Moreover, I was beginning to think in those first few months that the paper industry wasn’t exactly for me. My job was to stand between the barker and the woodpecker, which did not mean that I was positioned between a dog and a bird, though the foreman did have a dog, a Welsh terrier who nipped at my heels and who went frantic each time the cranes piled up a new shipment of eight-foot-long logs. It seemed to me that a dog who went crazy at the sight of wood shouldn’t have been hanging around a paper mill. I’d never liked dogs, anyway. (That’s not true. I started disliking dogs when the Germans were using them in the war.) This particular little dog was called Offisa Pupp after the cartoon character, and he started hating me the day I reported to work. My partner on the job was a fellow named Allen Garrett, a strapping six-footer from Chicago’s South Side, who, like me, was seeking to make a “future” in the paper industry. Allen worked with me at the far end of the barking drum where the peeled logs came out. We both held spiked picaroons in our hands, and we — well, I think I’d better explain what I was beginning to learn about making paper from wood.
Back in Eau Fraiche, we always cut a felled tree into eight-foot lengths, but the drum barker wasn’t designed to take such big chunks of wood and also you couldn’t make paper out of wood that still had the bark on it. So the first thing that happened was all the logs were piled up in these towering pyramids and then dumped into what was called the hot pond, which was a big concrete basin through which hot waste water from other parts of the plant flowed. This was done to soften the bark and get rid of leaves and ice and clinging forest dirt. Then they were carried up a jack-ladder conveyer to the circular saw where they were cut into four-foot lengths so they could be taken to the drum barker. I came in after the drum barker, some exciting job, I was not exactly an executive.
The drum barker, or the barking drum as we also called it, was a cylindrical steel tube open at both ends, close to fifteen feet in diameter and some forty-five feet long. Supported by rollers and enormous steel tires, power-driven by chain belts slung from overhead and spaced along its entire length, the drum received a tangle of logs on a conveyer belt from the hot pond and the cut-off saw, tumbled, tossed, and sprayed them for maybe fifteen minutes, and then plunked them stripped and white onto a conveyer belt at the other end. The drum made a lot of noise, as what wouldn’t with thousands of logs banging into each other and shedding their skins, the loosened bark dropping through the open-rib construction onto another conveyer belt, to be whisked away as fuel for the steam plant. At the far end of the drum, Allen Garrett and I studied each of the logs as they went by on the conveyer belt. If we saw one with a section of bark still clinging to it, or a furrow filled with pitch, or a knot, we hooked it with our picaroons and rolled it over to the woodpecker, where the operator there would either drill out the knot or grind off the bark, after which we rolled the log back onto the conveyer belt. I knew nothing at all about what happened to the wood once it moved deeper into the mill. I was new in this business, and it was a bore.
I worked fifty-four hours a week, from eight o’clock in the morning to six o’clock at night. It took me almost an hour and a half to get to the mill in Joliet, which meant that I had to get up at six in the morning, wash and dress, go into the kitchen for breakfast with Nancy, and then run down to catch the #88 streetcar to Archer Avenue, where I transferred to the #74 to Cicero Avenue, and then caught a train. The train was run by the Chicago and Joliet Electric Railway, and the trip was thirty-one miles each way, morning and night. I would not get back to the apartment until close to eight o’clock. It was a long, grueling noisy day, broken only by the pleasant lunch-hour conversations I had with Allen Garrett. I naturally looked forward to my Sundays with Nancy.
It was therefore disheartening to wake up to a ninety-one degree heat that Sunday, and the promise of another suffocating Chicago day. We packed a picnic lunch, much as we might have done back in Eau Fraiche, took two streetcars to Twenty-ninth Street, walked the three blocks to the beach, and tried to enjoy ourselves despite the rising temperature and the throngs of people.
I was exhausted when the trouble started.
Nancy was lying beside me on the blanket, her blond hair curled into a bun at the back of her head, her black bathing costume striped horizontally at the skirt-hem and on the mid-thigh pants showing below, wearing black stockings that must have been unbearable in this heat, a fine sheen of sweat on her face and on her naked arms. A ukulele started someplace, and a man with a high whiny voice began singing all the old war songs, “Good Morning, Mr. Zip-Zip-Zip!” and “I’d Like to See the Kaiser with a Lily in His Hand,” and finally got around to some of the newer stuff to which he didn’t know the words, “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home,” and “Let the Rest of the World Go By,” Nancy trying to hum along with him, but the heat defeating everything, a stultifying crushing heat that made movement and even conversation too fatiguing to contemplate.
With considerable effort, I had raised myself up on one elbow in an attempt to locate the ukulele player with the nasal voice, scanning the beach and only chancing to look out over the water where I saw first a small raft, and then noticed that the person on the raft, paddling it toward the beach, was colored. New to Chicago, I did not know at the time that the Twenty-ninth Street Beach was considered “white” territory, an improvised adjunct to the Twenty-fifth Street Beach which bordered the black belt, the section of Chicago known as Douglas. I only learned that later. What I realized now, signaled by the sudden cessation of the ukulele and a hush so tangible it sent an almost welcome shiver up my back, was that something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong. A man was running down toward the lakefront. Another man was shouting, “What’s that nigger doing here?”
“Get back where you belong!” someone yelled.
“Get him out of here!” a woman screamed.
I rose to my feet and with my back to the sun (this was close to five o’clock, I suppose, but the sun was still strong behind me), I looked out over the lake and saw that the intruder was just a boy, fourteen? fifteen? it was difficult to tell from this distance, but a boy certainly enough, judging from the slenderness of his body and the quick eager way he lifted his head and broke into a grin that flashed white across his black face. Perhaps he had not understood the consternation he was causing here on this white beach, perhaps he had assumed the men and women running down toward the shore were there to greet him after his exceptional and extraordinary navigational feat, the brave sailor who had come halfway around the world, or at least the several hundred yards separating the white beach from the black beach beside it, he had surely misunderstood because he was still grinning when the first stone struck him.
“Get the little bastard!” someone yelled (they knew he was little then, they knew he was only a boy) and another stone struck the raft, and the grin vanished from the boy’s face, he knew now that the people on this discovered shore were unfriendly, were perhaps even hostile, a volley of rocks and stones falling upon the raft and upon his shoulders now as he frantically paddled in an effort to get out of range, “What is it, Bert?” Nancy said, and I moved off the blanket and began running toward the shore as a rock struck the boy full in the face and he fell into the water.