Beggars of Life (11 page)

T
HE
winter passes, and the warm winds of May made me long to wander again. The whistling of a locomotive on a still night had a lure, unexplainable, yet strong, like the light which leads a moth to destruction.

One night, early in the month, I left on the blind baggage of a mail train with a heavy-set Hollander called Dutch Vander.

A faint star twinkled at the upper tip of a young moon. In the afterglow of sunset, the great Lake, rolling smoothly, loomed, an inland sea, in enchanting mysterious purple.

We waited an hour for the train on a bridge under which it ran. The young moon, still on fire from the sun, dipped a red sickle into the lake. The water purred and broke lazily white on the shore. Then the moon sank into the lake, and the white breakers merged into purple, then the purple into a dark, deep blue. Then the stars shone like diamonds on a huge inverted ceiling.

“It's a peach of a night,” said the Dutch boy. And I, with a dream tapping at my brain, replied, “It sure is, Dutch.”

The Big Four mail left the Illinois Central each night around eight o'clock. The bridge on which we stood was about nine blocks from the station. To avoid railroad bulls, our plan was to drop from the bridge onto the tender of the engine as it rolled underneath.

As the smoke from the train scattered over the lake, and the headlight of the engine gleamed across the tracks, we climbed over the railing of the bridge. It was a nervous moment. The train drew nearer in a cloud of smoke. At last the engine was under the bridge, and the downward-driven smoke curled in heavy masses in an effort to escape into the air. The whistle shrieked twice, and the train rolled faster. Releasing ourselves from the railing, we dropped safely on the tender. In a few moments, our composure regained, we climbed down and stood upon the blind baggage in order to escape the wind from the lake and the cinders from the engine.

Cincinnati was three hundred miles away. It was our intention to arrive there at eight the next morning. It was considered nothing unusual for “road-kids” to make such a journey in a night. There were many who had made trips from Kansas City and Omaha under the friendly shield of darkness most of the way. These cities were between four and five hundred miles from Chicago.

At Kankakee, Lafayette, and Indianapolis, we were forced to leave the engine and seek a hiding place near the track, but we reached the Ohio city on schedule.

In this city, I had spent six years in an orphanage. When a boy leaves an American orphanage, he leaves it forever. I have never been able to become sentimental over a home for beggar orphans, though coming of a race of sentimentalists who chatter nonsense to God when their very lives are in ruin.

“Well,” said Dutch, “we'll have to shake our feet for breakfast.” Weary from the long ride, and dirty with the dust and grime of the road, the begging of the morning meal was not a pleasant prospect.

We entered a saloon on the levee near the Ohio river. The bartender showed us the washroom, and gave us a piece of yellow soap and a frayed white and black towel.

Refreshed from the use of soap and water, my courage returned. “Let's beat it for Fountain Square, Dutch, and hit the stem for enough money to buy a real meal.”

“I'm on,” said Dutch, who had the great redeeming features of stolidity, quick decision, and an absence of fear.

During all my years at the orphanage, the fear of the reform school had been drilled into me by the religious women in charge.

The bartender heard us debating the question of breakfast. “I ain't got a dime, or I'd stake you kids, and I can't tap the till. The boss knows how much dough he's got. But I kin stake you to a shot.”

“That'll be fine,” I replied, as Dutch and I walked toward the bar. The bartender lifted a rusty, stained bottle from behind the bar. He set two small glasses near the bottle, and filled them with the red liquor. It poured as flat and beadless as water. All three of us looked at it, and knowing that good whiskey always had bubbled beads at the top of the glass after being poured, the bartender said with a crooked smile, “It ain't Catholic liquor, kids. It ain't got a bead on it, but two shots o' that and you'll lick the Pope's uncle.” We swallowed one glassful and then another. It burned down our throats. The reform school and the fears of my childhood were things that existed no longer. My brain teemed with a mad purpose. I'd get a meal of ham and eggs, or I'd go to jail trying.

Dutch rubbed his cone-shaped head. I laughed outright, “That stuff ‘ud jolt a bum off a train, eh, Dutch?”

“I'll say so,” replied Dutch. “She'd jolt a train off the track.”

We took our positions on each side of the Square, after making plans for a meeting in an hour.

I was lucky at once. A negro labourer in a plaster-covered suit of overalls came humming loudly along the street. I put on my saddest expression, and told him a tale of woe. He grinned, wordless, while I talked. A thousand Irish tellers of tales awoke in me. The negro's yellow-white eyes became misty as I pounded at his heart with words… . I had helped a negro escape a lynching—and I was fired from my job for so doing. I described the black man running down the street with the madder whites after him with a rope. I described how I jerked him into a hallway in a last wild effort of daring, while the crowd rushed on thinking he had turned a corner… . The negro rubbed his eyes, while I talked on and on. Two policemen passed, and for their benefit I changed suddenly to a long conversation about work. Suddenly I got a whiff of the negro's breath, and it dawned upon me that black fairies danced whirligigs in his brain. Weary of the word bombardment, he said, “Let's eat.” As is the way of humans, I forgot my companion in misery and walked away with the gentleman in the plaster-spotted overalls.

There was a cheap saloon down Fifth Street way where the races of the earth commingled. We walked inside and sat at a table, each of us now talking at the same time. A heavy waiter ambled clumsily toward us. The negro gave an order for drinks of liquor, while I pounded the table and said, “Bring me food.” The waiter looked toward the bar. “Bring ‘um food then,” said the negro. The drinks came first, and were quickly swallowed. Two more drinks were ordered.

I became tired of talking, my object gained. The negro went on—“Boss, he say to me, ‘Hey Niggah,' an' I say, ‘Who you callin' Niggaht Wheh you t'inks you is, down souf? I done quit.' I frew that 'ere hod right in the plasteh, I did, and mosies down the street. No guy kin call me niggah, 'cause I ain't.”

“Sure you ain't,” I answered, “you're as good as white people any day. God made us all, an' he knew what he was doin' even if he was a little colour blind. Do you believe in God?” I asked.

“Does I believe in 'im? I know 'im. God's come to me an' talked lots o' times. God ain't white. He's blacker'n me. I seen 'im, I did. Now way long time ago all de people was black, den de sun shone hot an' all de sick people tuhned white. Then they gits to thinkin' white's de best coloh, an' gits swell-headed. They can't call me Niggah. I knows what I's talkin' 'bout.”

The waiter appeared with a mess of food called “slumgullion” on a yellow plate. The negro looked at the steaming hot stuff, and said, “Bring me some o' dat, waiteh.” The waiter looked at his darker brother and went away to comply with the order. When he returned with the food, the negro said, “Bring us some moh drinks.”

The negro resumed his talk. “Two hunerd yeahs from now, they won't be but one niggah lef', and he'll be crippled up. Den all de'll be's a white man, a niggah, an' a poodle dog. The white man'll kill the niggah, an' use 'im foh black peppah when he eats de poodle dog, an' that'll be de end o' the niggah.”

“Well,” I said, “that won't matter.”

“Suah nuff it won't matteh to de niggah, 'cause de niggah has a mohtal soul.”

The negro tasted the food, and immediately his mind became busy with material things.

He ordered another round of drinks. The rotgut liquor made the black fairies dance wildly in his brain. He swallowed his glassful, and ordered another one. I reneged.

I shoved the half-eaten food away from me, and watched my negro benefactor across the greasy, unvarnished table. With tipsy brain, I tried to figure out the mystery of the races. They marched before my eyes for a million years back, the blonds and the blacks, the reds and the yellows. The man in front of me felt that his God was black. The women who had pounded a mock religion into me felt that their God was white, while as a child I had dreamed of Him as an immense man a hundred feet tall, with long red whiskers. And, possibly from hearing other little children cry themselves to sleep, I gathered the idea that He was a cruel man from whom orphans scampered away as soon as their mothers died. In that fly-reeking and dirt-covered saloon, my tipsy brain reveled in a tipsy dream. Never will I forget it.

… Countless numbers of girls of all colours, as naked as slender trees in winter, danced on an immense level and yellow stretch of sand, near a blue-green ocean under the light of the moon. Red, white, blue, and green angels flew above them scattering flowers. Their bodies danced in rhythm to the waves of the sea. In a short time the sand was covered with many-coloured flowers, and still the flying angels dropped more. All of a sudden a horn of sand formed that reached to the moon. It circled round and round as it was blown by the wind. Then millions of varied and brightly coloured birds and butterflies came as if from nowhere. Each bird and butterfly picked a flower from where the sand had once lain, and each flower picked was of a different colour from the bird or butterfly that picked it. Carrying the flowers, the winged beauties flew in circles with the sand that reached up to the moon, which now danced madly in the sky. Then the angels flew after the birds and butterflies. The millions of girls suddenly mounted into the air with wingless bodies and vari-coloured streaming hair, singing the while, a weird, sad song, like a billion Jenny Linds singing together. The stars dropped downward from the sky, and the sun tore a great jagged hole through it in the east. Only the moon remained dancing, a mad fantastic orb of brilliant light above. It circled around in the sky, the very opposite of the circling sand and girls and butterflies. Then the sun came swiftly forward from the east, travelling faster than light. It rolled over the blue-green ocean and dried it up suddenly, as a hot flame dries a drop of rain. Fishes, sea-animals, and grotesque reptiles died slimy deaths in the kelp and coral of the ocean bed. Great whales lashed their dying tails and splashed mud for hundreds of feet, and then lay still. Each little fish and animal attacked a larger one and died a second later. A great wind followed the sun, and swept the ocean bed clear of life, and sent all forms of it whirling, dead, among the flying angels, girls, and flowers. Everything moved with exact precision, and stars and sun and whales and even the tiniest bird carrying a flower, were in no more danger of striking each other than the planets, which had swung aloft in the now empty sky. A girl flew out of the confusing welter of confusion with some ham and eggs on a tray. I reached out for her. A hand grasped my shoulder. “Wake up, Kid. This ain't a lodgin' house.” The waiter stood near me, while across the table, the negro rubbed his eyes.

As we left the saloon, I said to the negro. “Loan me a dollar till I see you agin?” The negro laughed.

“Ah'll loan you the buck, but I done won't see you no moah.” He handed me the dollar and I hurried away to find Dutch.

The negro was right. He never saw me again.

I
HURRIED
to the appointed place, but Dutch was nowhere to be seen. An hour passed, and still my companion did not appear. The separation of rovers is a common occurrence in tramp life, and at times, owing to the uncertainty of circumstance, the most expert of drifters find it impossible to travel together. Perhaps Dutch had been picked up by the police. Well, he knew which train we had decided to beat to the east. He might show up there.

Hours passed, during which I loitered in Fountain Square, while the sun slid westward in the sky. At last, I made my way to the Kentucky side of the yellow Ohio, and waited for the Fast Flyer Virginia, which was scheduled to leave at seven.

Night stole softly over the Kentucky hills. A large white boat, the lights from its windows shining across the water, worked its way slowly in the direction of New Orleans. Some negroes lolled on boxes in the steerage and chanted an indistinct song, inarticulate dark poets, weary with the labour of the world, sailing back to rest on their wonderful river of dreams. With well-modulated voices, their words glided over the water in a weird and beautiful cadence. Forgetful of the fascinating road of the young hobo, I gave myself up to listening to unknown minstrels, singing to relieve their snarled and wretched lives,

The boat glided onward, and the voices became more indistinct. They at last died away, softly, like a June breeze swaying shamrocks over far-off Irish graves.

As the lights of the boat faded, the great headlight of the Fast Flyer Virginia swept over the rails. Aroused from the lethargy of dream, I was the rider to far places again, and my great iron horse was snorting on its way.

I turned my coat collar up, hurriedly adjusted my cap low on my head, and waited with heart pounding nervously as the train approached. It was my ambition to reach Washington, over five hundred miles away, on the Fast Flyer Virginia by the middle of the next afternoon.

Like many ambitions, it was rather worthless in itself, but perhaps the grueling grind of the road, the lashing of the wind, the rain, and cinders combined with the smoke and gaseous grime of tunnels, gave me the courage to endure the keener mental tests that met me at the yearly stations ahead, when I learned to write without knowing the simplest rules of punctuation. Indeed, the endurance learned on the road abided with me on many a sixteen-hour day during which I fumbled at a typewriter with the knuckle-cracked hands of the hobo and pugilist.

Years later, when my first book was published, a famous writer, with elaborate condescension, said that it was hard for an ex-hobo to learn to write. I put away the thought with a grim smile, for self pity is one of the things a young hobo learns to discard sooner than do other men who paddle in the softer waters of life.

The Fast Flyer Virginia was rolling swiftly eastward. I dashed for the smoke-enveloped blind baggage, and was quickly aboard. Another vagrant clambered up behind me. He had come from some hiding-place near the tracks. The engine swerved; the whistle shrieked; the smoke cleared away. The face of my companion was visible under the stars. It was Dutch.

“Where the devil you been?” I asked. “I thought you were pinched.

“Not me, old scout. I run into a streak of luck. Met a drunk. Went down to the Silver Moon, an' got a lot of drinks an' a big feed from him. Then I took him in the alley, an' busted 'im in the jaw, an' rolled 'im. He diden have nothin' on ‘im though—thirty cents.”

“What kind of a guy was he, Dutch?”

“Some shine, blacker'n coal, wit' a pair o' overalls covered wit' plaster.”

“It's a funny world, Dutch. The good guys always get it in the neck.”

“Damn'f they don't,” replied Dutch.

“That same nigger fed me,” I said, “an' gave me a silver dollar.”

“The hell,” said Dutch. “That's funny.”

I wondered how the next beggar would fare who told the plaster-covered darky a tale of woe. Perhaps as well as I did, for a kind heart is a sad heritage of which all the ills of life do not rob a person.

For a long time, as the train whirled through emerald-green Kentucky, I thought of the negro knocked out in an alley for being kind to strangers. And then I thought of the thirty cents of which Dutch had robbed him. I recalled a terrible picture of Judas holding out his hand for thirty pieces of silver. But strangely enough, I did not condemn Dutch, nor connect him with Judas. The ethics of the road are brutal and strange.