Chapter 9

Until now I have endeavored to record events in their true chronological order. This has taxed my memory, and while the events themselves are as clear to my mind as though they had happened an hour ago, the placing of them in their true relationship in time has become so bothersome that, from here on, I shall try only to approximate the time of their occurrence. For example, I am not at all sure whether it was the winter of 1890-1891 or the following winter that I got married. As an old German acquaintance used to say, "it mox nix aus."

That winter I was forced to marry a girl who was pregnant, when I was caught in flagrante delicto by her father. I had known the girl only a week or two and knew nothing of her condition, though I should have suspected it because she was unusually plump about the waist. It was a case of marry her or be returned to the reform school. It was also a matter of being returned to the school if I didn't live with her for a while, so I rented a three-room apartment adjoining mother's, and tried to make the best of it.

At the time, I was taking a course in bookkeeping from a Mr. H. S. DeSollar in the Central Business College. I worked Saturdays and Sundays at barbering and did the bookkeeping for two grocers during evenings, bringing my earnings to a princely eighteen dollars a week. After a few weeks I began to suspect that my wife was making a cuckold of me. I stayed away from school a couple of afternoons and, with the assistance of two friends, watched the front and rear entrances of our apartment house. Our vigil was rewarded on the second afternoon when the young man I suspected entered the building. We waited about half an hour, then quietly entered the apartment with my pass key, where I found my wife in bed alone and discovered her lover hiding in a closet, wearing nothing but a shirt and Derby hat, his other clothing being held in his hands. He presented the funniest spectacle I had ever seen.

I helped my wife pack her belongings and took her to her parents. Her baby was born about four months later, but lived only a few weeks. I never saw her again, but about two years later I received a letter from a Madame in one of Colorado's mining towns, asking me to defray the funeral expenses of one of her girls who, she said, was my wife. She had been known there under the name of Dixie Blackman, and had committed suicide when her pimp had deserted her for another. I passed the buck.

I concluded my course in bookkeeping, secured another grocer's books to keep, and continued my attendance at the Turn Verein, where I took up boxing and became quite proficient. I soon learned, however, that fighting held no future for me. I was five feet eleven and weighed about one hundred and sixty five pounds; I possessed a terrific punch, but alas, I also had a "glass jaw", and any ordinary punch landed on my chin would knock me out. Several years later I joined the Royal Athletic Club where, once a month, we used to put on a boxing show, charging two bits admittance. The bouts were of four rounds, and I boxed with such well-known fighters as Kid Parker, Sam Langford, Mysterious Billy Smith, and Tom Shoemaker-- the latter a local product who, I believe, would have become a champion had he been properly handled and trained. He was exceptionally clever with hands, head, and feet, and had a punch in either hand that would stagger a buffalo. I have been told that he knocked out Sam Langford twice in training bouts, though I had often heard it said that Langford had never been sent to the canvas.

Shoemaker and I were friends, and for a while he boxed every Saturday night at the Central Theatre. I went with him several times in exhibition bouts. When no one in the audience could be induced to try to earn the standing offer of twenty- five dollars to anyone who could stay four rounds with him, we would box four two-minute rounds with twelve-ounce gloves, for which I received five dollars and Shoemaker, twenty. Whenever some outsider tried to earn the offered prize, the gloves would be eight-ounce ones, with half the padding removed from the ones Tom wore. If his opponent proved to be tough, he would put him away as soon as possible, sometimes aided by a short count. If the opponent was easy, he would carry him along for three rounds and then put on the finishing touch in the fourth. Only once that I know of did he come close to falling down on his assignment. His opponent on this occasion was a big miner who weighed all of two hundred pounds, and who kept his head covered with his brawny arms while crouched over so far that Tom couldn't get at his midriff. The first three rounds were of two minutes each, and Tom hadn't landed a good blow on the man during that time. The audience was cheering the miner, and when the fourth round started it looked as though he would win out. The timekeeper allowed the round to go considerably beyond the two minutes, and when the audience began shouting "Time!", the miner dropped his guard and turned to say something to the referee. It remained unsaid, for the next instant Tom landed a haymaker and the miner was out for several minutes. Within two or three years, Tom's hands had been broken up so often that they became useless for fighting. The last I heard of him, he had become a motorcycle officer on the Denver police force.

After my wife's baby was born I hit the road again. I met a tramp whose monicker was "Mexican Frank", whom I had first met the year before in California. We went up into Idaho and Montana, then east to Minnesota. Somewhere along the way we met a tramp called "Crips". He was far from being a cripple, but he could twist his left hand into a semblance of paralytic deformity, while shifting his hips in such a manner as to produce an apparent shortness of the left leg when he walked. He was short, thin, and anemic-looking, and his take was seldom less than two dollars a day, and frequently twenty or more. He was a "good" tramp, spending his money freely with other tramps. He delighted in mooching doctors, none of whom,he said, ever suspected that he was other than the hopeless paralytic he appeared to be.

During that trip, Frank was using a Cantharides bug and I was using a P.P.; we averaged about four dollars a day apiece. We came through Omaha to St. Joseph, Missouri, where we were both picked up in the railroad yards and given ten days in jail for trespassing. When we were released, we went to Kansas City and rented a room. When Mex did not come in that night, I thought he had probably gotten stewed and had parked himself on the floor of a back room at one of the tramps' saloon hangouts. When he didn't show up the next evening, I made inquiries and learned that he had been arrested the night before for strongarming the passenger agent of one of the railroads entering the city. The agent's gold watch was found on him, so he made a plea of guilty and was given twenty years at Jefferson City.

A few days later, while I was mooching on one of the main streets, I accosted a benevolent-looking man who listened attentively to my spiel and then called the patrol wagon. He was a "fly bull", and the next morning the Judge gave me thirty days on the Brush Creek chain gang for begging. It was the first and only time I ever was jailed for that offence.

When the morning session of the Court was over, I was herded with several other prisoners into a large farm wagon, where a ball and chain was padlocked to two iron bands encircling my ankles. We were driven ten or fifteen miles into the country to a large ramshackle frame building, on the floor of which there were about a hundred dirty straw-filled pallets. presided over by a big negro who assigned a pallet to each of us. We were each given a tin cup and plate, and a fork, but no knife. We were shown the privy at one end of the building--a hole about twenty feet long, four feet wide and four feet deep. In lieu of seats, there was a two-by-four rail of unplaned lumber. At the head of each two pallets there was a galvanized pail for a donicker, and each pallet in use was covered with a cheap cotton comforter. As it was mid-afternoon, we were not required to work that day; and when the road gang came in shortly after six o'clock, we were fed a plateful of watery hash, a cup of slops designated as soup, and a cup of chicory coffee.

There was a well close by surrounded by low benches which held about a dozen tin washbasins; there was no soap. The only entrance to the windowless building was guarded by a big buck negro armed with a shotgun. This I learned that night when I picked up my ball and chain and stealthily stole outside the door, only to have a dark-lantern flash in my face, and to hear a negro voice growl, "get back in dey, white man, or I'll blow your guts out."

I had five twenty-dollar bills sewed into the lining of my coat sleeves, and had hoped to find some farmer whom I could bribe to cut off my shackles. To have offered the bribe to the guard would have been folly; he would have taken it and denied that I had given it to him, so I went back to my pallet, where I lay awake all night fighting mosquitoes and bedbugs.

About six the next morning we were all herded out to the well, where we washed the best we could without soap. Afterwards, we were fed all the oatmeal mush we could eat and were given a cupful of chicory coffee. I was given a pick and shovel, and as we stood around waiting for the wagons to come and take us to our work I counted over sixty prisoners, two-thirds of whom were negroes. When the wagons came, about seven o'clock, we were divided into three crews and taken down the road about a mile, where we were set to grading and leveling behind several mule-drawn plows and scrapers. At noon, a wagon brought us dry bread--half a loaf per man--while the waterboy filled our cups from a large barrel rigged to a two-wheeled cart. We were allowed about half an hour to eat and then worked until six o'clock, when we were returned to our dormitory.

Supper was hash again; in fact, it was supper for five days each week. Saturdays and Sundays we were given slumgullion, a mess for which tramps have an unprintable name. There was plenty of it, but it was poorly cooked and seasoned. We were allowed to buy tobacco and cigarettes at twice the usual prices, and as I had several dollars in silver I was not deprived of my smokes.

Nights and Sundays were times of horror to me. At night, bedbugs, lice and fleas swarmed all over everyone. There was no place to boil up, and no way to buy gasoline or benzine, so on Sundays I spent most of the day picking lice from my clothing and crushing bedbugs that were so bloated with blood that they were unable to crawl into their usual hiding places. There was another pest, a homosexual negro, who disturbed my sleep by waking me at night with his importunities to let him satisfy his unnatural hunger. He only molested the white men, several of whom told me they enjoyed his attentions; but he didn't appeal to me, and I finally discouraged him by threatening to beat him up.

There was only one other tramp,"Boston Joe", in the outfit. He was released a day or two before me; I picked him up in Kansas City and we traveled together for about a month through Kansas, Missouri and Illinois. We separated at Peoria, as he wanted to go east, and I, south.

A day or two later, I met two tramps, "Illinois Star", and his companion, "Skinny the Corpse". Skinny carved his monicker by cutting the outlines of a coffin with a face peering out from it. I had seen it several times on water tanks, and had wondered what he looked like. He was about six feet six, and as thin as a rail. They told me they had a plant of pocketknives and razors in a nearby haystack, and asked me to go with them that night and help them lift it. I agreed; it never occurred to me to ask them where they had stolen the stuff, though the experience I had with Jiggers in Denver should have taught me a lesson.

When night came, we walked two or three miles to the field where the stuff was planted, and Star began pulling the hay from the side of the stack where the goods were hidden. Skinny stooped to pick up a sack that Star had pulled out of the hay, when suddenly came a shout of "Hands up!" I bolted immediately. I heard shots being fired and commands to stop, but kept going and ran smack into a barbed-wire fence that bounced me back about five feet. I crawled under it and ran until I came to a road, which I followed until it crossed some railroad tracks. I turned and followed the tracks toward the lights of a town in the distance. Finally I could run no more, sat down beside the tracks, and discovered that I had been wounded. A revolver bullet had struck the calf of my left leg, but had only gone into the flesh about an inch. The wound was not very painful and bled but little. After a few minutes rest, I got up and continued running at a dogtrot until I reached the town, which turned out to be Streator. Fortunately, there was a freight train on a siding waiting for a Chicago-bound passenger train to come in before going on. When the freight pulled out, I decked it and rode to Galesburg. My leg had begun to pain me, but I was afraid the alarm was out for me and I hid near the depot until a passenger train, bound for St. Louis, came in. I boarded it from the dark side and went into the smoking car, and when the conductor came through I bought a ticket to St. Louis. There I dug out the bullet, which was about ready to fall out, and sterilized and bandaged the wound.

I met Star some six or seven years later on the coast. He and Skinny had been given five years at Juliet. He told me that the tipoff to the police had been given by the farmer who owned the haystack; he had noticed that the stack had been disturbed, made an investigation, and discovered the loot. I never saw Skinny again.

From St. Louis I went to Memphis, Tennessee. The tramp hangout there was a saloon called "Rosy's", which faced the levee. I met several tramps there whom I knew; one of them was New Orleans Frenchy, the man Curly had kicked and beaten in the little Indiana town some six years before. He did not recognize me, but was just as truculent as ever and it gave me a lot of satisfaction to pick a quarrel with him and give him an unmerciful beating. He left town, and I learned a couple years later that he had been killed in the jungles by his own knife when he tried to bulldoze a tramp named Cincinnati Dutch.

A man accosted me on the levee one day and asked if I wanted a job. He told me that he was a diver, sent down from St. Louis to salvage the steamboat Chickasaw, which had struck a snag in the river near President's Island, a few miles below Memphis. He told me that the boat was not entirely submerged, and that he needed a man to assist his helper in manning the air pumps. The pay was three dollars a day and found. I took the job, mainly because I was curious to know how a diver worked, and my interest was heightened because the Chickasaw was the boat I had taken two years before from Cairo to Saint Louis. We left that afternoon on a small houseboat, towed by a small tug; it was about the size of today's cabin cruisers used for fishing.

We reached the Chickasaw before sundown, a negro cook served us supper on the hurricane deck, and I went to bed in one of the cabins. The next morning before breakfast I went all over the boat, which lay on the mud at a slight angle with part of her lower deck submerged. On the higher side there was a complete diver's gear, which the diver's assistant was overhauling. He explained the operation of the air pump and the signals used. After breakfast the diver put on his rubber suit, lead shoes, and helmet, and we lowered him over the side, together with a mesh bag containing tools. My sole duty was to keep the air pump turning, at which the diver's helper relieved me from time to time. The diver, I was told, was engaged in blocking off the hole in the boat's bottom so that it could be pumped free of water and towed to a dry dock. The job was finished in about three weeks, and I returned to Memphis.

I had heard that many communities in Mississippi farmed out their prisoners to various people or groups under conditions that practically enslaved them. One tramp told me that it had taken him fourteen months to work out a twenty-five dollar fine imposed on him for begging, so I decided to give that state the go-by when going to New Orleans. I bought a first-class ticket on one of the finest steamboats on the river, the Oliver Beirne (pronounced 'burn') but I had no forebodings about the name. We stopped at Helena, Arkansas, and several landings further south to take on bales of cotton, which were piled one on top of another until they were level with the top of the hurricane deck on which I had my berth. One night, when the boat was loaded to capacity, we tied up at a place near Greenville, called Milliken's Bend; it had become too foggy for the pilot to risk piling up on a sandbar. I awoke about three o'clock in the morning to hear shouts and screaming all about me, and saw that the boat was on fire. Flames covered the entire side of the vessel's load of cotton, and were creeping over the tops of the bales in front of my stateroom. I believe that was the only time in my life I ever felt the fear of death. There was no escape except across the bales of burning cotton. I don't know what thoughts flashed through my mind, but I did remember that there were several fire buckets outside my stateroom door, and I opened the door far enough to reach out and pull one in. It was about three-fourths full of water, and I hastily soused my pants in it. I got into my pants and shoes and tried to souse the blanket from my berth in the remaining water, but upset the bucket in my attempt.I slipped into my coat, turned the bucket over my head, and with the blanket over all I stepped out into the open passageway. I remembered the low taffrail that surrounded the hurricane deck and, stepping over it onto the burning cotton, I ran the short distance to the steamboat's side and fell into the river.

For a minute it seemed as though I had reversed the old saw and gotten out of the fire into the frying pan, for the blanket clung to me like glue. I finally got rid of it and the bucket and tried to swim underwater to get away from the intense heat, but my coat buoyed me up. I kept my head under water as long as I could, and soon made the bank a hundred feet or more downstream.

It was a terrible disaster. There must have been at least a hundred people on the boat, mostly passengers, and I believe that more than half of them were either burned to death or drowned. I sicken whenever I think of it, for there were women and children among them, and somehow the thought of women and children dying like that disturbs me much more than the thought of men dying en masse. I was too numbed by the sight of people burning to death before my eyes to think of attempting to rescue those in the water. I might have saved at least one life, but I seemed to be able only to stand and stare as the vessel burned to the waterline.

The fire was still burning at daylight when one of the boat's officers hailed a passing houseboat, which took some of the survivors aboard, to land them somewhere down the river. Two or three hours later a stern-wheeler stopped and picked up the rest of us and took us to Vicksburg, where I was furnished train transportation to New Orleans. I was uninjured except for slight burns above my ankles.

At that time, New Orleans was not a paradise for tramps. A man couldn't mooch twenty-five cents of an evening if he begged from one end of Canal Street to the other. The flashing of a phoney ring to even the most unsophisticated negro would only elicit a "no thank you, mister", or its equivalent in French. Nevertheless, I liked New Orleans more than any city I had ever been in, except for San Francisco. The principal reason was the low cost of living. The principal tramps' hangout was at the Three Brothers (Five Brothers?) saloon north of Canal Street. For five cents one could get a "Cincinnati scoop" of beer, holding about a quart, and all the potato pancakes one could eat. In addition, there was a free lunch on the bar, consisting of pretzels, rye bread, sausage, and cheese. There was a small Chinese restaurant nearby that served a substantial five-course dinner for twenty cents without wine, or twenty-five cents with a half-pint bottle. By walking for several blocks to the Conti basin where the oyster smacks unloaded, fifteen cents would get one a peck basket heaping-full of freshly dredged oysters, an oyster knife, a fork, a bottle of either catsup of pepper sauce, and a large bowl of oyster crackers. The only catch in it was that you had to open your own oysters. The first time I went there I jabbed the oyster knife into my left hand two or three times before the waiter obligingly showed me how to split the shells. The oysters served there were outsize, being too large for canning or shipping, but were tender and fine-flavored. There were a number of French restaurants where one could get a six-course dinner with wine for thirty-five cents, while in the French and Poydres markets south of Canal Street food was equally cheap.>

The Society for Psychical Research probably could explain the following strange event. I had written to mother, telling her that I was going to New Orleans, but I made no mention of going by boat. A day or two after arriving, I went to the General Delivery window at the Post Office and asked for my mail. I was handed a letter that mother had written and posted the morning that the Oliver Bierne was destroyed. She wrote that she had had a dream in which I was vividly pictured as being completely surrounded by flames. The dream, she later told me, had been more like a nightmare and had awakened her. She had been terrified and feared that something dreadful had happened to me, and she had risen at once and written to me urging me to reply immediately upon receipt of her letter. After reading it I immediately sent a telegram, and later that day I wrote her a long letter describing my escape from the fire. At the time we both considered the incident to have been a case of mental telepathy.

I met "Baldy Todd" again and though he was about fifty, I liked him and we became pals. One night we were prowling about the railroad yards in Algiers, a town across the river from New Orleans, when a watchman ordered us to halt. We ran, the watchman fired several shots at us, but we got away. Baldy was hit by a bullet which went clean through the fleshy part of his left thigh, and when we got back to our room in New Orleans I threaded an iodine-soaked piece of gauze through the wound, pulled it out again, and applied drains and a bandage. Two weeks later the wound was entirely healed.

We loafed around the levee at the foot of Canal Street most of the time, and occasionally took short jobs as roustabouts and dock wallopers. Once we took jobs paying two dollars a day and found at the Myrtle Grove Sugar Plantation about sixteen miles below New Orleans. We worked five days among the negroes, cutting sugar cane in the field and on the "carry" at the grinding mill. When we quit, instead of getting the expected ten dollars, we were paid about three dollars and fifty cents.

When we complained, the timekeeper showed us a paper we had signed at the employment agent's office which stipulated that employees who quit their jobs in less than thirty days would recieve only one dollar a day, from which the cost of their transportation from the city would be deducted. That was a good lesson to me never to sign anything without first reading it. We had quit because the only food served, day after day, was sowbelly and corn pone.

It was impossible to beat a ride on the one train that ran to the city each day, so we walked the ties. Most of the road was laid on long trestles over alligator- and garfish-infested swamps. The ties were too close to each other to permit taking a comfortable step from one to the next, but so far apart that skipping every other tie was even more tiresome. What bothered us most, apart from the swarms of gnats and mosquitoes, was the fact that after walking fifty feet or so the passing of the ties beneath our feet not only blurred our vision but seemed to have a hypnotic effect, so that we had to stop frequently and sit down. The blinding glare of the sun's reflection from the still water beneath us also contributed to our distress.

We had each taken a beer bottle filled with water when we started, and had refilled them at an oasis in that desert of swamp. It was a small island populated by several negroes and a white man who operated a small general store; we stopped there long enough to buy and eat some crackers and cheese. Although we had left the plantation at about nine that morning, darkness found us still far from our goal. We camped on a similar island and built a fire, but were unable to sleep because of the mosquitoes. When morning came, we continued our trek. As we neared the city, the trestles became less numerous and we made much better time, reaching New Orleans about nine o'clock. That sixteen miles was perhaps the most distressing hike I have ever taken.

The next job I took was as roustabout on the levee. There was a shoulder-high platform on which a large number of medium-sized filled sacks were piled. A stream of negroes was running at a dogtrot from the platform to the steamboat at the foot of the levee, with a sack on each man's shoulder, returning like an endless chain for another load. It looked easy at seventy-five cents an hour, but it was the hardest job I had ever tackled. Each sack was filled with salt and weighted about two hundred pounds. Several negroes on the platform would drag the sacks to the edge and tip them over onto our shoulders, and away we'd go downhill to a long narrow gangplank that led to the boat. The gangplank was like a springboard, bouncing us up and down at every step; one had to have a fine sense of balance just to keep from falling, and as the negroes speeded up when I joined them, an hour of that work was all I could stand.

When I told Baldy about the speedup, he laughed and told me it was their custom to do so in order to discourage white men from taking their, to them, well-paid jobs. I had further evidence of this practice a few days later, when I went up to Bayou La Fouche to load barrel sugar. We left New Orleans at night on the Belle of the Coast and reached the Bayou early the next morning One-by-twelve inch boards were laid between the sugar warehouse and the boat, making a narrow runway. Two big blacks trucked the barrels of sugar to the first plank and turned the barrel on its side. At this point, a roustabout would take over and roll the barrel, weighing about three hundred fifty pounds, along the boards to the boat. I managed to keep the first barrel on the boards for about fifty feet before it rolled off into the sand. I tried to get it back on the boards, but an overseer stopped me and told me to go get another. I had better success with this one, getting it to within about twenty-five feet of the boat before it too rolled off into the sand. It was hard enough work to trot back through the soft sand, and I was out of breath when I tackled my third barrel. Before I had gone fifty feet, the negro behind me bumped his barrel into my heels. I didn't lose control of either my temper or the barrel, but when I got the barrel to the boat I concluded that I had had enough. I walked slowly through the sand and past the warehouse to the town of La Fouche, from where I made my way to Shreeveport and back to New Orleans.

An incident occurred that winter which, while it furnished amusement to a large theatre audience, left me discomfited and bruised. The New Orleans Picayune advertised for supers to take part in an opera that was being produced by a celebrated Parisian opera company. As I had an excellent (though untrained) singing voice, I applied for the job at the stage entrance and, much to my surprise, was engaged at once. I asked the man who engaged me if he wanted to hear my voice. He smiled, and told me to yell as loud as I could. I did so, and he led me to the stage where rehearsal was going on. In addition to the regular troopers about forty supers, all white, stood about the stage listening to a little Frenchman who was directing the rehearsal. His English was so poor that I couldn't understand much of what he said, but I learned that the Opera was L'Africaine, and I gathered that we were to engage in a fight with the crew of a ship. A few minutes after I arrived, the supers were given fifty cents each and told to report that evening at seven o'clock.

As we went out I asked one of the supers what we were supposed to do, and he told me that we were to act the part of African savages who, upon finding a vessel stranded on their shores, were to try to take possession of the boat and overpower its crew and passengers. That was not very enlightening, but it sufficed to make me eager to take part in the show.

When I returned at seven I was encased in black tights from neck to ankles. My face, hands, and feet were blacked, and a black kinky wig was placed on my head. I was given a very large warrior's shield for my left arm, and a large hair-stuffed war club. When my makeup was finished I joined a number of the other supers--who were similarly made up--in walking about the stage, which was set up as the deck of a sailing vessel. The director was giving the cast a dress rehearsal and I think he intended to include the supers, but he never got around to it.

A few minutes before the curtain rose, we were herded into the wings and backstage behind the ship's taffrail. We lay there for quite a long time before the cue to attack was given, but when it came we clambered onto the ship and began yelling and swinging our phoney clubs onto the heads of the defending seamen. I hadn't been told that I was supposed to drop to the deck after being hit a couple of times with phoney belaying pins and marlinspikes, so I kept on fighting. I saw the little director in the wings waving his arms up and down frantically, and I thought he was urging me to fight harder. All the rest of the supers were lying on the deck, and the audience was in an uproar. Finally, several of the crew ganged up on me and pummeled me with their fists, forcing me to the floor, where two of them lay beside me to make sure that I didn't get up again.

When the curtain fell for the last time on hat set, I was lifted to my feet and led into the wings. The little director started to bawl me out in French, but gave it up when he began to choke on his own words. The audience out front was still in a turmoil, for I could plainly hear the whistling and stamping. Whether it was in amusement or anger I couldn't determine, but I learned next day that tickets for the next performance were at a premium.

Facilities for washing the makeup off my face, hands and feet were nonexistent. I did as the others were doing, dipped my hands into a large jar of cold cream, smeared it over my blackened features and wiped it away with pieces of cheesecloth. I got out of the tights and into my clothes, collected fifty cents as I went out the stage door, and thus ended my first and last appearance in Grand Opera.

Since then I have often wondered why, in a city containing so many negroes, the director of the Opera deemed it necessary to employ white men to impersonate the black ones. The only reason I can think of is race prejudice, or the whim of some temperamental member of the cast.