The Celestials (2 page)

There were an equal number of citizens not attending to the train's arrival, including Mr. Calvin T. Sampson's wife.

Julia watched her husband that morning as he readied to quit their well-appointed rooms on the highest floor of the eastern tower of the Wilson House.

He had mentioned history, as in history being made. She had not asked for clarification, as she knew he would offer it bidden or not, and he had been making this same point in one way or another for the last several weeks since his plan had commenced. He was in the prime of his life, the pioneer shoe manufacturer in North Adams. She handed him his hat and waited.

“Practically to a one, our nation's newspapers have sent representation to witness this event,” he said. “These Celestials will transform American manufacture as we know it, and in their hearts those union hooligans know they are finished.” He twisted the brim of his hat and she relieved his hands of it, placing it upon his head. “I did that,” he said simply.

“So you did,” she said with some careful pride.

He opened the apartment's door and turned again to face her. “You might reconsider your decision not to come,” he said quietly.

She smiled and told him that perhaps she would, though she knew she would not. That he would now be even further disappointed when she did not make an appearance was a price she was willing to pay.

By June of that year, Julia Hayden Sampson was forty-three years old and had lost thirteen pregnancies. She did not think of herself as having experienced a common suffering. Each loss had been hers alone. She did not want to belong to that particular and unhappy community of women, and so she imagined herself an unpopulated island to which there was no bridge. A month prior, her woman's time had not arrived, and she had passed the weeks since occupying that terrible space constructed of the intricate mix of hope and dread.

It did not occur to her that in such a case even those she held dearest could not discover her. She did know that her husband was not a man to fail: since his boyhood, he had accomplished whatever he undertook, showing a power to execute as well as a mind to plan, together with much tenacity of purpose. The Asiatic boys heading their way were fresh proof of that. So the responsibility of the dark cloud over this life he'd built for the two of them was hers and hers alone. And for that reason, she had shared nothing of her latest anguish, planning to surprise him with good news, and dreading having to confess yet again to her utter failures as a woman and a wife. She would not be going to the factory today. Who knew what damage the atmosphere of a place like that could do? If this was history her husband was making, it was history that was at that moment of no concern to her.

Instead, she spent the next several hours before her dressing glass stripped to her skin, interrogating her body. Even when goose bumps raised themselves across her form, she did not stop. Surely, she thought, God would not do this to her again.

In 1870, the population in these United States was well over thirty-eight million. Ulysses S. Grant was president. The Civil War had been over since a bright Sunday afternoon five Aprils prior. The previous spring, Chinese and Irish crews had laid the last two rails joined with a tie of polished California laurel, and the final stake had been driven in the Transcontinental Railroad. Of 63,291 women in San Francisco, 1,452 were Chinese prostitutes. The Fifteenth Amendment was ratified on the first Thursday of February. New York was the largest city in the country, and North Adams the largest manufacturing center in the Berkshires, boasting thirty-eight factories and two hundred cotton mills. Or, in the words of a local historian, North Adams was the smartest village in the smartest nation in all creation: the concentrated essential oil of Yankeedom. Yet one-third of the town's inhabitants were foreigners—largely Irish, French Canadian, and Welsh—at work in the textile mills and tanneries, the paper factories, and on the formidable Hoosac Tunnel, which had been commenced in 1851 and which wouldn't host regular service until 1876, at a total cost of $20,241,842.31 and 195 lives.

Five languages were preached from the town's pulpits. And now another headed toward town: Cantonese, the language of the seventy-five Chinese male workers, most of
whom had barely attained their majority, on the late train from Troy, and Omaha before that, and all the way back to their start, thirteen days prior, in Oakland, California.

The Celestials were coming
. Denizens of a country so foreign that in America it was known as the Celestial Empire, inhabited by the alien and strange.
The Celestials were coming
. Two thousand citizens of North Adams awaited their arrival as they would the quiet but firm interruption of an opinionated dinner guest.

It was an unusually mild afternoon, a breeze from the north swaying the elms on the hill as nineteen-year-old Alfred Robinson worried the rock he had slipped into his pocket.

His fellow Crispins were three hundred strong on the south end of the passenger platform. They had been waiting for hours. The Order of the Knights of St. Crispin was a force to be reckoned with, the largest union in the country, forty thousand members in Massachusetts alone. And on this day they were joined by their brothers from five other local shoe factories, all staging sympathy strikes, refusing, among other things, to consent to a reduction from ten dollars a case to nine during the dull season. If Mr. Sampson had refused to recognize their strength so far, he wouldn't be able to ignore it for long.

On that thirteenth of June, Calvin T. Sampson was forty-three years old, married for just over twenty-one years to Julia Hayden Sampson, whom in her childlessness he conceived of as fragile, and his factory was one of the largest in
Massachusetts. He liked to say that from his establishment, or through his encouragement, every shoe factory operating in town had its origin. One of the leading citizens in enterprise and public spirit, he had plenty of money and knew how to make more and, as one New York paper put it, “in the democratic acceptation of the term, was a true and practical Christian, and a genuine, untarnished brick.”

From the station at Troy, Sampson's superintendent, George W. Chase, who had arranged the Celestials' contract and traveled with them from California, wired his employer:
Just through Troy
.

Sampson stuffed six pistols into the pockets of his suit trousers and greatcoat, checked on the small army of constables he'd hired to meet the train, and took a carriage to Eagle Bridge, where he would climb aboard and ride with his new workers into North Adams.

He had blue eyes that Julia favored, a beard and a moustache already tinged with gray about which she was ambivalent, and stood five feet eight inches in his bare feet. He was the youngest son of Calvin Sampson and Polly Millard Sampson (dead at that point for twenty-four and sixteen years, respectively) and, with his eldest sister, Thankful, and nearest brother, Chester, was one of the three surviving children of the six his mother had been able to bring to term. For the last several years, Thankful had resided with Julia and Sampson, and she and Sampson had often spoken of how, while their mother remained alive, they had felt as if their job was to distract her from the three small ghosts always graying the room. Sampson had told his wife more
than once that this experience gave him some understanding of her own losses. Her expression had disabused him of his certainty. And truth be told, he understood that the sadness that dogged her after each and every loss was a long, dark hallway to which he had no access. After the last pregnancy, he had reassured her that though he could not enter this corridor of her grief, he would be at its end awaiting her return. Her sobs had resumed and he had felt, as he often did when speaking of such things, that he had been asked to bottom a shoe with a hammer made of paper. He did not know what to do with his own sadness, and the one person he might've asked for aid in this regard was not available to him, and so he had determined simply to banish his distress and turn his attentions to hers.

He was no stranger to the flexibility of certitude, as he had claimed for some time to be connected by direct descent to the Pilgrim colonists, even to one of the company who crossed in the
Mayflower
. The absence of his ancestor's name on the compact had, he often explained, to do with his ancestor's not having attained his majority.

His grandfather had played a small but sure role in Shays' Rebellion, avoiding arrest by fleeing to the wilderness of Stamford, Vermont, and making the hard life of a farmer for himself and his family. Before transforming himself from farmer to businessman, Sampson had often found himself in one argument or another with the land, wondering what inducement this place could have offered, and always returning to his own troubled worrying that, though the rebellion had been worthy, hadn't there been
something cowardly in his grandfather's avoidance of the consequences of his actions? Sampson believed in the value of making one's own way but he believed equally strongly that one's pigheadedness was one's own, not to be, at day's close, foisted upon someone else.

It was the trait of which he was the most proud and which he held most responsible for his current situation. For although he knew the newspapers and the politicians from West to East could argue that there were many logs that made up this particular labor bonfire, he had held the match to the pyre. What else could one do in the face of the bullying of a surplus of men professing to be shoemakers who knew nothing about it?

The disharmony between Sampson and his workers had existed for some time, and he kept a catalog of their offenses against him, which he took personally, as justification for his current course of action. In 1861, he had been the first in town to introduce the newly patented Wells pegging machine. His workers had left the shop, walked out in protest, declaring that skilled labor would be replaced by inhuman machines and unskilled operatives to man them. He had, he tried to assure his workers, their best interests at heart. Indeed, his interests and theirs were coupled. Labor and manufacturing were two parts of one scissors, useless without the other. Machinery would not
reduce
the need for labor, but
increase
it. The workers returned to their benches, but Sampson no longer regarded them as allies. He felt as he had during the first week of his one term at Drury Academy, when he had stood in the school cloakroom unbeknownst
to the classmates whose conversation he overheard: “But did you see his jacket?” “I did,” assured the other, “but I hear it is unlikely he will be here long.” When he'd made his presence known, both young men had inclined their heads slightly, stepping back to let him pass. He found himself wondering if this was perhaps a version of what his mother and brother must have experienced when he'd announced he would not be continuing on the family farm. To alleviate his discomfort at the comparison, he took note of the fact that two-thirds of the workers who had struck had been French Canadians, foreigners not to be relied on to uphold or even understand the Christian American values by which he endeavored to live.

By 1863, Sampson had established his own store in Boston. By 1868, he no longer rented, but had purchased, the old tannery on Eagle Street and had added an eighty-square-foot addition, making the entire building 16,400 square feet, able to employ two hundred fifty hands. Sampson footwear was sold in Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, Boston, and New York. On the fifth of March 1868, he became treasurer of the Baptist church; he would serve for ten years. Whatever talk there had been concerning his choices not to go to war and not to change his product from ladies' shoes and boots to brogans for solider and slave had ceased.

In April of 1868, the Knights of St. Crispin held their first annual meeting. By that May, all of Sampson's employees in the bottoming room, save two, were Crispins.

In mid-May, the foreman of the bottoming room made his way down to Sampson's office to inform his boss that
there was a man upstairs whom the help did not like to have there.

Sampson stiffened slightly as if in preparation for an unpleasant medical examination. He knew already of which man the Crispins had complaint: St. John, an excellent man, who could make a very nice shoe. Sampson chose not to remember that St. John had worked for him previously, over a year ago, and had already been turned off once.

The foreman chose not to remind his boss that at that time, Sampson had sworn, in front of the other men, never to employ the man again, given as he was to drinking, gambling, and dissipation. So treacherous and deceitful was St. John that when the workers told the foreman they didn't want to work with him, the foreman had said he didn't know as he could blame them.

“What are the particulars of their complaints?” Sampson asked.

“He is a little light-fingered,” the foreman answered. “He takes kit.”

Sampson said nothing, and the foreman's nerves grew for no reason he could identify.

“The boys do not like to work with him,” he finally added weakly.

Sampson made as to return to the papers on his desk. “I'm sure I don't know why that is of concern to me,” he said.

The foreman did not like being in the office. Recognizing Sampson's tricks of intimidation as tricks did nothing to lessen their effect. Growing resentment, at his employer and at himself, was impossible to avoid.

“I believe the boys have an order called the Knights of St. Crispin, and that it was so constituted that they could not work with a man not belonging to it. I believe that St. John does not belong to it.”