by Colin Asher
Nelson’s act was entertaining, but it didn’t withstand close scrutiny—“It got a little ridiculous the poses he would put on,” Frankie Lemon said—and the Fallonites never accepted him because, bluster aside, he was far more reserved than they were. “He was smart as a shit house rat,” Conroy said later. “He didn’t drink much, he was too cautious.”
Bud Fallon could see the situation clearly. He tolerated Nelson’s presence because it lent his gang prestige, but he resented being the object of Nelson’s curiosity, so he set the price of access high, and raised it steadily. At first, he mocked Nelson. “I don’t have a Pulitzare but I’m not the type to care,” he recited once in a packed bar. “’Cause I got a pocketful of notes.” Then he attacked Nelson’s reputation by mailing anti-Semitic letters to Meyer Levin and Henry Alsberg—the head of the Federal Writers’ Project—and signing them with Nelson’s name. Finally, in December, he sent an abusive letter directly to Nelson.
“I . . . know you for what you are,” it read, “the flash in the pan, the mediocrity, the almost-but-not-quite-Algren. The Communist Ass Kisser unparalleled, the fawning, vapid, favor courter. . . .
“Better be content to sink into your greasykike [sic] obscurity . . .”¶
Nelson accepted Fallon’s provocations as the price of collecting material, but eventually he realized he was paying for the time he spent with the Fallonites in more painful ways as well. He never had enough time to write, his friends were beginning to surpass him, and his personal life was a shambles.
Richard Wright, who was living a more focused and austere life in New York, had just published a collection of short stories to great acclaim. Nelson wrote to congratulate him, but his circumstances also required him to mention an old loan in the same note. “I hate to knock down that $500, needing it as I know you do,” he wrote to Wright, “but you will recall that you intended to send along a couple bucks I loaned you, when you could spare it. . . . we live here on the grim verge ourselves.”
Nelson was the up-and-comer when he met Wright five years earlier, so the reversal of their fortunes was impossible to ignore—and so was the state of Nelson’s marriage. By the spring of 1939, it was nothing but silence and jagged edges.
Amanda rarely saw Nelson, so she found other ways to fill her time. She had recently begun attending a weekly painting class where she focused on abstracts and still lifes. She liked the idea of being an artist, like Nelson, and coveted his approval, so once she brought a watercolor back to Rat Alley and asked him what he thought of it.
“It’s very nice,” Nelson said, “but what does it mean?” His reaction made Amanda feel fragile and discouraged. She resented the idea that all art had to have social significance, so she quit. “I never really did anything after that,” she said—no more classes, no more painting.
Amanda had a new job by then. She had stopped counting the homeless population in Lincoln Park and accepted a less conventional position selling erotic books on the sidewalk outside a porn theater on Michigan Avenue. It was not as physically demanding as her last job, but still trying. She had to stand for hours, and look charming while she solicited.
One day at work, a tall Armenian man named Ed Cazarian approached Amanda. He was an old friend of Richard Leekley’s, so they spent a few minutes catching up. Before he left, Cazarian asked Amanda if she’d like to have dinner sometime. His implication was clear, so she took a moment to consider the proposal’s merits. He’s “ugly,” she thought, but he’s very nice.
“Yes,” she replied then. I would.
Cazarian passed by regularly after that. They ate dinner together several times, and then they began visiting hotels to have sex.
Amanda could have hidden the relationship, but didn’t. Conroy was having an affair, and she suspected—but never had proof—that Nelson was, too, so she flaunted hers. She told Cazarian to call the Rat Alley apartment when he wanted to see her, and took his calls without shame. Sometimes, Nelson answered the phone, heard a man’s voice, and handed the receiver to Amanda.
“I’ll see you at eight thirty,” she’d say. Then she went out for the night.
Amanda expected Nelson to confront her about the relationship, but he never did. Instead, he watched her leave, and brooded until she returned home.
Once, she and Cazarian spent a weekend together. They drove to Peoria, Illinois, where he lived, and played house. On the second evening, they had sex several times and then went to sleep. That night, Amanda dreamed about Nelson and woke up screaming his name.
Cazarian ended the relationship the next day. He said he wanted to marry Amanda, but suspected she would never leave Nelson, so there was no reason for them to see each other again.
Amanda returned to Rat Alley feeling chastened and lonely then, and slipped back into whatever was left of her marriage. She had been seeing Cazarian for months, but she and Nelson never spoke about him.
Nelson’s sister Bernice had been sick for some time by then. Her stomach was swollen, and she was lethargic. She was in constant pain as well, so in early 1939 she agreed to have exploratory surgery. When the doctors cut her open, they found cancer in her intestines. It was a death sentence.
Bernice’s husband, Morris, had recently gone back to work, and he spent lavishly to make her happy and comfortable. He took her to California that summer for a vacation, and bought a large house in North Park when they returned. Then the family gathered. Gerson and Goldie moved in so they could care for Bernice and her children, Robert and Ruth, and Morris stayed close to home.
Nelson’s reaction was different. Bernice had introduced him to the written word when he was young, encouraged him to write, and made it possible for him to go to college. Without her, he would have become a mechanic or maybe ended up in jail after getting too involved with the scene at Johnson’s. He was in her debt, and he decided to honor her life with labor instead of grief. After her diagnosis, he cut back on the amount of time he spent with Fallon and Conroy and began writing like a man on deadline.
The first novel in Nelson’s planned series was going to be set in the Near Northwest Side—the Triangle, the heart of Chicago Polonia. So he began spending his free time there, collecting material.
The neighborhood had a fascinating history. A hundred years earlier, a few Polish immigrants fled the Polish–Russian War and settled in the area with the intention of establishing a state called New Poland. They failed politically, but succeeded in every other regard. Waves of immigrants followed, and created a neighborhood that was both part of the city and separate from it.
The Polish community in the Northwest was the largest ethnic enclave in Chicago when Nelson began his research, and among the most powerful. It produced millionaires, policeman, teachers, politicians, and priests. The Dziennik Chicagoski, Zgoda, the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, and a handful of other newspapers kept people informed. St. Stanislaus Kostka, St. Boniface, and Holy Trinity tended to their souls, and the Catholic Union and the National Alliance told everyone how to vote. It was possible to live in the area without ever finding a reason to leave, and it was possible to thrive without knowing English.
But the Triangle was changing. New immigrants were pouring in from Europe and competing with native-born residents for jobs and space, and the American-born generation that came of age during the Depression was faltering. Their ethnicity prevented them from joining the city’s mainstream, but their American childhoods created an unbridgeable distance between themselves and their parents. They spoke broken Polish, bowed their heads in church without praying, and looked toward the future with apprehension. There weren’t enough civil service positions to go around anymore, and political posts were only available to the people with the deepest roots and the most friends.
The Triangle’s insularity made those children feel like orphans. They were the product of a city that never wanted them and a neighborhood that couldn’t afford to provide—so they became toughs and boxers, stick-up men, prostitutes, and madams. They hung around schoo
l yards, gathered under the El tracks, and kept themselves out of jail by paying off the police and ward politicians who had come of age a generation ahead of them.
When Nelson began spending time in the neighborhood, he focused his attention on those youths because their lives captured the area’s shortcomings and contradictions. He started haunting street carnivals, juvenile court, poolrooms, and a juvenile detention home. He began corresponding with prisoners who had been convicted of street crimes in the area, and a former alderman of the Twenty-sixth Ward who had been indicted for selling civil service jobs. And he wandered around the Triangle, interviewing people and writing down snippets of dialogue as they floated past.
In the evenings, after he returned home, he typed up the best material he had collected:#
“I used to go by taverns; I was fourteen.”
“In 1937 I was lyin’ til 1938, then I seen it didn’t do no good.”
“The boys rolled a Jew on Division Street for $6 and his topcoat. A few days later they were picked up on suspicion. After they were thrown in a cell awhile the same Jew was thrown in with them, drunk. They rolled him again.”
After a four-year absence, Nelson’s writing finally returned to print in 1939. He and Conroy had released three issues of the New Anvil, and his poetry appeared in each one. Then Poetry magazine accepted a piece of his, and published it in November.
That poem is called “Home and Goodnight,” and it’s a beautiful thing—fifty-seven lines of closely observed atmosphere and lament that offer the first clear indication of the direction Nelson’s work was taking. Its tone is lyrical, and its sensibility political; it speaks directly about race, but there isn’t a hint of sanctimony or bitterness in it.
The boys in the three-piece orchestra can go home now,
And the come-on girl fingering a pink paper gardenia and saying,
“My feet is killen me but I’m still dancen”—
Can walk two blocks east and have breakfast No. 9 at the Greek’s with her best boyfriend
And be back dancing in bed; all in twenty-five minutes flat.
But the brown boy who gets an indifferent hand for imitating Stepin Fetchit,
Saying in a studied drawl while kneeling for pennies,
“Thank yo’ all fo’ de neckbones, suh,”
Will have to ride out to 47th and Prairie,
The longest ride of all.
“Home and Goodnight” was the high point of Nelson’s year—and the weeks that followed its publication were the low. The Writers’ Project fired everyone who had been on staff for more than eighteen months in December, and Nelson, Conroy, and most of their friends got the ax. Almost everyone living in Rat Alley was unemployed and in need of distraction by the end of the year, so one night they walked south in a pack and found a black and tan club where they could drink and hear good jazz. Nelson and Amanda went, and so did Conroy and the Fallonites.
When they arrived, John Barrymore, a movie star and notorious lush was making a scene, and a band was laying down a beat. Nelson found a seat off to the side of the room, started a conversation, and took in the music. Amanda danced and partied. “I must have been drinking as much as Barrymore,” she said later. Eventually, a young Fallonite named Russ Finch offered her his hand, and they pressed together closely and moved with the music.
The sky was pitch black when the group left the club and began moving north in a long snaking line toward Thirty-fifth and Cottage Grove. Nelson and Conroy chatted in the lead. Amanda and Finch brought up the rear. The group cut through Washington Park to save time, and before Amanda reached its northern edge, she began to feel sick.
I drank too much, she said. I need to throw up.
Finch had just enrolled in the University of Chicago and rented an apartment nearby, and he told Amanda she could use his bathroom. Nelson was more than a block ahead and home was three miles away, so Amanda agreed. Then she spent the night.
The next morning, Finch walked Amanda home. When they opened the door to 3569, they found Nelson sitting alone and looking grim.
Finch said hello, but Nelson didn’t respond. He was staring at the floor and wouldn’t look up. Finch considered Nelson for a few minutes in silence, and then left.
“I’m leaving,” Nelson told Amanda when Finch was gone. He didn’t raise his voice or curse, but he looked angry.
Nothing happened with Finch, Amanda insisted, but she didn’t have much credibility. Her affair with Cazarian had ended only a few months earlier. She saw Nelson wasn’t convinced, so she answered his challenge.
“No,” she said. “I will.”
Amanda moved in with Theodora Pikowsky that afternoon, and over the next few weeks Nelson fell apart. He rattled around the storefronts, obsessed, and became violent. He and Conroy ran into Finch and Amanda at Pikowsky’s loft once, and Nelson attacked Finch with a knife. Then Amanda moved into Finch’s apartment, and Nelson smashed a window in their building’s lobby.
Nelson spread word that he intended to kill Finch, and then he spent several weeks drinking himself stupid. He stumbled through the neighborhood with a bottle in hand, and once he was spotted slumped against a wall, nearly insensate, singing “Three Little Fishes.”
“Boop boop dit-tem dat-tem what-tem chu,” he crooned. “And they swam and they swam all over the dam.”
* This book was part of a project called America Eats. The FWP shelved it at some point, and Nelson’s manuscript died a merciful death. Then, in the 1970s, Nelson sold his copy of the cookbook to a friend, who convinced the University of Iowa to publish it under the title America Eats. Now, any Algren fan interested in cooking sixty gallons of Flemish booya using thirty pounds of oxtails and four fat hens can buy a copy, and turn to page 82.
† In a letter dated January 14, 1938, Nelson criticized the party’s stewardship of its magazine New Masses. “All I can see is that these things are due to editorial slovenliness . . . and it occurs to me to wonder how people who feel perfectly capable of running an entire nation at a moment’s notice, can reconcile to themselves their inability to run a small magazine with efficiency.”
‡ Golden Wedding was a cheap brand of rye whiskey whose label featured a drawing of two elderly men wearing tuxedos.
§ Amanda, who knew Rose, claimed that this encounter was consensual—but added that Rose regretted it afterward.
¶ This letter has a complicated history. Fallon actually signed it with the name Wallie Wharton—one of his acolytes. He misspelled Wharton’s name, though, and Nelson learned Fallon was its author. Conroy confronted Fallon on Nelson’s behalf eventually, and somehow the letter made its way into Wharton’s possession. Now, it lives in his archive at the State Historical Society of Missouri.
# In a grant application Nelson submitted that year, he listed the locales mentioned above, and also: “churches . . . taverns, bookies, amusement parks,” and “private homes . . . police show ups . . . the Illinois State training school and . . . meeting-places of gangs functioning as ‘social and athletic clubs.’ ” He also used his position with the Writers’ Project to interview a boxer named Davey “Human String Bean” Day and a prostitute. Material from both interviews later appeared verbatim in his second novel.
Morning
(March 1940–September 1942)
Richard Wright’s second book, Native Son, was released in March, and it created a sensation. It became the first Book of the Month Club selection by a black author, and an immediate best seller. Reviews appeared everywhere, and most praised it effusively. “The finest novel as yet written by an American Negro,” one review said. “A rare and special thing,” added another.
Wright’s former coworkers at the Writers’ Project in Chicago were proud of his success, but not surprised by it. They had always respected him for his talent and work ethic, so they celebrated his accomplishment by cutting his reviews out of newspapers and magazines and pinning them to the large bulletin board near the front of their office, where they were visible to everyone, Ne
lson included. He had recently been rehired by the project, so he walked past Wright’s reviews several times a day, and each time they caught his eye, he must have experienced a confusing mixture of pride and envy.
Despite constant reminders of its release, Nelson resisted the urge to buy a copy of Native Son for weeks. Wright had promised to send one to him, and he was waiting for it to arrive.* The book finally reached Rat Alley on a Saturday morning, and when Nelson opened it, he found an inscription inside its cover that was so touching it must have erased any resentment Wright’s success had created.
“To my old friend Nelson,” it read. “Who I believe is still the best writer of good prose in the U.S.A.”
Nelson grabbed a postcard then, and typed, “I haven’t begun it [Native Son] yet because I can’t get past the autograph. I hope you meant it all the way, because it did something to me . . . I’m now hoping I can do something—just a little—toward earning that inscription.”
Then he began reading.
Native Son is the story of Bigger Thomas, a twenty-year-old black man who lives in a rat-infested room on the South Side of Chicago with his mother, his sister, and his younger brother Buddy. He is angry and listless, and wastes his days “trying to defeat or gratify powerful impulses.” He leans against walls and smokes cigarettes, shoots pool, fights, and plans a robbery he doesn’t follow through on.
When Native Son begins, Bigger is trying to change his life. He breaks with his gang and ventures into the white world—a “cold and distant place” with large homes and “secrets carefully guarded”—to accept a job as a chauffeur. The position is a coup for Bigger, but he derives no satisfaction from it. He is anxious and on edge. He feels scrutinized, and though he can’t articulate it, he understands, subconsciously, that his fate has been predetermined by his race. The world expects him to disappoint, and the pressure of their expectation builds inside him.
