America, Where the Rivers Meet

In one of the linked stories in my next book, there’s a family reunion, and on one sunny morning everyone heads down to the Point Park in Pittsburgh, where the rivers meet; the Allegheny and the Monongahela flow together to form the Ohio. It’s a place with a lot of history—history that reflects both the best and the worst of America. In the story, two people provide accounts of two very different American lives. In the book, I had at first included versions of those accounts that were too long and too formal to suit the tone of a work of fiction; thanks to my partner Maureen’s good advice, those are now edited out; I’ll include them here in case they may be of interest.

The first is the story of William Trent Junior, who was the commander at Fort Pitt during Pontiac’s Rebellion. Like George Washington, he was a land speculator, amassing vast tracts of land west of the Alleghenies at a time when white people weren’t allowed to do that—it was land that was supposed to be only for the Shawnee and the Lenape and the Huron and various other Indian nations. And when the Shawnee and the Lenape and the Huron and the others had had enough of their lands being illegally taken from them, they fought back—that was Pontiac’s Rebellion. Trent's attempt to destroy them using deadly disease is one of the most notorious episodes in American history:

William Trent grew up in a wealthy slaveholding family in New Jersey. When he grew up, he started to acquire land west of the Alleghenies, paying as little as he could get away with to the Indians who had occupied the land—all this when settlers or would-be settlers were not allowed to occupy or to buy land west of the Alleghenies. The British colonial authorities had spelled that out in the Treaty of Easton in 1758 (and it would be spelled out again in the Proclamation of 1763). But the settlers and the land speculators had other ideas. George Washington put his view of the situation bluntly in a letter to a friend: he said he looked on the Proclamation as nothing more than “a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians.” Eventually, in Washington's view, the Indians would have to consent to the settlers occupying those lands. Of course Washington asked his friend to keep those views secret—this was still years before the American Revolution, and it wouldn’t do to be seen or heard to openly defy the colonial authorities.

William Trent Jr. had been a colleague of Washington’s in the British army, and like Washington he had become a land speculator as well as a soldier. The plan was simple: buy or acquire through whatever means you could as much land west of the Alleghenies as you could. Join the growing chorus of American colonists insisting that the westward march of colonial settlement must not be held back. Be prepared to fight the Indians as necessary.

And of course it was necessary. Pontiac and the others did not give up land that was rightfully theirs without a fight. In 1763 they laid siege to Fort Pitt, where Willam Trent Junior was commanding the militia. During a truce, Trent made an infamous gift to a Lenape [Delaware] group who had promised to remain friendly with the militia. “Out of our regard for them,” he wrote afterwards, “we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.” Trent and the settlers would have quashed Pontiac's Rebellion even without resorting to atrocity. But clearly he had no qualms at having done so.

The other account has to it a very different tone:

Look at an 1880s map of the first ward in Pittsburgh—the ward that included what’s now the Point Park. None of what's now parkland was open land back then; Fort Duquesne and Fort Pitt were long gone, but there were houses and factories all the way west to the point. The Pennsylvania Railway had a big freight terminal, running between Liberty and Penn. All through the blocks between the Allegheny and the railway—First Street, Second Street, Third Street—there were sawmills, planing mills, foundries, lumber yards, boiler works. There were houses too—cramped little working-class houses, with privies out the back. Some of them fronted on the streets, and some of them fronted on little alleys—like Greentree Alley, that ran between Duquesne Way and Penn St. just east of third Street. The McQuywan and Douglass planing mill and boiler works ran for the whole block on one side of the alley, and on the other side there was another planing mill at Duquesne Way. But there were a handful of houses tucked in there too; David Leo Lawrence was born in one of those houses. He was the last of the four children born to Charles and Kate Lawrence—Kate Conwell, she had been. Both parents came from Belfast families (the whole neighborhood was overwhelmingly Irish—Point Irish, it was called); his father worked in a warehouse and later became a road supervisor; his mother eventually became prominent in a maternity hospital for unwed mothers. When the children were young, though, the family was very poor. It’s an interesting detail that Greentree Alley was originally called Green Alley; the name was changed a few years before Lawrence was born, in order to prevent any confusion with Green Street in the Hill District. “Born on Green Street” would have been the perfect beginning for the greenest mayor that Pittsburgh—and maybe America—has ever seen.

It was right after the war that Dave Lawrence became mayor—1946. Pittsburgh was the dirtiest city in America; it might have been the dirtiest anywhere in the world. There were ordinances on the books that should have been improving things, but they’d never been enforced. Lawrence made sure they were enforced, and he added new ones. He didn’t eliminate the smoke in his twelve years as mayor—“smoke” was still a regular part of Pittsburgh weather reports into the 1960s. But with help from the state and federal governments, he reduced it by 90 percent. He started to address pollution in the waterways as well. He worked to increase the amount of available low-cost housing—and he often acted as a mediator when there were strikes, trying to arrange settlements that would provide decent wages for workers, and help them afford the new housing that was being built. And Point Irish, where he’d grown up? It had been devastated by a fire as well as by industrial blight and decades of neglect of the housing stock. Lawrence was responsible for turning it into a park — what is now Point State Park. He fought with the steel industry, but he would often work with other businesses, and (as Governor as well as when he was mayor) he would work with Republicans as well as Democrats. He wouldn’t have been able to get done all that he did if he hadn’t tried to find common ground with a lot of people he didn’t have much in common with.

So, in Dave Lawrence, some of the best of Pittsburgh and some of the best of America. And in William Trent Jr., some of the worst.

It’s a sad commentary on America today that many on both sides of the great ideological divide would be comfortable in hearing only one of these stories. On the political left, many are uncomfortable with any sort of story that seems to celebrate American achievements—particularly if they are achievements by a mainstream figure who tried to build bipartisan consensus.

On the political right, many are far less tolerant than that. Numerous state governments have been revising educational curricula, making every effort to banish topics that show America in anything other than a positive light. Those efforts have gathered steam recently, but they are not new. In 2008, for example, the Arizona Legislature declared that the state's public schools would not be allowed to "include within the program of instruction any courses, classes, or school-sponsored activities that promote [or] assert as truth ... any political, religious, ideological or cultural beliefs or values that denigrate, disparage, or overtly encourage dissent from the values of American democracy and Western civilization."

The sad fact is, of course, that while "the values of Western civilization" have often been expressive of admirable ideals, they have often also been expressive of conquest and oppression; such was clearly the case during Pontiac's Rebellion.

In much of America, there has never been much appetite for telling the truth about the land speculations of the likes of George Washington and William Trent Jr. or the atrocities committed by the likes of Trent. And a great many textbooks, encyclopedias, and institutional websites, in discussing the causes of Pontiac's Rebellion, tend even today to omit any mention of the fundamental underlying dynamic - Indigenous peoples rising in protest against settler colonialists taking their land. Here is how the Battlefield Trust website presents things:

Influenced by the unwillingness of the British to establish alliances, the preaching of a Delaware holy man, Neolin, ignited the struggle between the various Native American tribes and the new power in North America...

Here is how Wikipedia summarizes the causes of the war:

Pontiac's War (also known as Pontiac's Conspiracy or Pontiac's Rebellion) was launched in 1763 by a loose confederation of Native Americans who were dissatisfied with British rule in the Great Lakes region following the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Warriors from numerous nations joined in an effort to drive British soldiers and settlers out of the region. ... The war began in May 1763 when Native Americans, alarmed by policies imposed by British General Jeffrey Amherst, attacked a number of British forts and settlements.

No mention there of white settlers having taken over large tracts of land that the colonial authorities had agreed would remain Indian land. Eric Foner, arguably America's most distinguished living historian, tells a different story, making clear that the Indians took up arms with the aim of driving the settlers from the Indian lands that the settlers had intruded onto:

[Neolin's message was] that his people must reject European technology, free themselves from commercial ties with whites and dependence on alcohol,... and drive the British from their territory.... In the spring and summer of 1763, Ottawas, Hurons and other Indians ...seized forts and killed hundreds of white settlers who had intruded onto Indian lands.

Now, in not a few jurisdictions, it’s becoming illegal to try to teach the sorts of truths that Foner recounts in his Give Me Liberty: An American History (which has become the most widely used university survey textbook on American history).

We can only hope that one fine day all of America will be willing to learn about all of its history.

Imagining Cleaners’ Work, and Cleaners’ Lives

If you’re looking to enter imaginatively into the life of someone who works as a cleaner or as a house-servant, what do you focus on? Their social status? Their economic circumstances? The physical reality of their daily life? Their emotions and their personal life? To even contemplate such questions is of course to have come a long way from the world of Jane Austen, where the very existence of servants is barely acknowledged, and where those whose existence is touched on usually remain nameless. That’s the starting point of Jo Baker’s marvelous 2013 novel Longbourn, which goes over much of the same ground as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice but is told from the point of view of Sarah, the Bennet’s housemaid. Extraordinarily engaging and often quite moving, Longbourn is utterly persuasive in its presentation of the realities of a life largely spent in cleaning other people’s dishes and other people’s clothes—the intellectual and emotional realities of such a life quite as much as the physical and economic ones.

A more recent example, Nita Prose’s The Maid, sets its sights much lower. The protagonist, Molly, is a good-hearted, enormously conscientious, neurodivergent employee of the luxurious Regency Hotel. Molly inadvertently becomes deeply involved with a criminal network operating within the hotel, and is herself accused of the murder. The story line works well enough, and Molly is an engaging character; in short, it’s a breezy read of a murder mystery, so one should not expect too much. But (as a former cleaner myself, albeit for only a brief time), I couldn’t help but feel the novel to be rather disappointing as a portrayal of this sort of working life. There is a good deal of description of the sorts of work that Molly and her fellow workers do, but almost nothing about the toll such work inevitably takes on the human body. In reading of Sarah’s life at Longbourn, one is frequently told of such things as “the calluses on her hands, or the swellings that pained her legs.” In The Maid, one is reminded again and again of Molly’s determination to return each hotel room “to a state of perfection,” but told little of the physical toll that must take. Nor, it seems to me, are the economic realities confronted as they deserve to be. Prose effectively conveys the financial hardship Molly suffers after her grandmother (a cleaner of houses, who Molly has shared an apartment with) dies, leaving Molly both grieving and falling behind on the rent. But Prose never connects the dots in any way that might suggest a systemic or collective problem rather than an individual financial predicament.

Toward the end of the novel, when Molly is promoted to head maid at the hotel, she receives a raise, and at about the same time she begins again to live in shared accommodation. Even then her circumstances allow her to save at only the most minimal level—“just a few hundred dollars” to start with, though it is described as enough that she can dream of one day being able to enroll in the hospitality program at the local community college. And then she receives an unexpected windfall—a $10,000 gift from a wealthy friend. “Life has a way of sorting itself out,” we are told at the book’s conclusion—one of the nuggets of wisdom that Molly’s grandmother once dispensed. “Everything will be okay in the end. And if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” But it is the end of the book, and, much as things may have turned out okay for Molly, in the broader world that the book touches on, things are very far from okay. There is no suggestion that the other maids have received raises when Molly is promoted. Though we understand that their lives will be improved by having Molly as head maid rather than the hated Cheryl (who used to steal the tips meant for others on the housekeeping staff), presumably the ordinary cleaners are still not making a living wage.

A much more rounded portrayal of what life as a cleaner is really like can be found in the 4,000 words of Sherman Alexie’s* superb short story “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest” (originally published in the 29 May 2017 issue of The New Yorker), the story of Marie, who works for decades as part of the housekeeping staff at a motel. Here is part of the description of what the work does to Marie physically:

Marie’s knees and ankles hurt because she had so often squatted and kneeled to clean the floors.

Her feet hurt because she stood for most of the day. And she’d never owned a good pair of work shoes. She’d always promised herself that she would buy a better pair of shoes with the next paycheck.

But “with the next paycheck” was like saying “Dear Big Bang.”

Her lower back hurt because of all the times she had carried the vacuum and heavy bags of clean and dirty towels, and had thrown garbage and recycling and compost into the dumpsters in the alley behind the motel.

One day, she’d twisted her back so severely that she’d collapsed in pain on the sidewalk.

At the free clinic, she learned that “back spasms” was the fancy way to say “torn muscles.”

Once or twice a year since then, she’d torn her back again. But she’d missed only a few days of work because of her bad back. She’d spend one day in bed, recovering, and then she’d force herself back to cleaning, because she’d read that an injured back heals best during activity.…

Her hands hurt.

Arthritis.

Carpal-tunnel syndrome.

And the recurring rashes caused by the soaps and disinfectants and window cleaners.

Her skin itched and burned.

She tried wearing gloves at work, but that only made her rashes migrate from her hands to her wrists, forearms, and elbows. Some mornings, she woke with hands so stiff that she could not make fists. She could not hold her coffee cup or toothbrush. She’d submerge her hands in hot water and flex and flex and flex until her fingers worked properly again.

“It’s hard work,” she’d said to Father James. “But it’s not like working in a coal mine."

“Maybe it is,” he’d said.

Alexie’s “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest” is clear-eyed too on the economic front. There is no $10,000 windfall for Marie; her gift on her last day of work is that she is paid for a full day while being asked to clean only a single room. Then, her retirement send-off:

The owner gave Marie her last paycheck in cash. Two weeks’ worth of money. Six hundred dollars.

Then she got into her car. It started on the fourth try.

She drove home to her husband. He was sitting on their couch watching the midday news. He’d retired from his job at the hardware store a few months earlier.

With Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare and good luck, Marie and her husband would survive.

It would be difficult in a 4,000-word story to say much of the collective issues relating to the sort of work that Alexie describes—the urgent need for better wages and benefits for all workers in such jobs-though something of their importance can I think be inferred from a careful reading of "Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest." As Tony Keller pointed out in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, the reality today is that those “with the least bargaining power—in low-education and low-wage jobs, with limited benefits or job security—tend to have the fewest protections. If anyone needs some old-fashioned union representation, it’s them.” It is of course extraordinarily difficult for such workers to unionize, not least of all because unpleasant, low-paying jobs will almost inevitably have an extremely high turnover rate (another reality that is brought home vividly to readers of “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest”). But a high turnover rate is not the only obstacle; in many jurisdictions, governments have since the 1980s made it far more difficult for workers to act collectively.

It's interesting that the best portrayals of effective collective action over the past several decades have been in films rather than in books. Norma Rae and Made in Dagenham are well known examples; less well known but at least as good is Bread and Roses (directed by Ken Loach, and starring Adrien Brody, Elpidia Carrillo, and Pilar Padilla), a brilliant 2000 film based on a true story of the successful struggle of Los Angeles janitorial workers to unionize. I can’t think of any finer example of a work of art that gives an equally powerful and equally moving sense of individual lives and of the collective reality of life for a group of oppressed workers.

In very different ways, both The Maid and Bread and Roses are heartwarming stories of working-class heroes. I recommend them both to anyone, without reservation. But I have to wonder if the very different levels of success they have met with might say anything about twenty-first century society. The Maid (which will soon also be a movie), a perfectly pleasant portrayal of an individual life that in no way challenges the socio-economic status quo, has been a number one bestseller both in Canada and in the United States. Bread and Roses, a deeply moving individual story that is also a profound exploration of a broader socio-economic reality, earned only $533,479 at the box office, and is not always easy to find today, either on streaming services or as a DVD. It’s worth the search!

*Anyone nowadays who praises any aspect of the work of Sherman Alexie has to accept that some readers may respond with surprise and with disapproval. Given that background, I should make clear that praising “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest” as an extraordinarily accomplished and richly evocative work of fiction should in no way be construed as a defence of its author against the series of accusations of sexual harassment that surfaced in 2018—any more than praising Le Morte Darthur should be construed as a defence of Sir Thomas Malory against accusations of rape, or than praising Four Quartets should be construed as a defence of T.S. Eliot against charges of misogyny and antisemitism.