Excerpts from Prejudice, mistrust etc. – 1-21-2013
My Grandfather, Pepere, Paul Charbonneau in 1948- “The only mistake Hitler ever made was that he didn’t kill enough Jews.” My grandfather was a hard-working businessman, honest and even charitable to people crushed by the Great Depression. However, his sentiments toward this group was often harsh. Maybe, struggling folks from competing ethnic origins simply hate and distrust one another? Could it be a Darwinian, cold-blooded response to Mother Nature many challenges?
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How can I know about these other people living in Lowell? I don’t go to their churches or schools, and I never get invited to a dinner at their house? Sure, I do run into them – Irish, Greek, Jew and Yankee – when I take the Lilly Avenue bus to shop downtown on Saturday, usually. But, we never talk except, maybe, for Mom’s asking to see another size in a blouse or, perhaps, the same jacket, but in a different color. To me, they are only shoppers for and sellers of clothes, sandwiches, frappes and winter oil seasonally pumped into our 55-gallon tank located in the basement of our tenement. These foreigners must also have homes, families and bills to pay, and, yet, they remain complete strangers to us in Little Canada and in Centralville. This is all very strange and a bit bizarre.
Mostly, I learn about these strange others through stories that my parents and relatives have gathered over their lives working in the textile mills or at North End Dairy, but, mostly while doing their weekly shopping and errands downtown at the Bon Marche, Pollard’s and also at the Five-and-Ten-Cent stores on Merrimack Street.
My mother’s voice rings out in my brain as I try to recapture these tales of long ago. Of course, all is in French.
“Une femme irlandaise, ça, c’est souvent une femme qui ne sait pas bien faire la cuisine. C’est souvent très malpropre chez elle. Les irlandaises, elles, sont sales. Elles ne semblent pas savoir faire un bon ménage.”
If I were asked to translate this comment for my non-French-speaking friends, it might come out like this:
“An Irish woman is often a woman, who does not know how to cook well. Often, her place is dirty. Irish women are unclean. It seems that they don’t know how to keep a clean house.”
Since I, myself, don’t know any Irish women, I can only assume that these comments are true, but, sometimes, I wonder how such a tale could be true. Of course, there are other stories overheard at the dinner table and on the side porch along Dana Street that also shock me a little, but these are reserved for later.
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unclean
‘The Irish kids would throw rocks at the French-Canadian kids crossing the Bridge Street Bridge as they were walking home in Centralville on their side of the Merrimack.’
‘Claire, the bosses would spit on us factory workers as we walked down the creaky, spiral stairs on our way home.” My Mom never worked in the mills. She was the daughter of a modest and successful milk delivery business where she had worked as a young women.
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Irish women are all dirty. They don’t know how to clean house or to cook.
‘The poor always get the shitty end of the stick.’
‘Poles or polocks are blockheads.’ – they are natively dumb.
Often a rich encounter with Harry Levine, the grocer store owner, whose variety store and house was located just across the road from our first floor apartment at Ludlam and Dana. According to my Mom, he was always ‘le juif’, the Jew. The thought that in life, we are all in this together remained a concept quite foreign to the local culture.
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Our next-door neighbor, Nick, and his beautiful dark-haired wife were the young couple of Greek origin, who kept their clapboard, Victorian house and surrounding lawns and separate garages in excellent condition. An old three-foot high picket fence separated our living spaces. Religion and financial status kept us firmly apart. My Mom usually referred to this couple and the other Greek couple, who rented an apartment located on the second floor of their house as ‘le grec’ or ‘les grecs’- ‘the Greek or the Greeks.’ Foreigners were suspect, different and not trustworthy. Proceed with caution!
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Francis Murphy was her boy friend for years during her post high school years. They had met on the dance floor at the huge ballroom by the water at Lakeview. Pepere and memere, her parents, simply could not accept that he might wish to marry Claire, my mother-to-be. All romantic and domestic plans and hopes that they had built around this Irish-Canuck connection had to be tossed out the window. The discussion was finished. Marriage was out! Over the years, my Mom and Francis were close, but the mores of the times required obedience to the rules.
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puddle-jumper
frog
un crapaud
a Canuck
a Yankee
a Jap
a Kraut
a blockhead
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un italien
un irlandais
un grec
un juif
un polonais
un portugais
http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/lowe/ethnicity.pdf
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Naturally, the situation can become upsetting with emotions bubbling over to a boil when these different people all work together within very tight confines in the textile mills, where many must earn their daily bread. Many years ago, the shop-floor straw bosses overseeing the gritty, grimy workers plus the gritty, grimy and noisy machinery were usually brought in by the factory owners to blend these factors of production into a profitable business.
Today, with President Eisenhower ably steering the country into new and troubled waters, some of the textile operatives (women factory workers, who are manually involved in meshing the rotating gears and revolving pulleys of clanking metallic parts) sometimes can reach first-line management positions, so there is restrained optimism among the day laborers However, class conflicts remain, and new title does not make for instant happiness.
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All these others, the strangers, who also walk our streets, and who let their children play freely in our public parks can cause friction just because they are different in so many obvious ways. Maybe, people like us fear some of these others just as much as these different people fear us, French-Canadians, the Canucks? It is a fragile mix, apparent peace and internal fear.
My Mom has related to me many frightening stories from her growing up years in the city during the 1920s and 1930s. These tales would easily curl the socks of any decent, well-bred and industrious, Catholic girl or boy leaving the safe and pleasant environment of a parochial school setting. Of course, Protestants were just as scary as the Jews, Portuguese, Irish and Greeks.
My mother has certain terms that neatly refer to these strangers such as: les juifs, les portuguais, les irlandais and les grecs. But, to be fair, these French terms don’t have an insulting tone attached to them. Of course, I also occasionally overhear talk of a blockhead for a Pole, a chink for a Chinese person, a spic for an Italian and a mick for an Irishman. But, these slurs are not vicious. Rather, we can find them entertaining, but a bit insensitive. That is true.
During the war years, Jap and Kraut were favorites of many a dining room conversation, but I don’t recall what the English soldiers were called. Being allies of Britain, we probably just let them be. But, the Russians, they were the Russkies and never the Bolsheviks.
In all these ramblings, there has been no mention of any blacks in my surroundings and in our daily world, which was so often focused on the world of friendly Canucks (usually) in that truly magical neighborhood marked by the intersection of Ludlam and Dana streets in Lower Centralville.
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The chestnut tree in our front yard and the accompanying maple tree on our side yard along Dana Street held a particular appeal to many children of the neighborhood. This area became the common playground for the youth of the area. Although much of the grass had long since been ground into stubbles and knobs of its former self, the brown, sandy gravelling soil still provided a secure and fertile home for the roots of this sparse forest, and also the many childhood friendships that evolved there over the years.
During wintry months, the local igloo icehouse could be found neatly by the knurled branches of the chestnut tree. While in the summer time, games of “baseball catch”, Bowie knife throwing and wild, Tarzan antics in the leafy overhead branches of the maple tree brought joy and relief to many a child suffering from the “clam chowder” humidity of the city’s climes.
I recall that it was in this play yard of sorts that I greet and chat with passers-by walking along Ludlam Street on their trek to the bus stop on Lilly Avenue or to the local retail business district at “The Corner”. This crossroad is where West Sixth and Aiken Streets come together, just a stone’s throw from the Merrimack River.