Somebody in Boots. Nelson Algren

Valley.”

      I was shelling my way to fame.

      In a land that seemed like an empty room furnished with fixtures of another day; when nobody knows where the old tenant has gone nor who the new tenant will be.

      Nor what changes he’ll make in the fixtures.

      The land no longer knew what it was; so the men and women moving across it no longer knew who they were.

      The youth with the outfielder’s mitt on his hip, begging soap from housewives in backyards along the route of the Southern Railroad, thought he belonged to the Tallahassee Grays because he had a signed contract in his pocket. When he reached Tallahassee he’d learn that the league in which the Grays played had been dissolved. So all he belonged to was backyards along the route of the Southern Railroad.

      The woman whose green years had been wasted in the tumult and din of a hundred speakeasies, now sat before a whiskey glass with a false bottom saying, “Don’t get the wrong idea, Mister, I’m no whoo-er. But at the moment I don’t have a place to sleep.” And the tumult and din of nights without end kept dying slowly away.

      I was a day-editor, night-editor, sports columnist, foreign correspondent, feature-writer and editorialist. At the moment, however, I was shelling peas.

      Between a past receding like a wave just spent and an incoming tide, in a time-between-times, multitudes were caught in the slough of the waters. To be hurled, if they were young, strong and lucky, high onto the sands; others were carried topsy-turvy and didn’t come up till they were far out to sea. Some were swept under never to rise.

      There were snakes among the field stumps and lizards on the stones. Once a field of black butterflies came out of the sun, fluttered one moment and were gone: fled, like a dream of black butterflies.

      I shelled on.

      Huey Long was clamoring for redistribution of the wealth of those who were richer than himself in 1931, and the D.A.R. was demanding that all unemployed aliens be deported immediately. A cardinal was announcing, with contentment, that the nation’s economic collapse was a spiritual triumph, because it brought multitudes closer to the poverty of Christ: the cardinal hadn’t missed a meal in his life. Al Capone, on his way to the Atlanta Penitentiary, denounced Bolshevism. Herbert Hoover wanted somebody to paint his portrait. Huey Long threatened to vote Farmer-Labor rather than with the “Baruch-Morgan-Rockefeller Democrats.” Alexander Meiklejohn observed that “American Statesmanship has come to a dead stop.”

      So had the cardinals, the rabbis, the ministers, the businessmen, the politicians, the bankers, the editorialists, the educators, the generals, the industrialists and the philosophers. Only the poets, the poets alone, saw what was building far out to sea.

       Under the palaces, the marble and the granite of banks

       Among the great columns based in sunless slime

       The anonymous bearers of sorrows

       Toil in their ancient march.

       They look like men.

       They look like men.

       Whence do they come? How endure?

       How spring from dragon’s teeth in gutters of death?

       Full-armed and numerous, where do they go?

       To gather red lilies sprung from seas of blood.

       They look like men.

       They look like men.

       They look like men of war.¹

      American statesmanship had come to a dead stop; and yet I kept on shelling.

      It had been Herbert Hoover’s land of Every-Man-For-Himself. It had also been Walt Whitman’s land, saying, “If you tire, give me both burdens.” Between the shelling of one sack and the next, I had had this flash notion: to show what had happened to a single descendant of that wild and hardy tribe that had given Jackson and Lincoln birth.

      I had seen them riding the manifests and shilling at county fairs; whose forebears had been the hunters of Kentucky.

      Where had the hunters of Kentucky gone when all the hunting was done? These were the slaveless yeomen who had never cared for slaves or land. They had never belonged to the plantations: they had seen the great landowner idling his hours while the blacks worked his cotton. So they’d put their own backs up against their own cabin walls and idled away their hours too: a cabin and a jug was all a man needed. If he had a fiddle and could fiddle a tune he was rich: Burns was their poet.

      They had been as contemptuous of white mill hands as of black cotton pickers and for the same reason: they held all men in contempt who were dependent upon any owner. Nobody owned a man who owned a gun along the wild frontier. But, now that the frontier had vanished, where did the man go whose only skills were those of the frontier?

      The struggle to preserve the great plantations was not their struggle, they knew: nor had they felt that “Mr. Lincoln’s war” was their own. Putting a plague on both houses, they became hiders-out between armies who began moving southwest after Shiloh. Forced down to the border by the spread of great cities, their final frontier became the dry bed of the Rio Grande.

      I hoped to show a Final Descendant: a youth alienated from family and faith, illiterate and utterly displaced, I thought of him always as a Southerner unable to bear scorn; who had yet borne scorn all his days. One who wandered through some great city’s aimless din, past roar of cab and cabaret, belonging to nothing and nobody. A walker in search of something to belong to in order to belong to himself.

      Where crossing-bells announced the long freight moving through the Georgia Pines, I had seen him riding shoeless on a boxcar roof. I had seen him with his face framed between the bars of the El Paso County Jail, looking out. I had seen him taking charity in a Salvation Army pew: a man representing the desolation of the hinterland as well as the disorder of the great city, exiled from himself and expatriated within his own frontiers. A man who felt no responsibility even toward himself.

      “Keep things goin’ up, Son,” Luther advised me, “never inform on a sergeant to a private—inform on the private to the sergeant. Never inform on a lieutenant to a sergeant—inform on the sergeant to the lieutenant—Up up up.”

      There were wild pigs below the station’s floor. At night we heard coyotes cry.

      Luther boggled off one morning but failed to return that evening or the next. Two nights later I heard a car wheel up—then no sound but that of the frogs in the ditch. Standing in the station door I discerned, dimly, a figure crouching. I called out but got no reply.

      The next morning I discovered that Luther had siphoned the gas out of both tanks. I was stuck in the chaparral with nothing to drink but creek water, nothing to eat but black-eyed peas, and in debt to Sinclair Oil & Refining Company for a hundred gallons of gas. I started thumbing my way toward Mexico.

      In the small-time vice-village of Matamoros I took a room in a hotel run by a woman who had entitled herself “The Mother of the Americans,” though she didn’t look like anyone’s mother. There I wrote the first chapters of a novel I first called Native Son.

      Reading, thirty years after, this attempt to depict a man of no skills in a society unaware of his existence, the curiously opaque face of Lee Harvey Oswald, alive one day and dead the next, comes through like the face of new multitudes.

      Belonging neither to the bourgeoisie nor to a working class, seeking roots in revolution one week and in reaction the next, not knowing what to cling to nor what to abandon, compulsive, unreachable, dreaming of some sacrificial heroism, he murders a man he does not even hate, simply, by that act, to join the company of men at last.

      My flash notion of the story of a Final Descendant now appears to be that of a progenitor.

      This is an uneven novel written by an uneven man in the most uneven of American times.

      Now