s [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

hog.
Was it the thought of Grandfather Backmaker that made me ask,  And do they
want to give
Negroes equality?
He drew back sharply.  Touch of the tarbrush in you, boy? No, I can see you
ain t. You just don t understand. We might have won that war if it hadn t been
for the Abolitionists. They re better off among their own. Better leave those
ideas alone, Hodge; there s enough to be done for our own.
Chase the foreigners out; teach their agents a lesson; build up the country
again.
 Are you trying to recruit me for the Grand Army?
Pondible finished his beer.  No. I want to get you somewheres to sleep, three
meals a day, and that education you re so anxious for. Come along.
III
He took me to a bookseller s and stationery store on Astor Place with a
printshop in the basement and the man to whom he introduced me was the owner,
Roger Tyss. I spent almost six years there, and when I left neither the store
nor its contents nor Tyss himself seemed to have changed or aged. I
know books were sold and others bought to take their places on the shelves or
be piled towerwise on the floor; I helped cart in many rolls of sulphide paper
and bottles of printers ink, and delivered many bundles of damp pamphlets,
broadsides, letterheads and envelopes. Inked ribbons for typewriting machines,
penpoints, ledgers and daybooks; rulers, paperclips, legal forms and cubes of
indiarubber came and went. Yet the identical disorder, the same dogeared
volumes, the indistinguishable stock, the unaltered cases of type remained
fixed for six years, all covered by the same film of dust which responded to
vigorous sweeping only by rising into the air, filling it with the sneezes of
the sweeper or any customers happening to be present and immediately settling
back on the precise spots.
Roger Tyss grew six years older and I can only charge it to the heedless eye
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of youth that I
discerned no signs of that aging or that I was never able to guess his years
to my satisfaction. Like
Pondible and as I learned so many members of the Grand Army, he wore a beard.
His was closely trimmed, wiry and grizzled. Above the beard and across his
forehead were many fine lines which always held some of the grime of the store
or printing press. One did not dwell long on either beard or wrinkles,
however; what held you were his eyes: large, dark, fierce and compassionate.
Anyone might have dismissed him at first glance as simply an undersized,
stoopshouldered, slovenly printer had one not been fixed by those compelling
eyes.
For six years that store was home and school, and Roger Tyss was employer,
teacher and father to me. I was not indentured to him, nor did he pay me any
wages. Our agreement if so simple and unilateral a statement can be called an
agreement was made ten minutes after he met me for the first time.
 Hodgins, he said, staring piercingly up at me (he never then nor later
condescended to the familiar
 Hodge nor did I ever address or even think of him but as Mr. Tyss),  I ll
feed you and lodge you, teach you to set type and give you the run of the
books. I ll pay you no money; you can steal from me if you have the
conscience. You can learn as much here in four months as in a college in four
years or you can learn nothing. I ll expect you to do the work I think needs
doing; any time you don t like it you re free to go.
He was my father and teacher, but he was never my friend. Rather he was my
adversary. I respected him and the longer I knew him the deeper became my
respect, but it was an ambivalent feeling and attached only to his zealotry. I
detested his ideas, his philosophy and some of his actions; and this
detestation grew until I was no longer able to live near him. But I am getting
ahead of my story.
Tyss knew books, not only as a bookman knows them binding, size, edition,
value but as a scholar. He seemed to have read enormously and on every
conceivable subject, many of them quite useless in practical application. As a
printer he followed the same pattern; he was not concerned solely with setting
up a neat page; he wrote much on his own account: poetry, essays, manifestoes,
composing directly from the font, running off a proof which he read and
immediately destroyed before pieing the type.
I slept on a mattress kept under one of the counters during the day; Tyss had
a couch, hardly more luxurious, downstairs by the flatbed press. Each morning
before it was time to open, Tyss sent me
across town on the horse-cars to the Washington Market to buy six pounds of
beef twelve on [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]