Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (36 page)

In New York City, the Caughnawagas work mostly for the big companies – Bethlehem, American Bridge, the Lehigh Structural Steel Company, and the Harris Structural Steel Company. Among the structures in and around the city on which they worked in numbers are the R.C.A. Building, the Cities Service Building, the Empire State Building, the Daily News Building, the Chanin Building, the Bank of the Manhattan Company Building, the City Bank Farmers Trust Building, the George Washington Bridge, the
Bayonne
Bridge, the Passaic River Bridge, the Triborough Bridge, the Henry Hudson Bridge, the Little Hell Gate Bridge, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the Marine Parkway Bridge, the Pulaski Skyway, the West Side Highway, the Waldorf-Astoria, London Terrace, and Knickerbocker Village.

North Gowanus is an old, sleepy, shabby neighborhood that lies between the head of the Gowanus Canal and the Borough Hall shopping district. There are factories in it, and coal tipples and junk yards, but it is primarily residential, and red-brick tenements and brownstone apartment houses are most numerous. The Caughnawagas all live within ten blocks of each other, in an area bounded by Court Street on the west, Schermerhorn Street on the north, Fourth Avenue on the east, and Warren Street on the south. They live in the best houses on the best blocks. As a rule, Caughnawaga women are good housekeepers and keep their apartments Dutch-clean. Most of them decorate a mantel or a wall with heirlooms brought down from the reservation – a drum, a set of rattles, a mask, a cradleboard. Otherwise, their apartments look much the same as those of their white neighbors. A typical family group consists of husband and wife and a couple of children and a female relative or two. After they get through school on the reservation, many Caughnawaga girls come down to North Gowanus and work in factories. Some work for the Fred Goat Company, a metal-stamping factory in the neighborhood, and some work for the Gem Safety Razor Corporation, whose factory is within walking distance. Quite a few of these girls have married whites; several have broken all ties with the band and the reservation. In the last ten years, Caughnawaga girls have married Filipinos, Germans, Italians, Jews, Norwegians, and Puerto Ricans. Many North Gowanus families often have relatives visiting them for long periods; when there is a new baby in a family, a grandmother or an aunt almost always comes down from the reservation and helps out. Caughnawagas are allowed to cross the border freely. However, each is required to carry a card, to which a photograph is attached, certifying that he or she is a member of the band. These cards are issued by the Indian Affairs Branch; the Caughnawagas refer to
them
as ‘passports.’ More than half of the North Gowanus housewives spend their spare time making souvenirs. They make a lot of them. They specialize in dolls, handbags, and belts, which they ornament with colored beads, using variations of ancient Iroquois designs such as the sky dome, the night sun, the day sun, the fern head, the ever-growing tree, the world turtle, and the council fire. Every fall, a few of the most Indian-looking of the men take vacations from structural steel for a month or so and go out with automobile loads of these souvenirs and sell them on the midways of state, county, and community fairs in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The men wear buckskins and feathers on these trips and sleep in canvas tepees pitched on fairgrounds. Occasionally, on midways, to attract attention, they let out self-conscious wahoos and do fragments of the Duel Dance, the Dove Dance, the Falseface Dance, and other old half-forgotten Mohawk dances. The women obtain the raw materials for souvenirs from the Plume Trading & Sales Company, at 155 Lexington Avenue, in Manhattan, a concern that sells beads, deerskin, imitation eagle feathers, and similar merchandise to Indian handicraftsmen all over the United States and Canada. There are approximately fifty children of school age in the colony. Two-thirds go to Public School 47, on Pacific Street, and the others go to parochial schools – St Paul’s, St Agnes’s, and St Charles Borromeo’s. Caughnawaga children read comic books, listen to the radio while doing their homework, sit twice through double features, and play stick ball in vacant lots the same as the other children in the neighborhood; teachers say that they differ from the others mainly in that they are more reserved and polite. They have unusual manual dexterity; by the age of three, most of them are able to tie their shoelaces. The adult Caughnawagas are multilingual; all speak Mohawk, all speak English, and all speak or understand at least a little French. In homes where both parents are Caughnawagas, Mohawk is spoken almost exclusively, and the children pick it up. In homes where the mother is non-Indian and the father is away a good deal, a situation that is becoming more and more frequent, the children sometimes fail to learn the language, and this causes much sadness.

The Caughnawagas are churchgoers. The majority of the
Catholics
go to St Paul’s Church, at Court and Congress streets, and the majority of the Protestants go to Cuyler Presbyterian Church, on Pacific Street. Dr David Munroe Cory, the pastor at Cuyler, is a man of incongruous interests. He is an amateur wrestler; he is vice-president of the Iceberg Athletic Club, a group that swims in the ocean at Coney Island throughout the winter; he once ran for Borough President of Brooklyn on the Socialist ticket; he is an authority on Faustus Socinus, the sixteenth-century Italian religious thinker; he studies languages for pleasure and knows eight, among them Hebrew, Greek, and Gaelic. A few Caughnawagas started turning up at Cuyler Church in the middle thirties, and Dr Cory decided to learn Mohawk and see if he could attract more of them. He has not achieved fluency in Mohawk, but Caughnawagas say that he speaks it better than other white men, mostly anthropologists and priests, who have studied it. He holds a complete service in Mohawk the first Sunday evening in each month, after the English service, and twenty or thirty Caughnawagas usually attend. Twenty-five have joined the church. Michael Diabo, a retired riveter, was recently elected a deacon. Steven M. Schmidt, an Austrian-American who is married to Mrs Josephine Skye Schmidt, a Caughnawaga woman, is an elder. Mr Schmidt works in the compensation-claim department of an insurance company. Under Dr Cory’s guidance, two Caughnawaga women, Mrs Schmidt and Mrs Margaret Lahache, translated a group of hymns into Mohawk and compiled a hymnal,
The Caughnawaga Hymnal
, which is used in Cuyler and in the Protestant church on the reservation. Dr Cory himself translated the Gospel According to Luke into Mohawk. Dr Cory is quiet and serious, his sermons are free of cant, he has an intuitive understanding of Indian conversational taboos, and he is the only white person who is liked and trusted by the whole colony. Caughnawagas who are not members of his congregation, even some Catholics and longhouse people, go to him for advice.

Occasionally, in a saloon or at a wedding or a wake, Caughnawagas become vivacious and talkative. Ordinarily, however, they are rather dour and don’t talk much. There is only one person in the North
Gowanus
colony who has a reputation for garrulity. He is a man of fifty-four whose white name is Orvis Diabo and whose Indian name is O-ron-ia-ke-te, or He Carries the Sky. Mr Diabo is squat and barrel-chested. He has small, sharp eyes and a round, swarthy, double-chinned, piratical face. Unlike most other Caughnawagas, he does not deny or even minimize his white blood. ‘My mother was half Scotch and half Indian,’ he says. ‘My grandmother on my father’s side was Scotch-Irish. Somewhere along the line, I forget just where, some French immigrant and some full Irish crept in. If you were to take my blood and strain it, God only knows what you’d find.’ He was born a Catholic; in young manhood, he became a Presbyterian; he now thinks of himself as ‘a kind of a free-thinker.’ Mr Diabo started working in riveting gangs when he was nineteen and quit a year and a half ago. He had to quit because of crippling attacks of arthritis. He was a heater and worked on bridges and buildings in seventeen states. ‘I heated a million rivets,’ he says. ‘When they talk about the men that built this country, one of the men they mean is me.’ Mr Diabo owns a house and thirty-three acres of farmland on the reservation. He inherited the farmland and rents it to a French Canadian. Soon after he quit work, his wife, who had lived in North Gowanus off and on for almost twenty years but had never liked it, went back to the reservation. She tried to get him to go along, but he decided to stay on awhile and rented a room in the apartment of a cousin. ‘I enjoy New York,’ he says. ‘The people are as high-strung as rats and the air is too gritty, but I enjoy it.’ Mr Diabo reads a lot. Some years ago, in a Western magazine, he came across an advertisement of the Haldeman-Julius Company, a mail-order publishing house in Girard, Kansas, that puts out over eighteen hundred paperbound books, most of them dealing with religion, health, sex, history, or popular science. They are called Little Blue Books and cost a dime apiece. ‘I sent away for a dollar’s worth of Little Blue Books,’ Mr Diabo says, ‘and they opened my eyes to what an ignorant man I was. Ignorant and superstitious. Didn’t know beans from back up. Since then, I’ve become a great reader. I’ve read dozens upon dozens of Little Blue Books, and I’ve improved my mind to the extent that I’m far beyond most of the people I
associate
with. When you come right down to it, I’m an educated man.’ Mr Diabo has five favorite Little Blue Books –
Absurdities of the Bible
, by Clarence Darrow;
Seven Infidel U.S. Presidents
, by Joseph McCabe;
Queer Facts about Lost Civilizations
, by Charles J. Finger;
Why I Do Not Fear Death
, by E. Haldeman-Julius; and
Is Our Civilization Over-Sexed
?, by Theodore Dreiser. He carries them around in his pockets and reads them over and over. Mr Diabo stays in bed until noon. Then, using a cane, he hobbles over to a neighborhood saloon, the Nevins Bar & Grill, at 75 Nevins Street, and sits in a booth. If there is someone around who will sit still and listen, he talks. If not, he reads a Little Blue Book. The Nevins is the social center of the Caughnawaga colony. The men in the gangs that work in the city customarily stop there for an hour or so on the way home. On weekend nights, they go there with their wives and drink Montreal ale and look at the television. When gangs come in from out-of-town jobs, they go on sprees there. When a Caughnawaga high-steel man is killed on the job, a collection is taken up in the Nevins for the immediate expenses of his family; these collections rarely run less than two hundred dollars; pasted on the bar mirror are several notes of thanks from widows. The Nevins is small and snug and plain and old. It is one of the oldest saloons in Brooklyn. It was opened in 1888, when North Gowanus was an Irishtown, and it was originally called Connelly’s Abbey. Irish customers still call it the Abbey. Its present owners are Artie Rose and Bunny Davis. Davis is married to a Caughnawaga girl, the former Mavis Rice.

One afternoon a while back, I sat down with Mr Diabo in his booth in the Nevins. He almost always drinks ale. This day he was drinking gin.

‘I feel very low in my mind,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go back to the reservation. I’ve run out of excuses and I can’t put it off much longer. I got a letter from my wife today and she’s disgusted with me. “I’m sick and tired of begging you to come home,” she said. “You can sit in Brooklyn until your tail takes root.” The trouble is, I don’t want to go. That is, I do and I don’t. I’ll try to explain what I mean. An Indian high-steel man, when he first leaves the reservation to work in the States, the homesickness just about kills
him
. The first few years, he goes back as often as he can. Every time he finishes a job, unless he’s thousands of miles away, he goes back. If he’s working in New York, he drives up weekends, and it’s a twelve-hour drive. After a while, he gets married and brings his wife down and starts a family, and he doesn’t go back so often. Oh, he most likely takes the wife and children up for the summer, but he doesn’t stay with them. After three or four days, the reservation gets on his nerves and he highballs it back to the States. He gets used to the States. The years go by. He gets to be my age, maybe a little older, maybe a little younger, and one fine morning he comes to the conclusion he’s a little too damned stiff in the joints to be walking a naked beam five hundred feet up in the air. Either that, or some foreman notices he hasn’t got a sure step any longer and takes him aside and tells him a few home truths. He gives up high-steel work and he packs his belongings and he takes his money out of the bank or the postal savings, what little he’s been able to squirrel away, and he goes on back to the reservation for good. And it’s hard on him. He’s used to danger, and reservation life is very slow; the biggest thing that ever happens is a funeral. He’s used to jumping around from job to job, and reservation life boxes him in. He’s used to having a drink, and it’s against the law to traffic in liquor on the reservation; he has to buy a bottle in some French-Canadian town across the river and smuggle it in like a high-school boy, and that annoys the hell out of him.

‘There’s not much he can do to occupy the time. He can sit on the highway and watch the cars go by, or he can sit on the riverbank and fish for eels and watch the boats go by, or he can weed the garden, or he can go to church, or he can congregate in the grocery stores with the other old retired high-steel men and play cards and talk. That is, if he can stand it. You’d think those old men would talk about the cities they worked in, the sprees they went on, the girls that follow construction all over the country that they knew, the skyscrapers and bridges they put up – only they don’t. After they been sitting around the reservation five years, six years, seven years, they seem to turn against their high-steel days. Some of them, they get to be as Indian as all hell; they won’t
even
speak English any more; they make out they can’t understand it. And some of them, they get to be soreheads, the kind of old men that can chew nails and spit rust. When they do talk, they talk gloomy. They like to talk about family fights. There’s families on the reservation that got on the outs with each other generations ago and they’re still on the outs; maybe it started with a land dispute, maybe it started with a mixed-marriage dispute, maybe it started when some woman accused another woman of meeting her husband in the bushes in the graveyard. Even down here in Brooklyn, there’s certain Indians that won’t work in gangs with certain other Indians because of bad blood between their families; their wives, when they meet on Atlantic Avenue, they look right through each other. The old men like to bring up such matters and refresh their recollections on some of the details. Also, they like to talk about religion. A miraculous cure they heard about, something the priest said – they’ll harp on it for weeks. They’re all amateur priests, or preachers. They’ve all got some religious notion lurking around in their minds.