The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (16 page)

I never felt threatened (as one might today) as I passed through Blacktown on Sunday mornings, on my way to the Sahara, but I did feel intrusive and glaringly white. People sitting out on their wooden stoops would interrupt their soft-voiced gossip and watch me walk by, then start talking again after I had passed; and little kids would stop skipping rope or playing finger games and look at me with big-eyed, disconcertingly frank curiosity until I was well down the street and they felt free to get on with their play.

I was intrigued by the storefront churches with hand-painted bible pictures and mysterious names including words like Nazarene, Glory, Eternal, Assembly, Salvation and Tabernacle, sometimes several of these in the same name. I used to slow down as I passed them so I could catch some of the singing, so much more spirited than ours. And sometimes, if no one was around, I would pause and listen for a moment to a fast-talking, gasping, repetitious preacher in the throes of being penetrated by the Holy Ghost (enthusiastic in its etymological sense) and the shouted responses of the congregation that asked the brother (rather than 'father') to lay the Word of God upon them! For a long time, the only Protestants I knew were Negroes, and it seemed that being a Protestant was a more lively and interesting affair than being a Catholic. That was before I met White Protestants and learned that this is not the case. But at least most Protestants eventually get over their relatively rigid and sanitized childhoods, while Jews and Catholics struggle with their uncertainties and guilt for the rest of their lives and, what is worse, feel obliged to tell everybody about it.

The blocks east of us, down the hill between North Pearl Street and the Hudson River, were entirely Negro. Most people called them niggers or spades or blacks or coons or smokes or jigs, not in anger or contempt, but simply because that was their street appellation, just as we were polacks or wops or micks or canuks. When people did say 'Negro', you could often hear ironic quotation marks in the long e in the North. In the South the e was a short i, and the o reduced to a schwa, so that it came out 'niggre', only a breath away from nigger. My mother never let my sister or me use any other word than Negro, perhaps because she was sensitive to the racial slurs she had faced as a quarter-breed child in a very Yankee village.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note16#note16” ??[16]?

This Can't Be Love... My Heart Belongs to Daddy... Louise... You Go to My Head... I Get Along Without You Very Well...

Sometimes I was able to get Mother to retell the stories of how her father had begun life as a half-breed laborer, but had worked and studied to improve himself and eventually surmounted barriers of culture, race and religion to win the hand of my grandmother. I knew these stories by heart, but I loved hearing about my grandfather whom I hero-worshipped and tried to emulate—indeed, still do. The images I retain of Edmond LaPointe come mostly from my mother's stories, because he died when I was five, so I have only fragmentary sensory memories of his visits to us at Lake George Village every Sunday: the smell of leather polish and of the Johnson's baby powder he used to cover his raspy cheeks. Half-blood though he was, he had not inherited the Indian male's advantage of having little beard. His cheeks were usually blue with stubble because it was his habit to shave just before going to bed. Mother explained to me that businessmen shave in the morning, because they love their jobs, but men like Edmond LaPointe shave at night, because they love their wives. It would be some years before I understood this.

My grandfather used to arrive at our cottage in Lake George Village bearing 'safety lollipops', which had flexible loop-sticks designed to protect the child who ran with a lollipop in his mouth from falling flat on his face and driving the stick through the back of his neck... an ever-present danger, according to the prevailing folk wisdom of the era. A packet of the loop-stick safety lollipops contained five different flavors (five colors, really, as the flavors were only slight variants of 'sweet'), and we had to choose one, first Anne-Marie, then I. The moment of choice was difficult. It wasn't so much deciding which one I wanted, but which three I was willing to leave behind.

The LaPointes came from a small mixed-blood farming community in Quebec, where their ancestors had lived since they had been driven out of their homeland in the Finger Lakes near the end of the eighteenth century. Their tribe, the Onondaga, had fought on the side of the French and against the English in the French-and-Indian Wars because the French fur traders had no intention of settling in Onondagan territory, while the land hunger of the English colonists was insatiable. But the English colonists won, and several decimated Onondaga clans made their way up into Canada and settled on thin, rocky farmland near the juncture of the Ste. Anne and St. Lawrence rivers, where they found themselves surrounded by Algonquin-speaking tribes, their traditional enemies. (Well, not so much their enemies as their livestock, as the Iroquois economy included a regular harvest of the possessions, furs, and women of the Algonquin tribes within their catchment.) So it is understandable that this band of displaced Onondagas was unloved by their new Algonquin-speaking neighbors.

Because the stranded Iroquois remnant consisted almost entirely of women, children and old men, their warriors having fallen in battle, the community quickly became mixed with local French blood. Thus, the part-breed character of later generations did not result from intermarriage between a lovely Indian princess and a brave White woodsman, as the romantic traditions of so many métis families assert, because Victorian sensibilities could not abide the thought of an Indian male astride a White woman; the people of my grandfather's generation were breeds descended from breed parents, who had descended from breed great-grandparents, and so on. They had little contact with either the Whites or the Algonquins of the Three Rivers country, and after the last of the Onondaga returned at the end of the nineteenth century to that part of their homeland that had become the United States, the Algonquins remaining behind got a belated revenge by writing these Iroquois interlopers out of the folk history that they packaged for White tourists.

Over-farmed and badly farmed,? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note17#note17” ??[17]? the LaPointe land was too fatigued to support the clan through the agricultural depressions of the 1860s and 70s, so, together with most of the displaced Onondaga mixed-bloods, they gave up and drifted south, settling in French-speaking communities that provided unskilled labor for mills and factories throughout northern New York and New England. My grandfather, Edmond LaPointe, began working for the New York Central Railroad at the age of fifteen, gandy-dancing with a line crew in the draining heat of summer and the drifting snows of winter. But he was bright enough to see that life was better for those who toiled indoors and wore ties, so he worked on his English and taught himself Morse code and ultimately became a railroad telegrapher. Step by step, he worked his way up until, at the age of twenty-five, he was appointed station master in the town of Fort Anne, New York. If you picture the all-powerful station master of a major railroad terminal presiding over a staff of several hundred clerks, ticket agents, baggage men, bookkeepers, yard bosses, freight handlers, cleaners, maintenance crew and signal men, you will not have a very accurate image of Ed LaPointe's work and life, for in little whistle-stops like Fort Anne at the turn of the century, the station master was the clerk, telegrapher, baggage man, freight handler, cleaner, yard boss, signal man and maintenance crew. These versatile one-man-bands were so valuable to the New York Central Line that they were seldom considered for advancement into mainstream administration; instead, they were moved from one tank-town to another, lucky if they ended up having one trainee-assistant by the time they reached retirement age, after which they usually spent three or four years as a semi-retired 'floater': an experienced man who could replace any station master in the system in case of illness, death or, very rarely, a vacation. But it was indoor work, and the station master was an important man in his village, not only at the center of its transportation but of its communications too, as he was also the Western Union telegrapher. A station master got news from the outer world first, so his views were listened to around the pot-bellied stove of the general store. He wore a suit and tie and was called Mister—a big step from being an anonymous French-speaking, half-breed gandy-dancer. Although the station master was at the center of his community (in addition to being the entire staff of the station, Edmond LaPointe used his access to transportation to establish an independent enterprise in coal and ice), he was viewed as an oddity and an outsider by the stiff Yankee village of Fort Anne, not far from the Vermont border. Not only was he French, but he was half Indian—a savage, not to put too fine a point on it. Worse yet, he was a Catholic. And if all that wasn't enough, he was also a Democrat, which in those ultra-conservative rural up-state villages was akin to being a bomb-throwing anarchist. But any harassment or overt hostility he might have met because of his race, religion or political orientation was mitigated by the general knowledge that Ed LaPointe was an avid amateur boxer who was not only quick with his fists, but who took a delight in fighting. (A savage delight, some added archly.) He had a powerful grip and bony fists he could throw at your face like rocks, and it was his practice to go to Fistcity while the other fellow was still strutting and blustering, a tactic I imitated.

The village of Fort Anne was dismayed to learn that this Catholic, Democrat, half-breed scrapper had successfully wooed Maud Prescott, the daughter of a Puritan family that lived on the Vermont farm their ancestors had worked since before the Revolution (indeed, before there had been a Vermont). The Prescotts had come to the New World in the 1640s and they could (and often did) boast that the four men of their name who died fighting in the Revolution were fifth-generation Americans. Maud was the eleventh generation of Prescotts in America, which makes me the thirteenth and my grandchildren the fifteenth; this in a country where few people can claim more than four or five generations of American-born ancestors, and most of those who can are Black.

To tease his wife, Ed LaPointe used to tell his children: “Your mother's family is proud of having come to the New World on the Mayflower, but when they arrived my family was standing on the shore, waiting for them.” This wasn't exactly true because the Prescotts didn't come to New England until 1642, and the eastward migration of the Iroquois had only reached the Hudson River when they collided with the westward migration of the Whites. I later discovered that my grandfather's line about the White side of the family arriving on the Mayflower and the Indian side greeting them on the shore has been ascribed to Will Rogers; and that made sense because the wry, folksy Will Rogers, also a half-blood, was both Edmond LaPointe's favorite newspaper columnist and his favorite actor.

At the age of eighteen, the high-spirited Maud Prescott must have been very much in love to have married Edmond LaPointe against the wishes of her family, which not only refused to attend their wedding but had nothing further to do with either her or her children. The women of Fort Anne endorsed the Prescott family's behavior because, as they told one another in those tense whispers that adults naively believe are inaudible to children, there could only be one reason why a girl from a good family would marry a Catholic half-breed, and we all know what that is. The fact that Maud and Edmond's first child came, stillborn, a full year after their marriage did not stanch rumors of Maud's having married out of necessity. Fact and evidence being but feeble defenses against prejudice, the village women were able to say: “Well, all right, so maybe she wasn't 'that way' when they got married; maybe she just thought she was. But she wouldn't have thought so if the two of them hadn't been... well, you see what I mean.”

Saturday was market day in Fort Anne, and it occasioned one of those splendidly eccentric New England traditions that made Yankee communities unique before the homogenizing effects of electronic mass communications. It was the custom for village women to hold open house between three in the afternoon and the fall of evening, when the wagons and buggies had to start back towards the farms. The signal that a house was 'receiving' was a lit oil lamp in the front window. Half the village women offered hospitality one week, half the next, and those whose turn it was to serve cookies and tea received those whose turn it was not, along with any passing farm people who might be glad for a chance to tie their wagons to the rail and rest their feet and bottoms for a while, letting their kids run the streets with the town brats while they sat in stuffy parlors whose only other functions were receiving preachers and laying out the dead. While sipping their tea and nibbling cookies, they would exchange succulent bits of gossip, grim prognostications about declining farm prices and public morals, and mutual assurances that the younger generation was far too pampered to ever develop into strong, useful, self-reliant citizens like—well, like themselves, though they shouldn't say it.

The first Saturday after Maud and Edmond returned from their two-day honeymoon in Montreal (Ed could not find a 'floater' to replace him for longer), Maud worked all morning baking the fancy cookies that were her only domestic glory, because before meeting Ed she had been determined never to marry, but instead to teach in some big city like New York or Albany and devote herself to the crusade for Woman Suffrage. A dozen brand-new cups and saucers and a tea pot were set up on the table, and a kettle was purring on the back of the coal stove when, at three o'clock, she lit an oil lamp in the window of their small house. She would have to receive the guests and well-wishers herself, because Ed could never leave the station until the northbound 7:53 had passed through.