Southside Chicago, the Black ghetto, was like a besieged city.
Whole sections of it were in ruins. Buildings burned and the air was heavy with smoke, reminiscent of the holocaust from which I had rccently returned.
Our small band, huddled like a bunch of raw recruits under machine gun fire, turned up Twenty-sixth Street and then into the hcart of the ghetto. At Thirty-fifth and Indiana, we split up to go our various ways; I headed for home at Forty-second Place and Bowen. None of us returned to work until the riot was over, more I han a week later.
The battle at home was just as real as the battle in France had hccn. As I recall, there was full-scale street fighting between Black und white. Blacks were snatched from streetcars and beaten or killed; pitched battles were fought in ghetto streets; hoodlums •
rnamed the neighborhood, shooting at random. Blacks fought hack.
As I saw it at the time, Chicago was two cities. The onc was the
<'hamber of Commerce's city of the "American Miracle," the ( 'hicago of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. It was the new industrial city which had grown in fifty years from a frontier town lo hecome the second !argest city in the country.
The other, the Black community, had been part of Chicago ni most from the time the city was founded. Jean Baptiste Pointe I >uSable, a Black trapper from French Canada, was the first scttler. Later came fugitive slaves, and after the Civil War-more Blacks, fleeing from post-Reconstruction terror, taking jobs as domestics and personal servants.
The large increase was in the late 1880s through World Warl, as industry in the city expanded and as Blacks streamed north following the promise of jobs, housing and an end to Jim Crow lynching. The Illinois Central tracks ran straight through the deep South from Chicago to New Orleans, and the Panama Limited made the run every day.
Those that took the train north didn't find a promised land.
l'hcy found jobs and housing, all right, but they had to compete wit h the thousands of recent immigrants from Europe who were nlso drawn to the jobs in the packing houses, stockyards and steel
4
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
mills.
The promise of an end to Jim Crow was nowhere fulfilled. In those days, the beaches on Lake Michigan were segregated. Most were reserved for whites only. The Twenty-sixth Street Beach, close to the Black community, was open to Blacks-but only as long as they stayed on their own side.
The riot had started at this beach, which was thenjammed with a late July crowd. Eugene Williams, a seventeen-year-old Black youth, was killed while swimming off the white side of the beach ..
The Black community was immediately alive with accounts of what had happened-that he had been murdered while swimming, that a gro up of whites had thrown rocks at him and killed him, and that the policeman on duty at the beach had refused to make any arrests.
This incident was the spark that ignited the flames of racial animosity which had been smoldering for months. Fighting between Blacks and whites broke out on the Twenty-sixth Street beach after Williams's death.lt soon spread beyond the beach and lasted over six days. Befare it was over, thirty-eight people-Black and white-were dead, 537 injured and over 1,000 homeless.
The memory of this mass rebellion is still very sharp in my mind.
It was the great turning point in my life, and I have dedicated myself to the struggle against capitalism ever since. In the following pages of my autobiography, I have attempted to trace the development of that struggle in the hopes that today's youth can learn from both our successes and failures.lt is for the youth and the bright future of a socialist USA that this hook has been written.
A Child of Slaves
I was bom in South Omaha, Nebraska, on February 4, 1898-1 hc youngest of the three children of Harriet and Haywood Hall.
()tto, my older brother, was bom in Mayl891; and Eppa, my sister, i11 December 1896.
The 1890s had been a decade of far-reaching structural change 111 the economic and political life of the United States. These were l'ntcful years in which the pattern of twentieth century subjugation uf Blacks was set. A young U.S. imperialism was ready in 1898 to Nhoulder its share of the "white man's burden" and take its
"munifest destiny" beyond the Pacific Coast and the Gulf of Mexico. In the war against Spain, it embarked on its first
"ci vilizing" mission against the colored peoples of the Philippines und the "mixed breeds" of Cuba and Puerto Rico. In the course of thc decade and a half following the Spanish-American War, the lwo-faced banner of racism and imperialist ·"benevolence" was
\'Urried to the majority of the Caribbean countries and the whole of l.ntin America.
"The echo of this industrial imperialism in America," said W. I i. B. DuBois, "was the expulsion of Black men from American dcmocracy, their subjection to caste control and wage slavery." 1 In IM77, the Hayes-Tilden agreement had successfully aborted the ongoing democratic revolution of Reconstruction in the South.
Hlncks were sold down the river, as northern capitalists, with the 1mistance of some former slaveholders, gained full economic and
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
political control in the South. Henceforward, it was assured that the future development of the region would be carried out in complete harmony with the interests of Wall Street. The following years saw the defeat of the Southern based agrarian populist movement, with its promise of Black and white unity against the power of monopoly capital. The counter-revolution against Reconstruction was in full swing.
Beginning in 1890, the Southern state legislatures enacted a series of disenfranchisement laws. Within the next sixteen years, these laws were destined to completely abrogate the right of Blacks to vote. This same period saw the revival of the notorious Black Codes, the resurgence of the hooded terror of the Ku Klux Klan and the defeat for reelection in 1905 of the last Black congressman surviving the Reconstruction period. Jim Crow laws enforcing segregation in public facilities were enacted by Southern states and municipal govemments. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Jim Crow in the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision in 1896, declaring that legislation is powerless to eradicate "racial instincts" and establishing the principle of "separate but equal." This decision was only reversed in 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court held that separate facilities were inherently unequal.
At the time when I was bom, the Black experience was mainly a Southern one. The overwhelming majority of Black people still resided in the South. Most of the Black inhabitants of South Omaha were refugees from the twenty-year terror of the post
Reconstruction period. Omaha itself, despite its midwestern location, did not escape the terror completely, as indicated by the lynching of a Black man, Joe Coe, by a mob in 1891. Many people had relatives and families in the South. Some had trekked up to Kansas in 1879 under the leadership of Henry Adams of Louisiana and Moses "Pap" Singleton of Tennessee, and many had then continued further north to Omaha and Chicago.
My parents were bom slaves in 1860. They were three years old at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. My Father was bom on a plantation in Martin County, Tennessee, north of Memphis. The plantation was owned by Colonel Haywood Hall, whom my Father remembered as a kind and benevolent man.
7
When the slaves were emancipated in 1863, my Grandfather, with the consent of Mr. Hall, took both the given name and surname of his former master.
I never knew Grandfather Hall, as he died before I was bom.
According to my Father and uncles, he was-as they said in those days-"much of a man." He was active in local Reconstruction politics and probably belonged to the Black militia. Although Tennessee did not have a Reconstruction government, there were many whites who supported the democratic aims that were pursued during the Reconstruction period.
But Tennessee was also the home of the Ku Klux Klan, where it was first organized after the Civil War. In the terror that followed the Hayes-Tilden agreement, these "night riders" had marked my Grandfather out as a "bad nigger" for lynching. At first they were deterred because of the paternalism of Colonel Hall. Many of Hall's former slaves still lived on his plantation after the war ended, and the colonel had let it be known that he would kill the first "son-of-a-bitch" that trespassed on his property and tried to terrorize his "nigrahs."
But the anger of the night riders, strengthened by corn liquor, finally overcame their fear of Colonel Hall. My Father, who was about fifteen at the time, described what happened. One night the Klansmen rode onto the plantation and headed straight for Grandfather's cabin. They broke open the door and one poked his head into the darkened cabin. "Hey, Hall's nigger-where are you?''
My Grandfather was standing inside and fired his shotgun point blank at the hooded head. The Klans man, half his head blown off, toppled onto the floor of the cabin, and his companions mounted their horses and fled. Grandmother, then pregnant, fell against the iron bed.
Grandfather got the family out of the cabin and they ran to the
"big house" for protection. It was obvious they couldn't stay in Tennessee, so the Colonel hitched up a wagon and personally drove them to safety, outside of Martin County. Some of Grandfather's family were already living in Des Moines, Iowa, so the Hall family left by train for Des Moines the following morning. The shock of
8
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
this experience was so great that Grandmother gave birth prematurely to their third child-my Uncle George who lived to be ninety-five. Grandmother, however, became a chronic invalid and died a few years after thc flight from Tennessee.
Father was only in his teens when the family left for Des Moines, so he spent most of his youth there. In the late 1880s, he left and moved to South Omaha where there was more of a chance to get work. He got a job at Cudahy's Packing Company, where he worked for more than twenty years-first as a beef-lugger (loading sides of beef on ref rigerated freight cars), and then as a janitor in the main office building. Not long af ter his arrival, he met and married Mother-Harriet Thorpe-who had come up from Kansas City, Missouri, at about the same time.
Father was powerfully built-of medium height, but with tremendous breadth (he had a forty-six-inch chest and weighed over 200 pounds). He was an extremely intelligent man. With little or no formal schooling, he had taught himself to read and write and was a prodigious reader. Unfortunately, despite his great strength, he was not much of a fighter, or so it seemed to me. In later years, some of the old slave psychology and fear remained.
He was an ardent admirer of Booker T. Washington who, in his Atlanta compromise speech of 1895, had called on Blacks to submit to the racist status quo.
Uncle George was the opposite. He would brook no insult and had been known to clean out a whole barroom when offended. The middle brother, Watt, was also a fighter and was especially dangerous if he had a knife or had been drinking. I remember both of them complaining of my Father's timidity.
My Mother's family also had great fighting spirit. Her father, Jerry Thorpe, was bom on a plantation near Bowling Green, Kentucky. He was illiterate, but very smart and very strong. Even as an old man, his appearance made us believe the stories that were told of his strength as a young man. When he was feeling fine and happy, his exuberance would get the hest of him and he'd grab the
}argest man around, hoist him on his shoulders, and run around the yard with him.
Grandfather Thorpe was half Creek lndian and had an Indian
9
profile with a humped nose and high cheekbones. His hair was short and curly and he had a light brown complexion. He had a straggly white beard that he tried to cultivate into a Van Dyke. He said his father was a Creek lndian and his mother a Black plantation slave. No one knew his exact age, but we made a guess hased on a story he often told us.
He was about six or seven years old when, he said, "The stars ren."
"When was that, Grandpa?"
"Oh, one night the stars fell, I remember it very clear ly. The skies were all lit up by falling stars. People were scared almost out of t heir wits. The old master and mistress and all the slaves were running out on the road, falling down on their knees to pray and ask forgiveness. We thought the Judgement Day had surely come.
Glory Hallelujah! It was the last fire! The next day, the ground was nit covered with ashes!"
At first we thought all of that was just his imagination, something he had fantasized as a child and then remembered as a real event. But when my older brother Otto was in high school, he got interested in astronomy and came across a reference to a meteor shower of 1833. We figured out that was what Grandfather Thorpe had been talking about, so we concluded that he was bom nround 1825 or 1826.
Grandfather Thorpe was filled with stories, many aboutslavery.
"Chillen, I've got scars I'll carry to my grave." He would show us I he welts on his back from slave beatings (my Grandmother also had them). Most of his beatings came from his first master in Kentucky. But he was later sold to a man in Missouri, whom he said I reated him much better. This may have been due in part to his value as a slave-he was skilled both as a carpenter and l�a binetmaker.
Grandfather had many stories to tel1 about the Civil War. He was in Missouri at the time, living in an area that was first tak en by n group known as Quantrell's raiders (a guerrilla-like band of irregulars who fought for the South) and then by the Union forces.
When the Union soldiers first came into the plantations, they would call in slaves from the fields and make them sit down in the
10
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
great drawing room of the house. They would then force the master and mistress and their family to cook and serve for the slaves. Grandfather told us that the soldiers would never eat any of the food that was served, because they were afraid of getting poisoned.
The master on the plantation was generally decent when it became clear that the Union forces were going to control the area for awhile. At that time, Grandfather and my Grandmother Ann lived on adjacent plantations somewhere near Moberly, Missouri. Grandfather was allowed to visit Ann on weekends. Often on Sundays when he went to make a visit, he was challenged by Union guards. They would roughly demand to know his mission.
My Grandfather and Grandmother got married, with the agreement of their two masters, and eventually had a family of five daughters and two sons. Grandfather Thorpe was given a plot of land in return for his services as a carpenter, but the family soon moved into Moberly. As the children reached working age, the family began to break up, but the girls always remained very close.
They came back to visit frequently and never broke family ties as the boys had.
My Mother, Harriet, was bom when Grandmother was a slave on the plantation of Squire Sweeney in Howard County, Missouri.
After the family moved into Moberly, Mother worked for a white family in town. She later went to St. Joseph, Missouri, to work for another white family. One day, while she was at work in St.
Joseph, she heard a shot and then screams from down the street.
She ran out to see what had happened. There was a great commotion and a crowd of people was gathering in front of the house next door.
The family living there went by the name of Howard-a man, wif e and two children. Both the man and his wife were church members; they appeared to be a most respectable couple. Mrs.
Howard had been very active in church affairs and socials. Her husband was frequently absent because, she said, he was a traveling salesman and his work took him out of town for long periods of time.
What the neighbors were not aware of was that "Mr. Howard"
Il
wns none other than the legendary Jesse James.Re was shot in the hnck while hanging a picture in his house. The man who killed him wns Robert Ford-a member of Jesse's own gang who had turned trnitor for a bribe offered by the Bums Detective Agency.
When my Mother did the laundry, I remember she would aften Ning the "Ballad of Jesse James" -a sang which became popular nftcr his death.
Jesse James was a man-he kil/ed many a man, The man that robbed that Denver train.
It was a dirty little coward
Who shot Mr. Howard,
And they laid Jesse James in his grave.
Oh the people held their breath
When they heard of Jesse's death,
And they wondered how he came to die.
He was shot on the sly
By little Robert Ford,
And they laid poor Jesse in his grave.
In 1893, my Mother went to Chicago to visithersister and see thc Exposition. She said she saw Frank James, Jesse's brother.
I le was out of prison then, a very dignified old man with a long white beard. He had been hired to ride around as an attraction at one of the exhibitions.
Mother kept moving u-p to the north by stages. After the job in St. Joseph, she found work in St. Louis. She arrived to find the city in a tense situation-the whole town was on the verge of a race riot.
· I 'he immediate cause was the murder of an Irish cop named Brady.
The Black community was elated, for Brady was a "nigger-hating cop" who carved notches on his pistol to show the number of Blacks he had killed. Brady finally met his end at the hands of a
"bad" Black man who ran a gambling house in Brady's district.
The gambling, of course, was illegal. But as was aften the case, t he cops were paid off with a "cut" from the takings of the house.
As the story was told to me, Brady and the gambler met on the NI reet one day and got into an argument. Brady accused the
�ambler of not giving him his proper "cut." This was denied
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
vehemently. Brady then threatened to close the place down. The Black man told him, "Don't you come into my place when the game's going on!" He then turned and walked off. The scene was witnessed by several Blacks, and the news of how the gambler had defied Brady spread immediately throughout the Black district.
This was bad stuff for Brady. It might lead to "niggers gettin'
notions," as the cops put it. A f ew days passed, and Brady made his move. He went to the gambling house when the game was on and was shot dead.
Some anonymous Black bard wrote a song about it all: Brady, why didn't you run,
You know you done wrong.
You came in the room when the game was going on!
Brady went below /ooking mighty curious.
Devil said, "Where you from?"
"l'm from East St. Louis."
"East St. Louie, come this way
/'ve been expecting you every day!"
The song was immediately popular in the Black community and became a symbol of rebellious feelings. Mother said that when she arrived in St. Louis, Blacks were singing this song all over town.
The police realized the <langer in such "notions" and began to arrest anyone they caught singing it. Forty years later, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Carl Sandburg sing the same song as part of his repertoire of folk ballads of the midwest. I had not heard it since Mother had sung it to us.
Mother later moved to Kansas City, Missouri, and then to South Omaha. Her marriage there to my Father was her second.
As a very young girl in Moberly, she had married John Harvey, but he was, to use her words, "a no-good yellah nigger, who expected me to support him." They had one child, Gertrude, before he deserted her.
Gertie came to Omaha some time after my Mother, and married my Father's youngest brother, George. I have a feeling that Mother promoted this match; the two hard-working, sober Hall brothers must have been quite a catch!
A CHILD OF SLAVES
13
As I remember Mother in my childhood years, she was a small, hrnwn-skinned woman, rather on the plumpish side, with large 1111tf hcautiful soft brown eyes. She had the humped, Indian nose of thr Thorpe family.
My first memory of her is hearing her sing as she did housework.
Sht· had a melodious contralto voice and what seemed to me to be nn cndless and varied repertoire. Much of what I know about this
,,rriod, I learned from her songs. These included lullabies ("Go to Slccp You Little Pickaninny, Mamma's Gonna Swat You if You l>on't") and many spirituals and jubilee songs. There were also l1111umerable folk ballads, and the popular songs of her day like
"I >own at the Ball" and "Where Did Y ou Get That Hat?'' Then I hr.rc was the old song the slaves sang about their masters fleeing 1hr Union Army-"The Year of Jubilo."
Oh darkies, have you seen the Massah with the mustache on his face?
He was gwine down de road dis mornin' like he's gwine to leave dis place.
Oh, de Massah run, ha ha!
And the darkies sing, ho hof
It must be now the Kingdom comin' and de
year of Jubilo!
Mother never went to school a day in her life, but she had a phcnomenal memory and was a virtual repository of Black folklore. My brother Otto taught her to read and write when she wns forty years old. She told stories of lif e on the plantations, of I hc "hollers" they used. When a slave wanted to talk to a friend on 11 ncighboring plantation, she would throw back her head and half 11i11g, half yell: "Oh, Bes-sie, I wa-ant to see you." Often you could hcur one of the "hollers" a mile away.
When Mother was a girl, camp meetings were a hig part of her lift·. She had songs she remembered from the meetings, like "I I >on't Feel Weary, No Ways Tired," and she would imitate the 1ncachers with all of their promises of fire and brimstone. La ter, whcn we lived in South Omaha, she was very active in the African Mct hodist Episcopal Church. As a means of raising funds, she
14
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
used to organize church theatricals. Otto would help her read the plays; she would then direct them and usually play the leading role herself. She was a natural mimic. I heard her go through entire plays from beginning to end, imitating the voices (even the male ones) and the actions of the performers.
In addition to caring for Otto, Eppa and myself, Mother got jobs catering parties for rich white families in North Omaha. She would bring us back all sorts of goodies and leftovers from these parties. Sometimes she would get together with her friends among the other domestics, and they would have a great time panning their employers and exchanging news of the white folks' scandalous doings.
Mother had the great fighting spirit of her family. She was a strong-minded woman with great ambition for her children, especially for us boys. Eppa, who was a plain Black girl, was sensitive but physically tough, courageous, and a regular tomboy.
Worried about her future, Mother insisted that she learn the piano and arranged for her to take lessons at twenty-five cents each.
Though she learned to play minor classics such as "Poet and Peasant," arias from such operas as Aida and Il Trovatore, accompanied the choir and so on, Eppa never liked music very much and was not consoled by it the way Mother was.
As a wife, Mother had a way of making Father feel the part of the man in the house. She flattered his ego and always addressed him as "Mr. Hall" in front of guests and us children.
LIFE IN SOUTH OMAHA
You ask what town I love the best.
South Omaha, South Omaha!
The Jairest town of all the rest,
South Omaha, South Omaha!
Where yonder's Papillion's limp stream
To where Missouri's waters gleam.
Oh, Jairest town, oh town of mine,
South Omaha, South Omaha!
A CHILD OF SLAVES
15
In the early part of the century, the days of my youth, South Omaha was an independent city. In 1915, it was annexed to hccome part of the larger city of Omaha. Like many midwestern towns, the city took its name from the original inhabitants of the nrea. In this case, it was the Omaha Indians of the Sioux tribal family. The area was a camping ground of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804. It grew in importance when it became a licensed trading post and an important outfitting point during the ( 'olorado Gold Rush. But the main growth of South Omaha came in the 1880s as the meat packing industry developed.
In 1877, the first refrigerated railroad cars were perfected. This made it possible to slaughter livesto·ck in the midwest and ship the rneat to the large markets in eastern cities. As a result, the meat packing industry grew tremendously in the midwest.
The city leaders saw the opportunity and encouraged the cxpanding packing industry to settle there-offering them special tnx concessions and so forth. The town, situated on a plateau back from the "hig muddy" (the Missouri River), began to grow. Soon it was almost an industrial suburb of Omaha and was one of the three largest packing centers in the country. All of the hig packers of the time-Armour, Swift, Wilson and Cudahy-had hig branches there. Cudahy's main plant was in South Omaha.
The industry brought with it growing railroad traffic. As a boy, I watched the dozens of lines of cars as they carried livestock in from the west and butchered meat to ship out to the east. The Burlington; the Chicago and N orthwestern; the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific; the Illinois Central; the Rock Island; I hc Union Pacific-all of these lines had terminals there. By 1910, Omaha was the fourth largest railway center in the country.
When I was bom in 1898, South Omaha was a bustling town of nhout 20,000. Most of these 20,000 people were foreign-born and first generation immigrants. The two largest groups were the Irish und the Bohemians ( or Czechs). There was a sprinkling of other Slavic groups-]?oles, Russians, Serbs-as well as Germans,
< ireeks and ltalians.
The Bohemians were the largest ethnic group in town. They li ved mainly in the southern part of town, towards the river, in the
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
Brown Park and Albright sections. One thing that impressed me was their concern with education. They were a cultured group of people. I can't remember any of them being illiterate and they had their own newspaper. They were involved in the political wheelings and dealings of the town and were successful at it. At one time, both the mayor and chief of police were Bohemians.
The Irish were the second largest group, scattered throughout the town. The newly arrived poor "shanty" Irish would first settle on Indian Hill, near the stockyards. There were two classes of Irish- the "shanty" lrish on the one hand, and the "old settlers" or
"lace curtain" lrish on the other. This second group, who had settled only one generation befare, was mostly made up of middle class, white collar, civil service and professional workers who lived near N orth Omaha. There were also a few Irish who were very rich; managers and executives who lived in Omaha proper. They had become well assimilated into the community. The tendency was
.for the poorer Irish to live in South Omaha, and those who had
"made it" to ane degree or another would mave up to N orth Omaha or Omaha proper.
There were only a few dozen Black families in South Omaha, scattered throughout the community. There was no Black ghetto and, as I saw it, no "Negro problem." This was due undoubtedly to our small numbers, although there was a relatively large number of Blacks living in N orth Omaha. The Black community there had grown after Blacks were brought in as strikebreakers during the 1894 strike in the packing industry, but no real ghetto developed until af ter W orld War I.
Our family lived in the heart of the Bohemian neighborhood in South Omaha. Nearly all our neighbors were Bohemians. They came from many backgrounds; there were workers and peasants, professionals, artists, musicians and other skilled artisans, all fleeing from the oppressive rule of the Austro-H ungarian Empire.
They were friendly people, and kept up their language and traditions. On Saturdays, families would gat her at one of the beer gardens to sing and dance. I remember watching them dance scottisches and polkas, listening to the beautiful music of their bands and orchestras, or running af ter their great marching bands
17
when they were in a parade. On special occasions, they would hring out their colorful costumes. Much of their community life l'.Cntered around the gymnastic clubs-Sokols or Turners' Hallswhich they had established.
There were differences in how the ethnic groups related to each nt her and to the Blacks in town. In those days, Indian Hill was the Ntomping ground of teenage Irish toughs. One day, a mob of predominantly lrish youths ran the small Greek colony out of town when one of their members allegedly killed an Irish cop. I rcmember seeing the Greek community leaving town one Sunday nfternoon. There Were men, women and children (about 100 in all) walking down the railroad tracks, carrying everything they could hold. Some of their houses had been burned and a few of them had hcen beaten up in town.
We should have seen the <langer for us in this, but one Black man even boasted to my Father about how he had helped run the (ireeks out. My Father called him a fool. "What business did you have helping that bunch of whites? Next time it might be you they run out!" The incident was an ominous sign of tensions that were to come many years later.
At the time, however, our family got along well with all the immigrant families in our immediate neighborhood. I loved the sweet haunting melodies of the Irish folk ballads: "Rose ofTralee,"
"Mother Machree" and many of the popular songs, like "Mylrish Molly-0" and "Augraghawan, I Want. to Go Back to Oregon."
There was a Bohemian couple living next door. On occasion, Mr. Rehau would get a bit too much under his helt. He'd come home and really raise hell. When this happened, Mrs. Rehau scurried to Officer Bingbarn, the Black cop, to get some help. I rcmember one afternoon when Bingbarn came to lend a band in taming him. The Bohemian was a little guy compared to him.
Officer Bingbarn threw him down out in the yard and plunked himself down on Rehau's back.
Dust flew as he kicked and thrashed and tried to get out from under the Black man. Bingham just "rode the storm" and when Rehau raised his head, he'd smack him around until the rebellion subsided.
18
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
"Had enough?" he'd yell at his victim. "You gonna behave now and mind what Mrs. Rehau says?" All the while, she was running around them, waving her apron.
"Beat him some more, Mr. Bingham, please! Make him be good."
Finally, either Bingham got tired or Mr. Rehau just gave out and peace returned to the neighborhood.
"Police and community relations" were less tense then. The cops knew how to control a situation without using guns. Often this meant they'd get into actual fist fights. In those days, there was a big Black guy in town named Sam, a beef lugger like my Father.
Sam was a nice quiet guy, but on occasion he'd go on a drunk and fight anyone within arm's length (which was a big area). The cops generally handled it by fighting it out with him.
But I remember one time Sam really caused a row. He was outside a bar on J Street, up in Omaha proper. During the course of his drunk, he'd beaten up five or six of the regular cops. This
• called for extreme measures. Briggs, the chief of police, came to the scene to restore law and order. He marched up to Sam and threw out his chest. "Now Sam, it's time for you to behave, you hear?" He even pulled out his thirty-eight to show he meant business.
But Sam wasn't ready to behave. He came at Briggs, intending to lay him out like he'd done with the other officers. Briggs backed up, one step at a time. "Sam, you stop. Y ou hear me Sam? Time to stop, now." Sam forced Briggs all the way back to his carriage.
Once Briggs was in, he delivered his final threat: "Sam, you come down to City Hall on Monday and see me. This just can't hap pen this way."
Briggs drove off. Monday morning came and Sam went down to City Hall. He was fined for being drunk and disorderly. He didn't fight the court and willingly paid the fine. It seemed like an unwritten agreement. The cops wouldn't shoot when Sam went on a spree. When it was over, Sam would go and pay his fine and that ·
would end the whole business.
Our family was the only Black family in our n ;ighborhood, and we were pretty well insulated from the racist pressures of the outside world. As children we were only very dimly aware of what
19
DuBois called the "veil of color between the races."
I first became aware of the veil, not from anything that happened in the town, but from what my parents and grandparents told me of how Southern whites had persecuted Blacks and of how they had suffered under slavery. I remember Grandfather and Grandmother Thorpe showing me the scars they had on their backs from the overseer's lash. I remember Pa reading newspaper accounts of the endless reign of lynch terror in the South, and about the 1908 riots in Springfield, lllinois.
In 1908, Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion, defeated the "great white hope," Jim Jeffries. Pa said that it was the occasion for a new round of lynchings in the South. There were other great Black fighters-Sam Langford, Joe Jeanett and Sam McVey for instance-but Johnson was the first Black heavyweight to be able to fight for the championship and the first to win it.
He was conscious that he was a Black man in a racist world. "I'm Black, they never let me forget it. I'm Black, l'11 never forget it."
Jeff ries had been pushed as the hope of the white race to reclaim the heavyweight crown from Johnson. When Johnson knocked out Jeffries, it was a symbol of Black defiance and self-assertion.
To Blacks, the victory meant pride and hope. It was a challenge to the authority of bigoted whites and to them it called for extra measures to "keep the niggers in their place."
To us children, Black repression seemed restricted to the South, outside the orbit of our immediate experience. As I saw it then, there was no deliberate plot of white against Black. I thought there were two kinds of white folk: good and bad, and the latter were mainly in the South. Most of those I knew in South Omaha were good people. Disillusionment came later in my life.
The friendly interracial atmosphere of South Omaha was illustrated by the presence of Officer Bingham and Officer Ballou, two Black cops in the town's small police force. Bingbarn was a big, Black andjollyfellow. His beat was our neighborhood. Ballou was a tall, slim, ramrod straight and light brown-skinned Black.
He was a veteran of the Black Tenth Cavalry. He had fought in the lndian wars against Geronimo and had participated in the chase
20
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
for Billy the Kid. Ballou was also a veteran of the Spanish
American War. All the kids, Black and white, regarded himwith a special awe and respect. Both Black officers were treated as respectable members of the community, liked by the people because they had their confidence. While they wore guns, they never seemed to use them. These cops fought tough characters with fists and clubs, pulling a gun only rarely, and then only in selfdefense. It seemed that a large part of their duty was to keep the kids out of mischief.
"Officer Bingbarn," the Bohemian woman across the alley would call, "would you please keep an eye on my boy Frontal. See he don't make trouble."
"Don't worry, Mrs. Brazda. He's a good boy."
"Has Haywood been a good boy?"
"Oh yes, Mrs. Hall. He's all right." And he would stop for a chat.
My sister Eppa, a lad called Willy Starens and I were the only
�lack kids in the Brown Park Elementary School. My brother Otto had already graduated and was in South Omaha High. Our schoolmates were predominantly Bohemians, with a sprinkling of Irish, German and a few Anglo-Americans. My close childhood chums included two Bohemian lads, Frank Brazda and Jimmy Rehau; an Anglo-Irish kid, Earl Power; and Willy Ziegler, who was of German parentage. We were an inseparable fivesome, in and out of each other's homes all the time.
During my first years in school, I was plagued by asthma, and was absent from school many months at a time. The result was that I was a year behind. I finally outgrew this infirmity and became a strong, healthy boy. By the time I reached the eighth grade, I had become one of the hest students in my class, sharing this honor with a Bohemian girl, Bertha Himmel: Both of us could solve any problem in arithmetic, both were good at spelling, and at interschool spelling bees our school usually won the first prize. My self-confidence was encouraged by my teache'rs, all of whom were white and yet uniformly kind and sympathetic.
Of course, like all kids, I had plenty of fights. But ·race was seldom involved. Occasionally, I would hear the word "nigger."
While it evoked anger in me, it seemed no more disparaging than
A CHILD OF SLAVES
21
thc terms "bohunk," "sheeny," "dago," "shanty Irish" or "poor white trash." All were terms of common usage, interchangeable as slurring epithets on one's ethnic background, and usually employc<l outside the hearing of the person in question.
In contrast to the daily life of the neighborhood, however, the virus of racism was subtly injected into the classroom at the Brown Park School I attended. The five races of mankind illustrated in our geography books portrayed the Negro with the receding forehead and prognathous j aws of a gorilla. There was a complete absence of Black heroes in the history books, supporting the inference that the Black man had contributed nothing to civili-1.ation. We were taught that Blacks were brought out of the savagery of the jungles of Africa and introduced to civilization through slavery under the benevalent auspices of the white man.
In spite of my Father's submissive attitude, it is to him that I must give credit for scotching this big lie about the Negro's past.
His attitude grew out of his concern for our survival in a hostile cnvironment. He felt most strongly that the Negro was not innately inferior. He perceived that his children must have same sense of self-respect and confidence to sustain them until that
<l istant day when, through "obvious merit and just dessert," Blacks would receive their award of equality and recognition.
Father possessed an amazing store of knowledge which he had culled from his readings. He would tell us about the Black civilizations of ancient Egypt, Ethiopia and Cush. He would quote from the Song of Solomon: "I am Black and comely, oh ye
<laughters of Jerusalem." He would tell us about Black soldiers in the Civil War; about the massacre of Blacks at Fort Pillow and the battle cry they used thereafter, "Remember Fort Pillow! Remember Fort Pillow!"2 He knew about the Haitian Revolution, the defeat of Napoleon's Army by Toussaint L'Ouverture, Dessalines and Jean Christophe. He told us about the famous Zulu chief Shaka in South Af rica; about Alexandre Dumas, the great French romanticist, and Pushkin, the great R·ussian poet, who were both Black.
Father said that he had taught himself to read and write. He had an extensive library, which took up half of one of the walls in our
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
living room. His books were mainly historical works-his favorite subject. They included such titles as The Decisive Battles of the World, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, and many histories of England, France, Germany and Russia. He had Stanley in Africa, and a number of biographies of famous men, including Napoleon, Caesar and Hannibal (who Father said was a Negro). He had Scott's Ivanhoe and his Waverly novels; Bulwer Lytton; Alexandre Dumas' novels and the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, and Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington.
On another wall there was a huge picture of the charge of the Twenty-fifth Black Infantry and the Tenth Cavalry at San Juan Hill, rescuing Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. There were pi et ures of Frederick Douglass and, of course, his hero, Booker T.
Washington. He would lecture to us on history, displaying his
.extensive knowledge. He was a great admirer of Napoleon. He would get into one of his lecturing moods and pace up and down with his hands behind his back before the rapt audience of my sister Eppa and myself. Talking about the Battle of Waterloo, hewould say:
"Wellington was in a tough spot that day. Napoleon was about to whip him; the trouble was Bluchei" hadn't shown up."
"Who was he, Pa?"
"He was the German general who was supposed to reinforce Wellington with 13,000 Prussian troops. Wellington was getting awful nervous, walking up and down behind the lines and saying,
'Oh! If Blucher fails to come! Where is Blucher?' "
"Did he finally get there, Pa?''
"Y es, son, he finally got there and turned the tide of battle. And if he hadn't shown up and Napoleon had won, the whole course of history would have been changed."
It was through Father that I entered the world of books. I developed an unquenchable thirst to learn about people and their history. I remember going to the town library when I was nine or ten and asking, "Do you have a history of the world for children?"
My first love became the historical novel. I loved George Henty's books; they always dealt with the exploits of a sixteen-
23
ycar-old during an important historical period. Through Henty's hcroes, I too was with Bonnie Prince Charlie, with Wellington in the Spanish Peninsula, with Gustavus Adolphus at Lutsen in theThirty Years War, with Clive in India and Under Drake's Flag uround the world. I was also fascinated by romances of the feudal pcriod such as When Knighthood Was in Flower and lvanhoe. I read Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and the works of H. Rider Haggard.
I went through a definite Anglophile stage, in part due to the influence of a Jamaican named Mr. Williams who worked as ussistant janitor with my Father. Mr. Williams was a buge Black man with scars all over his face. He was a former stoker in the British Navy. I was attracted by his strange accent and haughty dcmeanor. Evidently he saw in me an appreciative audience. I would listen with open mouth and wonder at the stories of the strange places he had seen, of his adventures in faraway lands. He was a real British patriot, a Black imperialist, if such was possi ble.
He would declare, "The sun never sets on the British Empire,"
und then sing "Rule Brittania, Brittania Rule the Waves." He l)UOted Napoleon as allegedly saying, "Britain is a small garden, hut she grows some bitter weeds," and "Give me French soldiers und British officers, and I will conquer the world." I pictured myself as a British sailor, and read Two Years Before the Mast und Battle of Trafa/gar.
"Do you think they would let me join the British Navy?" I asked Mr. Williams.
"No, my lad," he answered, "You have to be a British citizen or subject to do that." I was quite disappointed.
But it was not only British romance that fascinated me. At about I hc age of twelve I became a Francophile. I read all of Dumas'
novels and quite a number of other novels about France. I had hcgun to read French history, which to me turned out to be as interesting as the novels and equally romantic. I- read about Joan of Are, the Hundred Years' War, Francis I, about Catherine de Mcdici, the Huguenots and Admiral Coligny, the Duc de Guise, I hc massacre of St. Bartholomew Eve or the night of the long knives; then the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities, the
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
guillotining of Charlotte Corday and the assassination of Marat.
Occasionally, the ugly reality of race would intrude upon the dream world of my childhood. I distinctly remember two such occasions. One was when a white family from Arkansas moved across the alley from us. Mr. Faught, the patriarch of the elan, was a typical red-necked peckerwood. He would sit around the store front, chawing tobacco, telling how they treated "niggers" down his way.
"They were made to stay in their place-down in the cotton patch-not in factories taking white men's jobs."
As I remember, his racist harangues did not make much of an impression on the local white audience. Apparently at that time there was no feeling of competition in South Omaha because there were so f ew Blacks. I would also imagine that his slovenly appearance did not jibe with his white supremacist pretensions.
One day a substitute teacher took over our class. I was about ten years old. The substitute was a Southerner from Arkansas.
During history class she started talking about the Civil War. The slaves, she said, did not really want freedom because they were happy as they were. They would have been freed by their masters in a few years anyway. Her villain was General Grant, whom she contrasted unfavorably with General Robert E. Lee.
"Lee was a gentleman," she put forth, "But Grant was a cigar-smoking liquor-drinking roughneck."
She didn't like Sherman either, and talked about his "murdering rampage" through Georgia. I wasn't about to take all of this and ehallenged her.
"I don't know about General Grant's habits, but he did beat Lee.
Besides, Lee couldn't have been much of a gentleman; he owned slaves!"
Livid with rage, she shouted, "That's enough-what I could say about you!"
"Well, what could you say?" I challenged.
She apparently saw that wild racist statements wouldn't work in this situation, and that I was trying to provoke her to do something like that. She cut short the argument, shouting, "That's enough"
"Y es, that's enough/' I sassed.
A CHILD OF SLAVES
25
During the heated exchange, I felt that I had the sympathy of most of my classmates. After school, some gathered around me and said, "Y ou certainly told her off!"
When I told Mother she supported me. "Y ou done right, son,"
she said.
But Father was not so sure. "Y ou might have gotten into trouble."
I f eel now that one of the reasons for my self-confidence during my childhood years, and why the racist nations of innate Black inf eriority left me cold, was my ol der brother Otto. His example belied such claims. He was the most brilliant ane in our family, and probably in all of South Omaha. He had skipped a grade both in grade school and in high school, and was a real prodigy. He was a natura! poet, and won many prizes in composition. His poem on the charge of the Twenty-fifth Black lnfantry and Tenth Cavalry at San Juan Hill was published in ane of the Omaha dailies. Otto was praised by all of his teachers. "An unusual boy," they said,
"clearly destined to become a leader of his race."
One day, ane of his teachers and a Catholic priest called on Mother and Father to talk about Otto's future. Otto was about fourteen at the time. They suggested that he might be good material for the priesthood, and that there was a possibility of his getting a scholarship for Creighton University, Omaha's famous Jesuit school. The teacher suggested that if this were agreed to, he should take up Latin. My parents were extremely flattered, despite the faet that they were good Methodists (AME). Even Father, who did not seem ambitious for his children, was impressed.
But when the proposition was placed befare Otto, he vehemently disagreed. He did not want to become a priest nor did he want to study Latin. He wanted, he said, to be an architect! Doctors, dentists, teachers and preachers-these were the professions for an ambitious Black in those days.
"An architect!" they exclaimed in amazement. "Who ever heard of a Black architect?"
"Who ever heard of a Black priest?" Otto retorted. (At that time there were only two or three Black priests in the entire U.S.)
"But Otto," Mother argued,"you'll have the support of a lot of
26
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
prominent white folks. They'll help you through college."
But Otto would have none of it. Undoubtedly, my parents thought that they could finally wear down his opposition and that he would become more amenable in time. They did force him to take Latin, a subject he hated.
Otto stayed in school, but no longer seemed interested in his studies. He dropped out of school suddenly in his senior year. He was sixteen. He left home and got a job as a bellhop in a hotel in N orth Omaha's Black community. This move cut completely the few remaining ties he had with his white age group in South Omaha.
Otto's drop-out from high school evidently signified that he had given up the struggle to be somebody in the white world. He had become disillusioned with the white world and therefore sought identity with his own people. During my childhood years, our relationship had never been close. There was, of course, the age gap-he was seven years older. But even in tater years, when we were closer and had more in common, we never talked about our childhood. I don't know why. As a child I had been proud of his academic feats and boasted about them to my friends.
At the time he left high school Otto was the only Black in South Omaha High and was about to become its first Black graduate.
Highly praised by his teachers and popular among his fellow students, he was a real showpiece in the school.
What caused him to drop out af school in his senior year?
Thinking back an it, I don't believe that it had anything to do with the attempt to make him a priest. I think that he had won that battle a couple of years before. At least, I never heard the matter mentioned again.
Otto undoubtedly had had high aspirations at one time, as evidenced by his desire to become an architect. Somewhere along the line they disappeared. Perhaps a contributing factor was the accumulating effect af Otto's malady. On occasion, Mother would remind us that Otto had water an the brain, and that he was different from Eppa and myself. At the time, he seemed smarter than us, more independent and in rebellion against Pa's lack af encouragement, moral support and his parental authority. Cer-
27
tainly in adult life Otto used to sleep about ten hours a day and very often fell asleep .in meetings. He seemed to Jack the ability of prolonged concentration, although whatever brain damage he may have suffered never affected the quickness of his mind and ability to grasp the nub of any question or the capacity for leadership which he showed on a number of occasions.
But more debilitating, probably, than any physical disease was lhe generation gap of that era-between parents of slave backgrounds and children bom free, particularly in the north. Otto's dropping out of school and his later radical political development were undoubtedly related to a conflict more intense than the ones of today.
Father was an ardent follower of Booker T. Washington. His ambitions for his sons were very modest, to put it mildly. He undoubtedly would have been satisfied if we could become good law-abiding citizens with stable jobs. He thought of jobs a notch or lwo above his own station, like a postal employee, a skilled tradesman, or a clerk in the civil service. The offer of a scholarship for the priesthood was, therefore, simply beyond his expectations, and I guess that the old man was deeply disappointed at Otto's rejection of it.
Otto was quite independent and would not conform to Father's idea of discipline. For example, he was completely turned off on lhe question of religion, and Father could not force him to go to church. I don't remember Otto ever going to church with the family. Father claimed that Otto was irresponsible and wild. As a result, there was mutual hostility between them. The results were numerous thrashings when Otto was young and violent quarrels between them as he grew older. Mother would usually defend Otto. Grandpa Thorpe, himself a strict disciplinarian, would warn Mother: "Hattie, you mark my words, that boy is going to lan' in the pen."
At some point, Otto came to the conclusion that there was no use in continuing his education. He must have felt that it was irrelevant. Opportunities for educated Blacks were few, even in N orth Omaha's Black community where there were only a few professionals. In that community there were a few preachers, one
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
doctor, one dentist and one or two teachers. Black businesses consisted of owners of several undertaking establishments, a couple of barber shops and a few pool rooms. The only other Blacks in any sort of middle class positions were a few postal employees, civil service workers, pullman porters and waiters.
Then too, Otto had passed through the age of puberty and was becoming more and more conscious of his race. Along with the natural detachment and withdrawal from childhood socializing with girls-in his case w_hite girls who were former childhood sweethearts-Otto experienced a withdrawal and non-socialization because of his race. He ended up quite alone because there were not many Black kids his age in South Omaha. There wasn't much contact with the Black kids from North Omaha either. As a very sensitive person on the verge of manhood, I imagine he began to f eel these changes keenly.
Af ter he dropped out of school in 1908, Otto was soon attracted tø the "sportin' life"-the pool halls and sporting houses of North Omaha. He wanted to be among Black people; he was anxious to get away from Father. Thus, he left home and gotjobs as a bellhop, shoeshine boy, and busboy. He began to absorb a new way of life, stepping fully into the social life of the Black community in North Omaha. He'd evidently heeded the "call of the blood" and gone back to the race. It was not until a few years later, when I had similar experiences, that I understood that Otto had arrived at the first stage in his identity crisis and had gone to where he felt he belonged.
He would come home quite often, though, flaunting his new clothes, a "box-backed" suit-"fitting nowhere but the shoulders,"
high-heeled Stacey Adams button shoes, and a stetson hat. He'd give a few dollars to Mother and some <limes to me and my sister.
Sometimes he would bring a pretty girl friend with him. But most of the time, he would bring a young man, Henry Starens, who was a piano player. He played a style popular in those days, later to be known as boogie-woogie, in which the piano was the whole orchestra. He played Ma Rainey's famous blues, "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor, Make It Where Your Man Will Never Know," and the old favorite, "Alabama Bound."
A CHILD OF SLAVES
29
Alabama Bound
I'm Alabama Bound.
Oh, babe, don't leave me here,
Just leave a dime for beer.
A boy of ten at the time, I was tremendously impressed. There is 110 doubt that Otto's experience served to weaken some of my rhildish notions about making it in the white world.
IIALLEY'S COMET AND MY RELIGION
On May 4, 1910, Halley's Comet appeared flaring down out of t he heavens, its luminous tail switching to earth. It was an ominous sight.
A rash or'religious revival swept Omaha. Prophets and messiahs appeared on street corners and in churches preaching the end of t he world. Hardened sinners "got religion." Backsliders renewed t heir faith. The comet, with its tail moving ever closer to the earth, scemed to lend credence to forecasts of imminent cosmic disaster.
Both my Mother and Father were deeply religious. Theirs was t hat "old time religion," the fire-and-brimstone kind which leaned hcavily on the Old Testament. It was the kind that accepted the Bi ble and all its legends as the literal gospel truth. We children had t he "fear of the Lord" drilled into us from early age. My image of God was that of a vengeful old man who demanded unquestioned faith, strict obedience and repentant love as the price of salvation: I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
Every Sunday, rain or shine, the family would attend services at the little frame church near the railroad tracks. For me, this was a
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
tortuous ordeal. I looked forward to Sundays with dread. We would spend all of eight hours in church. We would sit through the morning service, then the Sunday school, after which followed a break for dinner. We returned at five for the Young People's Christian Endeavor and finally the evening service. It was not just boredorn. Fear was the dominant emotion, especially when our preacher, Reverend Jamieson, a hig Black man with a beautiful voice, would launch into one of his fire-and-brimstone sermons.
He would start out slowly and in a low voice, gradually raising it higher he would swing to a kind of sing-song rhythm, holding his congregation rapt with vivid word pictures. They would respond with "Hallelujah! " "Ain't it the truth! " "Preach it, brother!"
He would go on in this manner for what seemed an interminable time, and would reach his peroration on a high note, winding up with a rafter-shaking burst of oratory. He would then pause dramatically amidst moans, shouts and even screams of some of the women, one or two of whom would fall out in a dead faint.
Waiting for them to subside he would then, in a lowered, scarcely audible voice, reassure his flock that it was not yet too late to repent and achieve salvation. All that was necessary was to:
"Repent sinners, and love and obey the Lord. Amen." Someone would then rise and lead off with an appropriate spiritual such as: Oh, my sins aref orgiven and my soul set free-ah, Oh, glory Halelua-a-a-af
Just let me in the kingdom when the world is all a'fi-ah, Oh Glory Hale/uf
I don't feel worried, no ways tiahd,
Oh, glory Hale/uf
I remember the family Bible, a buge hook which lay on the center table in the front room. The first several pages were blank, set aside for recording the vital family statistics: births, deaths, marriages. The hook was filled with graphic illustrations of biblical happenings. Leafing through Genesis (which we used to call "the begats"), one came to Exodus and from there on a pageant of bloodshed and violence unfolded. Portrayed in striking colors were the interminable tribal wars in which the Israelites slew
A CHILD OF SLAVES
31
I hc M ennonites and Pharoah's soldiers killed little children in Nl'nrch of Moses. There was the great God, Jehovah himself, whitcbearded and eyes flashing, looking very much like our old nncker neighbor, Mr. Faught .
.I ust a couple of weeks before Halley's comet appeared, Mother hnd taken us to see the silent film, Dante's Inferno, through which I sat with open mouth horror. Needless to say, this experience did not !essen my apprehension.
The comet continued its descent, its tail like the flaming sword nf vengeance. Collision seemed not just possible, but almost t·crtain. What had we poor mortals done to incur such wrath of the I .ord?
My deportment underwent a change. I did all my chores without rnmplaint and helped Mama around the house. This was so unlike mc that she didn't know what to make of it. I overheard her telling l'a about my good behavior and how helpful I had become lately.
But I hadn't really changed. J was just scared. I was simply trying lo carry out another one of God's commandments, "Honor thy fut her and thy mother that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth I hce."
Then one night, when the whole neighborhood had gathered as 11sual on the hill to watch the comet, it appeared to have ceased its movement towards the earth. We were not sure, but the next night wc were certain. It had not only ceased its descent, but was dcfinitely withdrawing. In a couple more nights, it had disappcared. A wave of relief swept over the town.
"lt's not true!" I thought to myself. "The fire and brimstone, thc lccring devils, the angry vengeful God. None of it is true."
It was as if a great weight had been lifted from my mind. It was I hc end of my religion, although I still thought that there was most li kely a supreme being. But if God existed, he was nothing like the (iod portrayed in our family Bi ble. I was no longer terrified of him.
I .ater, at the age of fourteen or fif teen, I read some of the lectures of Robert G. lngersoll and became an agnostic, doubting the cxistence of a god. From there, I later moved to positive atheism.
Two years tater, the great event was the sinking of the Titanic.
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
This was significant in Omaha because one of the Brandeis brothers, owners of the biggest department store in N orth Omaha, went down with her. In keeping with the custom of Blacks to gloat over the misfortunes of whites, especially rich ones, some Black hard composed the "Titanic Blues": When old John Jacob Astor /eft his home,
He never thought he was going to die.
Titanic fare thee well,
I say fare thee well.
But disaster was more frequentiy reserved for the Black community. On Easter Sunday 1913, a tornado struck North Omaha. It ripped a two-block swath through the Black neighborhood, leaving death and destruction in its wake. Among the victims were a dozen or so Black youths trapped in a basement below a pool hall where they had evidently been shooting craps.
Mother did not fail to point out the incident as another example of God's wrath. While I was sorry for the youths and their families (some of them were friends of Otto), the implied warning left me cold. My God-fearing days had ended with Halley's Comet.
Misfortune, however, was soon to strike our immediate family.
It happened that summer, in 1913. My Fat her fled town af ter being attacked and beaten by a gang of whites on Q Street, right outside the gate of the packing plant. They told him to get out of town or they would kill him.
I remember vividly the scene that night when Father staggered through the door. Consternation gripped us at the sight. His face was swollen and bleeding, his clothes torn and in disarray. He had a frightened, hunted look in his eyes. My sister Eppa and I were alone. Mother had gone for the summer to work for her employers, rich white folks, at Lake Okoboji, Iowa.
"What happened?" we asked.
He gasped out the story of how he had been attacked and beaten.
"They said they were going to kill me if I didn't get out of town."
We asked him who "they" were. He said that he recognized some of them as belonging to the Irish gang on lndian Hill, but there
33
Wl'rc also some grown men.
"But why, Pa? Why should they pick on you?"
"Why don't we call the police?"
"That ain't goin' to do no good. We just have to leave town."
"But Pa," I said, "how can we? We own this house. We've got lriends here. If you tel1 them, they wouldn't let anybody harm us."
Again the frightened look crossed his face.
"No, we got to go."
"Where, where will we go?''
"We'll mave up to Minneapolis, your uncles Watt and George ure there. l'11 get work there. I'm going to telegraph your Mother to l'ome home now."
He washed his face and then went into the bedroom and began packing his bags. The next morning he gave Eppa same money and sn id, "This will tide you over till your Mother comes. She'll be here in a day or two. I'm going to telegraph her as soon as I get to the depot. l'11 send for you all soon."
He kissed us goodbye and left.
Only when he closed the door behind him did we feel the full impact of the shock. It had happened so suddenly. Our whole world had collapsed. Home and security were gane. The feeling of safety in our little haven of interracial goodwill had proved clusive. Now we were just homeless "niggers" on the run.
The cruelest blow, perhaps, was the shattering of my image of I "ather. True enough, I had not regarded him as a hero. Still, however, I had retained a great deal of respect for him. He was 11ndoubtedly a very complex man, very sensitive and imaginative.
Probably he had never gotten over the horror of that scene in the cabin near Martin, Tennessee, where as a boy of fifteen he had seen his fat her kill the Klansman. He distrusted and feared poor whites, especially the native bom and, in Omaha, the shanty Irish.
Mother arrived the next day. For her it was a real tragedy. Our home was gone and our family broken up. She had lived in Omaha for nearly a quarter of a century. She had raised her family there and had built up a circle of cl ose friends. With her regular summer job at Lake Okoboji and catering parties the rest of the year, she had helped pay for our home. N ow it was gane. We would be lucky
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
if we even got a fraction of the money we had put into it, not to speak of the labor. Now she was to leave all this. Friends and neighbors would ask why Father had run away.
Why had he let some poor white trash run him out of town? He had friends there. Ours was an old respected family. He also had influential white patrons. There was Ed Cudahy of the family that owned the packing plant where he worked. The Cudahys had become one of the nation's hig three in the slaughtering and meat packing industry. Father had known him from boyhood. There was Mr. Wilkins, general manager at Cudahy's, whom Father had known as an office boy, and who now gave Father all his old clothes.
A few days later, Mr. Cannon, a railroad man in charge of a buffet car on the Omaha and Minneapolis run and an old friend of the family, called with a message from Father. He said that Father was all right, that he had gotten ajob for himself and Mother at the Minneapolis Women's Club. Father was to become caretaker and janitor, Mother was to cater the smaller parties at the club and to assist at the larger aff airs. They were to live on the place in a basement apartment.
The salary was ridiculously small (I think about $60 per month for both of them) and the employers insisted that only one of us children would be allowed to live at the place. That, of course, would be Eppa. He said that Father had arranged for me to live with another family. This, he said, would be a temporary arrangement. He was sure he could find another job, and rent a house where we could all be together again. As for me, Father suggested that since I was fifteen, I could find a part-time job to help out while continuing school. Mr. Cannon said that he was to take me back to Minneapolis with him, and that Mother and Eppa were to follow in a f ew days.
With regards to our house, Mr. Cannon said that he knew a lawyer, an honest fellow, who for a small commission would handle its sale. Mother later claimed that after deducting the lawyer's commission and paying off a small mortgage, they only got the paltry sum of $300! This was for a five-room house with electricity and running water.
A CHILD OF SLAVES
35
The next day, Mr. Cannon took me out to his buffet car in the railroad yards. He put me in the pantry and told me to stay there, and if the conductor looked in: "Don't be afraid, he's a friend of mine;" Our car was then attached to a train which backed down to the station to load passengers. I looked out the window as we left Omaha. I was not to see Omaha again until after World War I, when I was a waiter on the Burlington Railroad.
My childhood and part of my adolescence was now behind me. I felt that I was practically on my own. What did the world hold for me-a Black youth?
Arriving in Minneapolis, I went to my new school. As I entered the room, the all-white class was singing old darkie plantation songs. Upon seeing me, their voices seemed to take on a mocking, derisive tone. Loudly emphasizing the Negro dialect and staring directly at me, they sang:
"Down in De Caunfiel-HEAH DEM darkies moan All De darkies AM a weeping
MASSAHS in DE Cold Cold Ground"
They were really having a hall.
In my state of increased racial awareness, this was just too much for me. I was already in a mood of deep depression. With the hreakup of our family, the separation from my childhood friends, and the interminable quarrels between my Mother and Father (in which I sided with Mother), I was in no mood to be kidded or scoffed at.
That was my last day in school. I never returned. I made up my mind to drop out and get a full-time job.
I was fifteen and in the second semester of the eighth grade.
