by Studs Terkel
Still, he offers morning salutations, after his own fashion. On one occasion, George Johnson, solemnly awaiting him, calls to the Fool, “Now, listen heah.”
The Fool shuffles over, a reluctant schoolboy. “What?”
“Whatchu mean what you say ev’y day?”
“Oh,” explains the Fool, “it’s the way I say ‘Good morning.’ Or ‘How are you?’ ‘How’s it goin’?’ ‘Have a nice day.’ Know what I mean? Friendly. Nothin’ bad.”
George Johnson scratches his head, looking up, studying the Fool’s face. He turns away. The Fool runs for his bus.
The following day is bitter cold. Most of the kids are inside the school’s hallway. A crossing guard, a red sash across his front, stalks toward the Fool, no nonsense. “You talk ’at way again, I’ll whip you’ ass.” He’s a Korean kid, nine years old at most. He tips the beam at seventy pounds, tops.
The Fool is astonished. The crossing guard turns away and strolls toward his companions across the street. The Fool’s voice is unexpectedly hard: “What did you say?” His voice carries across the way. He cannot stop, though something tells him he’s acting the fool even for the Fool. “Are you tryin’ to be a tough guy in front of your friends?”
The small boy with the red sash looks surprised. The Fool runs for his bus. His outburst was something he himself hadn’t anticipated. His fall from grace was, this time, less insignificant than before.
On a subsequent morning, a father from the Orient, his face furrowed from days unto days in the hard sun, is standing by his small child. The Fool, having offered the usual orotund salutation to one and all, smiles at the man. The man does not smile back. A Latino father and an Appalachian mother are also standing by. The Fool offers them his sunniest. They’re not certain how to respond. They turn away. The Fool runs for his bus.
On this latest day, the children of the UNICEF card are waiting for him. He approaches. The little Vietnamese sliver and the ever-so-small Japanese kid are jumping up and down, chanting in ragged unison, “The crazy man! The crazy man! The crazy man!” The small Filipino, the tiny Colombian, and the Tennessee tot appear more bored than sullen. George Johnson shakes his head and turns away.
As the Fool waits for his bus, he sees the blubbery old man of rheumy eyes and slight drool, ragged cap comically atop his head, a guest of the nearby halfway house. The Fool nods toward him and smiles. The man—is he Schubert’s wretched organ grinder?—shuffles on. The Fool boards the bus for the last lap of his daily winter journey.
As I said: The Fool’s a fool, as any fool can plainly see.
A Family Bar, 1979
SUNDAY MORNING COMING DOWN BOULEVARD: Call the street Argyle if you’re so inclined, free country. Walk the strip between Sheridan and Kenmore any day, especially on Sunday, and you’ll get the idea. A mother lode for Diane Arbus, were Diane Arbus still around catching our strangeness. It is our street, not “theirs.” It may be a Riverview funnyhouse mirror, but it’s our mirror. There is only they; there is only us. If you have any doubt, ask the Fool . . .
See. See how that raggedy kid, small, delighted Latino, call him Tico, see how he runs, darts, leaps with such agility between the U-Haul and the ’67 Chevy. Hear. Hear the Paducah beauty, twenty-three going on fifty, calling out to nobody in particular. Observe. Observe. The inscrutable Oriental (Why is he so wistful?) peering through the window of his Ma-and-Pa grocery while Mama-san busies herself at the counter. The American Dream. Seoul was never like this. Or was it? Listen. Listen to the two black dandies say something funny to the lean brown girl embracing the lamppost. She can’t stop laughing. Funneee!
Look. Look at these three others making it down the street the hard way. The girl (Can she be more than eighteen?), Himalayan, bearing mountains of flesh, waddles on. Her face, lifted upright by mounds of chins, is a baby doll’s, a Playboy Playmate’s. She is laughing, too. Indeed, she is radiant. The companion, strutting at her left, a chocolate cadaver, Artis Gilmore in height, is gesticulating excitedly. Dig. Dig, he’s making a joke. The third of these merrymakers is twisting, twitching, and Morris dancing along, though laboriously. He is palsied, cerebrally so. The hollow sound erupting tells us that he is enjoying the joke, too. Immensely. Oh, I love you, Junie Moon.
Stumbling out of Foremost Liquors, a fifth of J & B in a brown paper bag, the drunk Fool shuffles into the tavern. There are other such oases in these parts, any number of such places for people to get in out of the rain, especially when there is no rain at all. But this one has something going for it. Something spess-ial, the Welsh would say. Something edgy. Call it je ne sais quoi. The Fool has multiple choices, but he knows—don’t ask him how he knows—that this is his dearhearts-and-gentle-people place. Entrez-vous.
“Take This Job and Shove It.” Loud and clear out of the jukebox. It’s Johnny Paycheck’s way of saying hello. Again and again and again. The barmaid is Ollie, hard-pretty; a miracle out of the Scriptures had she been soft-pretty after so many hard days’ nights. Bad teeth. She’s been shoving quarters into the machine, quarters left as a tip by the drunk Fool. Paycheck’s her boy, again and again and again. Does the Fool sense that it’s her way of saying shove it?
The drunk Fool, who lives in a house on a tree-lined street—close by, yet five planets away—is on his fourth boilermaker. It does seem silly, what with a good enough fifth of J & B in a brown bag at his elbow, patched, of course. His neighbor, slouched low on the adjacent stool, a weary black, age indeterminate, has a brown paper bag at his elbow, too. A quart of muscatel. You pays your money and takes your choice.
“She likes that song,” the drunk Fool, who catches on quick, mumbles at his musky friend. The other shakes his head, looks at the wine while it’s red, and chuckles softly as though it’s a private joke between himself and his brown paper bag. He’s the only black in the place. The others are Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia people. Bad teeth. They’re busy with one another talking Appalachian talk. A randy joke or two. A job lost, another found and lost. Tomorrow Monday Morning Coming Up, a day at the day-labor exchange. A woman who has run off, a man wearing horns. Harsh laughter. Then, soft: home. Home, that’s what they’re talking about most. Where they were, not where they are. They don’t know where the hell they’re at. Neither does the drunk Fool. His neighbor may know, but he ain’t talking; that’s between himself and the brown paper bag.
“I like that song,” the Fool, stiff as an Appalachian recruit in basic training, says to the fifth of Early Times that’s minding its own business on the back shelf.
“You better,” says Ollie. “Your quarters.” She refills the shot glass.
“Hey, she’s pretty good,” says the Fool. He grins a foolish grin at his neighbor.
“All right,” laughs the other.
“Take this job and shove it,” Johnny Paycheck defiantly growls, again and again and again.
Ollie has other fish to fry. At the street end of the bar, she nudges a seated skeleton. Something is passed about Kentucky. There is a short laugh. What the Fool hears isn’t that funny, but what the hell, he joins in, too. There’s nothing like getting in good with your new neighbors.
Ollie freshens his beer.
“Kentucky, huh?” He squints at her. He can do little else; his eyelids weigh heavily.
“’At’s me all over,” she says.
“Ever been to Whitesburg?”
The drunk Fool had been there a few months before, looking in at Tom Gish. Tom runs The Mountain Eagle, a local newspaper. He had returned to his hometown, realizing the journalist’s dream of being a small-town editor. Among his own people. They kicked the bejeepers out of him, his own people did. Tom had written something about strip mining laying waste to the land. Tom is still bleeding. Whitesburg.
“Sure I been to Whitesburg,” says Ollie. “My brother’s a jailer. ’At’s how I kept outta jail.”
The Fool laughs appreciatively. He shoves two more quarters at her.
“Put ’em in the box,” she says. He
stumbles off the stool and does as requested. He presses B-7 four times. “Take this job and shove it.” Anything to win Ollie’s approval. After all, her brother’s a keeper.
He points at his shot glass. Ollie pours something into it. He tugs at his pants pocket, hears the sound of ripping cloth, and comes up with two badly wrinkled bills. He slaps them on the counter.
“May I buy you one?” he says to his neighbor.
The musky man sighs, looks at the Fool, smiles, nods. “Gotcha covered.”
Ollie pours out some red wine.
“How about you? Would you care for one?”
“Why not?” says Ollie, as she goes for the white.
“Miners are havin’ a rough time,” he says out of the blue. It’s not really out of the blue; the strike’s been going on for some time and the TV is full of it, telling the story in a halfassed way.
“They never had it so good,” says Ollie.
The Fool shuts his eyes tight. His head is throbbing, intimations of a hangover bearing down. It is slowly dawning on him that Ollie’s a fink. He’s a romantic and somehow can’t see the hardworking Cumberland barmaid as the mine operators’ darling. Yet Ollie is indubitably a fink. And down at the other end of the bar, are they all finks, too? The whole world is finky when you’re out of love. His neighbor stares into his muscatel. He shoulda stood in bed, the Fool.
“ERA women is pigs!” It is a loud pronunciamiento from the shadowy end of the bar. He had been aware of vague mumblings in that precinct, but hadn’t noticed the patrons there. A couple of couples had been occupying space and, after a fashion, spooning. But now their presence is definitely felt.
“A man, if he’s half a man, wears the pants in the family, and any woman who thinks different’s a pig an’ oughta be horsewhipped.” The Fool shields his eyes as he searches out the voice, a no-fooling-around contralto. She is an extra-large blonde, bearing a startling resemblance to The Muppet Show’s Miss Piggy. Her consort is a sad, silent horse. Clearly, he’s not accustomed to much talk, not in present company.
“Why do you say that?” The Fool, indubitably drunk, doesn’t really know when to quit. His voice is low, mellow, as though hawking Gallo wines on TV. He has assumed his sincere, persuasive tone.
“ ’Cause ’at’s what they are—pigs—and oughta be horsewhipped.”
“Why do you say that?” He is Mastroianni now, the smiling, silly Marcello of La Dolce Vita’s last reel.
“ ’Cause they’re pigs an’ oughta be horsewhipped.”
This is getting nowhere. He slides off the stool and moves toward the shadows.
“You’re a woman,” he says.
“All woman.” It’s a challenge more than a declaration.
“Well, then,” says the Fool, indubitably a fool, “don’t you like yourself ?” Oh, boy.
“Hey.” The other woman, larger than our Phyllis Schlafly and even more blond, disentangles herself from a bespectacled daddy, whose eyes are out of focus. “That’s my stepdaughter. Watch yer language.”
“Oh,” he says, sinking deeper into the slough, “we’re merely having a discussion.”
He fumbles out another quarter, finds his way to the jukebox, and presses down hard on B-7. Twice. He needs Johnny Paycheck. Back at the old stand, he finds Ollie waiting for him. She is not smiling.
“Sir.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“This is a family bar.”
“Oh, I know.”
“We can’t have that.”
“We were just having a friendly discussion.”
“Sir, this is a family bar.”
“May I have another beer, please?”
Ollie flips open a Meisterbräu and carefully pours it into his glass.
Ollie calls out cheerily to the others at the far end that she’s knocking off for an hour. Her relief is a mustache and long legs in a cowboy hat. He’s laughing about something or other. “OK,” he announces, “Johnny Cash is here.”
The fool is hearing Johnny Paycheck and wonders, Why not Johnny Cash? He’s out of quarters.
“Where you from?” asks the Fool.
“Tennessee. T for Texas, T for Tennessee.” This one’s full of good cheer. The Fool feels better. Maybe those guys down there are not finks, after all. Maybe they’re ex-miners, blacklisted or black-lunged. Maybe. And maybe he’s J. Paul Getty.
He gets a good grip on his brown paper bag and slowly, carefully, as though walking a tightrope, moves toward the door.
On the Magnificent Mile, somewhere between Kenmore and Sheridan, invigorated by the Sunday air, he finds himself galumphing alongside Junie Moon and her two companions. Junie, all four hundred pounds of her girlishness, is laughing, still laughing. Artis Gilmore is gesticulating excitedly. Their buddy, twisting, twitching, and Morris dancing along, is letting go with a hollow noise, clearly enjoying the joke. The Fool, his brown paper bag clasped to his pouch, like a kangaroo’s baby, is smiling. Now they are four.
Aaron Barkham
“ ONE TIME THEY HAULED A MULE OUT.” They fired the guy that got that mule killed. They told him a mule’s worth more’n a man. They had to pay fifty dollars for a mule, but a man could be got for nothin’. He never had worked another day since. Blackballed for costin’ ’em that money.
“An old woman, about sixty years, she come down from Canyon Creek. One time she was makin’ a speech near a railroad track. She was standin’ on a box. The strikebreakers shot her off with a shotgun. . . .
“The county sheriff had a hundred strikebreakers. They were called deputies. The company paid him ten cents a ton on all the coal carried down the river, to keep the union out. . . .
“They brought the army in. The country was under martial law, stayed till about thirty-one. What strikes me is the soldiers along the company road, dispersin’ people. When people’d gather together, they couldn’t talk. Two guys could, but three couldn’t.
“About that time, a bunch of strikebreakers come in with shotguns and ax handles. Tried to break up union meetings. The UMW deteriorated and went back to almost no existence. It didn’t particularly get full strength till about 1949. And it don’t much today in West Virginia. So most people ganged up and formed the Ku Klux Klan.
“In my life, I’ve found people won’t take anything. If things get real bad again, I’m afraid there’d be some millionaires made paupers because they’d take their money. They’d take it the rough way. The people are gonna take care of their families, if they’d have to shoot somebody else. And you can’t blame ’em for that. You think I wouldn’t take what you got if you had a million dollars and I had to protect my family? I sure would. I’d take your money, one way or the other. Some people don’t have courage enough to fight for what they have comin’. Until 1934, more than half the people of Logan County were scabbin’. Gives you an idea how they don’t know . . .” 4
Barkham, black lungs and all, came to Uptown, too. Obviously, he patronized another kind of bar in Uptown.
A Voice from a “Hey, You” Neighborhood, 1973
Peggy Terry is usually described as “a poor white.” She is certainly that; she is also Peggy Terry, an individual. She lives in Uptown, where so many Appalachian and Ozarkian émigrés are crowded together in rickety furnished flats. They are often charged by the week. Like poor blacks, they provide bonanzas for absentee landlords. Like poor blacks, they were, once upon a time, considered faceless. Though the psychic depression is deep, so is the anger.
“ HILLBILLIES ARE UP HERE for a few years and they get their guts kicked out and they realize their white skin doesn’t mean what they always thought it meant.”
She reflects on her personal experiences, on race and on life in the big city.
“Almost any black says what I would say, were I better educated and had more words at my command. I’ve found that being poor white trash really means I learned about my own history in starting to read black history. Influences on my life—church, schools, the air you breathe—tend to make you
feel you’re not really worthwhile. While you’re deeply racist, you don’t think about yourself. You still have a terrible burden of guilt. The way I came to know myself was reading black history. It’s a long story how I came to do that. The first thing that I read was Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett, and it just blew my mind. So many things I didn’t know. When I realized that the beautiful history of black people had been kept completely from me, I became interested in myself.”
Many black people can’t live where they want. Can you?
“No, because I don’t have the money. This is just as bad a wall as the color of one’s skin. This is one of the funny jokes, in the country: There are no poor whites. Nobody talks about us. The middle class is deathly afraid of us. They’re more afraid of us than they are of blacks.”
Why, Peggy?
“Because we look like them, but we don’t think like them. Our way of life is more like Puerto Ricans, like poor blacks, like any other poor people. Nobody wants to admit this. What they say to us in various ways is ‘You’re white and you could make it if you really wanted to.’ It isn’t true, because this economic system will not absorb all the people who need jobs, and if all the whites in this country were educated, who would they get to go in the Klan? Who would pick cotton and do all those hard and terrible jobs?
“A lot of this is being automated now, but it wasn’t when I was growing up. My folks were sharecroppers. They were a little bit of everything to stay alive. We traveled back and forth from Kentucky and Oklahoma. I married a young boy who was from Alabama and went there to live when I was fifteen. It’s the same trap. But it takes you a long time to figure it out, and this is what they don’t want you to figure out. They don’t want you to figure out that you have anything in common with Spanish-speaking people or black people or any other kind of poor people. You’re white and they drill that into you, and this is supposed to make up for your hungry belly. When you figure all this out, you’re goddamned angry that you’ve been stupid for so long. It took me forty years to figure this out. And I’m ashamed. I think of a song Bob Dylan wrote: of the poor white in the caboose of the train. He talks of how the sheriffs and mayors, the cops, all get paid for the kinds of dirty work that they do for the rich. And don’t make no mistake about it: they do it for the rich; they don’t do it for the poor.”
