I heard much of these last-named essential persons, but cannot recall ever seeing one. They were Jews, or countrymen, and the social lines were tightly drawn; never would my father, even in the midst of drink and degradation, have dreamed of using his aristocratic Southern wife to impress his customers. Nor would he use his little son, who was expected to grow up to be a naval officer like his ancestors. “The social position of a naval officer is the highest in the world,” pronounced my father. “He can go anywhere, absolutely anywhere; he can meet crowned heads as their equals.” And meantime the little son was reaching out into a strange world of books; reading things of which the father had never heard. “What are you reading?” he would ask, and the son would reply, none too generously, “A book.” The father got used to this answer. “Reading a book!” he would say, with pathetic futility. The chasm between the two was widening, never to be closed in this world.
XI
I was ten years old before I went to school. The reason was that some doctor told my mother that my mind was outgrowing my body, and I should not be taught anything. When finally I was taken to a public school, I presented the teachers with a peculiar problem; I knew everything but arithmetic. This branch of learning, so essential to a commercial civilization, had shared the fate of alcohol and tobacco, tea and coffee; my mother did not use it, so neither did I.
The teachers put me in the first primary grade, to learn long division; promising that as soon as I caught up in the subject, I would be moved on. I was humiliated at being in a class with children younger than myself, so I fell to work and got into the grammar school in less than a month, and performed the unusual feat of going through the eight grammar grades in less than two years. Thus at the age of twelve I was ready for the City College—it was called a college, but I hasten to explain that it was in reality only a high school.
Unfortunately the college was not ready for me. No one was admitted younger than fourteen; so there was nothing for me to do but to take the last year of grammar school all over again. I did this at old Number 40, on East 23rd Street; my classmates were the little “toughs” of the East Side tenements. An alarming experience for a fastidious young Southerner, destined for the highest social circles—but I count it a blessing hardly to be exaggerated. That year among the “toughs” helped to save me from the ridiculous snobbery that would otherwise have been my destiny in life. Since then I have been able to meet all kinds of humans and never see much difference; also, I have been able to keep my own ideals and convictions, and “stand the gaff,” according to the New York phrase.
To these little East Side “toughs” I was, of course, fully as strange a phenomenon as they were to me. I spoke a language that they associated with Fifth Avenue “dudes” wearing silk hats and kid gloves. The Virginia element in my brogue was entirely beyond their comprehension; the first time I spoke of a “street-cyar,” the whole class broke into laughter. They named me Chappie, and initiated me into the secrets of a dreadful game called “hop, skip, and a lepp,” which you ended, not on your feet, but on your buttocks; throwing your legs up in the air and coming down with a terrific bang on the hard pavement. The surgeons must now be performing operations for floating kidney upon many who played that game in boyhood.
The teacher of the class was a jolly old Irishman, Mr. Furey; he later became principal of a school, and I would have voted for his promotion without any reservation. He was a disciplinarian with a homemade method; if he observed a boy whispering or idling during class, he would let fly a piece of chalk at the offender’s head. The class would roar with laughter; the offender would grin, pick up the chalk, and bring it to the teacher, and get his knuckles smartly cracked as he delivered it, and then go back to his seat and pay attention. From this procedure I learned that pomposity is no part of either brains or achievement, and I have never in my life tried to impress anyone by being anything but what I am.
One feature of our school was the assembly room, into which we marched by classes to the music of a piano, thumped by a large dark lady with a budding mustache. We sang patriotic songs and listened to recitations in the East Side dialect, a fearful and wonderful thing. This dialect tried to break into the White House in the year 1928, and the rest of America heard it for the first time. Graduates of New York public schools who had made millions out of paving and contracting jobs put up the money to pay for radio “hookups,” and the voice of Fulton Fish Market came speaking to the farmers of the corn belt and the fundamentalists of the bible belt. “Ladies and genn’lmun, the foist thing I wanna say is that the findin’s of this here kimittee proves that we have the woist of kinditions in our kimmunity.” I sat in my California study and listened to Al Smith speaking in St. Louis and Denver, and it took me straight back to old Number 40, and the little desperados throwing their buttocks into the air and coming down with a thump on the hard pavement.
As I read the proofs of this book I have returned from a visit to New York after thirty years. The old “El” roads are gone, and many of the slum tenements have been replaced by sixty-story buildings. The “micks” and the “dagos” have been replaced by Negroes and Puerto Ricans, who have taken possession of Harlem.