After I had read the various pamphlets that Bannerman gave me I was like the old negro who went to sleep with his mouth open. A white man came along and put a spoonful of quinine in his mouth. When the negro woke up the bitter taste worried him. “What does it mean?” he asked. The white man told him it meant that he “had done bu'sted his gall bladder and didn't have long to live.” A mighty bad taste was left in my mouth by those communist pamphlets. If they were telling the truth I realized that labor's gall bladder had done bu'sted and we didn't have long to live. One book said that British capitalists owned all the money in the world and that at a given signal they would draw the money out of America and the working men here would starve to death in twenty-nine days. It seemed that some crank had fasted that many days in order to get accurate statistics showing just how long the working man could hope to last after England pushed the button for the money panic.
Another book said that Wall Street now owned ninety per cent. of the wealth in America and was getting the other ten at the rate of eight per cent. a year. Within twelve years Wall Street would own everything in the world, and mankind would be left naked and starving.
The wildest book of all was called Caesar's Column. It was in the form of a novel and told how the rich in America worshiped gold and lust instead of God and brotherly love, and how they drove their carriages over the working man's children and left them crushed and bleeding in the street. America had ceased to be a republic and was an oligarchy of wealth all owned by a dozen great families while the millions were starving. The end of the book described a great revolution in which the people arose, led by an Italian communist named Caesar Spadoni. The mob took all the fine houses and killed the rich people. Caesar took the bodies and, laying them in cement like bricks, he built an enormous column of corpses in Union Square towering higher than any building in New York. He established his headquarters in a Fifth Avenue palace and was directing the slaughter of all men who owned property, when some of his followers got jealous of his fine position and killed him and burned the house. By that time everything in America was destroyed, and the hero of the book, having invented an air-ship, flew away to South Africa to escape the general demolition. This book was being circulated by communists as a true picture of what the country was coming to.
These pamphlets came into my hands at a time when work was getting scarcer every day and a million men like myself were moving about the country looking for jobs. Then for the first time I realized my need for a broader education. If these things were true, it was my duty to stop chasing the vanishing job and begin to organize the workers so that they might destroy the capitalists. But how could I know whether they were true? I had no knowledge of past history. And without knowing the past how could I judge the future? I was like the old man who had never seen a railroad train. His sons took him thirty miles over the hills and brought him to the depot where a train was standing. The old man looked things over and saw that the wheels were made of iron. “It will never start,” he said. He knew that if his wagon had heavy iron wheels, his team could never start it. But his sons said: “It will start all right.” They had seen it before; they knew its past history. Soon the train started, gathered speed like a whirlwind and went roaring away down the track. The old man gazed after it and then, much excited, he exclaimed. “It will never stop!”
The wisest head is no judge unless it has in it the history of past performances. I had not studied much history in my brief schooling. The mills called me because they needed men. Good times were there when I arrived, and as for hard times, I was sure they “would never start.” Now the hard times were upon us and panic shook the ground beneath our feet. “It will never stop,” men cried. Had they studied the history of such things they would have known that hard times come and hard times go, starting and stopping for definite reasons, like the railway train.
I had done the right thing in quitting school and going to the puddling furnaces at a time when we needed iron more than we needed education. The proverb says, “Strike while the iron is hot.” The country was building, and I gave it iron to build with. Railroads were still pushing out their mighty arms and stringing their iron rails across the western wheat lands. Bridges were crossing the Mississippi and spanning the chasms in the Rocky Mountains. Chicago and New York were rising in new growth with iron in their bones to hold them high. My youth was spent in giving to this growing land the element its body needed.
Now that body was sick. What was the matter with it? Lacking an education, I was unprepared to say. When I left school my theory was that every boy should learn a trade as soon as possible. Now I saw that a trade was not enough. A worker needs an education, also. The trade comes first, perhaps, but the education ought to follow on its heels.
During the next ten years of my life I was a worker and a student, too. My motto was that every one should have at least a high-school education and a trade.
That caravan of railroad cars bearing the happy lodge members to their meeting in the Rockies, had started a train of thought that went winding through my mind ever after. In fancy I saw the envious Bannerman shaking his fist at his thriftier, happier brothers. Should I denounce the banding together of men for the promotion of fun and good fellowship? Were these men hastening the downfall of America as the communist predicted? Is not good fellowship a necessary feeling in the hearts of civilized men?
Love of comrades had always been a ruling passion with me. I joined my union as soon as I had learned my trade, the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers of North America. It was a long name, and we liked every word in it. We felt the glow of brotherhood, and as I said before, we used to share our jobs with the brother who was out of work. The union paid a weekly benefit to men who had to strike for better working conditions. At that time there were no death benefits nor any fund to educate the children of members killed in the mills. When such a death happened, the union appointed a committee to stand at the office window on pay-day and ask every man to contribute something from his wages. There is a charitable spirit among men who labor together and they always gave freely to any fund for the widow and orphans. This spirit is the force that lifts man above the beasts and makes his civilization. There is no mercy in brute nature. The hawk eats the sparrow; the fox devours the young rabbit; the cat leaps from under a bush and kills the mother robin while the young are left to starve in the nest. There is neither right nor wrong among the brutes because they have no moral sense. They do not kill for revenge nor torture for the love of cruelty, as Comrade Bannerman would in praying that the train be wrecked and the rich men burned to death in the ruin. The beasts can feel no pity, no sympathy, no regret, for nature gave them no conscience. But man differs from all creation because he has a moral sense, he has a conscience. My conscience has been a very present thing with me through all my life. I am a praying man. I never take a doubtful step until I have prayed for guidance.
“You'll never get anywhere, Jim,” fellows have said to me, “as long as your conscience is so darn active. To win in this world you have got to be slick. What a man earns will keep him poor. It's what he gains that makes him rich.” If this is so, the nation with the lowest morals will have the most wealth. But the truth is just the opposite. The richest nations are those that have the highest moral sense.
But this was a great problem for a young uneducated man. To be told by some of my fellows that dishonesty was the only road to wealth, and to be shown in communist documents that the capitalists of America were stealing everything from the workers, put a mighty problem up to me. And that's what made me pray for guidance. I pray because I want an answer, and when it comes I recognize in it my own conscience. Praying banishes all selfish thoughts from mind, and gives the voice of conscience a chance to be heard. I pray for a higher moral sense, that which lifts man above beasts, and when my answer comes and I feel morally right, then all hell can't make me knuckle under. For civilization is built on man's morals not on brute force (as Germany learned to her sorrow), and I fight for the moral law as long as there is any fight left in me.
Nature planned that when the cat ate the mother robin, the young robins in the nest must starve. Nature had other robins that would escape the enemy. But among men it is wrong for the little ones to suffer when the hand that feeds them is destroyed. For man has sympathy, which beasts have not. Sympathy is the iron fiber in man that welds him to his fellows. Envy is the sulphur that pollutes these bonds and makes them brittle. Suppose some master puddler of humanity could gather thousands of men into a melting-pot, a fraternity whose purpose was to boil out the envy, greed and malice as much as possible, and purify the good metal of human sympathy. How much greater the social value of these men would be. Bound together by good fellowship and human sympathy these men could pool their charity and build a happy city where all the children of their stricken comrades could be sent to school together, there to learn that man is moral, that the strong do not destroy the weak, that the nestling is not left to fate, but that the fatherless are fathered by all men whose hearts have heard their cry.
This vision came to me in the darkest days of my life. I had seen the children of my dead comrades scattered like leaves from a smitten tree never to meet again. I had left my parents' roof to be buffeted about by strikes and unemployment, and I feared that our home would be lost and my brothers scattered forever. The voice of hate was whispering that the “classes” would ride down the children of the poor, and with this gloomy thought I went to bed. My couch was a bed of coal slack, and I was journeying to a mill town in a freight car.
As we rolled along, I saw in a vision train after train of lodge men going to some happy city. They were miners and steel workers, as well as clerks and teachers, and they were banded together, not like Reds to overthrow the wage system, but to teach themselves and their children how to make the wage system shed its greatest blessings upon all. The city they were going to was one they had built with their own hands. And in that city was a school where every trade was taught to fatherless children, as my father taught his trade to me. And with this trade each child received the liberal education that the rich man gives his son but which the poor man goes without. This was the wildest fancy I had ever entertained. It was born of my own need of knowledge. It was a dream I feared I could not hope to realize.
A brakeman stuck his head in the end window of the box car and shouted at me:
“Where're you going?”
“Birmingham,” I answered.
“What have you got to go on?”
I had some money in my belt, but I would need that for the boarding-house keeper in the Alabama iron town. So I drew something from my vest pocket and said:
“This is all I've got left.”
The trainman examined it by the dim light at the window. His eye told him that it was a fine gold watch. “All right,” he said as he pocketed it and went away. I never knew whether I cheated the brakeman or the brakeman cheated me. The watch wasn't worth as much as the ride, but the ride wasn't his to sell.
I had bought the watch in Cincinnati. A fake auction in a pawnshop attracted my attention as I walked along a street near the depot. The auctioneer was offering a “solid gold, Swiss movement, eighteen jeweled watch” to the highest bidder. “This watch belongs to my friend Joe Coupling,” he said, “a brakeman on the B. & O. He was in a wreck and is now in the hospital. Everybody knows that one of the best things a railroader has is his watch. He only parts with it as a matter of life and death. Joe has got to sell his watch and somebody is going to get a bargain. This watch cost eighty-five dollars and you couldn't buy the like of it to-day for one hundred. How much am I offered?” Some one bid five dollars, and the bidding continued until it was up to twenty-five dollars. At that price the watch was declared sold, and I strolled on, thinking the matter over. I figured that the story of Joe the injured brakeman must be false. If he had an eighty-five-dollar watch he could borrow forty on it. Why should his “friend” have sold it outright for twenty-five? The fakery of it was plain to any one who stopped to think. Who then would be fool enough to pay twenty-five dollars for a fake watch at a side auction? Not I. I was too wise. “How easy it is,” I said to myself, “to solve a skin game.”
The next day I happened to pass the place again and they were selling the same watch. I listened for the second time to the sad story of Joe the brakeman. He was still in the hospital and still willing to sacrifice his eighty-five-dollar gold watch to the highest bidder. Just for fun I started off the bidding at two dollars. The auctioneer at once knocked down the watch to me and took my money. The speed of it dazed me, and I stumbled along the street like a fool. What was the game? I held the glittering watch in my hand and gazed at it like a hypnotized bird. I came to another pawnshop and went in. “What will you give me on this watch?” I asked. The pawnbroker glanced at it and said he couldn't give me anything but advice.
“I can buy these watches for three dollars a dozen. They are made to be sold at auction. The case is not gold and the works won't run.”
I had been caught in the game after all. The whole show had been put on for me. The men who did the bidding the first day were “with the show.” Their scheme was to get a real bid from me. When I failed to bite, they rung down the curtain and waited for the next come-on. The show was staged again for me the following day, and that time they got me. I had the “brakeman's watch” and he had the laugh on me. In the next wreck that Brakeman Joe got into I wished him the same luck Comrade Bannerman wished for the trainload of plutocrats. “If I should meet Joe now,” I said, “I'd gladly give him back the timepiece that he prizes so.” Let us hope that the brakeman I gave the watch to down in Alabama was Brakeman Joe.
There was much to think of in that auction incident. Experience will often give the lie to theory. My theory of the game was good enough for me. I acted on my theory, and they got my money. Perhaps the theory of Bannerman was wrong. He claimed he knew just how the capitalists were robbing labor. Suppose we backed his theory with some money and got stung? I was now theory shy and I have stayed away from theories ever since.
If you know the facts, no swindle can deceive you. I spend my life in getting facts. I now have seen enough to know that capitalism is not a swindle. If all hands labored hard and honestly the system would enrich us all. Some workers are dishonest and they gouge the employers. Some employers are dishonest and they gouge the workers. But whether employer or employee does the robbing, the public is the one that's robbed. And they are both members of the public. In making the world poorer they are rendering a sorry service to the world.
Dishonesty is the thing that does the trick. And it is not confined to any class. It was not a capitalist but a slick wind worker who robbed me by the watch swindle. He had to swing his jaw for hours every day in order to steal a few dollars.
In Birmingham I found a job in a rolling mill and established myself in a good boarding-house. In those days a “good boarding-house” in iron workers' language meant one where you got good board. One such was called “The Bucket of Blood.” It got its name because a bloody fight occurred there almost every day. Any meal might end in a knock-down-and-drag-out. The ambulance called there almost as often as the baker's cart. But it was a “good” boarding-house. And I established myself there.
Good board consists in lots of greasy meat, strong coffee and slabs of sweet pie with gummy crusts, as thick as the palm of your hand. At the Bucket of Blood we had this delicious fare and plenty of it. When a man comes out of the mills he wants quantity as well as quality. We had both at the Bucket of Blood, and whenever a man got knocked out by a fist and was carted away in the ambulance, the next man on the waiting list was voted into our club to fill the vacancy. We had what is called “family reach” at the table (both in feeding and fighting). Each man cut off a big quivering hunk of roast pork or greasy beef and passed the platter to his neighbor. The landlady stood behind the chairs and directed two colored girls to pour coffee into each cup as it was emptied.
These cups were not china cups with little handles such as you use in your home. They were big “ironstone” bowls the size of beer schooners, such as we used to see pictured at “Schmiddy's Place,” with the legend, “Largest In The City, 5c.” (How some of us would like to see those signs once more!) To prevent the handles from being broken off, these cups were made without handles. They were so thick that you could drop them on the floor and not damage the cups. When one man hit another on the head with this fragile china, the skull cracked before the teacup did. The “family reach” which we developed in helping ourselves to food, was sometimes used in reaching across the table and felling a man with a blow on the chin. Kipling has described this hale and hearty type of strong man's home in Fulta Fisher's Boarding-House where sailors rested from the sea.
But the boarders did not fight with knives at the Bucket of Blood. Knifing is not an American game. We fought with fists, coffee cups and pieces of furniture, after the furniture went to pieces. We were not fighting to make the world safe for democracy, although we were the most democratic fellows in the world. We slept two to a bed, four to a room. Not always the same four, for like soldiers on the firing line, some comrade was missing after every battle.
These fights started in friendly banter. One fellow would begin teasing another about his girl. The whole table would take it up, every man doing his best to insult and enrage the victim. It was all fun until some fellow's temper broke under the strain. Then a rush, and a few wild swings that missed. Then the thud of a blow that connected, and the fight was over. These men had arms with the strength of a horse's leg, and as soon as their “kick” struck solid flesh, the man hit was knocked out. He wouldn't be back for supper, but the rest of us would, without having our appetites disturbed in the least. I didn't like these methods, but if the boys did I was not going to complain.
My practice of studying at night offended my roommates. The lamplight got in their eyes. There were three fellows in the room besides myself. For several nights they advised me to “cut out the higher education, douse that light and come to bed.” Finally they spoke about it in the daytime. “Majority rules,” they said, “and there's three of us against you. We can't sleep while you have that lamp burning. The light keeps us awake and it also makes the room so hot that the devil couldn't stand it. If you stay up reading to-night we'll give you the bum's rush.”
I was so interested in my books that I couldn't help lingering with them after the other fellows went to bed. Everything grew quiet. Suddenly six hands sized me and flung me out the window. It was a second-story window and I carried the screen with me. But as it was full of air holes it didn't make a very competent parachute. I landed with a thud on the roof of the woodshed, which, being old and soft with southern moss, caved in and carried me to the ground below—alive. The fellows up above threw my books out the window, aiming them at my head. They threw me my hat and coat and my valise, and I departed from the Bucket of Blood, and took up my abode at “The Greasy Spoon.”
The Greasy Spoon isn't an appetizing name; not appetizing to men who live a sedentary life. But it was meant as a lure to men who live by muscular toil. It sounded good to us mill workers for, like Eskimos, we craved much fat in our diet. We were great muscular machines, and fat was the fuel for our engines. Muckraking was just beginning in those days, and a prying reformer came to live for a while at the Greasy Spoon. He told us that so much grease in our food would kill us. We were ignorant of dietetics; all we knew was that our stomachs cried for plenty of fat. The reformer said that our landlady fed us much fat meat because it was the cheapest food she could buy. Milk, eggs and fruits would cost more, and so this greedy cruel woman was lining her pocket at the expense of our lives.
The landlady was a kindly person, and she took the reformer's advice. She banished the fat pork, and supplied the table with other food substitutes, but she was generous and gave us plenty of them. We ate this reformed food and found we were growing weaker every day at the puddling furnace. We got the blues and became sullen. Gradually all laughter ceased in that boarding-house. We even felt too low to fight. At the end of two weeks there was one general cry: “Hog fat, and plenty of it!” Our engines had run out of fuel; and now we knew what we needed. We were so crazy for bacon that if a hog had crossed our path we would have leaped on him like a lion and eaten him alive.
Fat came back to the table, and the Greasy Spoon again rang with laughter. How foolish that reformer was! He did no work himself and was a dyspeptic. He tried to force his diet upon us, and he made us as weak as he was. How many reformers there are who are trying to reshape the world to fit their own weakness. I never knew a theorist who wasn't a sick man.
To-day we understand that we can't run a motor-car after the gasoline is played out. The burning of the oil in the engine gives the power. The burning of fats in the muscles gives the laborer his power. Sugar and starches are the next best things to fat, and that's why we could eat the thick slabs of sweet pie. We relished it well and have burned it all up in our labor in the mills. We came out with that healthy sparkle that dyspeptics never know.
When we realized that the reformer didn't know what he was talking about, and that in his effort to help us he was hurting us, we saw he was our enemy, and we gave all of his ideas the “horse laugh.” His theory that the boarding-house keepers were in a conspiracy to rob the workers by feeding them pork instead of pineapples turned out to be much like all the “capitalist conspiracies” in Comrade Bannerman's pamphlets. I am glad I have lived in a world of facts, and that I went therefrom to the world of books. For I have found there is much falsehood taught in books. But life won't tell a fellow any lies.
A man who knows only books may believe that by writing a new prescription he can cure the world of what ails it. A man who knows life knows that the world is not sick. Give it plenty of food and a chance to work and it will have perfect digestion.
The Greasy Spoon was all right. It was a peaceful place. The landlady was Irish, and her motto was: “If there's any fighting to be done here I'll do it myself.” On the sideboard she kept a carving knife as big as a cavalry saber. Whenever two men started a row, she grabbed this carving knife and with a scream like a panther she lit into them.
“Stop yer fightin' before I hack your hands off!”
The men were in deadly fear of her because they knew she meant business. The sight of that swinging knife quelled every riot before it got started. We fellows were like children in that we only thought of one thing at a time. And when we saw the landlady's carving knife we forgot whatever else was on our minds. This woman was a real peacemaker. She not only wanted peace, she knew how to get it. Such things afford us lessons that are useful all our lives. This woman had learned by sad experience that healthy men will quarrel and thump each other; that these fights put men in the hospital, after breaking her dishes and splattering her tablecloths with blood. Hating bloodshed, she prevented it by being ever ready to shed blood herself. She stood for the moral law, but she stood armed and ready.
Impractical men have told me that right will always triumph of itself; it needs no fighters to support it. The man who believes that is ignorant, and such ignorance is dangerous. Right is always trampled down when no fighter upholds it. But men will fight for right who will not fight for wrong. And so right conquers wrong because right has the most defenders. Let no man shirk the battle because he thinks he isn't needed.
The reason a woman with a carving knife was strong enough to put a stop to fighting in the Greasy Spoon was this: she had behind her every man except the two who were fighting. Had either of those men struck down the woman, then twenty other men, outraged by such a deed, would then and there have swarmed upon the two and crushed them. The woman stood for right and she always triumphed because she had (and these two knew she had) the biggest bunch of fighters on her side.
This is what peace means, an equilibrium between forces. It is the natural law,—God's way of keeping peace. And any plan for World Peace that is builded not upon this law is nothing. Justice must stand with an upraised sword. When two states quarrel she must admonish them, and let them know that should they overthrow her, all good nations would rush in and crush them. The same law that keeps peace in a rowdy boarding-house will keep the peace of the world. For what is this world but a big wide boarding-house, and all the nations rough and greedy grabbers at the table?
I left the Greasy Spoon and went to the “Pie Boarding-House.” The Greasy Spoon had peace, but peace is not enough. After peace comes prosperity. The Pie House represented prosperity. For the woman who ran it knew how to make more pies than the fellows ever heard of. You see, we were all from the British Isles where they have pudding. The pie is an American institution. Nobody knows how to make pies but an American housewife. And lucky that she does, for men can not thrive in America without pie. I do not mean the standardized, tasteless things made in great pie factories. I refer to the personally conducted pies that women used to make. The pioneer wives of America learned to make a pie out of every fruit that grows, including lemons, and from many vegetables, including squash and sweet potatoes, as well as from vinegar and milk and eggs and flour. Fed on these good pies the pioneers—is there any significance in the first syllable of the word—hewed down the woods and laid the continent under the plow. Some men got killed and their widows started boarding-houses. Here we workers fed on proper pie, and we soon changed this wooden land into a land of iron. Now the pie is passing out and we are feeding on French pastry. Is our downfall at hand?
Life in the Pie Boarding-House was a never-ending delight. You never knew when you sat down at the table what kind of pie would be dealt you. Some of the fellows had been there half a year and swore that they had seen fifty-seven varieties and were expecting new ones at any meal. The crowd here was a selected crowd. It was made up of the pie connoisseurs of mill-town. Word was quietly passed out among the wisest fellows to move to this boarding-house and get a liberal education in pie. So it was a selected and well-behaved crowd. They didn't want to start any rumpus and thus lose their places at this attractive table.
And that is one way that virtue is its own reward. Only the well-behaved fellows were tipped off to the pie bonanza. From this I learned that the better manners you have, the better fare you will get in this world. I had steadily risen from the “Bucket of Blood,” through the “Greasy Spoon” to a seat at the cherished “Pie” table. Here the cups were so thin that you couldn't break a man's head with them. I was steadily rising in the social world.
It was while I was in Birmingham that the industrial depression reached rock bottom. In the depth of this industrial paralysis the iron workers of Birmingham struck for better pay. I, with a train load of other strikers, went to Louisiana and the whole bunch of us were practically forced into peonage. It was a case of “out of the frying pan into the fire.” We had been saying that the mill owners had driven us “into slavery,” for they had made us work under bad conditions; but after a month in a peon camp, deep in the swamps of Louisiana, we knew more about slavery than we did before. And we knew that work in the rolling mills, bad as it was, was better than forced labor without pay. To-day when I hear orators rolling out the word “slavery” in connection with American wages and working conditions, I have to laugh. For any man who has ever had a taste of peonage, to say nothing of slavery, knows that the wage system is not real slavery; it's not the genuine, lash-driven, bloodhound-hunted, swamp-sick African slavery. None is genuine without Simon Legree and the Louisiana bloodhounds. The silk-socked wage slave, toiling eight hours for six dollars, is not the genuine old New Orleans molasses slave. He may carry a band and give a daily street parade, but if he's not accompanied by Simon Legree and the bloodhounds, he is not a genuine Uncle Tom, his slavery is less than skin deep. You can't fool me. I know what real slavery is. I know as much about slavery as the man that made it. He's the guy that taught me. I worked under Simon Legree in Louisiana.
On the way to New Orleans we paused at a siding, and a native asked me, “Who are all them men, and which way are they goin'?”
I told him “which way” we were going, and that we were needing jobs. He replied:
“You-all are comin' down hyah now looking for food and work. In '65 you was down hyah lookin' fo' blood!”
When we reached the great city on the Mississippi, we scattered over the town looking for jobs. I saw a pile of coal in the street before a boarding-house. I asked for the job of carrying in the coal. There were two tons of it. I toted it in and was paid a dollar. New Orleans was a popular winter resort where northerners came to escape the severe cold of the North Atlantic States. I was given the job of yard-man in this boarding-house. I carried in groceries, peeled potatoes, scrubbed the kitchen floor and built fires each evening in the guests' rooms. Each room had a grate, and I carried up kindling and coal for all of them. For this work I received a dollar a day, with two meals (dinner and supper) and was permitted to carry away from the kitchen all the cooked food that remained after the guests had eaten. This privilege had grown out of the custom of the colored help in the South having their “man” to feed. I had several men to feed. My “gang” was still looking for work and not finding any. Times were desperate. For five cents a man could get a glass of beer and floor room to sleep on in a lodging-house for homeless men. This was called a “Five Cent Flop” house. My pals were not able at times to raise the five cents a day to buy sleeping quarters. It was late fall and too cold to sleep in the “jungle” down by the levee. The poor fellows were able to stave off starvation by visiting various free lunches during the day. Every night I arrived with my dollar, and that meant beer and beds for a score. I also brought along a flour sack half full of biscuits, cold pancakes, corn bread, chicken necks and wings and scraps of roasts and steaks. These hungry men, with their schooners of beer, made a feast of these scraps. My loyalty in coming every night and giving them everything I could scrape together touched them deeply. They regarded me as deserving special honor, and while they believed in democracy as a general proposition, they voted that it would be carrying equality too far if they permitted me to get no more out of my work than all the rest got. So they decided that I was to have a fifteen-cent bed each night instead of a five-cent flop with the rest of them. And I was assigned to the royal suite of that flop house, which consisted of a cot with a mosquito bar over it.
At this time they were holding “kangaroo” court in the New Orleans jail. Every vagrant picked up by the police was tried and sentenced and shipped out to a chain-gang camp. Nearly every man tried was convicted. And there were plenty of camp bosses ready to “buy” every vagrant the officers could run in. My bunch down at the flop house was in deadly terror of being “kangarooed” and sent to a peon camp in the rice swamps.
One day when I was renewing the fuel in the room of a Mrs. Hubbard from Pittsburgh, I found no one in the apartment and Mrs. Hubbard's pearls and other jewels lying on the dresser. Immediately I was terrified with thought of the kangaroo court. I knew that the jewels were valued at several thousands of dollars. If I went away some one else might come into the room and possibly steal the jewels, for they were lying in plain sight and were valuable enough to tempt a weak-willed person. I sounded an alarm and stayed in the doorway. I refused to leave the room until Mrs. Hubbard returned and counted her valuables.
She found them all there and thanked me for guarding them. She said it was by an oversight that she had gone away without locking up her treasures. She asked me how she should reward me. I told her that I was already rewarded, for I had guarded her jewels in order to protect myself from being suspected of their theft and so kangarooed into a slave-camp.
But in spite of all my precautions, I landed there after all. The gang down at the flop house was dazzled by an employment agent, who offered to ship them out into the rice country to work on the levee for a dollar a day and cakes. The men were wild for a square meal and the feel of a dollar in their jeans. So they all shipped out to the river levee and I went along with the gang.
As our train rattled over the trestles and through the cypress swamps the desperate iron workers were singing:
When we reached the dyke-building camp I learned how ignorant I really was. I could not do the things the older men could. I was young and familiar only with the tools of an iron puddler. The other men were ten years older and had acquired skill in handling mule-teams and swinging an ax. They saw I couldn't do anything, so they appointed me water carrier. The employing boss was what is now called hard-boiled. He was a Cuban, with the face of a cutthroat. Doubtless he was the descendant of the Spanish-English buccaneers who used to prowl the Caribbean Sea and make headquarters at New Orleans. Beside this pirate ancestry I'll bet he was a direct descendant of Simon Legree. He suspected that I couldn't do much in a dyking camp, so he swarmed down on me the second week I was there and ordered me to quit the water-carrying job and handle a mule team and a scraper. I saw death put an arm around my neck right then and there. But I wouldn't confess that I couldn't drive a team.
I put the lines over my head, said “Go 'long” as I had heard other muleteers say, and, grasping the handles of the scraper, I scooped up a slip load of clay. My arms were strong and this was no trick at all. But getting the load was not the whole game. The hardest part was to let go. I guided the lines with one hand and steadied the scraper with the other as I drove up on the dump. Then I heaved up on the handles, the scraper turned over on its nose and dumped the load. But that isn't all it dumped. The mules shot ahead when the load was released, and the lines around my neck jerked me wrong side up. The handle of the scraper hit me a stunning blow in the face and the whole contraption dragged over my body bruising me frightfully. I staggered to my feet with one eye blinded by the blood that flowed from a gash in my brow. Simon Legree cursed me handsomely and told me I was fired. I asked him where I would get my pay, and he told me he was paying me a compliment by letting me walk out of that camp alive. I went to the cook shack and washed the blood off my face. I was a pretty sick boy. The cook was a native and was kind to me.
“Boy, you're liable to get lockjaw from that cut,” he said. “I'll put some of this horse liniment on it and it'll heal up.” He then bandaged it with court-plaster.
“It's a long way back to New Orleans,” the cook concluded. “And you might as well have something to keep your ribs from hitting together.” He cut off a couple of pounds of raw bacon and put it in my pocket together with a “bait” of Plowboy tobacco. And so I hit the road. When I came to the place where my pals were working, cutting willows along the levee, I told them of my plight.
“Never mind, boy,” they said. “You go back to New Orleans and wait for us. After we've worked our hundred days to get a hundred dollars each, we will work a few days more to get a hundred dollars for you. Then we'll all go north and be rich together.”
I began footing it thirty-five miles to the city. I decided, like Queen Isabella, to pawn my jewels to enable me to discover America again. I had an old ring and I met a darky who had a quarter. He got my ring. After tramping all day I was exhausted. I came to a negro cabin and went in and offered the “mammy” a pound of bacon for a pound of corn pone. I further bargained to give the first half of my other pound of bacon if she'd cook the second half for me to eat. She cooked my share of the bacon and set it and the corn bread on the table. I ate heartily for a while, but after two or three slices of the bacon, I was fed up on it. She hadn't cooked enough of the grease out of it. I began feeding this bacon to a pickininny who sat beside me.
“Man, don't give away your meat,” the mammy said. I told her that I had had all I wanted. Then she said to the pickininny:
“Child, doan eat that meat. Save it foh you papa when he come home.”
When I got into New Orleans the next morning, I traded my Plowboy tobacco for a bar of laundry soap. With my twenty-five cents I bought a cotton undershirt. Then I went into the “jungle” at Algiers, a town across the river from New Orleans, and built a fire in the jungle (a wooded place where hoboes camp) and heated some water in an old tin pail I found there. Then I took off all my clothes and threw my underwear away. A negro who stood watching me said:
“White man, are you throwing them clothes away?”
“I certainly am,” I replied.
“Why, them underclothes is northern underclothes. Them's woolen clothes. Them's the kind of underclothes I like.”
“You wouldn't like that bunch of underclothes,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because if you look in the seams you will find something that is unseemly. I've been out in a levee camp.”
“Hush mah mouf, white man,” laughed the negro. “Them little things would never bother a Louisiana nigger. Why we have them things with us all the time. We just call 'em our little companions.”
He picked up the garments and walked off proud and happy. I took my soap and warm water and scrubbed myself from crown to heel. I put my clothing in the pail with more soap and water and boiled the outfit thoroughly.
Then I went back to New Orleans and got my old job in the boarding-house. I saved all my money except my fifteen cents for the nightly flop. A month later my gang came roaring back from the peon camp. They had worked thirty days and had not got a cent. Slave-driver Legree had driven them out when they demanded a reckoning. They were lucky to escape with their lives, their cooties and their appetites. Instead of financing me, I had to finance them again. They finally got cleaned up and we all went back to Birmingham, where the strike was over.
“Show us that spieler,” they said, “who told us the wage system was the worst kind of slavery. If daily wages is slavery, God grant that they never set us free again.”