’d like ya to meet my pal Maeve. Mr. Jordan is a real estate man.” He smiled that big lit up smile must have made him good at his job. “An agent, you know, and he found me a swell place on State, not too far south, but criminy with all that’s goin’ on, I can’t stay there.”
“You know Jesse Binga, do you, miss? Name’s been in the papers just about every week. I wish I could say it’s been good news, but they’re tryin’ to bomb out Jesse. Unfortunately, it so happens to be one of Mr. Binga’s buildings where I found suitable accommodation for Miss Eveline.”
They never said they were staying together, and I didn’t want to know.
“Suitable, he says.” Here I thought she’d break out with that ironic laugh of hers, but Mr. Jordan wasn’t finished.
“It’s on account of all the people moving up from the south and needing somewhere to stay, spreading into neighborhoods where white folks live. White folks don’t like it. I’m talking about the bombings.”
“Mr. Jordan,” (and here she winked at him) “thinks I oughta get out of town for a while. Visit my cousin in Madison, Wisconsin. Well, Madison is not so far.”
“In the United States of America, a man is supposed to be free as a U.S. dollar bill no matter his color.” Mr. Jordan was not smiling anymore, but shaking his head, addressing someone was not Eveline nor me. “A man ought to be able to find a place for his family anywhere in the city he can pay for it, but huh-uh. They say colored folks have no civic pride. They say let the coloreds into a neighborhood and soon enough you’re gonna have your gambling dens and bawdy houses. Well, miss, thing is—”
Eveline cut in. “Mr. Jordan, my pal Maeve don’t need a lecture. All you say might be true enough, but I’m not going to risk my neck for that or any fight’s not mine. If I have to stay up in Madison a week, I’ll stay a week. Maeve, you make Mr. R understand, willya? I don’t want to lose my place here, not with what it takes to get a job in this burg.”
“They want to blame that on us too. Not good enough that colored folks died right alongside white folks over there in the fields of France. No, these thugs like to forget that. They say the only reason our boys signed up was so’s they could find themselves a white French lady.”
I’m looking from one to the other as they’re talking to me, both tall, both looking down as if I’m the student and they’re after giving me a lesson. It was dim in the hall, but Mr. Jordan’s gold ring flashed as he waved his hand from here to there. He was a hand waver, all right, but not the light hearted fella’d shocked me for his ease with Eveline the day before.
“There’s talk of the National Guard coming in to quiet things. It’d be better than the Chicago cops who started the trouble.”
“They didn’t arrest the guy who threw the rock and killed that colored boy, Maeve. That got things going. That’s what he means.”
“It started long before that, Miss Eveline, Miss Maeve. I was born here and my daddy was born here and I ought to know. They treat us like we’re just off the train, like the plantation colored.” It looked like his hand wanted to touch her like his eyes did, but he pulled it back and fingered the tie know at his throat instead. Tie had a floral pattern as I recall, and the scent of bay rum rose off his milky-tea skin, and it must a been the same lotion caused the mustache above his full lips to glisten. When we heard the elevator mechanism whirring, he edged himself back against the wall and sort of slid along it, towards the stairway exit.
“Maeve, we are flat in luck to find you here. I thought’d be Florence. Guess she didn’t want to risk her pretty little blonde head.”
She kept talking as Mr. Jordan continued to back away, doors down from the Chicago Magic Company office and she moved as if he had a string pulling her, and because she did, I did. All the while I’m wondering, what if it’s Mr. R gets off the elevator and finds me outside when I said I’d look after the front and what would he have to say about Eveline and her fellow, if he was her fellow, and I don’t know why I was still asking the question.
§
Everyone was scared. Hot and scared and if not angry, sad—and hot. Everyone hot. The wave of scorching temperatures lasted and lasted, made you think you were in Florida where Margaret and me’d been, or some place never knew snow and cold rain pelted Chicago in November. Yet faithful Billy got in with the envelopes, even earlier than normal, and dropped them off at our desks, and picked up the orders we had for him and, if he was in no hurry to get back to the storeroom to fill them, we didn’t mind him hanging around a bit, asking us what we’d seen and making up stories about being mistaken for a colored himself.
“How?” Ruth asked. “And who would do the mistaking? You may not be as pale skinned as Maeve, but there’s nothing about you says Negro.”
“If it was night, though, and my head was down.”
She only laughed for him exaggerating, our Billy. Him skinny and tousle-haired, mixed of some kind of ancestry did tint him darker than me, but not as much as he imagined. It’s just that he always wanted to be part of things, Billy.
“Hey, Ruth,” he said, before ducking back into the storeroom. “Do ya know what kind of fruit here is always in season?”
She thought for a minute, despite also grimacing at the way he wouldn’t let up.
“An apple?”
“A date!”
He laughed as he shuffled back, as if offstage. That Billy. Ruth was blushing, but could she a thought he was after flirting with her?
It was that distracting, inside and out. But I did my share of work ripping open the envelopes and making out the forms and passing the money along. Mr. R went out again to look for the latest edition of the papers, told us he was going to lock the door this time. Wouldn’t be gone long. When he came back in he told us his cronies in the café off the lobby’d said the colored counc
il members had to ride the line between pleasing their white voters and being loyal to their kind. Didn’t seem to trouble him, though. Despite people of every hue battling each other all over the city, Mr. R himself seemed somehow outside it all.
But me, who’d expected to spend the day wrenching my thoughts away from that scene by the lake, his body over mine, my eyes closed but feeling him, letting his hands and his fingers, and that other part of him, come into me the way I’d never known, wasn’t I distracted by news of the terrible ruction’d started while I dozed beside my man, not really sleeping, because my mind made a stage where the romance played out again and again. Darlin’, he’d said, and that pinch beneath the water scared me half to death, and his voice like pink smoke in my ear when he apologized for it being the way it’d been on the hard ground and my debut. Hah!
Oh, but why did I have to mix Janet into those thoughts? Not her so much as the man who’d had his way with her, and her so small. It could not have felt a bit thrilling to the child, only terrifying, unless she was already gone and if so, how could he? How could it be that same act expressed love drove men who could not love at all? I wanted to confide this thought to Desmond, would confide it, when we next met. I imagined the twist of his head. How ashamed he must feel sometimes for being a man, same as Fitzgerald.
The morning passed, tension building, so when lunchtime came, Ruth and me, we thought we ought to stay indoors and took our lunches to the mezzanine and, though there were no chairs or benches, we could walk around below the heads of them Indians guarded our place. Lucky, too, considering. Ruth confessed she hoped Eveline was okay, because I knew, didn’t I, that Eveline liked to go to what they called then a Black and Tan resort, where colored and white folks mixed and listened to wild music, and all the black men wanted a white woman. She’d read about it, but not in one of her “True Life Love Stories.”
