Spring advanced as the New Orleans floated farther south on the river, and an ever hotter sun shone down on her deck. The Mississippi widened, the shores grew more lush and the vegetation richer. And the heat increased in the galley under the deck where two Swedish farm hands sat and peeled their way to California.
The crew members who did the loading, fired the engines, filled the bunkers, served the food on the New Orleans were nearly all white men, although the officers on the steamboat preferred a black crew. This time, however, there hadn’t been enough Negroes; there were only about half a dozen. The command preferred Negroes because they were pleasanter to the passengers, happier and jollier; they entertained the passengers. The blacks could also stand the heat better than the whites; and they endured the beatings they got, while such rough treatment was not allowed with a white crew.
One evening Arvid and Robert watched as a uniformed officer beat up a disobedient Negro. Arvid wondered; were they allowed to do that to people in this country, as they did at home? Robert explained that only black-skinned people were allowed to be beaten in America, for it was written in the laws of the American Republic that all white people were equal. What luck, said Arvid, that time when God decided what color their skins should be.
In the evenings the crew — firemen, loaders, kitchen helpers, waiters — gathered on their own deck and lit torches. The flickering torches reflected in the dark river water on either side of the boat while the crew sang their songs, strange songs whose words had little meaning:
Corn and pudding and tapioca pie,
Hi ho, hi ho!
The geese play cards and the chicks drink wine,
Hi ho, hi ho!
In the crowd, on the shore,
In New Orleans,
There stands my girl on the shore!
She is young and she weeps and she is mine,
The girl on the shore in New Orleans!
Corn and pudding and tapioca pie,
Hi ho, hi ho!
When the geese play cards and the chicks drink wine,
While floating down the river to the sea!
Robert and Arvid thought that tapioca pie must taste good, and they were disappointed never to sample it.
They counted their days on the river, and the barrels of potatoes they peeled through but which never came to an end. They felt that through their work they were paying too much for their transportation on the New Orleans. But they must save their cash.
At last one day when the bell rang they heard the words they had been listening for each time the boat docked: St. Louis! They were free! The two boys threw their peeling knives onto the deck with shouts of joy, picked up their rucksacks, and ran down the gangplank. They had traveled the first stretch of the road and it hadn’t cost them a penny.
They had come to a place with crowds of people and jostling animals and vehicles on the streets. Stillwater was a river town on the St. Croix, but St. Louis was a larger town on a larger river. It was the biggest town they had ever seen, except for New York. It seemed to be fenced in by the river. But it wasn’t yet completed, and outside of New York they hadn’t seen a town in America that was completed: all were a-building, all were like a shell of a house, ready to be finished up. In St. Louis timbers and boards were strewn over the streets, hammering and digging went on everywhere. People sat eating bread and fruit outside shacks that were so primitive the boys wondered if they were lived in or in the process of being built. A great many Negroes mingled in the crowds, half-naked, woolly-haired, and Arvid remarked that there was much black hide to be beaten in this town. The blacks were slaves, they knew, slavery being permitted here in the South, but they didn’t see a single one in chains or shackles.
In St. Louis the two boys got along better than they had in New York the previous year. I am a stranger here, Robert had told the people then, but he had not been able to make anyone understand. Now he could say almost anything he wanted in English — although a little haltingly and not always according to his language book — and he understood most of what people said to him. It was harder for Arvid; he did not know many of the English words as yet, even though he usually pretended to understand everything. Robert did not let on that he knew Arvid pretended; Arvid had never learned to read or write his own mother tongue — how could he learn English?
From the pier the boys followed a broad street, perhaps the town’s Broadway, although it wasn’t half as wide as the street of that name in New York. But here, too, wonderful fruits were sold, many kinds whose names they did not know. At one stand they bought oranges, and sat down on some boxes against the tin wall of a nearby shed to eat them.
The sun felt good on their faces as they sat eating the juicy fruit; this was a fine place, and summer had already arrived.
Robert and Arvid had traveled over water to St. Louis. Now they would continue over land to California. Robert had figured out they would walk as far as possible on that road; their own legs would have to pay for the journey which their money couldn’t afford. But all who traveled over land, and on ground in general, needed a road. If they rode horses, or wagons, a road was required. Even those who used their legs must have a road bed to walk on.
Now, where was the road to the goldfields of California?
In Stillwater Robert had bought a map of the United States. These grew in number and size for every year; they expanded so fast that nearly every year a new map had to be printed of the Northamerican Republic. This was a country that grew night and day, throughout the week, the whole year round. Robert had therefore asked for the latest map which the president in Washington had issued as the official map for this country this year, 1851, a map with no state left off, however small, empty, and insignificant it might be. It had cost him one dollar and fifty cents for the latest edition, completely revised, but he would get back that sum with the first little grain of gold he saw on the California ground.
Arvid knew that if one had a map and a watch one could find any road in the world, however crookedly it ran and however bad its condition. Robert had the map, he himself had the watch. He pulled it from his vest pocket, the nickel watch his father, Petter of Kråkesjö, had given him as a parting gift. It was his paternal inheritance from Sweden, and Arvid had chained it to his vest buttonhole. His father’s labor had earned it for him; much sweat had gone into that watch, many long days’ toil, many evenings with a sore back. It was not an old-fashioned spindle watch with unreliable works, it had cylinder works. A cylinder watch had a more precise mechanism and kept better time — this watch kept time to the second.
And now they would have great use of this cylinder watch. If Robert’s map showed the road they must take, then this watch would show the time it would take to walk it.