Return of Little Big Man (67 page)

“I was en route back to Kansas,” she said. “When in doubt, head for home, I suppose. Though I haven’t had an actual home there for a long time, I didn’t seem to belong anywhere else. A friend of mine from college lives in Chicago, and I had to change trains here, so I decided to accept her longstanding invitation to visit. Well, it’s turned out to be the best decision I ever made. My friend is Jane Addams.”

She said this with the kind of expectation of voice and eyebrow that goes with a familiar name, but I didn’t recognize it, so she goes on, but not with any disapproval of my ignorance, of which she had had plenty of evidence in the past. “Jane Addams and her associate Ellen Starr founded Hull House four years ago. It’s a settlement house in the worst of the West Side slums.”

I was still so dumb I wondered what these ladies was doing in a part of town like that if they had went to college and could do better, but I was smart enough not to ask, for it shortly turned out that, as I should of suspected if it had attracted Amanda, Hull House was a place where folks who was down and out through no fault of their own could come and get trained for various vocations and trades, get fed if they was hungry and a bath when needed; board there safe and respectable if they was working girls away from home; put their kids if they was mothers while they went to jobs; belong to social clubs; use the gym to get healthy; and study any number of subjects which if you kept them up would be pretty near as good an education as a university had to offer. Amanda for example taught music, for which she was well qualified from her own college days and also that experience at the piano, though I doubt whether she spelled out the nature of where it had been acquired.

Now most of the people helped was women and children, as most of the staff was female, but Miss Addams was also interested in getting better conditions for workingmen in a time when the work week averaged sixty hours and the unskilled might not earn as much as a dollar per day, so she and her women did a good deal of politicking and had only lately got the state legislature to raise the minimum age for full-time employment all the way up to fourteen.

In short, Jane Addams was a troublemaking do-gooder after Amanda’s heart, a fellow ex-college girl reared genteelly, and in Miss Addams’s case with quite a lot of money, who figured they had had it easy enough in a life that was real mean for many others, to whom it would be nice to lend a hand. You could see them as a pain in the arse, which I expect they could be, and doing what they did on account of guilt at their own good fortune instead of accepting it as coming from God, and maybe that could be so, and you could doubt what they did made much difference in the long run and instead blow up everything and start over, if you, as the saying went, regarded the right thing as a big omelet and individuals like so many eggs.

Or you might, like me, see them as real kind folks. And if you think there can ever be too much kindness in the world, then you’ve managed to live in another one than mine. But then I admit I was prejudiced and maybe my own motives had less to do with justice than just being crazy about Amanda.

Anyway, after telling me about Hull House, what Amanda wanted to do now instead of taking my suggestion and going back to the Midway and having pastry and coffee with whipped cream at the Vienna Cafe, was to take me for a visit over to Miss Addams’s place and see all the good that was being done there, and there wasn’t any way I could get out of that, happy as it made her to do it and worthwhile as it was. It’s just that I would first of appreciated continuing to have Amanda to myself awhile longer rather than going immediately to see how she was helping others who she didn’t even know. You see how selfish I was but maybe will forgive me in view of the circumstances.

So we went to the West Side of town, and she had not exaggerated about the slums, which was as bad as them in Manhattan, a comparison that might of pleased Chicagoans who was always in competition with New York, and Amanda took me through Hull House, a big old formerly private mansion on South Halstead Street now used for the activities I mentioned, and I tell you it was a fine thing to see, not tiresome as I admit I expected. It wasn’t a bunch of grown men in a sham battle or little ladies shooting at glass balls or doing trick riding, but helping people further themselves in real life had a lot to recommend it.

Of course I was under the influence of Amanda, but before I was there long, seeing them earnest young women, both them on the staff and those being trained in various skills, not to mention the children who instead of fighting with one another or fetching cans of beer for their father from the saloon was learning to play the piano and so on, well, I tell you, I begun to total up my own contribution to the human race, at the age of better than half a century, as nil, and I seen most of the individuals I had frequented as worthless in the greater scheme of things: gamblers and harlots, most of them, leaving aside the entertainers such as Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley, who I guess did bring pleasure to many folks, and nothing wrong with that, but it didn’t feed the hungry or rescue poor women from sweatshops or do anything for the freed slaves come north to live worse than before Emancipation. You name the dirty deal and Jane Addams was trying to correct it while I had been looking in the opposite direction.

So when Amanda took me to meet her, I was ready to ask Miss Addams if she had something I could do that would be of use at Hull House. This might sound remarkable for a person like me, but I was in a state of great feeling from having run into Amanda and had it go so well and keep getting better.

Jane Addams was younger than I expected, younger in fact, I learned later, than Amanda, but looked somewhat older than she was due to being in delicate health owing to a spinal curvature she had since childhood. She couldn’t of been nicer. For all her social activism, I got the idea right away that she was more of what you could call diplomatic than Amanda, which you had to be to make a go of a cause like hers in the Chicago of that day, where they could also give New York a run for its money in political corruption.

We had a real pleasant though brief conversation, on account of she was so busy, and as Amanda hadn’t said nothing about my connection with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, I didn’t mention it either, and Miss Addams got the idea I was just in town to see the Fair, which she said, in her diplomatic way without either praising or condemning it Amanda-style, was quite a spectacle which she was interested in seeing even though her purse had been stole while she attended opening-day ceremonies, at the memory of which she raised her eyebrows while smiling.

“Miss Addams,” I said, surprising Amanda, “I sure would admire working here at your settlement house in some way, but unfortunately I ain’t got any talents nor no education.”

“Why, Jack,” Amanda says, lifting her own eyebrows, and she then says, “Jane, he knows more about Indians than any other white man could. He was raised by the Cheyennes.”

“There you have it, Mr. Crabb,” Miss Addams says, and she forthwith suggests I give the Hull House children a class in American Indian ways and customs and crafts if I knowed any like curing leather and making moccasins and beadwork. If all idealists had her mind for the practical, and vice versa, the world soon wouldn’t have no more problems that couldn’t be handled.

Now not only did I soon begin to give a course of the type Jane Addams suggested, but from time to time I brung over Sioux from B.B.W.W. to show them slum kids what real Indians looked like and if they was women (usually the case, for the warriors couldn’t teach much that Miss Addams would approve of), why, they might demonstrate their type of sewing, decoration with beads, and all, and show how they chewed a hide to make it soft, the way they braided hair, and so on. Most of my class was girls, for boys would of been interested only if Sioux men showed the use of weapons, something I doubt Miss Addams and her ladies understood, but then Hull House was mainly a female affair, speaking of which, after I was there awhile, I begun to get an uneasy feeling which I’ll get to later.

At last not only was I doing something with my life I could be proud of, but also I had that closer connection with Amanda that I had yearned for, and it might not seem much, us just being at first teachers in the same place, but it turned out to be the right way to start towards something more, and I mean not only personally but by way of profession, for though giving music lessons to poor children was a mighty fine occupation, as was my own, I kept after Amanda on the subject of that book she had wanted to write about Indians, whether just about Sioux women or an account of Sitting Bull’s death, or what seemed best to me, combining the two, and I admit at the back of my mind was including a good bit of my own story with it, though how that might be done I never had no idea, being as you know barely literate, not to mention I hadn’t ever so far told her more than bits and pieces with respect to my childhood with the Cheyenne.

My time at Hull House was of a morning, for I hadn’t asked nor was offered any pay, so stayed on with the Wild West, continuing to draw the wage, which come in handy now, as seeing Amanda all the time I took more care of my appearance, getting shaved daily by a barber, which cost me twenty-five cents but he also kept my hair and mustache trimmed, the former having taken on more gray at the sideburns and receding some at the temples, which concerned me a little but the barber assured me I looked the more distinguished for it, and then combed my hair down with pimp oil, adding to the stink of the bay rum he had earlier doused my face with, but if that’s what it took to look like a gent, I would endure it, along with acquiring a striped blazer, a pair of white flannel pants, and a summertime straw skimmer to replace the winter derby.

I dressed more sober for Hull House, and of course around the Wild West you couldn’t look like a cake-eater from the East, so the fashionable outfit was for my off-time, the fairly rare occasions when I got any, given my two employments. And when I did find a few free hours, it had to coincide with Amanda’s for it to be of value to me.

I’ll go into that subject further in a minute, but first I don’t want to forget that matter that led to my reconnection with Amanda. I had promptly reported back to Annie Oakley that Rain in the Face denied killing either Custer brother.

“Do you believe him?” she asked. “Or was he just saying that?”

“I don’t know,” I says. “I don’t think he’d admit it if he did, but maybe he really didn’t. He feels sorry for Mrs. Custer, anyhow.” It wasn’t exactly sorrow, but that seemed the best thing to call it for the purpose at hand. “He asked me if I could get him a picture of her.”

I don’t know exactly what Annie thought of the request, for she just looked quizzical. “Well, I don’t personally own one, Jack,” she says, “and maybe when we get back east I could ask her about it, but I don’t know as I really want to.”

I never saw Rain in the Face again nor went near Sitting Bull’s cabin, but then I didn’t see much more of Annie or Cody himself except during the show. I spent all my other time either frequenting Amanda or waiting to do so. What I wanted especially was to get her over to the Fair, and don’t mean just the Midway but also the White City with its display of the wonders of the end of the nineteenth century, and not all of them was machines and industrial and farm products: there was that enormous Palace of Fine Arts full of paintings, and concerts of fine music by the brass band of none other than John Philip Sousa, but she never had a good word to say about it, so on the first occasion we “walked out,” as they put it at that time when you was courting a girl, which I doubted Amanda had any idea I was doing, we had tea at the Palmer House, the fanciest hotel in Chicago and one they could hold up against any I seen anyplace in the world, for in fact it was constructed as a collection of the best features from other countries, from its French front to its Italian staircases and mirrors, Egyptian chandeliers, the interiors reproducing those of the German Kaiser’s palace, and the English rooms for smoking cigars and playing billiards.

Now the way I decided to handle the matter of acting so as not to embarrass her was to copy what Amanda done as to putting cream and sugar in the tea, and so on, and generally I got by using this means, along with being helped by dumb luck at such times as when the waiter wanted to take the order for us both from only me, which later in life I learned was the polite style, with the lady telling the man what she wanted and him telling the help, but independent as Amanda was, she ignored that system and told the waiter what she required, so I did likewise, because it was the same.

Another time I was favored by fortune is when I dropped my spoon but only started to bend down to fetch it off the floor when I realized I better wipe it off before using it again, but not dirty the expensive linen napkin they give you there, so was reaching for the bandanna I carried up my sleeve when a passing waiter, not our own, beat me to the spoon, and did not hand it back but supplied a fresh one. That’s the kind of service they had at the Palmer House. Imagine how much silverware they run through in the course of a day.

Along with the tea they brung an assortment of little cakes and miniature sandwiches with I guess some of the same fillings they used in England, which I couldn’t identify when over there, either, most of it being air so far as substance went, but it was real grand in that hotel, and had I been able for long to take my eyes off Amanda I would of studied more of the fancy furnishings, which was a real marvel in a city also known for its stockyards. I mentioned dropping that utensil, well, the thick carpet looked so clean I probably wouldn’t even of had to wipe that spoon off except for the principle of the thing.

At first, facing her like that across a table of white linen, gleaming silver, and china cups so thin as almost to be transparent, I wished I had fortified myself with whiskey before coming to drink tea, for the foregoing, including the crystal vase of fresh flowers, was as a setting of which Amanda was the jewel. She was wearing frosty blue today, a couple shades paler in hue than her eyes. In the summertime then women wore more than nowadays in the dead of winter: it was really a production, along with the wealth of hair carried on their heads, plus a hat.