Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

Like other Americans of large affairs, Emmet Sloan had welcomed the tide of working immigrants—the “Micks, Wops, Latwicks, Polacks, Hunkies” and others, who had poured into River City at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries. They worked hard and cheap at mill jobs and in foundries and they thus furnished much of the muscle that was essential to make America great—as well as to make men like Emmet Sloan rich. These people settled near the river, east of Market Street, on the mile-long, parallel stretches of Mechanic and Water streets, for the most part, and on the close-in cross streets. Land there was cheap. In summer it boiled with heat and damp from the river, as well as with mosquitoes. In winter it was raw and cold and gloomy. There were, furthermore, several then-small factories in the district as well as the GK. and T.T. yards and roundhouse. It was a smoky, clangorous neighborhood.

Gradually, however, the Irish and Italians and Slavs pushed north into the St. Anne, St. Paul and Mary streets area, which came to he known as the “Catholic Section.” The Negroes, displaced for a generation to outlying districts, often to mere tin shacks along the municipal dump, poured back in town and filled the slummy vacuum left by the economically ascending “foreigners.” These, by the early twenties, were second- and third-generation Americans and controlled much of River City’s politics as well as most of its organized vice and its rackets.

Emmet Sloan, perhaps because his occasional patronage of The Block kept him in sensory touch with the dismal living conditions of the Negroes, determined to do something for them. Their direst need was a hospital. And when, in 1937, he foreclosed on a rayon knitting mill on James Street, he rebuilt it into an “infirmary.” At first, the inhabitants of the “Catholic” area had violently and actively resented the resulting enlargement of Negro “territory.” There had been street brawls. The windows of the Infirmary had been smashed the night before its dedication. But Sloan, a determined man, finally established his gift for its intended recipients, by the costly but very effective means of constructing a much better hospital for the “foreign” population on a site which thitherto had been the territory of “white” people—native sons, one hundred per cent Americans, his “own” group. This in turn caused litigation. However, the “old families” of River City along with its citizens were beginning to move to the suburbs.

Looking at maps, thinking of the temper of people, considering the future population and the probable developments of technology, Emmet Sloan decided the migration to suburbs in the thirties and forties was the start of a future landslide. Hence he invested in real estate on River City’s edges and was among the first to finance the removal into suburban communities of branches of big department stores. His grandfather had seen what railroads meant to the farm and the city; his father had seen what automobiles would do to make cities grow; now Emmet perceived the automotive vehicle was about to strangle cities. All three had acted on their views with phenomenal financial success.

Minerva had never been much interested in colored people. While her husband lived, she had dutifully inspected the Infirmary from time to time and irregularly dropped in on Wednesday afternoons, when a group of white Episcopal ladies—“meddlesome gossips and prying shrews,”

Minerva called them—came to the Infirmary to sew. One of Minerva’s countless, small sensations of relief, at the time of Emmet’s funeral, had been the realization that he would no longer “dragoon” her to those charitable Wednesdays.

In that, to her astonishment, Minerva found she had erred.

Shortly before his death, Emmet had signed a contract employing as the new head of the Infirmary one Alice Groves, an expert in hospital management, with a varied postgraduate background and a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University. Minerva had paid little attention at the time and remembered only her husband’s delighted remark that he and the hospital board had “bribed the woman away from Kansas City.” She understood the joys of successful bribery.

After Emmet was decently interred, Minerva had herself driven by Willis, in the Rolls, to what she thought of as a “last” Wednesday meeting. She was very much discountenanced to find that the new head of the Infirmary, Alice Groves, was herself a Negress. A mulatto, Minerva decided on sight. Not only that, hut Alice Groves was beautiful, gracious, young and, of course, exceedingly well educated. She spoke English with “a better Eastern accent than my son, Kit,” Minerva told certain outraged ladies.

She was warm and kind with Minerva, who made the sourest and most critical inspection in the history of the Infirmary, even though she found little enough to criticize, the facilities considered. After the tour of the hospital, to Minerva’s intense amazement, reporters from her own papers, accompanied by cameramen, took pictures of her with Alice and a dozen white-uniformed, dark-skinned nurses. These were duly printed, with captions noting how Mrs. Sloan was “carrying on the traditional family charities.” There was much editorial talk about the Infirmary being her late husband’s “favorite” charity and about her “nobility” in visiting it while her “bereavement was so recent.”

Minerva knew, of course, that it was a put-up job. Alice Groves was well aware her patronage was essential to the running of the hospital. So Alice Groves meant to keep Minerva’s interest. She was evidently publicity wise and had used publicity to gain her ends: Minerva could not repudiate a vast amount of printed praise. She came for a few Wednesdays and signed the annual check.

Just when she thought she could let the duty wither on the vine, she learned of a movement to rename the Infirmary. Mildred Tatum had been the first free slave to settle in River City. The colored population had apparently decided that, since they were no longer slaves, their hospital should have a different name. And “school children [Minerva again noted in her own newspapers] had voted by hundreds,” in a contest, to call it the “Minerva Sloan Infirmary.”

That move Minerva partly checked. She had no wish to be immortalized over the doorway—not to mention on the bedpans and diapers—of a “darkie infirmary.” But even as she graciously declined the offer and the vote of children, she found herself that much more enmeshed in Alice Groves’s toils. Her very refusal of the use of her name had wedded her person to the charity, which was what the administrator had wanted.

Their relations thenceforward were cordial but, on Minerva’s part, guarded. No white woman in River city or Green Prairie had ever managed to “take” her against her will, so thoroughly….

On a Wednesday, as usual, Willis drove across town to the Infirmary punctually at three.

Alice Groves, as usual, stood at the head of the stairs within the dingy building. She was dressed in powder blue, which, Minerva noted, became her. Behind Alice were the usual starched bevies of nurses, drawn up like a company for inspection.

Minerva made panting, reluctant rounds—baby wards and the new operating room (which was a sickening display of shiny things best not thought about, Minerva felt). She drew the line at visiting the adult wards, and there were no private rooms.

“Right after Christmas,” Alice Groves said pleasantly, as they finished the tour and started toward the bright, chintz-draped room where the ‘Wednesday ladies” sewed, “we’re going to start a drive among our own people for fifty thousand dollars.”

“Good heavens! Can you raise anything like that?”