John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

Jessie has passed the women before, standing in the cold under the elevated tracks on Ninth just north of Paddy’s Market, arms folded, chatting in small groups, waiting to be picked up. At first, unsure of their business on the street, she walked by pretending they weren’t there, but eventually began to nod politely and respond to their questions and listen to their suggestions. She has solicited as far south as Park Row and as far north as 80th Street, venturing all the way to the East River once to see about a position in a laundry. She has learned that the shops on the Ladies’ Mile do not hire colored girls to meet the public, and that most of the small manufacturing concerns employ workers who speak the same language as the floor managers. She has learned to hide rather than reveal her education when seeking a position as a domestic, and she has learned, in her two torturous half-days of employment, that she can neither cook nor sew. She has been left more than once outside an employment-agency door while dozens of white women were ushered past her and discovered how long a lady can sit alone resting her legs at a park bench before attracting unwelcome attention. It is not more than a few minutes.

“Is there a line for me to put myself at the end of?” she asks Alberta, the friendliest of the colored girls, who says she is from Charleston.

“Naw, honey, you just stan out here like the rest of us. If they like what they see they ask you over, then you make a deal and get in.”

“Sometimes they remember if they had you before,” says her friend Clarice. “Sometimes they want to look at your hands or hear you say your name or there’s a uniform you got to fit into.”

There is Alberta and Clarice and Queen, who is big and looks angrily at everyone, then an Irish woman called Wee Kate who doesn’t stop talking and four other Irish girls who listen to her and then two dark-haired girls who speak something Jessie doesn’t recognize, all of them standing in the dirty slush beneath the rattling trolleys waiting for someone to pick them up.

“They’ve been hiring to cover baseballs across the river,” says Wee Kate. “Hand stitching. It pays by the piece, but an able girl can do well for herself.”

“Ye’ve done it?” asks Sorcha, one of her listeners.

Wee Kate looks insulted. “Let them transport me to New Jersey? Of course not.”

“Then what does it have to do with us?”

“Only that there’s opportunities available, is all. Ye only have to put yerself forward.”

A white man with a stubble of beard rattles up in an old omnibus that has seen better days. There are five women already inside, staring out the windows at them.

“I need three more,” he says, and Jessie is left standing, the others all rushing forward. Two of the Irish girls climb on first and Wee Kate has a foot on the rung before Queen shoulders her out of the way and falls heavily into the final seat.

“That’s three,” she calls and the unshaven man, who has not turned to watch them, flicks his reins and the omnibus jerks away.

“Fecking black whoor,” grumbles Wee Kate, watching the vehicle rattle south toward the Market. “I’ll deal with her tomorrow.”

Jessie feels short of breath though she hasn’t moved from the spot.

“They didn’t ask what the pay was,” she says.

Alberta shrugs. “The sooner in the day you get started the more you can make.”

“Is it safe?”

“There were three of them, and more in the bus.”

“But if you’re alone—”

“Some girls do,” says Alberta. “Not me.”

Jessie is surprised that no one passing turns to stare at them. They have the snow banks to navigate, of course, and the wind cutting between the tall buildings, but still — if there is a place in Wilmington where women congregate and offer their services she does not know where it is. The two foreign girls are taken after a long conversation with a man who speaks their language and then the remaining six of them wait for what seems like hours. Wagons full of ice and meat and fish and fodder for horses pass by them and the trolleys rumble overhead and an Italian man pushing a cart goes by singing praises to his melons and uniformed servants of various races hurry to and from the Market and once a policeman looks them over but does not say hello.

“It’s the Jews ye have to look out for,” says Wee Kate when she has gotten over her tussle with Queen. “They’ll try to cheat ye out of it every time. And very free with their hands, if ye know what I’m sayin. They can’t help themselves in the presence of a Christian girl, it’s a well-known fact. And it’s them that runs the whole city.”

“And I thought it was the lads at Tammany,” says Sorcha, raising her eyes in an exaggerated way. “Croker and that lot.”

“They’re merely the custodians,” corrects Wee Kate. “It’s your Jews, the bankers and financiers and such, that own the whole shebang.”

The Jews that Jessie has seen so far in the city don’t seem to have much. Mrs. Kastner, who lives below them with her half-crippled son who sits mooning on the stoop, twists colored cloth and wire into flowers from early morning until she blows the candles out at night. A boy who wears the black hat and curls next to his ears comes every morning to take what is finished and bring her more material.

There must be different Jews.

“I was a waiter girl for a time,” says Wee Kate. “At Auchenpaugh’s Beer Garden. Now your Dutchman is tight with the gratuities until he’s poured a couple down his gullet, and then he’s as generous as the next fella. I could carry six steins of lager in each of me hands,” she says, holding her skinny arms out wide and making fists. “More than once I’ve navigated the floor with every Fritz on the East Side crowdin the place, and never spilt a drop. ‘Katie,’ they’d say to me when they was feelin no pain and waxin sentymental, ‘yer a drinkin man’s angel.’ ”

“How come you quit?”

Wee Kate raises her chin at Clarice, looking offended. “I didn’t quit at all. Auchenpaugh comes in one day, cocky as a magpie on a pump handle, and declares that from now on we’re to wear this get-up as a unyform—” she indicates with the side of her hand, “—down to here and up to there. A decent woman wouldn’t be caught dead in it. ‘Tis only the traditional costume in the village that I hail from,’ says Auchenpaugh. So I says, ‘Then, traditionally, yer women is whoors.’ ”

Sorcha keeps her eyes wide. “And he took offense, did he?”

“Thick heads and thin skins, if ye ask me. I don’t have a word of the German, and it’s a lucky thing too from the tone of what he was sputterin. Lost his best waiter girl that very night.”

“So the skirt was small, ye say?” Sorcha winks at the other women.

“Not enough to keep a field mouse warm. It’s all showgirls there now, the ones as can’t get on to wiggle their fannies at the Casino Roof. Arms like pipe cleaners that can barely lift an honest mug of ale, much less six in each hand. Strumpets, is all, and if that’s what the Dutchmen want I’m well rid of em.”

Wee Kate goes on to tell of her trials in a hotel kitchen and sewing undergarments and assembling cardboard boxes and pretending she was an experienced typewriter girl.

“They had me believe I was just to copy what was already there on the page, not to read it and make corrections,” she complains. “It’s been me own Stations of the Cross. An honest girl has nowhere to turn.”

It is nearly noon and Jessie feeling lightheaded from hunger when a drayman with a carbuncle that looks like a raspberry on his nose stops and calls them over to his wagon.

“Easy work,” he says. “Making toys. It pays two dollars a day — only half the day is gone already.”