The Celestials (6 page)

Charlie would need to see Mr. Chase's letters of credit. The house was particular about where they sent their men. They meant to be sure that their men were going to get their pay and be treated as they should.

It did not escape Chase's notice that the sentiment of the Celestial's demand resembled nothing more than one of Mr. Sampson's.

Unbeknownst to Chase, two days were spent investigating the matter with the house's sources in the East before Charlie gave Mr. Chase any encouragement, but when he
said he would furnish the men, he did so at once. The men could have been ready within twenty-four hours, but Chase did not want to hurry the thing up. Two or three times a day, he would go to the emigrant agency and watch the progress of events, passing judgment as he did on both Charlie and the men Charlie hired. A good many were drawn in by a notice on the door, in which the facts of the case were stated (save that hiring on meant hiring on as a strikebreaker), and when a man applied, Charlie took his name, and when a large number had been registered he selected out enough of the best to make the desired quota. Chase noted the reach of Charlie's hand in the situation and wondered at how long it would take this man to cross swords with the one waiting for him across the country.

It was a Thursday night when the bargain was closed. The contract read as follows:

San Francisco, Cal., May 26, 1870
.

This contract, entered into by Ah Young and Ah Yan of San Francisco and Charles
[sic]
T. Sampson of North Adams, Mass., witnessed: That said Ah Young and Ah Yan, partners in business, agree to furnish C.T. Sampson with 75 steady, active, and intelligent Chinamen, such as are quick to learn a trade (1 foreman, 2 cooks, and 72 workmen), on the following terms and conditions: They receive $1 commission for procuring each man. Wages of foreman, $60 per month for overseeing 74 men; if more men are added, to receive 50 cents on each man per month. Workmen and cooks to receive
$23 per month for first year, $26 per month for second and third years, and for all time they stay after three years they receive $28 per month. Pay roll to be made up first of each month, and the amount paid over the 10th of the month for the month preceding, in United States gold coin or its equivalent. House wood and water furnished free to men. Two cooks to be employed for less than 90 men. Time, 11 hours per day from the 20th of March to the 20th of September, and 10 1-2 hours per day from the 20th of September to the 20th of March. Lost time to be deducted except when employer stops work for his own benefit, in which case men are to receive full pay. If stoppage of work occurs by accident for one or two days at a time the men are to receive 30 cents per day for board during the stoppage. Railroad passage over to be furnished free, and if men work satisfactorily for three years or more they are to have a free passage back. Should the men be discharged by inability of employer to give them work they are to have free passage back, and wages paid to time of stopping work. The employer is to receive $25 from the first six months' wages of each man as a security to him against a man's leaving before his time expires, the amount to be taken out of his monthly wages, viz., $2 the first month, $3 the second month, and $5 each of the next four months. Pay of men to commence when they begin work.

Witness, W.W. Battles. Ah Young.

Witness, Charles Sing. Ah Yan.

C.T. Sampson
,

By George W. Chase.

The following Wednesday the men were on their way, each carrying between fifty and sixty of the maximum baggage allowance of one hundred pounds to a man. They had been placed in the charge of Charlie, and the first time Chase saw them all together was at the train station, where the new foreman introduced them informally, bowing his head gently in the direction of each of the seventy-four.

Charlie woke, as is customary for most insomniacs, between two and three in the morning, when the function of the liver shifts. If he had been in his home village, his mother might have prepared a bitter tea of root stems and tree bark to regulate the movement of the blood and the qi of the liver, but what he needed was not available, so he rose, slipped on his cloth shoes, and felt his way along the walls for a route into the factory's courtyard.

The moon was new and lent nothing but the palest light to the dirt courtyard. The night birds were not those with which Charlie was familiar. He had dressed for bed in a cotton tunic and drawstring pants, and he held his sleeve over his nose, trying to rebalance himself by way of a scent of home long since washed from the weave.

The courtyard was a hollow square of fifty feet, a giant's version of the courtyards of his native village. He sank to his knees and bent in the manner of prayer to press his nose against the earth, but his attempt to discover the familiar missed its mark, as the dirt yielded none of the rich humidity or smell of that saturated earth of home. Here, the land was grit and sand more than earth, and on his knees he
could not see how something like this could support any kind of life.

He made his way to the Marshall Street entrance—two huge arched wooden doors, split across the middle like the doors of horse stalls he had seen in California. They were adorned only by two forged iron circular pulls and the fresh-cut two-by-four that nested solidly in the newly mounted brackets. The shavings from installation drilling still graced the dirt at the base like a dusting of snow, and he bent to finger them before sweeping them into the dirt with his foot.

As a boy, he and his brothers had played warlords, each designating a corner of their courtyard as his fiefdom, and battling with fists and wooden swords in the middle. Warlords commanded the most power, the most land and men, wives, and concubines. Their larders were filled, their kangs always heated. What boy would not have aspired to that life? Only the weak.
Or the scholarly
, Third Brother had suggested, drawing characters in the dirt.
Same thing
, Charlie had said, swiping his wooden sword across the back of his brother's knees, bringing him to the ground.

But then Charlie had had occasion to enter an actual warlord's house. His father had been unable to pay for a pig the warlord insisted had been killed by someone in the Sing household. It was an unlikelihood, but Charlie had been indentured out for several weeks in exchange, and upon entering the courtyard of the warlord's house had watched a houseboy rake the packed dirt into uneven rows, seen the concubines bundled into one corner of the garden,
their babies at their feet, the wives, jealous and unhappy, in mismatched rosewood chairs, and had understood the warlord's power to be as much bluster as truth.

He had understood something similar about Sampson when his new employer boarded the train at Eagle Bridge. Erect, compact, and nervous, Sampson had introduced himself too loudly to the two cars of Chinamen and offered his hand only to Charlie. Charlie had noted the pistols, as had fourteen-year-old Long Ley Hin to Charlie's right. “
Six?
” the boy had asked incredulously. Charlie had said quietly, “Say nothing. They must be important to him.”

Sampson had expressed gratitude for Charlie's role in securing the boys and hope for a long and prosperous relationship for them all. He sounded as if he were making a toast, and Charlie had added, “Yes. To luck,” to which Sampson had replied, “Luck has nothing to do with anything. It's best you learn that now, and learn it well.” As he spoke, he placed his hand on Charlie's shoulder and gave it a light shake, and Charlie had noted his easy, proprietary nature, as if everything in the world were to be handled and assessed like fruit in a seller's basket.

And so Charlie stood with his back to the entrance door, reminding himself never to forget that the world he now surveyed was that man's creation.

To his right were the packing room and offices, fifteen feet high, with white hard-finished walls. He made his way to the offices, Sampson's and Chase's, Charlie guessed, testing the locked knob of the first. Both locks yielded easily to the thin hair stick that had once belonged to his
mother and that Charlie had had occasion to use several times before in this role. The offices were each handsomely furnished, especially the more private of the two. Chase's, Charlie guessed correctly again. But the Chinaman was more interested in the other office, Sampson's, with its wide views of both the street and the side yard. It had its own exterior entrance. He took in the lack of a reading lamp for either chair and the impractically small size of the bookshelf. The only adornment on the wall was a surveyor's map framed in bird's-eye maple by, Charlie correctly assumed, Sampson's wife. The overhead light was gas. There was a small woodstove in the far corner, a tidy stack of well-cut logs next to it, and despite the sparse and insistent practicality of the room, it was abundantly clear that this was where his new employer spent the most time and enjoyed the most happiness.

East of the packing room was the finishing room. To the other side of the factory's entrance was the sole-leather room, furnished with all the machinery, tools, and facilities necessary for the expeditious and economical cutting of the soles. Twelve non-union men were employed there, and he searched unsuccessfully for any sign of whether relations with these men would be defined by harmony or discord.

In the rear were engine and boiler rooms, coal house, and storerooms—all arranged and adapted for convenience, dispatch, and safety. An engine of twenty horsepower drove the machinery. The three stories were heated by steam, lighted by gas, and supplied with washrooms, cloakrooms, and advantages of every kind.

He climbed the wide stairs to the third, and top, story, leaving the second floor and the bottoming room for last. This level was divided into two vast rooms, both abundantly windowed and ventilated, again with white hard-finished walls. One was the stitching room, home to tables that stretched 115 in front of twenty-three windows.

The rear was the dominion of the sewing room foreman. East of this was the box room, where the boxes were made and stored.

Earlier that spring, Sampson had tilled some two acres in connection with the building, laid out walks, grass plots, flower beds, and trees, and although Charlie was too cautious to remove himself from inside the factory walls that June night, he did enjoy the scent of growth and greenery that made its way through the building's open upper windows.

The bottomers' room was on the second story, directly above the sole-leather room. Forty by eighty feet and eleven feet high. This was where the Celestials would work. Pushed against the walls, beneath and perpendicular to the windows, were a series of workbenches, destined within a matter of hours to be home to a team of three Chinamen per bench, one at the end and one on either side. Here, the teams would learn, through sign language and by example, how the parts of the shoes were to be put together. One foreman, an independent workman long in Sampson's employ, would go about his work unmolested. As for the other, a Mr. Robbins of Springfield, within an hour of his arrival and visit to the factory, he would be accosted in the street by one Crispin after another with mysterious and awful
hints. Mr. Robbins, an entire stranger to North Adams, but a typical New Englander with a good deal of strength of character and firmness of purpose, would later say to a reporter, “I heard all they had to say, and then I did not encourage them to say more.”

For both foremen, Charlie would do the translating, and the boys' wariness would grow. What could be said of someone who could stand, as Charlie could, with a foot in two lands, straddling the widest ocean of the world?

In the workers, the visitors to the factory would find the long slit eyes from their earliest remembered geographies. They would be struck with the general impression of extreme delicacy and effeminacy. The workmen would not to the American eye seem to be men. The breadth of their face and the fullness of their nose suggested what the Americans could describe only as an inscrutable expression, and many of them would leave ready to ask of their companions:
Is it the ignorance and prejudice of race or is it merely custom and familiarity which imparts such superior intelligence and sagacity to the American faces when compared to the foreign?

That first night, Charlie read an inscription scrawled on the wall by the stairs:
No scabs or rats admitted here
. But there was good air for work, which Charlie was glad to note, as he knew that, before striking, the American workers had bottomed twelve hundred pairs of shoes a day, and he further understood that those numbers were not to be equaled but surpassed if this Chinese Experiment was to seem any kind of success.

Adjoining the bottomers' room to the south was a large room where the shoes were brought for inspection and temporary storage before going to the finishing room. Until the evening of June 13, the rooms east of and below this had been unoccupied, but now he made his way back to them, following the sounds of seventy-four men breathing and murmuring in their sleep, dreaming—happily, he hoped—in their native dialects.

Lucy Robinson passed yet again a difficult night, and yet again Ida had been summoned in the middle of the darkest hours from the Widow Allen's house to be her companion through it, Alfred awake and awkward on the other side of the thin curtain that separated the front half of the one room from the back.

Lucy did not like to speak of the attack during the bright light of day, and Ida had come to cherish these nights for the intimacy they allowed. The widow found Ida's tending to Miss Robinson both Christian and useful, as the Robinson girl's attack was still the central topic among the sewing circle and Temperance Society ladies, and her proximity to the victim herself—only once removed, really—lent the widow the attention and interest she had long felt lacking.