Them And Us

I have been reading my sister Holly's journal she kept in the late forties when she lived in Greenwich Village with her husband in a one room basement apartment.  They were the proverbial starving artists, she trying to write and sell her stuff, he painting and printmaking, not very successful at all.  A bitter, desperate existence a lot of the time, punctuated by jolly drinking parties at the White Horse Tavern nearby, not yet made famous by Dylan Thomas' drunken nights there.  Things were cheaper then by far, everyone pooled their funds also.  She writes endlessly of the Irish immigrant dockworkers, their drunken behaviors, the husbands beating their wives, the wives beating their children, how it shocked her coming from an supper middle class WASP family of the Midwest.  Coincidentally my husband and I just went to a local production of Arthur Miller's "A View From The Bridge" where the same desperation and cruelties are played out in a family of Italian immigrant dockworkers, almost contemporaneous also in time.  It made me think of my own grandfather, a teenage immigrant from northern Germany, who came alone with his cousin, got themselves across half the continent by walking and working for lodging and food, separated in Chicago, the cousin went on to Iowa started farming in a German community and when his family entered again in our narrative a century later they were prosperous farmers.  Meanwhile my grandfather at nineteen enlisted in the Union Army in the contingent from Illinois, learned fluent English, came back to Chicago, hitched his wagon to a local businessman, married the daughter's friend visiting from Boston, and fathered eight or so children, becoming a successful businessman in his own right.  The family took on the coloration of the mother's Boston manner--to hear my mother, her daughter in law tell it, something out of Edith Wharton's milieu.  I only remember her high falutin' Boston accent, and I have a photo of her at the silver tea urn, serving to a bunch of ladies--tres genteel!  No, longshoreman from the New York harbor in this image!  But don't forget the German immigrant whose father back in the old country was a farmer--just don't mention it.  There were plenty of people of Irish descent in Iowa, and I met them when I switched to the public high school, and at the same time discovered my mother's prejudice against them, when I mentioned the Celtic names of some of my new friends.  "Oh, she's Irish."  "Isn't that an Irish name?" People of Italian origin were not so common.  I was first introduced to the notion of "Italian' when as fourteen I started on a paper route not too far from my home, delivering the eighty-five papers from a bag slung over my shoulders on foot or by bicycle, depending on the weather, and when my mother scanning the list of my customers spotted what she claimed was an Italian name, she determined that on Friday when it came time for me to collect from house to house the thirty five cents price of the weekly delivery, she would come and stand down at the foot of their sidewalk near the street so that they could see "who you were."  Otherwise, she claimed, "those people don't always pay."  How awful to infect a child with a prejudice, but oddly enough my burgeoning erotic interest in males and the inclination of so many of these--in mother's eyes--questionable ethnics to satisfy their own emerging lusts with me meant that I never really developed any prejudice until I was in graduate school at Harvard which in those days sat like a castle with the moat drawn up as protection from "le peuple" of Boston.