Young Eliot (5 page)

Special and privileged, Tom could be teased. When he was little an African American odd-job-man, Stephen Jones, one of whose tasks was to wash down the side-wall, agitated him by pretending to fall asleep beside the fire while toasting a piece of bread held between the toes of his outstretched foot. Tom would jump in alarm as Stephen pretended to wake up and murmured, ‘Some nigger's foot's burnin'.'
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Polite yet mischievous, Tom was fascinated by Stephen's family, and ready to mythologise them. Some of the land nearby had originally been ‘negro quarters' back in the days of slavery, and stories of that era persisted. Tom's closeness to these African Americans as a rich white boy in 1890s St Louis is a reminder that his grandfather had stood up for the African American community, and that the Joneses, in their kindness to Tom, would have known his family's history. Tom recalled Stephen's father, the janitor of the Mary Institute, whom he called Uncle Henry. At the school Uncle Henry

lived in a sort of basement flat under the Beaumont Street entrance. He was a romantic figure to me as a child, not only because he possessed a parrot which actually did a little talking but because he was reputed to have been a runaway slave and certainly had one mutilated ear. He is said to have been tracked by bloodhounds. But Uncle Henry Jones was a great friend of the family. In fact, his family were great friends of the family because his son Stephen, and in succession to Stephen his grandson Charlie, undertook in succession the duties of looking after the furnace, washing the sidewalk, cutting the grass, and so on – bringing in the coal and wood.
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Conscious from an early age of being shy with most girls, and remaining so throughout his teens, Tom in boyhood was struck by a very different attitude to sexuality that Uncle Henry represented. In later years, he was uncertain if his boyhood impressions were accurate, but they stayed with him: ‘as I remember it … Uncle Henry had two wives, not in succession but apparently married to both of them at the same time, and … this was only discovered when suddenly a new Auntie was found in place of the old Auntie, and I understood that this was the first or more legitimate bride who had turned up to turn the other one out. This, at any rate, is the story which I believed, and I'm sure to me it only added to my awe and respect of Uncle Henry.'
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Whether or not he understood quite what was going on, Tom liked this man, who lived just next door but represented a very different world from that of the much primmer, strait-laced Eliots.

Little Tom was watched over by his Irish nurse, Annie Dunne, by his pious New England mother and by other family members, but he saw and heard in St Louis aspects of very different cultures. Just two blocks from his family home, at the corner of Washington and Jefferson Avenues was Uhrig's Cave which presented ‘High-class Light and Comic Opera'.
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When ten-year-old Tom used the expression ‘A Hot Time', he was surely referring to the song ‘There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight', which became an 1890s national hit when taken up by East Coast music promoters but which had been introduced onstage as an original song just a couple of miles from the Eliot home by ‘Mama Lou' (Letitia Lula Agatha Fontaine).

There'll be girls for ev'ry body in that good, good old town,

For dere's Miss Consola Davis an dere's Miss Gondolia Brown;

And dere's Miss Johanna Beasly she am dressed all in red,

I just hugged her and I kissed her and to me then she said:

Please, oh please, oh, do not let me fall,

You're all mine and I love you best of all,

And you must be my man, or I'll have no man at all,

There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight!
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This was a favourite song of Mama Lou, the ‘St Louis street singer and “voodoo princess”' who starred at the Castle Club in the zone of saloons, brothels and gambling dens west of Twelfth Street along Chestnut and Market Streets.
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Later in life Tom was heard singing ‘Frankie and Johnny'; another song popularised by Mama Lou, it was based on a famous St Louis murder widely reported when Tom was ten.
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Lottie Eliot would never have allowed her sons to go to Mama Lou's Castle Club; but the boys surely heard music associated with it, even if this was mediated through St Louis's ‘Hot Time Minstrels', a group of young white men who (as was then customary) sometimes ‘blacked up' to perform an annual concert each year, and who starred in a ‘Black Face' show along with Tom's school's Mandolin Club in 1901 when he was twelve.
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Growing up in the soundscape of St Louis meant inhabiting a city where the highbrow European music of Wagner was performed not far from sophisticated ragtime. Scott Joplin, who lived for some years less than a mile from the Eliots' house, published his ragtime tune ‘The Entertainer' in St Louis in 1902, dedicating it to the leader of a local mandolin club. To live at the confluence of all these musics was part of St Louis's gift to Tom; it helped shape the lilt of his poetry, and contributed to his love of dancing. In London in 1917 in the context of ‘a dance', someone who knew him very well wrote to a friend, saying, ‘you really must try Tom's Negro rag-time. I know you'd love it.'
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Tom remembered his early childhood as one of only two periods in his life when he was really happy.
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A photograph of him, aged about seven and taken in the St Louis studio of Henry Holborn at Holborn's Dainties, 2820 Washington Avenue, shows a countenance not just mischievous, but positively scheming. Perhaps he was hoping someone might buy him candy. Yet, recalled much later, a memory of a boyhood incident implies, too, that he developed a wariness towards other lads:

When I was a very small boy, I was given a tricycle or velocipede: a beautiful shiny japanned and nickelplated affair, with brake, bell etc., and was riding it proudly up and down the pavement under the eye of my nursemaid, when an odious small boy who lived a few doors away, who wore a kind of frilly blouse, sidled up and said ingratiatingly, ‘Mother says I may ride your velocipede if I let you blow my whistle'. That aroused my first disquiet with human nature … I would as soon have used his toothbrush as blown his whistle.
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As well as signalling a physical fastidiousness rarely associated with small boys, this anecdote presents a child with a certain instinct for cutting himself off from other people – certainly from those whom he disliked. The unnamed, frilly-bloused near-neighbour was no playmate: ‘I didn't blow the whistle, and he didn't ride the velocipede. I never spoke to him again.'
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Socially, the area around the Eliots' large house in Locust Street was on the slide. When his grandfather and grandmother had moved into nearby Washington Avenue, the place had been irreproachably classy. Along the street a little, Lucas Place was the premier enclave of the city's rich. Yet ever since the construction of the great Eads Bridge over the Mississippi in 1874, it had proved difficult to escape the incursions of through-traffic, boarding-house residents and poor vagrants. By the 1880s most well-to-do white folks were leaving these once exclusive inner-city neighbourhoods for newly constructed suburban mansions further from the river. The new mansions bordered some of the most salubrious streets in early-twentieth-century America. The Eliots, however, stayed put. They wanted to remain close to Tom's elderly grandmother in Washington Avenue. Their determination cut Tom off somewhat from playmates he and his family thought suitable.

He was also set apart by an intimate secret. He had been born with a congenital double hernia, which meant that from early on he had to wear a truss. At first he took this for granted. He seems to have assumed all boys wore one; but when he realised his condition was unusual and that his parents were concerned about it, this was another aspect of his make up conducive to shyness and an awkwardness about physical rough and tumble. He and his masculinity were watched over carefully. His mother had many demands on her time, but his nurse, Annie Dunne from County Cork, regularly took him for walks. Tom was ‘devoted to her' and was ‘at an age when a nanny, especially to the much-the-youngest child of a large family, is more important than anybody else'. He felt intrigued when, going ‘to say her prayers', Annie brought him with her on several occasions into the small Irish Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception at the corner of Locust Street and Jefferson Avenue. Annie attended mass there. The priest, Father G. D. Power, well known in the local Irish community, had family connections to European theatre. For Tom, who ‘liked it very much', this was a very different sort of religion to that practised by his Unitarian family. The Church of the Immaculate Conception had coloured statues, paper flowers, alluring lights; ‘the pews had little gates that I could swing on'.
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The Catholic, Trinitarian Annie, to whom he felt close, discussed with him the existence of God. ‘I remember', he wrote in his thirties, a theological argument about God as First Cause being ‘put to me, at the age of six, by a devoutly Catholic Irish nursemaid'.
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Theological and philosophical arguments intrigued Tom from childhood, but his sense of mischief remained unsubdued. Henry photographed his little brother with Annie, around the time Tom started at his first school. Hand on hip, Annie looks impatient to get on. Tom grins at the camera, conspiratorially.

Dramatic weather – Mississippi floods, spring rain, high winds – governed the rhythms of St Louis. In summer, with temperatures routinely reaching the 90s Fahrenheit (over 32°C), many wealthy families fled the heat and spent their time in resorts further north, often in New England. The St Louis press carried advertisements for hotels in resorts including Bar Harbor, Maine, and Gloucester, Massachusetts: leisured, well-off mothers would take their children there for several months, while fathers worked on in the heat and spent a shorter time holidaying with the family.
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The Eliots summered this way, migrating and returning according to the seasons. In winter, when Missouri thermometers dipped to near freezing, there might be snow. Tom, who had a fondness for Mississippi steamboats (but whose mother thought Mark Twain's recent
Huckleberry Finn
unsuitable reading), delighted to hear their whistles blasting on New Year's Eve: the St Louis levee was jampacked with vessels; tales were told of heroic steamboat races. Yet perhaps spring was the Mississippi's most dramatic time, bringing with it regular inundations when, after rains, what Tom saw as the memorable ‘long dark river' might burst its banks.
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In Missouri flooding could occur at almost any time of year, but most commonly around April and May. Tom recalled being taken down in flood time to the Eads Bridge just to see the power of nature. That bridge, with its massive stone pillars and monumental girder-work, still spans the river, a celebrated feat of engineering. In 1896 it was tested almost to destruction.

During that spring, not long after the
St Louis Globe-Democrat
had published verses about ‘April's laughing sheen' and how ‘Cold and dull as memoried pain / Drips the rain', news items began to appear about devastation caused in the Southern states by torrential rain and cyclones.
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Almost a hundred people were killed in Texas in mid-May when a cyclone hit. In St Louis itself, however, life went on untouched by such turmoil: Buffalo Bill's Wild West show was in town, bringing a ‘free street cavalcade' with ‘100 Indian warriors' as well as a detachment of US Cavalry commanded by Colonel W. F. Cody – Buffalo Bill himself. Accompanied by marching bands, daily shows featured such attractions as that ‘peerless lady wingshot' Miss Annie Oakley, and even an exhibition herd of buffalo.
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Tom had a taste for such things; his grandmother Eliot liked to recall how an Indian had sneaked into her kitchen and stolen a red ribbon from her hair; a treasured family possession was a photograph of a Native American, Chief Joseph, wearing a suit; Forest Park in St Louis, where there were ‘Indian Mounds', was, Tom recalled, ‘to me, as a child, the beginning of the Wild West'.
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He went there to photograph ‘a rather mangy buffalo' chained to a tree.
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His lifelong interest in comings together of the supposedly ‘primitive' and the modern urban has its origins in his St Louis boyhood, but in his eighth year his city was suddenly convulsed by the most spectacular event of his boyhood.

The cyclone which struck St Louis on the afternoon of Wednesday 27 May 1896 was one of the most devastating natural disasters ever to hit an American city. Though its havoc was overshadowed in popular memory by the spectacle of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, what happened in St Louis was also apocalyptic. Some reports refer to a ‘cyclone', others to a ‘tornado' or ‘hurricane'. For hours heavy dark clouds built up on the horizon. ‘Early mutterings' gave way to damp gusts bringing a downpour of rain. Eyewitness accounts in the following day's
St Louis Globe-Democrat
detail how a great rain cloud ‘came up slowly at first; from the west, beyond Forest Park. As the black rim mounted higher above the horizon, its arc embraced more territory to the north and south.' After the thunder and lightning a ‘hurricane' broke over the city's western area about 5 p.m., bringing ‘a deluge of rain' and for half an hour making even ‘the best built structures tremble'. Then a second storm struck from the south-west, destroying large parts of the city hospital, injuring patients and passers-by, capsizing boats moored at wharves on the Mississippi, and killing more than a hundred people. Some were ‘crushed beneath falling walls, hurled against the sides of buildings, struck by flying timbers, cut by the shattered glass', or ‘shocked by the network of down wires' as the city's famous streetcar system was smashed. ‘Flashes of lightning' lit up the carnage as night approached and hundreds of injured people struggled through the streets of a city plunged into premature darkness because its power and public transport systems had been knocked out. ‘A thousand electric cars stood dark and deserted on the tracks, while men and women toiled homeward through the drenching rain. There were pale faces and sinking hearts in more St Louis homes than ever known before in the city's history.'
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