The Boy Orator (15 page)

“You think Oscar Ameringer walks around looking like he just fell off a hog train?” “I can do it.” “All right, then.”

Harry relooped the knot. “Does Oscar Ameringer look like he does in newspaper pictures?” he asked.

“Handsomer, in person. Almost as handsome as you.” Warren Stargell patted Harry's shoulder. “I'll tell you a little secret, though.”

“What's that?”

“He's not the speaker you are. No one in this camp can hold a candle to you, kid, once you get on a roll.”

Harry knew the man was just buttering him up, but he preferred this kind of talk to being called a baby. After that, he and Warren Stargell didn't fight so much. Harry grew accustomed to the daily pace. He took more care with his coat and his tie. Warren Stargell joked with him; he said Harry was trying to look like Oscar. Actually, Harry imagined Mollie whenever he dressed. It helped him do his best, knowing she'd be impressed if she could see him.

W
HEREVER
H
ARRY WENT
—A
NTLERS
, McAlester, Coalgate, Tishomingo—Andrew mailed him telegrams and letters full of good luck wishes, prayers. His correspondence said nothing about the family's money troubles or the national events Harry was learning about every day: the burgeoning of the garment workers union, the growing power of the American Federation of Labor, the energy of the Chicago Renaissance. Andrew never mentioned the bold Socialist challenge to Samuel Gompers for control of the AFL, or W. E. B. DuBois's doubts about the movement.

Little by little, Harry realized, he was beginning to outgrow his old man. In the encampments he met the movement's intellectuals—planners, talkers, readers who brought to life for him all the history and thoughts behind the words he'd spoken for years. They knew not only politics, but art and literature and fashion. They mourned Mark Twain, who'd died with the appearance of Halley's Comet (“What's the difference between a dog and a man? Twain said, ‘If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous,
he
won't bite you.'“). They quoted Walt Whitman and William Dean Howells. They gave Harry copies of the
Nation, Harper's, Scribner's
, the
Independent
and the
Outlook
, magazines so vivid and venturesome he couldn't imagine ever using their pages in an outhouse.

One man he met even had advance copies of articles and political cartoons that eventually appeared in a brand-new monthly called the
Masses
.

It's happening, Harry thought. The Red Tide. And no one can stop it. His head throbbed with excitement, with curiosity, and the pressure to learn.

Tough lessons, too: for example, he discovered that Socialists often bickered, like everyone else. There was rarely a united front. When he asked Warren Stargell why J. T. Cumbie seemed mad at him, Warren Stargell replied that Cumbie didn't trust Catholics or Jews (whom Harry had mentioned in his speech); he didn't favor voting rights for Negroes.

“He's crazy, then,” Harry said.

“He's our candidate for governor, Harry.”

“Bad choice.”

Warren Stargell shrugged.

“I'll support him publicly,” Harry said, growing in confidence—he felt it in himself, surging and rising—maturing rapidly in the heady swirl of the circuit, “but I'm going to stay away from the old coot.”

One day, Kate O'Hare bravely challenged her female comrades. Harry had gone with her and a few other speakers to address the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Club of Guthrie, a powerful women's organization. He was overwhelmed by the combination of thick, sweet perfumes in the downtown meeting room, the secretive rustling of petticoats beneath long black skirts. He thought of Mollie: her mysteries.

Two or three times since leaving the farm he'd noticed pretty young ladies in the streets of the towns, and tingled to touch Mollie again, or the girls in the streets, or
any
girl, and he marveled at the force, the new constancy in him, of this impulse.

Now, he sat by the stage, watching Kate O'Hare pull herself erect, smile, and open her arms. She praised the club and others like it for raising library funds, establishing kindergartens, lobbying for better child labor laws. “I've watched ragged children weave youth and health into shining silks,” she said. “I've followed children into mine and mill and sweatshop, into the cotton fields, and over to the sunny fruitland slopes. Oh, I know where the icy blasts chill blood and marrow, where fires scar body, mind, and soul, and sisters, having seen all this, I hate it as only a mother can!”

Harry thought of his own mother, of Mollie, of the ladies in the streets: the thrill of the pitch, the billowing shocks of the body. Comfort. Excitement. Desire. They were all mixed up in him now, like a fresh and potent marmalade.

Kate O'Hare commended the efforts of woman suffragists. Her voice was a steady drumbeat of sense: “Today, everything used in a home is produced
outside
the home in a factory; without the power to vote, to effect change in the workplace, a mother has absolutely no control of the conditions existing there. If a textile mill is unsanitary, operated by sickly women and children, a veritable breeding place of disease, a mother who buys the fabric made there is helpless. If a food factory is reeking with filth and germs, and sends poisoned food to the family table, a mother is powerless to protect her own.”

The club billed itself as an open forum for ideas. It allowed interested men to attend her speech. When she mentioned woman suffrage, a skinny fellow shouted, “My mother wouldn't have been any better if she'd had the ballot! She found ample opportunities
at home
to exercise feminine virtue.”

Another man, a chubby clerical-type, chimed in: “Supper's a part of everyday life. I suppose you ladies would like to change that, wouldn't you? If you get the vote, you'll all be running for county commissioner, and no one'll be home to fix our meals—”

“Exactly,” said the first man. “Woman suffrage and Socialism will ultimately lead to the destruction of our marriage vows. Do we want our daughters raised on the doctrine of free love? I think not!”

The women in the audience were stirring, tugging at their bracelets and puffy sleeves, waiting for Kate O'Hare to respond. Harry feared the anger of men, but by now he'd learned its shapes: the sudden boasts, the strutting shows of power. With women he didn't know what to expect. His mother usually went silent and asked to be alone when she got upset. What did she do by herself? What would the Chautauqua ladies do here in public, in the middle of the day? Their whispers made him nervous. Their perfume sailed in clouds. He felt closed in, he couldn't breathe: like sitting in a mine shaft again.

Kate O'Hare patiently raised her hands. “I agree with you,” she said.

Several of her listeners shook their heads in disbelief.

“Women shouldn't be given special treatment.”

The men nodded at each other.

“The issue is the oppression of the working class.
That's
the battle we're fighting. If we separate the sex struggle from the class struggle, we've lost sight of our ultimate goal.”

Women rose in their seats, shouting at her and each other. She stood calmly on the stage, smiling, supremely at ease with her principles. Harry thought he was probably in love with her.

“Where you're wrong,” she called, addressing the men, “is insisting that Socialism will destroy the institution of marriage.” The audience hushed. “I agree wholeheartedly that a woman's place is in the home. But in a capitalist economy, poverty is so rampant, many of our best young women are forced into the streets, pushed brutally into prostitution, abortions … far from harming the family, Socialism will promote better relations between men and women by giving them greater security.”

She spread her arms, a gesture of appeasement. “Look at the people you know,” she said softly. “Look, perhaps, at your own lives. Women are exploited at home. We all know it. A farm wife is just a hired girl. Despite what the ads say in the big city newspapers, it's not lack of cosmetics that ages women before their time. It's the treadmill, the life of hard, incessant labor without reward. Inevitably, a young girl ruins her health dragging big, heavy sacks up and down cotton rows day after day after day. Moneyless, she lives without power, without individuality. In time she weakens, grows bitter and dull.”

She wiped a film of light sweat from her brow. “Is her husband to blame?” she said. “Certainly, certainly—up to a point. But is he any better off? Isn't his back also bent and sore from the loads he carries? Gentle women—friends—I ask you, I beg you, to consider the larger issue. The
real
problem is that we're landless people. Our homes aren't
really
our homes. We're all of us—men and women both—slaves to the bank.”

The women nodded and murmured. The men fiddled with their shirt collars. “One step at a time,” said Kate O'Hare. “I absolutely support forcing a referendum on woman's suffrage onto the ballot this year. But that can wait if it has to. More important right now, because it affects
all
of us, is a statute declaring that use and occupancy are the only title to land.”

Brilliant, brilliant, the way she worked the crowd, Harry thought: first agreeing with her opponents on a minor point, setting them up, snaring them later with their own strict logic. She never raised her voice unduly, never got ugly, never lost her patience.

Day after day, he watched her charm miners, schoolmarms, merchants; heard her teach frugality and hope. In the country or in town, on a pinewood platform or in the grandest carpeted hall, she was equally at home.

“Never speak
at
people,” she told Harry. “Speak
for
them. You and me, blessed with this little gift of words—we're servants, that's all. We're not here to rise through the ranks of labor. We're here to rise
with
them.”

And their ranks swelled daily. They traveled in a ragged caravan of horse-drawn wagons and jitneys, Ford touring cars owned by various communities. Each week Harry and a few other young men would run into town ahead of their comrades with posters announcing the festivities:

One day while unloading equipment, one of the organizers told Harry his philosophy of a successful encampment: “Shade and water—essential. Good concessions—food, pinwheels—to keep the kids happy, and enough adults willing to supervise the little brats. Musicians are okay, but never hire a brass band. They drown out the speakers. And never put a merry-go-round too near the speakers' stand.”

That summer, the biggest attraction, aside from the speeches, was a gas balloon leased from an Oklahoma City circus. Chester Leeds, the man Harry had watched skin the squirrel his first night out, gave the public free rides in the giant contraption. He let Harry feel the balloon's rough fabric as it lay pooled on the ground, unfilled, between rides. Chester was a puppy of a man in his twenties, exuberant about the crowds that streamed into the camps, helpful and kind to the sunburned families who traveled many miles to receive the benediction of Socialism. He was engaged to a friendly young girl named Sally. At supper every night Harry split his time between the O'Hares and Chester and Sally, who adored him.