How Died My City, How died
My Soul
by Gary Hill
I grew up in East Saint Louis, Illinois, and I'm proud of it. I know. I know East Saint Louis is an all-black ghetto with major crimes every day, over a thousand derelict structures, murders, abandoned cars, trash in five hundred vacant lots, shootings, stabbings, perfidious racial prejudice, robberies, home of the bloodiest race riot in USA history, a place where deadly hate and prejudice pierced too deep. I know the incompetent, gluttonous politicians have robbed the city openly, and with no excuses, for 200 years, and that the mayors, today and for the past fifty years, have presided over a long, dragged-out funeral. I know the downtown area looks like a deserted battlefield, like Beirut after Civil War, with the shops boarded up, with derelict buildings crumbling, falling down, storm and sewage drains rotted, water lines old, dangerous and not repaired, shells of gutted structures, empty hulks, burned out buildings, 75% unemployment, broken glass, with garbage in the streets because of un-enforced sanitation codes, and iron bars on the few surviving businesses and homes, churches with chain link fences around their parking lots. I know there’s chromium, arsenic, mercury, selenium, in the soil, periodic flooding.
And in my last days, I stand-alone in my destroyed city and wonder, how died my city, how died my soul? Who of us can say when a city or a culture begins it’s last days? Is there ever a single event that is the seed of death? I don’t know, but if there was one such an event for my dead city, it was on July 2, 1917, and if there was one event that seared my soul, it was the death of El Cid in 1956. And I know I am responsible.
Looting of the city and county treasury by political hacks had become a habit near the 1900s. More than $250,000 was stolen by city officials from 1912 to 1917. City Treasurers were allowed by law to skim two percent off the top of the tax receipts until they had received their annual salary of $1,500.00, but they took two percent of all tax collections. The school treasurers deposited school monies in friendly banks and kept all the interest on the monies for themselves, and on and on. There was corruption at every level.
Fight! Saint Paul's was an old church, but no one ever thought of it as a church, because the Saint Paul Social Center was a place to box. St. Paul's was on 9th Street, right by two schools, Rock Junior High and East Saint Louis High School.
It was 1956; the year the Federal Aid Highway Act was made law. It was the crown of Eisenhower’s complacent presidency. Of course, Eisenhower did not build the highways for the people; he built them for his mobile missiles. He wanted all the roads smooth and the overheads in the cities high enough to permit his missiles-on-a-truck smooth sailing. It was also the year that Grace Kelly received a crown, marrying Prince Ranier III of Monaco. "The Great Pretender," and "Why do fools fall in love," was on the radios, with Little Richard’s record, "Tutti Frutti, all Rootti."
There was music and boxing. Saint Paul’s church was big, but I was never in the church part. I went to the basement where the social center was. There was a locker room to change in, an enormous room with a boxing ring, and a big banner stretching across the room that said, "Quitters never win. Winners never quit."
The Chicago, St. Louis, and eastern capitalists who owned the industrial base of the East Saint Louis tax-free enclaves, paid their laborers seventeen to twenty cents per hour in 1917, barely one-half of the prevailing wage in other cities.
The owners got away with it by playing one race against the other, by using racism as a way to pay low wages. "Take it or leave it," they said, "if you whites won’t accept it, the blacks will." This same attitude extended to the housing market, where landlords rented shacks for exorbitant prices by making the races compete.
My friends had told me about the Social Center where some of them boxed, and I started going. I just came in one night, got dressed in my gym shorts and tennis shoes, wrapped my hands with Ace Bandages, and began exercising with everyone else, like I knew what I was doing. The guy in charge was an old man named Max. He saw me but ignored me, like I wasn't there. So I just kept up with the others, shadowboxing, punching the big bag till my hands were bleeding, jumping rope, sweating, working hard. Some of the others who were training would give me tips.
"Punch straight."
"Snap it back fast, don't leave a punch hanging out there."
"Keep your elbows in."
"Shift your weight when you punch so your whole weight is behind the punch."
"Put your hips into it."
"Don't throw one punch if you can throw two."
"Keep your head down and your guard up."
East Saint Louis was a city of padded public payrolls, racism, journalistic lies, pay-offs, open gambling, prostitution, gouging, overcharging, kickbacks, embezzlements, nepotism, law violations, waste of public funds, bribes, manipulation of elections, extortions, cover-ups, theft, chicaneries, backbiting, throat slitting, murders and assassinations, legal swindles, stupidities, and incompetence. The thieves operated at all levels. The Chief and Night Chief of Police were both suspended for assisting criminals in 1917.
It was a time of blatant corruption, just like all other times in East Saint Louis, a time of stupidity and abuse, a time of crime and violence, a time of war as real as the war in the Projects or in Europe. There was war in Europe, a revolution in Russia, a Chicago White Sox World Series victory in Illinois, and labor problems in East Saint Louis.
I had a lot of help in the gym, but Max never said a word to me, not a word, not even a look, like I wasn’t a real person. Max had those calm eyes and his bearing told of authority; he spoke seldom and always quietly. Max was black; everyone at the gym was black except me and Buster Wortman’s (Mr. Mafia) son, but we never thought about that. We were just boxing, and the other guys were helpful. They watched me, helped me, and told me how to improve, but Max never spoke a word to me. But I watched Max. Whenever he looked my way, I would work hard as a wino scuffling after whiskey, but Max never acknowledged that I was alive. After a few months, I figured I could get along without him. There were some good boxers in the gym who liked me and who were always friendly and giving advice. Sonny Liston was one of them.
The absentee owners of Aluminum Ore Company hired several hundred blacks, newly arrived from the South to break the union strike in 1917. That year, no more than 5,000 blacks arrived in East Saint Louis, looking for better lives. The numbers were exaggerated by the labor unions however, and said to be ten to twelve thousand. The racist union organizers wanted to scare the white workers and used fright tactics. As far as breaking the strike, the white workers, the union, the city officials, and the newspaper, all blamed blacks when the Aluminum Ore Company was clearly to blame. On May 10, 1917, union officials of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) told Mayor Mollman to, "Inform Negroes of the South that there are no jobs in East Saint Louis."
Sonny Liston was a mountain, a big, angry mountain. What I remember most about him was his hands. He had hands the size of Mount Whitney. Everyone in the gym knew he was great. Everyone knew he would be a world champion one day, and everyone knew he could whip any three of the other boxers. They all treated him with respect, and he treated them okay. He told me several times to stay on the heavy bag longer. "You're little, James. You need to get more power in your punches. Punch that bag hard, 'cause how you practice is how you fight."
I had Sonny Liston to help me. Max could ignore me all he wanted. It was okay with me. I worked hard, listening, learning, and after I learned the basics I got in the ring. The guy I fought for my first fight was Koshi.
Union workers warned the Mayor that unless conditions were corrected, there would be a race riot. The frightened and ineffectual Mayor did nothing. On May 23, 1917, two groups of teenagers, one group black, one white, threw rocks at each other at the corner of 7th and Piggott. Police arrived, arrested several of the black youths and none of the whites. The East Saint Louis Journal presented a one-sided view of what happened, keeping rumor and the flames of race prejudice burning. Five days later, on May 28, sixty union delegates lodged a protest with the Mayor against black migration. "East Saint Louis," one man yelled, "must remain a white man's town!"
Koshi was undoubtedly one of the best lightweights in the history of this world. He was simply great, terrific at everything. He punched the light bag and made it sing with rhythm. He did songs on it. Koshi punched the heavy bag and made the bag echo and vibrate almost as much as Sonny Liston did. His punches could be felt it all over the gym when he hit the heavy bag. Koshi jumped rope better than the girls on the street, and the girls and their jump-rope songs were sensational. "Annie had a baby, wrapped it up in tissue paper, sent it down the elevator…"
As the union delegates left City Hall, they heard a rumor that a black robber had just shot a white man. Later, the rumor was found to be false. But it was too late. Mobs of whites rushed through downtown, beating every black in sight. The victims were beaten, kicked, and left bloodied in gutters. Later that night, after 2:00 a.m., hundreds of blacks carrying battered suitcases and torn boxes of belongings quietly moved, walking in a group for the Eads Bridge that led to St. Louis. Whites lined each side of the street, watched the solemn, silent parade, and watched with shotguns and torches, as the blacks walked that quiet, dangerous gauntlet.
Koshi shadowboxed beautifully. The guy was built like a rock, all definition, and all lean muscle. If there ever was anyone whom every boy wanted to be built like, it was Koshi. His body was cut more exquisite than Michelangelo’s David. Koshi had won the Golden Gloves the year before and was getting ready to do it again. He was the perfect fighter, absolutely perfect.
On May 29, out-of-work whites waited at Whiskey Chute (2nd and St. Clair Avenue) and beat black packinghouse workers who were getting off work. The East Saint Louis Journal concluded that whites had rioted against the "lazy, shiftless, and criminal Negro migrants."
I was boxing. Cecil B. de Mille’s, "Ten Commandments" was playing at the movies, Khrushchev secretly denounced the beast Stalin, and then acted just as brutally violent, demanding just as much absolute submission from Hungary and the other satellites, just as Stalin had done. Mickey Mantle was breaking baseball records, and one of the greatest athletes of all time, Babe Didrickson Zaharias died. When they had asked Babe if there was any sport that she didn’t play, she replied, "Yeah, dolls." She was just phenomenal. She had even boxed, and boxed well. Me too, or at least I tried. So who do I pick to get in the ring with me my first time in the ring? I walked up to Koshi who was working hard on the fast bag and I asked him, "You want to go a few rounds?"
Near midnight, on July 1, 1917, some whites drove along 17th and Market Streets in a Ford, firing shots into black homes. The second time they went through, blacks returned their fire, and the whites did not return. A Ford squad car that looked like the shooter's car, with six white police and a reporter on the running board, came to investigate. The reporter wrote that more than two hundred blacks opened fire on them without a word of warning. The blacks thought the white shooters had returned, but the East Saint Louis Journal did not report that. Two white City Detectives, Coppedge and Wadly, were killed.
The bullet-riddled car was exhibited the next day in front of the Police Department as "proof" that black "armies" were mobilizing for a massacre. The whites therefore got ready to wage a race war. They called a meeting.
Koshi looked at me and smiled. He had seen me in the gym a few times and, like everyone, knew I was new, knew I was green, and now probably thought I was retarded. He looked appraisingly at me and said, "You sure you want to do this?"
My knees kind of buckled, and I said, "Sure!" Like I knew what I was doing, like I was bad or something.
Koshi just smiled and said, "Okay, James, let's do it," and we both walked over towards the ring. On the way to the ring I started to get a little nervous. After all this was Koshi, this guy won the Gloves with four knockouts! I told him, "Take it easy, okay? I'm pretty new."
White speakers at the Labor Temple told the audience to go home and return in the afternoon with their guns. When the meeting broke up, white groups began killing blacks on the main street, Collinsville Avenue. People were pulled off streetcars and beaten, stoned, shot, and killed by roving mobs of twenty-five or so whites. By the early afternoon, when several blacks lay bloodied in the street, white mob leaders calmly walked over, shot and killed them.
Koshi just smiled. Dangerous people sometimes do that. They just smile, and when they give you that smile, you know your ass is unadulterated mud. We got into the ring, and Max surprises the hell out of me, 'cause he walks over to the ring too. He stands by and looks at Koshi, still ignoring me. I figured Max was worried about his boy, Koshi. We started. Max's referee was in the ring, keeping time, making sure I didn't get killed.
Whites, armed with pistols, shotguns, and rifles, surrounded black homes near 3rd and Brady. One at a time, they set fire to the houses, and laughingly shot men, women, and children who ran from the burning homes, swatted blacks like flies. Surrendering or begging for mercy did no good. Whites shot anyway; women and babies were thrown screaming into the flames of the fires, slaughtered like hogs, men were hung from telephone poles, and burned alive. Bodies were thrown anywhere. And many silent bodies lay about, lost and undiscovered.
I must have thrown a thousand punches that night, and had as many to miss. Koshi moved his head just a fraction, and I would miss. I would not only miss, I would look like a fool. Koshi blocked, bobbed and weaved so expertly, he was so good, I couldn't land a single punch. No matter what I did, charge, move, jab, get wild, snap straight, I couldn't touch him, not once! Oh, but Koshi made me pay for my every mistake. He pounded me. He landed every time he threw a punch, and his punches were stinging like little packs of dynamite, like thuds of a baseball bat. He hit me whenever he got ready, the stomach, the face, the ribs, wherever he wanted. Max just watched. The referee would look to Max from time to time to see if he wanted to stop the slaughter, but Max just watched, Mr. Inscrutable.
That night, fires were set, destroying three hundred twelve buildings; houses were looted, hundreds of bodies were dumped like trash into Cahokia Creek. Officially, thirty-nine blacks and nine whites were killed. Unofficially, more than three hundred blacks were slaughtered.
I charged more, got knocked down, got up, kept trying. Koshi was taking it easy on me, and I was dying. Koshi could have killed me, and everybody in the gym knew it, because everyone was watching, yelling advice to me. Not that they liked me more, they just felt sorry for me. I kept falling, getting knocked down, but didn't quit. I kept going. I just kept coming back, trying whatever advice got through to me. I wasn't about to quit, not with Max watching. "Just one punch," I whispered, "God, please let me get in just one punch." But it never happened. After a while Max nodded at the referee and walked away from the ring. The referee stopped the fight then. Koshi punched me one more time with both gloves, this time in friendship, saying, "You're all right, James. You did alright!"
The Illinois Militia was no help. They came, were there, but they were shooting blacks too, moving with an old man’s eagerness. Carlos Hurd, a St. Louis Post Dispatch newspaper reporter, wrote, "For an hour and a half …I saw man after man, with his hands raised pleading for his life, surrounded by groups of whites who stoned their victims to death. The police either watched with indifference or else encouraged the mobs.
"Women begged for mercy as white whores laughed and answered the coarse sallies of the men, as they beat the black women's faces and breasts with stones and sticks." Here, voices and loud cries echo, sounds of infants weeping, torn away by the mob, deprived of their life, ripped from the breast, plunged into bitter death.
"It was a manhunt, cool, deliberate, fun."
Koshie could have killed me, but, like the magnanimous Saladin, Koshi was chivalrous, and spared his foe. The other guys in the gym were friendlier too. "You did okay, James," they said.
"Not bad for a start."
"You're gonna make a good fighter."
"You got heart, boy."
All the others, as Dante said, "Those falcon-eyed and fully armed warriors; great honor then they gave me, welcomed me as one of them."
I couldn't figure it out. How could I have fought okay? I didn't land a single punch! That's not talent, that's lousy. But they cheered me up and I felt good. I dressed and started home, feeling like I had accomplished something, walking past Max on the way out.
During the slaughter, St. Louis policemen were stationed on the elegant Eads Bridge, protecting the fleeing hundreds of black men, women, and children who quietly passed under the flames of their homes, under the torches of the white shooters who lined the streets with a torch in one hand, a gun in the other, watching the poor procession, watching the quiet exodus of black families who walked past them, into the immense and silent regions of the night. The City of St. Louis gave help, protection, and a place of safety.
It was as Dante wrote, "Neither tongue nor memory are enough to describe the scenes of blood and wounds. Like ancient Guelphs (whites) and Ghibelines (blacks), they fought, but this fight was all one-sided and the piles of dead and suffering shamed the air. The mob drew guns and stoned the innocent, shouting, ‘and death to all thy kindred.’"
Max didn't even look up from his newspaper, didn't even look over the top of his paper when I walked past him. That took the wind out of my sails in a hurry. My face was already starting to swell, and I was beginning to feel sore. It would be worse the next day. I was feeling bad as I started to push the door open and leave when I heard someone yell, "Hey, Champ!"
The night of July 2, 1917 was a night of flames in East Saint Louis. White mobs torched black homes. Fires filled the night sky, shooting high into the air. The people in Belleville, high on the bluffs, overlooking the City of East Saint Louis, watched those flames of hate.
The people said that Pittsburgh Lake in Grand Marias State Park reflected the flames and was bright as a sheet of fire. The people in St. Louis, across the Mississippi River, stood on the riverfront and safely looked at what must always be the end of racism, the end of hate - blood and flame.
Several bodies were found later, burned crisp. One of the cremated children was found in a fetal position under a metal bed. The little girl had thought she would be safe under her bed. A little boy was caught by the men who torched the black owned homes, was caught running from a flaming building, and was thrown back into the flames to die. Both the white men and women were cold, heartless.
One white woman refused to help, refused to let a black woman hide under her front porch because, as the Christian white woman put it, "I’d rather not have my chickens disturbed."
I looked around and saw it was Max talking to me. To me! He was looking at me, talking to me, calling me, Champ! Max said, "You be here at 6:30 tomorrow night." Then he went back to his newspaper.
I yelled out, my voice squeaking, "Yes, sir!"
All the way home on the bus, I was smiling. People must have thought I was nuts. Beat up and crazy. Maybe I was beat up. Maybe my face was all red and swollen. Maybe I was wacky, but I was happy. Max had talked to me. Max was going to help me, train me. I had some talent after all. Max wouldn't waste his time on a chump who couldn't make it. I was happy, smiling like an idiot, laughing out loud, alone in the back of the bus. It was like Max was giving me arms, like conferring, maybe not Knighthood, but the beginning of a Knighthood. I was accepted. I kept thinking, "God is good man, God is good."
The white mobs were proud of what they had done, showed no remorse, they even bragged. When ambulances came to pick up the wounded or dead and dying blacks, but the drivers were turned away with guns in their faces. The mob took souvenirs from corpses, robbed the dead, pulled teeth, cut off fingers, cut off nipples from the breasts of dead black women, and toured the morgue in groups, laughing. When bodies were removed from Cahokia Creek, hundreds of white men and women stood around and cheered. President Woodrow Wilson, who was a bigot and an arrogant racist, did nothing. The next day, on July 3, more whites toured scenes of destruction and visited the morgue. They had parties.
I began training every night, Max giving me tips, Koshi sparring with me and teaching me. I was training for the Gloves, the Golden Gloves, and Max thought I had a good chance. "If you work like a mule, you just might pull it off."
One night, while I was training, about six of us were shadowboxing. The janitor's daughter came in with some paper and a pencil, and then asked me how to spell exist. I said, "E-x-i-t."
A couple of the other guys smiled and told her the correct spelling. She watched us and left after a while, and one of the guys told me, "Hey, stupid! The girl likes you."
I looked at him surprised, and he went on, "Look fool, she’s a straight-A student, and she's got a dictionary. She knows how to spell 'exist' better than any of us. She likes you. Say something to her, man!"
There were plenty of places to party. Peoria, Decatur, Springfield, and Danville had all closed their vice districts, and all of their whores had come to East Saint Louis, where they stood in front of their places half naked, enticing clients, and ignoring police. It was a city "where the law did not reach," and where ironically, blacks were blamed for the vice district, when most of the "Houses" were owned by the police and the politicians.
I did. I talked to her after training. I walked by where she studied on my way out. She looked up and smiled. I asked her if she wanted to go to a movie Friday night, and she said okay. The guys were right, she did like me.
Her name was Louise, and she was terrific. She was smart, a lot smarter than I was. She was also very pretty. That Friday, we went to the French Village Drive-in out on St. Clair Avenue. As soon as we got there, we kissed. My friend was in the front seat with his girl. Louise and I just kissed and pressed close to each other for three hours. It was great.
Whenever I trained now, I had an audience - Louise. Everyone there liked her and was very protective of her. More than one of the guys told me, "You better be good to that girl."
There were inquiries after the riot, military inquiries, local inquiries, State inquiries, Congressional inquiries, and all to no avail, it was all a public noise with no significance. The only inquiry of even a slight value was the Congressional inquiry. But their report was in error and useless, and nothing of note was done.
I was good to Louise, and she was good to me. I stayed after training almost every night. I would play my harmonica sometimes. Sometimes we would just sit and kiss for hours. The kissing progressed, and one night, it happened. We were sixteen. It was the year of the Salk polio vaccine, the year Peron and Churchill resigned, when Giovanni Gronchi was President of Italy, and Jomo Kenyatta was still in jail for his Mau Mau activities in Kenya. It was 1956, when Martin Luther King led the bus boycotts in Alabama, when the anti-proton was discovered at the University of California. It was the year of our first love.
Nine whites were sent to jail, four were charged with homicide. Twelve blacks went to prison, eleven for the homicide of the two detectives who had been mistaken for shooters and shot by accident.
One night, Louise and I were alone in the basement gym. Everyone had left, the lights were out, and we were kissing again when she ran away from me and climbed into the ring. I chased her, caught her, and kissed her. Then she pushed me away and quietly slipped her dress off. She was completely naked, standing in the ring in half-light, a walking vision of perfect innocence, youth and beauty. I took my clothes off, and we stood there uncertain and nervous, looking at each other, turning each other around, looking, just looking, then touching, touching and kissing.
It was beautiful and innocent. It was love, an act of warmth and goodness. I played my harmonica all the way home. No blues that night; only happy stuff. "Knick, knack paddy-whack...."
The major cause of the race riot was the Aluminum Ore Company. The same company that had just broken a white union strike by hiring blacks at lower wages. Resentment was high. There were other guilty parties: the slaughter houses, packinghouses, the greed of businesses, the racial games of management, landlords who played one race against the other, renting to blacks at higher rates, racism, lack of respect for the law, inept policemen, incompetent militia, weak external control, an indecisive, stupid, corrupt mayor, and biased, irresponsible, inflammatory news accounts from the bigoted reporting of the East Saint Louis Journal. The guilt was found in every direction.
Louise moved the very next month, to Alton, Illinois with her mother, and I didn’t see her for awhile. Several months passed and she called, asking to meet downtown in East Saint Louis. I met Louise downtown, in front of the Majestic Theater. I was surprised when I saw her, she looked so thin, so tired. I was even more surprised when she told me she was pregnant.
Pregnant. We weren’t ready for this. How could we take care of a child? Impossible! We were students.
Three days later, with a hundred dollars we managed to scuffle up, we went to an old woman they called the Finger Lady. The sinister looking old woman was an ex-nurse’s aid who did abortions with her finger. She took Louise into the back of her old, run down shack, did her stuff on the cold vinyl and chrome kitchen table, gave Louise some medicine that smelled like turpentine, and told us that Louise was four months pregnant and that this might take a few minutes. We sat down to wait. After a while, Louise began to cramp and went to the bathroom. I sat there in the room with the ancient Finger Lady. She looked so old, so wrinkled, so cold and deadly. Then Louise cried out in pain, "James!"
Rumors fanned by, spread by the East Saint Louis Journal, played a large part in portraying a series of small, irritating events that dramatized race friction. A more generalized cause of the riot was fear; fear of competition in jobs, housing, and votes.
I looked at the wrinkled, lifeless face of the Finger Lady. She didn't even look up. She just sat there, cold and heartless as only a whore can be, and said, "Go to her."
Louise was yelling for me, "James! Quick, come quick!" I ran through the old shotgun house, and burst into the bathroom. I found Louise sitting on the toilet. "It's out," she said. "It's in the water! Get it out of the water! I can’t touch it! Hurry James, hurry!!"
I reached down between her legs into the blooded toilet water as she scooted back on the seat, and pulled out a four-month-old fetus, and the placenta. I held our child in my arms as I knelt on my knees in front of Louise. I sat back on my feet in shock. "My God, it's a real baby. My God, Louise! What have we done?"
Laborers felt threatened because migrants from the South were given jobs at lower wages, breaking strikes, bringing labor and economic competition. Management used that threat and built upon race hatred to beat the unions.
Housing was another source of competition. Housing was scarce. Landlords played one race against the other in their shameful greed to squeeze out every cent they could in rent for their run-down shacks. Finally, there was resentment that at close elections, the black vote was thought to be the deciding factor.
I was on my knees, holding the baby, looking at Louise. We both started crying. We sat there, Louise on the toilet, me in front of her holding our baby, our daughter, and we cried.
Soon, there was a knock and we looked up. The malevolent old Finger Lady was standing in the doorway like a personification of evil. "Clean up and leave. Take the fetus with you," she whispered in a voice devoid of humanity.
I wrapped the little baby up in a towel while Louise cleaned up. The Finger Lady made us take the child with us, and charged us a dollar extra for the towel. We didn't know what to do with our dead baby, our beautiful, silent child. We walked, and walked, getting closer and closer to the river. Finally, not knowing what else to do, "We'll have to give her a river burial," I said.
It was the greed of management and landlords, corrupt government, irresponsible journalism, and racism that were the root causes of the riot. As early as the 1800s, East Saint Louis had the reputation of being an isolated settlement, "where the law did not reach." St. Louisans came to the Bloody Island to have sex, to gamble, and to fight duels.
Criminals made East Saint Louis their hideout, their retreat. A Congressional investigating report of the race riot concluded, "…In the history of corrupt politics in this country, there never has been a more shameless debauchery."
"Okay, it will be a river burial, like Vikings, but we'll need something to weigh her down with." Louise, logical even in her sorrow and pain, started picking up rocks as we walked up on the Free Bridge. Then she said, "Let me hold our baby."
We kept walking, and got about halfway across the bridge, halfway across the Mississippi River, and stopped. We laid the fetus down and looked at her, the little fingers and toes, the ears, and Louise and I both cried, "We killed her James, we killed a human being, we took a life. God forgive us!"
"I know Louise," I said, tears running in a continuous stream down my face, "poor little baby."
"We can't do this James. She doesn't even have a name."
"You're right. She needs a name. How about after you?" I said.
Non-residents who felt no civic responsibility to East Saint Louis controlled the real wealth of the city. American author Sherwood Anderson said, "East Saint Louis was nobody's home. The most perfect example, at least in America, of what happens under absentee ownership."
The businesses obeyed their own laws and had absolutely no civic responsibilities, nothing to do with human concerns. "The public be damned. We’re here to make a profit for our stockholders!" East Saint Louis was like a slave, a prisoner in a Nazi or Japanese Concentration Camp, a Geek, an alienated, isolated, less than real place where humanity did not exist. It was okay to hold the sword over the head of the city, the whip over the body - just make a profit!
"No, not me, don’t name her after me. Louise is like East Saint Louis; it has not been a lucky name. It'll have to be a fighter, a warrior, someone that never gives up. I want to think she's still somehow, still fighting, James . . .."
"Okay, let's call her El Cid, after the Conqueror of Valencia. He was known for his loyalty and endurance, his chivalry and generosity.
"El Cid took his armies to victory in the King’s name, even after he was outlawed by the King."
"Right," said Louise. "El Cid it is."
Just as absentee landlords had created practices that were destructive to slaves, the absentee owners of the industries created practices that were destructive to East Saint Louis. An additional and a major reason for the occurrence of the East Saint Louis violence were the weak and racist attitudes of both the police and military forces.
The major
causes of the race riot can be summarized as follows:
These were
the major causes that led to the most serious, the bloodiest race riot in the history of
the United States of America. After the violence was over, more blacks than whites were
indicted and convicted for felonies. There were widespread rumors among whites that blacks
were planning revenge, while whites openly threatened "to finish the job next
time." We placed
Louise's rocks around little El Cid and then wrapped the bloody towel around her, tying it
all up together. We said a prayer to whatever gods happened to be listening, and, hearts
screaming to the heavens in sorrow and pain, we dropped our dead child into the
Mississippi River. The blood of El Cid was on our hands, our clothes, reaching into our
souls, staining our lives forever. "God help us Louise," I said.
"We’re killers." Our eyes,
grievously weeping, we turned our heads and looked back upon our child. National
reaction was harsh. There was a Silent Protest Parade on Fifth Avenue in New York,
protesting the East Saint Louis riot. One banner read, "Pray for the Lady Macbeths of
East Saint Louis." The Tampa Tribune in Florida wrote, "Although we do have
occasional lynching, in comparison with the bloodthirsty, ravenous Negro-hunters and
Negro-killers of Illinois, the average Southern mob is a Sunday School picnic party."
One black
"Race" newspaper mentioned that, "The mistreatment of Negroes across the
nation was a symptom of an approaching moral disintegration." In 1918, the white
labor unions of East Saint Louis, who were at the center of the rioting and killing, and
who publicly justified their actions by blaming blacks, purchased a new park site for
blacks. Even Hitler was good to his dog. National reaction was harsh, but was in the end,
totally ineffective. Louise and I
walked away, in separate ways. People die alone; people live alone, in sadness and shame,
in silent sorrow and quiet regret, in a hospital of leukemia, in a police station, in a
gutter, between the legs where passion killed, in moral disintegration. Alone, always we
live, and always we die alone. It was 1956, my
city was corrupt and dying, and I was no better that those defiled politicians who were
destroying my city. White flight was beginning. The city was dying, and I had killed. I
was worse than Ramses, worse than Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, Attila, Timur Lang,
Stalin, Hitler, worse than the thieves that robbed our city, for I had killed my own
daughter. And I was guilty, I was responsible. Where is my punishment? Try me! I felt like
Bessie Smith had sung, "Oh Judge, send me to jail…" There were
race riots in twenty-nine American cities in 1919, as blacks returning from World War I
demanded civil rights, asking only to be treated with simple human dignity. Bodies of
blacks littered the streets and filled the ditches of East Saint Louis. Some had walked
away from this cruel conquest, stretched their legs and moved away. Others had their
throats slit, other body parts mutilated, burned alive at the stake, hurled, bound in a
sack, or towel, to drown or rot in the river. Prayers or vows were wasted breath. Would that I
could be like El Cid, Rodrigo Díaz, Count of Bivar, Knight, hero, freebooter, born at a
good hour, who, at a favorable moment, girt on his sword, a straightforward man, long in
the beard, who championed the people, who protected his daughters. How I wished I could
ride forth too with shining sword and purest steed to fight a noble fight that might erase
my crime, and purge my crippled soul. My Cid, my daughter, dead, and I had betrayed God,
my child, my Louise, my heart, my knightly childhood vows, and all I ever loved. God
forgive me, I cannot never no more forgive myself! "Helpless
and bewildered, tongues were hacked off down to the throat." And in the racist war
where there was no honor, "men had gone mad with pain and sorrow, walked unconscious,
with swords dipped in blood. A monstrous punishment was inflicted on our beloved
city." Lamentations. Louise went
back to Alton, and for awhile we did not see each other, or even call. I worked at school
and fought no more, played my harmonica, played the blues. I was as degenerate as my city,
and my act of shame only added to the moral crimes against my city, my East Saint Louis.
But justice comes, inexorably, and with a cold step. My city is a dead place now, where
heads were severed, where lives and innocence were lost. It is there that the bonds of my
humanity were cut. There is no suffering in American history equal to what has been
suffered in East Saint Louis. I had forgotten the lesson of Saint Paul’s,
"Winners never quit, Quitters never win." I had quit, had given up, and had
murdered. Can a nation
sin? Can a state do evil? Ask Babylon. Does land have memory? Do places speak of shame?
Ask Bokhara, Samarkand, the Black Hole of Calcutta, ask the land of the Cherokee, and the
Trail of Tears, ask Wounded Knee, ask Dachau. Do old bones writhe in the depths of Earth
and cry out for vengeance? Do ashes speak? Ask Buchanwald or Hungary. Does blood spilled
on brick speak? Ask Tienemen Square. Does the river cry out in perpetual sorrow? Ask me.
Can a city be a chaos of corruption, a madness and instructor of moral degradation? Can a
city be a shame to a nation? Ask East Saint Louis. Can a man kill his child and live to
see his city lost? Ask me, for I am responsible! So died my city,
so died my soul. Gary Hill is a retired laboratory supervisor, with over 20
publications on the microbiology and primary production of the lakes and rivers of the
Central Amazon. He now spends his time doing volunteer work in Central America, helping
the small villages obtain safe drinking water. In addition, he writes poetry and has
recently published a short story on the net at Dark Moon Rising (July), and a long poem
due out in November.
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