Brother Bones

Prelude

It was the premiere of their yearly minstrel show and the young men of St. John’s parish school were on parade. In keeping with the tradition’s format—one that had not changed appreciably in a century—they danced and pranced their way from the school to the auditorium, shuckin’ and jivin,’ rattling tambourines, whacking at banjos, smeared with greasepaint and singing “When The Saints Go Marching In” to the high heavens. A small marching band provided the music albeit somewhat off-key. An oompah tuba blamed the bottom end and the big bass drum held down the rhythm. This pre-show was for the amusement of the assembled ticket holders—among them Aunt Mag and John McGowan—queued up in the cold, waiting for the signal to enter. It was a peek at the spectacle that they would soon see in full, like when they lead the elephants over to the circus tent. These Irish-Catholic boys were dressed in gaudy costumes down to their handmade top hats. Their make-up was not amber, beige, buff, burnt umber, chestnut, chocolate, cocoa, russet, tan or taupe. It was black, and the garish white greasepaint that outlined their mouths was something out of a nightmare. The fact was, most of them had never seen person-of-color unless you wanted to count Stepin Fetchit or Buckwheat from the movies. They did know Amos ’N’ Andy from radio, but not the fact that they were always voiced my Caucasians. So this was what they supposed the “darkies” looked and acted like. These stereotypes had been passed down from the mid-1840s through the folk-art form of Minstrelsy, born in the year the bricks for the Beoli Mills were being mortared into place.

Rituals

Along with placing poinsettias at my mother’s final resting place after each Christmas, I stop at the family plot of her parents, aunt, uncle and brother. It’s always the end of December and it’s usually bleak and cold—sometimes bitterly so—and blustery enough that it’s a trick to keep a votive candle burning even for a minute. For the sake of survival, I find that a nip of Jameson’s is advisable, and, I like to think, apropos. The monument that marks this family plot is substantial yet without artifice which might also describe those at rest beneath. It’s a double-sized slab of grey granite with a serpentine top. Notches at the top corners are the sole adornments. The epitaph gets efficiently down to business as well inscribed as follows:

1886 JOHN J. McGOWAN
HIS WIFE
1874 MARGARET M. CRONIN
1891 HUGH M. GALLAGHER 1958
HIS WIFE
1891 HANNA M. CRONIN 1975
SON
1915 JOHN V. GALLAGHER 1937

Hugh and Hanna were my grandparents, and their son, John was my namesake. But it’s John McGowan and Aunt Mag that I’m considering today—one specific incident in particular. I observe that their years of death are not etched into the stone, which leads me to believe they were still alive in 1958—the year I’m guessing that this stone was placed with the passing of my grandfather. I’ve spoken of Aunt Mag in previous installments. She and her husband were Irish immigrants from the area of Knockmanagh near Killarney in the Southwest corner of the “Auld Sod.” They were the ones who sponsored my Grandma, Hanna, then a doe-eyed 18-year-old colleen—in the new country. Doing the math that would have been around 1910. Due to the repressive policies of their English colonial overlords, Irish children were kept under-educated (therefore less dangerous I suppose) which made the task of relocating to America and finding a decent job all the more daunting. As with many Irish immigrants, Hanna found work as a domestic in service to Fitchburg’s British Brahmin expatriates.

Once Hanna met and married Hubert Gallagher, they moved into a 10-room farmhouse on Baltic Lane in West Fitchburg provided by his new employer Crocker Burbank: makers of paper. He could easily walk to his job which was in Number Eight mill right next door. They had an extended credit line to buy their necessities from Crocker’s own co-op market up on Ashburnham Street and for all intents and purposes, you owed your soul to the company store, just like in that old saw, “16 Tons.” In fairness, there were to be plenty of those pesky necessities attending the births of the 11 children that followed, and—soul possession aside—there’s something to be said for a steady income. Especially with the Great Depression taking shape on the distant horizon like some worrisome, unknowable beast being born ugly.

~

Beoli Mills

John McGowan and Aunt Mag lived a mile or so away from the Gallaghers in a compact Mansard-roofed, two-story dwelling at 34 Sprague Street where it wound down at a precarious pitch towards the North Nashua River. As with my grandfather, Mr. McGowan could easily walk to his place of employment at Beoli Mills on Westminster Street, clicking the heels of  his spit-shined brogans in the face of the rising sun as he went. That leg of the commute was a breeze; a hundred cement stairs from his back yard; down onto Sanborn and then left on Simonds. Slogging home after his shift might call for some liquid fortification at the British-American Club or the Log Cabin before scaling that slope and facing his frequently feisty better half and her imposing arsenal of Blue Willow china.

Beoli was a textile mill operated by the American Woolen Company and John worked there as a “Finisher.” Architecturally the building could have been part of a Nazi concentration complex with it’s anxiety-inducing brick facade. The assortment of buildings were as varied in form as a capricious child’s grab bag of geometric shapes. At one corner stood a battlement-like tower capped with a giant onion dome which wouldn’t have looked out of place in Moscow. Old photos show an abundance of windows however so some cheer must have filtered down onto those otherwise drab, lanolin-soaked floors. The company provided John with solid employment for 25 years until it went belly-up—yet another Depression casualty in an era of many. The equipment was sold and the jobs were lost. But John McGowan was close enough to retirement age that the two events dovetailed as well as could be expected and he and his Maggie would be okay if they played their cards right—they hoped.

~

Cakewalk

Once inside the marching musicians joined the piano and drummer in the pit and the show’s Overture began. Snippets of popular songs and chestnuts from the Stephen Foster catalogue wafted through the room. As always, the minstrel show would be divided in three. In the first, the entire troupe would take to the stage warbling “Ain’t She Sweet” as they did a cocky cakewalk on from stages left and right to a thunderous ovation. It was hard for the audience to believe that these were their own sons, relatives and sons of friends as they tried to recognize them under their makeup. Freed of any stage fright by the anonymity afforded by disguise, these often-times shy youth appeared loose-as-geese in the footlights and hammed it up shamelessly. The Interlocutor appeared and instructed his minstrels to take seats in semi-circles to either side of his elevated perch. Also attired in a minstrel-fashioned costume (except for the blackface), the Interlocutor served as Master-Of-Ceremonies as well as somewhat pompous straight man for these mad proceedings. He was flanked by the so-called end men—Brother Tambo and Brother Bones. These two characters (caricatures?) got to set up the gags and deliver the punchlines as the rest of the cast rollicked in exaggerated mirth and jangled their tambourines. The concept of Surrealism was known in the thirties though what they might have called it back at its creation in the 1840s is a mystery, yet the term seems to describe the Minstrel Show experience best. A sampling of the humor is as follows:

Interlocutor: No, Bones, you mean three days previous to her decease. 

Brother Bones: No, she had no niece.

Interlocutor: I presume he was a pretty good physician? 

Brother Bones: No, he wasn't fishin'; he was home.

Interlocutor: I mean he was a doctor of some standing. 

Brother Bones: No, he wasn't standing, he was sitting on a three-legged stool.

At the conclusion of the Part One, the assembled cast along with the Interlocutor cakewalked back off the stage carrying their milking stools to another round of applause. The boys were far from stage frightened, the fact was they hated to leave the spotlight. Given the conditions of the times, this explosion of farce, color and music was a welcome respite from their grey existences and they were elated.

~

The Auction

In 1932 the physical plant of Beoli Mills—minus the textile producing equipment—went on the auction block. The proceedings would take place in the huge empty plant. Addison Freeman of Boston’s Samuel T. Freeman and Company would serve as auctioneer. His firm had previously announced that the property would be offered in its entirety first and then in four separate parcels. Whichever brought the highest bid would prevail.

Mr. McGowan’s motivation for wanting to purchase his former place of employment is at least partially conjectural and remains part of the lore of this grey Irish enclave of blue-collar labor nestled in amongst the granite hills. The legend would have us believe that a stop at the British-American club with a group of his peers before proceeding to the auction had perhaps impaired his judgment. But even into his cups, he made a cogent case to his former co-workers that it was a sound investment without revealing what he was about to lay on the table lest someone else beat him to it. He was confident that the economic pendulum would swing the other way eventually—wouldn’t it? Then again, what was the satisfaction of owning the place that you once slaved in. Regardless of his motivation he came prepared to buy. What was up for grabs was substantial too: ten mill buildings with 175,150 square feet of floor space and a large power plant located on several acres of land. The assessed value of the complex was $128,000 but during the peak years of the textile industry it was employing 600 souls (1926-1927), and was worth $264,100. After laying out the rules of the auction, Addison Freeman started the bidding with a “clarion” call that echoed off of the brick walls of the cavernous space, “How much am I offered for this property in its entirety?”

The scores of former employees that he’d just been drinking with bated their suspicious breaths and waited for the bid. Then came McGowan’s booming baritone, “ten thousand dollars.” It was the only offer so it was “knocked-down” to him. His former coworkers gaped at him in slack-jawed astonishment, and you could have heard a pin drop. When the newspaper reporter asked him what his intentions were for the property, he replied, “I am ready to sell it to anyone who is ready to pay me my price.” He also declared himself to be acting as sole agent. It was his and he planned to flip it. 

But on the dark way home, with the echoes fading in John’s ears with each footfall, the scaling of Sprague seemed to be taking a preternaturally long time. Now was the figurative cold, grey, light of dawn and as he approached the buttery luminescence of his own parlour windows, he began formulating the rationale with which he would present his case to Maggie—all 90 pounds of simmering Irish TNT. 

Put gently, she was not pleased. True; they had managed to scrape together $10,000 or so but not much more, and they were getting up there in years. What John hadn’t brought into the equation, Mag reminded him, were things like taxes on the appraised value ($128,000) and such mundane matters as building maintenance. It was clearly time for some damage control. They secured a lawyer and were able to extract themselves from the deal but at a cost of a couple of thousand dollars from their nest egg—money they were counting on. That class-consciousness that their neighbors brought over from the old country was still pervasive and there was a certain amount of self-satisfied blather behind the McGowans’ backs about them and the knives came out, as they will. Who did they think they were, anyway?

~

The "Olio"

The second act was called the "Stump Speech", a lone dissertation the main purpose of which was to allow the backstage to be set for the elaborate "Afterpiece." On this cold night, the custodian, Mr. James O’Brien, had stoked the coal furnace higher than normal for the comfort of the audience at the show, and between that and the rising body temperatures, the low-ceilinged auditorium became as hot as a Lakota sweat lodge, and the audience began peeling off any unnecessary clothing. 

Brother Bones took to the stage and began to pontificate on everything from science, society and politics during which his dim-witted character attempted to speak eloquently, only to deliver countless malapropisms, jokes, and unintentional puns. As he did, he moved about like a clown, standing on his head and often prat-falling off his stump. He delivered salient social criticism with the focus being on sending up unpopular issues and making fun of blacks’ supposed inability to make sense of them. Since local gossip was a fair target, Brother Bones introduced a song that he’d written especially for the occasion entitled: “The Day John McGowan Bought The Beoli Mills.” Although no record of this ditty exists, the imagination can provide a sketch.

With his black greasepaint running grotesquely down his face, Brother Bones delivered his mocking ballad directly towards John and Mag dead center in the audience like a command performance.

Within a peal of laughter, the furious McGowans donned their overcoats and stormed out. They would not be staying for the Afterpiece after all.

~

Coda:

I actually saw a performance of St. John’s Minstrel Show many years later, long before the term “politically correct" had been coined. 

Codetta: 
Aunt Mag and John McGowan lived to ripe old ages. They were not rich but they were okay—as he had hoped. Had they stuck with purchase of the Beoli Mills and then sold during the Depression’s end in 1940, they may have  enjoyed a truly golden age. But then again…?