The 42nd Parallel Read Free Page A

American deeds will make it illustrious.
    Civilization will never lose its hold on Shanghai. Civilization will never depart from Hongkong. The gates of Peking will never again be closed to the methods of modern man. The regeneration of the world, physical as well as moral, has begun, and revolutions never move backwards.
     
There’s been many a good man murdered in the Philippines
Lies sleeping in some lonesome grave.

The Camera Eye (1)
    when you walk along the street you have to step carefully always on the cobbles so as not to step on the bright anxious grassblades      easier if you hold Mother’s hand and hang on it that way you can kick up your toes but walking fast you have to tread on too many grassblades the poor hurt green tongues shrink under your feet      maybe thats why those people are so angry and follow us shaking their fists      they’re throwing stones grownup people throwing stones      She’s walking fast and we’re running her pointed toes sticking out sharp among the poor trodden grassblades under the shaking folds of the brown cloth dress      Englander      a pebble tinkles along the cobbles
    Quick darling quick in the postcard shop its quiet the angry people are outside and cant come in      non nein nicht englander amerikanisch americain      Hoch Amerika Vive l’Amerique She laughs My dear they had me right frightened
    war on the veldt Kruger Bloemfontein Ladysmith and Queen Victoria an old lady in a pointed lace cap sent chocolate to the soldiers at Christmas
    under the counter it’s dark and the lady the nice Dutch lady who loves Americans and has relations in Trenton shows you postcards that shine in the dark pretty hotels and palaces      O que c’est beau schon prittie prittie      and the moonlight ripple ripple under a bridge and the little reverbères are alight in the dark under the counter and the little windows of hotels around the harbor O que c’est beau la lune
    and the big moon

Mac
    When the wind set from the silver factories across the river the air of the gray fourfamily frame house where Fainy McCreary was born was choking all day with the smell of whaleoil soap. Other days it smelt of cabbage and babies and Mrs. McCreary’s washboilers. Fainy could never play at home because Pop, a lame cavechested man with a wispy blonde-gray mustache, was nightwatchman at the Chadwick Mills and slept all day. It was only round five o’clock that a curling whiff of tobacco smoke would seep through from the front room into the kitchen. That was a sign that Pop was up and in good spirits, and would soon be wanting his supper.
    Then Fainy would be sent running out to one of two corners of the short muddy street of identical frame houses where they lived.
    To the right it was half a block to Finley’s where he would have to wait at the bar in a forest of mudsplattered trouserlegs until all the rank brawling mouths of grownups had been stopped with beers and whiskeys. Then he would walk home, making each step very carefully, with the handle of the pail of suds cutting into his hand.
    To the left it was half a block to Maginnis’s Fancy Groceries, Home and Imported Products. Fainy liked the cardboard Cream of Wheat darkey in the window, the glass case with different kinds of salami in it, the barrels of potatoes and cabbages, the brown smell of sugar, sawdust, ginger, kippered herring, ham, vinegar, bread, pepper, lard.
    “A loaf of bread, please, mister, a half pound of butter and a box of ginger snaps.”
    Some evenings, when Mom felt poorly, Fainy had to go further; round the corner past Maginnis’s, down Riverside Avenue where the trolley ran, and across the red bridge over the little river that flowed black between icy undercut snowbanks in winter, yellow and spuming in the spring thaws, brown and oily in summer. Across the river all the way to the corner of Riverside and Main, where the drugstore was, lived Bohunks and Polaks. Their kids