Sin in the Second City (30 page)

DISPATCH
FROM THE U.S.
IMMIGRATION COMMISSION

Correspondence captured in raids instituted by agents of the commission shows some of these methods of recruiting. These letters are extremely valuable “human documents” relating to persons of the class in question. The men seem to feel affection for their children; they talk tenderly with reference to the fortunes or misfortunes of their mothers or relatives; they send polite greetings to one another and to their friends. At the same time they discuss the characteristics of the women in question with the same coolness that they would name the good points of a horse or a blooded dog which they have for sale.

DEAR FRIEND:

I can assure you that I have found a woman the like of whom you can never find; young, beautiful, and who fully decided to leave…. I could send her by the first mail steamer, so as soon as you get this letter send me the ticket or the money…. I will send you her photograph. Her beautiful teeth alone are worth a million.

MY DEAR MRS.—

I have just been to see the cigars; they are fine, young and good-looking; she has four of them, but it seems that they are in debt here to the extent of $
300
each: that is for their fare and other expenses for bringing them from Japan…now, if you feel like advancing them $
300
each, they are ready to go at once…this money you will get back as soon as the cigars earn it.

FRIEND ARTHUR:

…For your friend who was just arrested I am very sorry. Well, this will cost him a lot of money. It is very dangerous, this kind of business. A person has to be mighty careful. I have seen it coming. Here in Chicago the trouble is not over yet.

JUDGMENT
DAYS

Belle Schreiber, Everleigh Club butterfly and Jack Johnson’s paramour.

I am not a reformer. I am trying to make reform unnecessary.

—A
RTHUR
B
URRAGE
F
ARWELL

O
n Saturday, March 13, 1909, Minna, accompanied by her two maids, climbed into the Everleigh Club’s automobile. Painted a cheerful yellow, with a boulder-size arrangement of artificial flowers affixed to the hood, the machine had replaced their carriage as her chosen mode of transportation for jaunts downtown. But instead of directing her driver to the First Dearborn Bank for the usual daily deposit, Minna requested the Municipal Court Building. The car headed north to the Loop, cold needles of rain rapping the windows, as she prepared for her date in the courtroom of one Judge Cottrell.

The charge: selling liquor without a license.

Arthur Burrage Farwell had been exceptionally busy lately, gathering evidence about licenses (or the lack thereof), sending undercover Law and Order League detectives into dives—even on New Year’s Eve—to see what transpired after the 1:00 a.m. closing law. He also convinced fifty ministers to coordinate a day of sermons against the “trade in rum,” a ploy that guaranteed headlines. The whole city had gone mad lately; the health commissioner was arresting people for spitting, of all things, and proposed an ordinance against smoking on elevated trains and streetcars as a way to combat the “spitting evil.”

Minna remembered the advice an Illinois congressman once imparted to Bathhouse John: Stick to the “small stuff” and let the “big stuff” alone. The approach worked quite well for the alderman, politically as well as financially, and its reversal was equally successful for the Everleigh sisters. Since their graft fees and friendly relations with the police allowed the Club to remain open, why demand protection against the reformers’ pettier attacks? This court date was bothersome, sure, but inconsequential in the scheme of things, and the jury proved as much with their verdict: a fine of $25.

F
or all the agitation over the First Ward Ball, the bomb throwing and threat slinging and churlish back-and-forth, the Levee showed no signs of submission. Business had been brisk despite the visiting firemen’s nightly vigils outside their doors. The most recent damage, in fact, had been wrought not by the Bible brothers but by the Weiss brothers, Ed and Louis.

The Weisses’ old ploy of paying cabdrivers to drop off drunken revelers at their resorts instead of the Club was more lucrative than ever, owing to the advent of the automobile. Even worse, Ed married a former Everleigh Club girl, Aimee Leslie, who helped him run his place, using her impressive bordello pedigree to lure potential clients too foolish to distinguish an imitation from the original.

“They have us in the middle,” Minna joked to Ada. “But they’ve yet to get us in a corner.”

One night in April, a few weeks after Minna’s court date, two men appeared at the Club’s door knowing exactly where they were and what they wanted. For once, the madam yearned to escort clients—and wealthy clients at that—to the Weiss brothels herself.

Jack Johnson and his manager, George Little.

As his name implied, Little was short and squat, with a face that invariably looked as if it had just been slapped, flushed and tinged with shock. Once the stable manager at the Palmer House, Little had worked his way up, making the right connections and a few real estate acquisitions in the Levee. He now owned his own saloon, the Here It Is, on the West Side, and ran a combination bar and brothel called the Imperial on Armour Avenue, next to one of Maurice Van Bever’s dives.

Most important, Little was the “Levee czar”—the man sent personally by Ike Bloom to collect protection payments for Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink. Minna and Ada gave Little nearly $800 a month, the most of any house on the line, which didn’t include occasional emergency contributions to thwart harmful legislation in Springfield.

But that night, George Little wasn’t there to collect. By his side stood a man, six feet two and two hundred pounds, his frame overwhelming the doorway. A $1,500 diamond ring, a gift from Little, gleamed atop the knuckle of one long finger. He was a boxer—the new heavyweight champion of the world, no less—and he was famous not principally for his skill inside the ring but for the color of his skin.

His name was Jack Johnson, and he wanted in.

The sisters didn’t consider themselves prejudiced. Minna, after all, never forgot why she lost her religion—the day a Negro burned to death in her Virginia hometown and she watched, sickened, as white children lined the pews of the church to snicker at the sight of his charred bones.

“Even if I am a Virginian,” Minna later explained, “I am not intolerant. But I do know that every colored woman hates every white woman…. I know colored women, and they would kill white women who took their men…. In his heart, every colored man hates white men. That’s a reality. I don’t believe in illusions…. And as for Desdemona kissing Paul Robeson in
Othello,
that I don’t wish to see.”

But the sisters knew they had to be careful; any misstep or lapse in judgment could impugn their house. Inviting Scott Joplin to play ragtime for an evening alongside Vanderpool Vanderpool was one thing; inviting Joplin to climb the stairs with the choicest girls in Chicago was quite another. The Club’s clients appeared to agree. When they spotted Johnson in the doorway, the men’s raucous laughter diminished into a scuttle of whispers, and then a taut silence.

Minna looked at Ada, noted the same understanding in her return gaze. She slipped through the crowd
—Excuse me darling, pardon, I’ll be right back—
and pulled George Little aside. With all due respect, Minna said, she couldn’t allow his friend into the Everleigh Club.

George Little replied that, with all due respect, he was in charge of doling out protection.

A look passed between them, each tracking the course of the other’s brain, a carousel of cause and effect. There was a slim, subtle difference between a request and a threat, and Minna, familiar with the nuances of each, nodded at George Little and let them both pass.

What Minna didn’t know, what she couldn’t have known, was how charming the Everleigh girls would find the boxer. They marveled at his physique, the camel hump of his biceps. They giggled at his jokes, slipped their dainty hands in his. When Jack Johnson invited five of them—Belle Schreiber, Lillian St. Clair, Bessie Wallace, Virginia Bond, and “Jew Bertha” Morrison—to take a ride in his big shiny touring car, they pulled on their fur capes and piled in.

The sisters were thankful the incident had passed, but the following afternoon, word spread through the Club that Jack Johnson would come by again to pick up the girls. He wanted one harlot in particular, Belle Schreiber, a twenty-three-year-old brunette who had joined the Club the previous year.