The Chicken Hanger

Chapter 18

129 EIGHTEEN I’ m nothing but an old Polack,” Howard said. “My granddaddy was born in Warsaw in 1887. Factory worker. He came over in 1910, through Ellis Island, like everybody else. Millions of them, coming from damn near every country you can name. Funny thing about that island. Did you know it’s mostly manmade? They built it out of landfill—thirty-two acres of it.” It was ten before eight on Sunday morning. Tomás was still sleeping. He had taken a pain pill early in the morning. Ricky and Howard were sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee, talking, as rain pounded the metal roof. The threatening skies of the day before had held overnight, until an hour ago, and now it was coming down in sheets.The street in front of the house was already flooded. Very few cars had driven past. Everybody seemed to be holing up and waiting it out. Howard’s back yard looked like a small lake. Despite feeling poorly, Ricky had hoped to get out today and look for day labor, or maybe try to find a job as a busboy or a dishwasher, but the weather had put a stop to those plans. There was some good news, though: the saucepan on the floor was empty. So far. Ricky knew that it could take a while for a leak to start dripping. Sometimes water had to pool in the attic or a crawlspace before there was enough to come through the ceiling. But he was optimistic that he had fixed the roof. Howard said, “Anyway, there weren’t many restrictions back then. Unless you were flat-out crazy or diseased or a convict, they let you in. Nobody was an ‘illegal immigrant’ because there was no such thing. Well, except for the Chinese. No Chinese were allowed since the 1880s.Then, in 1924, they passed some quota laws against other types of people. They wanted to keep out all kinds of Orientals, plus the southern and eastern Europeans, especially the Jews and Italians.” “What if you were from Mexico?” Ricky asked. “No limits on Mexicans. They could still get in. The border wasn’t even guarded. You could come and go as you pleased.” “How do you know all this? You weren’t even born yet.” “My uncle—my daddy’s brother—tried to come over in 1936. At that time, I was eleven years old. They wouldn’t let him in.” “Because he was Polish?” “Because he was Jewish. So he stayed in Poland. My daddy got a letter from “ 130 him dated in June of ’38, and that was the last anyone ever heard of him.” Ricky had read enough about the Holocaust to know what had happened to Howard’s uncle. He kept silent for a respectful moment, then said, “What was the reason for the quotas?” Howard shook his head. “Oh, they gave a lot of reasons, but most of it was bullshit. Part of it—very few people said this outright—but the big part of it had to do with some people thinking the superior races came from northern Europe.There was a book—The Great Race, I think. No, The Passing of the Great Race. Can’t remember the writer’s name, but he said all the best things mankind had ever done, it was the Nordic people who’d done it.They were the best of the best, and they shouldn’t mix with other races.” “This was an American writer?” “Yep. That surprise you?” “That sounds like what Hitler would say.” “You bet it does.” Ricky was mesmerized by this discussion. He had never heard these things before. “People in the United States believed that?” “A lot of folks did, at least in part, including Calvin Coolidge. He was the president when those quota laws got passed. Boy, he said some things that ... well, if a president said them today, he’d get tossed out of office for being a racist. Hell, somebody would probably burn the White House down. But things were different back then. Being a bigot wasn’t such a big thing, because everybody was griping about one group or another. Same old arguments, too. Immigrants bring wages down. They won’t learn English. They’re all a bunch of criminals. They’re stupid and inferior. People were saying stuff like that two hundred years ago, and a hundred years ago, and they’ll still be saying it when...