The Hustle Read Online Free Page B

Seattle’s first black community was coalescing around William Grose’s land in the East Madison neighborhood in the 1890s, my great-grandfather Giovanni Merlino was conscripted into the Italian Army. When my grandfather was a kid, Giovanni used to show him the scars from bullet wounds in his shoulder and his side he’d gotten after he was sent to fight in Ethiopia. One day, the Italians—about twenty thousand troops in my great-grandfather’s telling—met a massive force of Ethiopians, who attacked from all sides. Before long, the Italians were in a panicked retreat. My great-grandfather survived only because his comrades carried him off the battlefield after he’d been shot. It’s impossible to say for certain, but given the details and the time he was in Ethiopia, Giovanni was probably describing the Battle of Adowa, which happened on March 1, 1896. The Ethiopians routed the Italians that day, derailing (for a time) Italy’s ambitions to conquer their country and keeping it the only nation in Africa free of colonization.
    If Giovanni thought about his role in the larger history of European adventures in Africa, he didn’t mention it to my grandfather. He returned home to his village in the mountains of southern Italy and found there was no work. His brother had already left for America, one of several men from the area who had sailed to New York and then headed across the country, drawn by the promise of jobs in the coal mines outside Seattle. Giovanni followed, arriving in 1898.
    The brothers had good timing. In the late 1890s, with the Klondike Gold Rush in full swing, Seattle was in the midst of one of its occasional economic booms. Thousands of prospectors, dreamers, and drifters poured money into the city as they geared up for the journey to Alaska. Giovanni went to work as a miner while Angelo opened an Italian grocery. In 1908, Giovanni returned to the village in Italy and asked a girl he knew to marry him. When they came back, my great-grandmother told him she had no desire to live in a mining camp, so they moved to Seattle, where he took a job in an iron foundry.
    The Italians lived in the Rainier Valley area of Seattle, just south of the Central Area. “Garlic Gulch” was full of “wops” who, like Giovanni, grew tomatoes and zucchini in their backyards, kept chickens and rabbits, and fermented homemade wine—known as “Dago red”—in their basements.
    As their numbers began to grow, the Italians settled in on Seattle’s economic ladder about one notch above blacks, a status that led to competition for menial work. One such job was shoe shining. At the turn of the century, Italians in Seattle had organized to the extent that they could buy the “rights” to set up shoe-shine stands on the sidewalks outside of downtown businesses. Blacks set up for free in alleys and side streets. After the Italians complained, the City Council passed a motion that required shoe shiners who operated on public property to pay for their spaces. The language of the law was race-neutral, but the effect was to shut down the black competition and give the Italians—on the cusp of being considered full-fledged “whites”—a leg up. It’s a small example that shows the difficult compromise behind Booker T. Washington’s theory of advancing through self-improvement: Without equal protection under the law, blacks could never know how secure their futures were.
    Seattle’s preeminent black family in the early 1900s was that of Horace Cayton, publisher of the Seattle Republican , the city’s second-largest newspaper, and his wife, Susie Revels, the daughter of the first black U.S. senator, Mississippi’s Hiram Revels, who served during Reconstruction. In 1909, when Booker T. Washington came to visit Seattle for the Alaskan, Yukon, and Pacific Exposition, the Cayton family had the honor of putting him up and showing him the