A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [79]
The next holiday was Halloween. Neeley blackened his face with soot, wore his cap backwards and his coat inside out. He filled one of his mother’s long black stockings with ashes and roamed the streets with his gang swinging his homely blackjack and crying out raucously from time to time.
Francie, in company with other little girls, roamed the streets carrying a bit of white chalk. She went about drawing a large quick cross on the back of each coated figure that came by. The children performed the ritual without meaning. The symbol was remembered but the reason forgotten. It may have been something that had survived from the middle ages when houses and probably individuals were so marked to indicate where plague had struck. Probably the ruffians of that time so marked innocent people as a cruel joke and the practice had persisted down through the centuries to be distorted into a meaningless Halloween prank.
Election Day seemed the greatest holiday of all to Francie. It, more than any other time, belonged to the whole neighborhood. Maybe people voted in other parts of the country too, but it couldn’t be the way it was in Brooklyn, thought Francie.
Johnny showed Francie an Oyster House on Scholes Street. It was housed in a building that had been standing there more than a hundred years before when Big Chief Tammany himself skulked around with his braves. Its oyster fries were known throughout the state. But there was something else that made this place famous. It was the secret meeting place of the great City Hall politicians. The party sachems met here in secret pow-wow in a private dining room and, over succulent oysters, they decided who’d be elected and who mowed down.
Francie often passed by the store, looked at it and was thrilled. It had no name over its door and its window was empty save for a potted fern and a half curtain of brown linen run on brass rods along the back of it. Once Francie saw the door open to admit someone. She had a glimpse of a low room dimly lit with dulled red-shaded lamps and thick with the smoke of cigars.
Francie, along with the other neighborhood children, went through some of the Election rites without knowing their meaning or reason. On Election night, she got in line, her hands on the shoulders of the child in front, and snake-danced through the streets singing,
Tammany, Tammany,
Big Chief sits in his teepee,
Cheering braves to victory,
Tamma-nee, Tamma-nee.
She was an interested listener at the debates between Mama and Papa on the merits and faults of the party. Papa was an ardent Democrat but mama just didn’t care. Mama criticized the party and told Johnny he was throwing his vote away.
“Don’t say that, Katie,” he protested. “By and large the party does a lot of good for the people.”
“I can just imagine,” sniffed Mama.
“All they want is a vote from the man of the family and look what they give in exchange.”
“Name one thing they give.”
“Well, you need advice on a legal matter. You don’t need a lawyer. Just ask your Assemblyman.”
“The blind leading the blind.”
“Don’t you believe it. They may be dumb in many ways but they know the City’s statutes backward and forward.”
“Sue the City for something and see how far Tammany will help you.”
“Take Civil Service,” said Johnny starting on another angle. “They know when the examinations for cops, firemen or letter carriers are coming up. They’ll always put a voter wise if he’s interested.”
“Mrs. Lavey’s husband took the examination for letter carrier three years ago. He’s still working on a truck.”
“Ah! That’s because he’s a Republican. If he was a Democrat, they’d take his name and put it on the top of the list. I heard about a teacher who wanted to be transferred to another school. Tammany fixed it up.”
“Why? Unless she was pretty.”
“That’s not the point. It was a shrewd move. Teachers are educating future voters.