Growing Up Greek in Helper, Utah

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 49, 1980, No. 3

Growing Up Greek in Helper, Utah

BY HELEN Z. PAPANIKOLAS

MY FATHER CAME TO AMERICA DURing the panic of 1907 when men born in America were riding the rails in search of work. For one full day he worked in a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, factory. Amazed, he saw giant machines driven by electricity. On leaving work he ran a gauntlet of rock-throwing Poles and Americans and in the refuge of a Greek coffeehouse learned they were that anomaly of America, strikers, and he that equally strange being, a strikebreaker. He washed dishes, slept on straw in an unheated stable, rode freights, dug a sewer in Oklahoma alongside a gang of blacks who laughed at this foreigner, unaware that in America no matter how lowly a white man, he did not work with Negroes. In snow-dusted sagebrush outside Leadville, Colorado, he built small fires to keep from freezing and went three clays without food. He worked on railroad gangs, became a foreman because of his size and wrath, and used the name Nelson for a time to circumvent the prejudice against Mediterranean immigrants.

My mother came to America in 1912 from Constantinople with the Jewish family for whom she had lighted the Sabbath fires. Without a dowry she had no chance of marrying in her country. On board ship she met a Greek journalist who sent her into the unknown, to a Greek family in Salt Lake City. Fearful, she rejected a number of young Greek immigrants until an upheaval in her host's family forced her to choose the man who would become my father. They were married in Pocatello, Idaho, in 1915 and planted wheat under the homestead laws. In 1917 they moved to a Carbon County mining camp called Cameron, adjacent to Castle Gate, to open a coffeehouse for hundreds of unmarried Greek miners. My mother was tight-lipped about this venture: free from the restraints of parents, the young men kept the mining camp awake with the singing and dancing of their ancient culture. I was born in Cameron, and three months later my parents moved to Helper where rock-crowned Steamboat Mountain jutted up from slopes of juniper and boulders.

We lived in one of the white frame Bonacci houses that lined the east side of the dirt road leading to town. The houses were of six rooms, divided in half for two families. We were a polyglot neighborhood. Many families, mostly from the south of Italy, lived in "Wop Town" on a plateau on the other side of the river, several of them raising a large number of children in caves gouged out of the hillside by the first inhabitants, pioneer Mormons. Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes established themselves nearby in "Bohunk Town"; mainland Greeks in "Greek Town" near the grade school, and Cretan Greeks north of town. Eleven families lived in the row of houses: Italians, Greeks, Irish railroaders, Americans, all together.

My sisters and I were safe in this small world. All day freight and passenger whistles blew. Each steam engine had its special sound and call: two long and one short, one long and two short, three long, three short. Each engine had a life of its own.

In the backyard on hard-packed dirt girls jumped the rope, boys shot marbles. Mothers called to each other as they splashed buckets of disinfectants down privies and hung wash on lines stretched between wooden poles. My father's long underwear had a rust spot in the middle from the gun he kept pushed inside his belt. We seldom saw him. He had contracted to bring a water line through the steep canyon north of town into the county. On his nameday, Saint George's feast day, my godfather and other friends would sit in the living room under floating layers of blue tobacco smoke and sing of their white-kilted ancestors waiting for night to pounce on their Turkish masters.

In the backyard court several languages screeched in the air together with an original American dialect of the mothers' own invention. "Go-a-Grina-wholgha. Get-a rossa warra an-a glickerina." I understood the dialect, but the druggist, hapless Mr. Greenhalgh, would cock his head sideways as if half-deaf, trying to catch a syllable to give him a clue to—rose water and glycerine.

Throughout the day neighborhood women came to the kitchen, often to have my mother interpret their dreams. Crowded by coal stove, sink with wooden drainboard, green cupboard, and oilcloth-covered table, my mother served coffee and read from her dream book. One cold day, the windows dripping moisture, diminutive Mrs. Bonacci brought an Italian woman to the kitchen. The visitor clutched her hands, protested, explained in Italian. My mother read aloud in the Greek dream book and then translated into Italian. (In the cosmopolitan neighborhood of the Holy City of Constantinople, she had learned Turkish, French, Italian, Spanish, and a little Yiddish.) The woman had dreamed that a large black bird had circled her daughter's head, alighted on it, and, its talons clutched in her hair, lifted the girl up and away. The book said the dream "foretold some sorrowful happening that would bring inevitable grief to the entire family."

The visitor screamed. She had promoted her daughter's engagement to a young man who was the girl's second cousin; it was too close a relationship, but there were no other young Italians ready for the responsibilities of marriage. The only alternative was to arrange a marriage for the girl with an older immigrant Italian. The mother had come from Italy as a picture bride for a man many years her senior and did not want her daughter to have the same fate.

On the other side of our three rooms lived an Italian family. The mother was plump and pretty, but my mother and Mrs. Bonacci shook their heads over her. The children in the backyard court whispered that when her bow-legged husband was on the graveyard shift at the mine, an Irish railroader came to visit.

In the house north of us were an American woman and her gloomy Greek husband, a barber with black-dyed hair. She often sat in the kitchen and whined about her husband's meanness. My mother sat, too, in strained politeness, glancing at her interrupted ironing and cooking. The woman was a kleptomaniac. "She kept stealing," one of my mother's Greek Town visitors said. "Even after he beat her, she kept right on. So, what could he do but throw her out of the house. That's what Greek men get for marrying American women!"

Beyond the kleptomaniac was a Greek family with something shameful about them, the portly father smoking cigars, home at all hours. It was a family without filotimo, without honor. When they first came to America, the man took his wife from one mining camp coffeehouse to another to dance with her tambourine. Good women, as everyone knew, never even looked into coffeehouses. When the children began coming and she could no longer dance, he became a labor agent and lived off cheating newly arrived immigrants.

The most frequent visitor to the kitchen was Mrs. Sarah "Killarney" Reynolds, the wife of an Irish railroader. It was from her my mother learned the American cooking we thought far superior to Greek honey and nut sweets: lemon meringue pies, Parker House rolls, fruitcakes, raisin oatmeal cookies. My mother used a bleached broomstick to roll out pastry. Back and forth her floured hands went, the little fingers turned inward giving a graceful look.

It was Mrs. Reynolds who told our mother to send us to the YMCA Sunday School, although she attended the small frame Catholic church near "Nigger Town," east of the railyards. It was unthinkable for Greek Orthodox to attend a Catholic church, and as for Mormons, polygamous until a few years past as were, still, the hated Turks who had conquered and ruled Greece for four hundred years—hmm!

And it was Killarney Reynolds, seldom smiling even when she played Irish tunes on her accordion, who told my mother about visiting days at the Helper grade school, about American customs, about cures for childhood illnesses. Obediently, my mother pushed her index finger dabbed with Vicks down our throats. Killarney gave my sister Jo her American name. Jo had been named by her godfather after the Virgin, the All-Holy (Panaghia). Mrs. Reynolds advised an American name. Trying to explain who the All-Holy was, my mother said, "She was the wife of Joseph." Mrs. Reynolds slapped one palm over the other. "Then call her Josephine," she said. And so, the odd, un-Greek name was given her instead of Mary, the Virgin.

Mrs. Reynolds also kept the baby Sophie all day when my mother, her heart weakened from the effects of the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918, almost died in childbirth. Four children had been born in five years; the third girl cried out in her sleep and lost consciousness. Town and mine company doctors said she would outgrow it, but they did not know what "it" was. The Greek priest from Price was summoned and with incense and prayers cleansed the house of sin, known and unknown.

Father Yianni was not allowed by the church board to wear his black robes and tall rimless black hat on the streets as earlier priests had done. He came in an American suit and clerical collar. Father Yianni "did not have his papers." He was neither a monk nor a defrocked priest but an illiterate chanter who had been made a priest on the spot during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 when under his spurious black robes he had carried messages through Turkish and Bulgarian lines. With few priests in Greek-immigrant America, the Greeks took what they could get, and as one of the first immigrants, Gust Pappas, often said, "Price, Utah, was the Siberia for Greek priests in America." "Anyway," the Greek women said of Father Yianni, "for dispelling the Evil Eye, no one can beat him."

We were safe in the Bonacci court. Beyond, all kinds of danger lay waiting: German shepherd dogs with bared fangs, owned by railroad families to keep tramps away; big, white-haired, white-eyelashed American-Mormonboys; dark, angry-faced boys from Wop Town; and other vague dangers that roused fears in my stomach.

There were times when the backyard court was quiet. Mothers were inside, children nowhere to be seen, the railyards somnolent with only faint buzzing coming from the roundhouse. The American flag atop Balance Rock on the leftward crest of Steamboat Mountain hung limp; the junipers on the arid slopes gave off a hot pungent scent. A horsedrawn wagon sprayed water on the dusty road, and minutes later the sun dried it out.

Suddenly the ruthless heat was pierced with shouts. The Bonacci boys on the boundaries of their yard and white-haired boys across the dusty road were screaming at each other: "Dirty Wops, go back where you came from!" "Yellow Mormon cowards, take one step closer, we dare you!" "Eat-a da spaghet! Ha! Ha!" "Aw, go eat your Mormon mashed potatoes!" "Dirty Catholics, wear your religion 'round your necks!" "Sappy Mormons, wear your peekaboo garments!" Mrs. Bonacci ran out waving her broom, and sons and white-haired boys scattered at her torrent of South-Italian dialect. I learned early to keep the cross my godfather had given me at baptism hidden inside my collar.

Twice in the hot, dusty summer that I turned five years of age, I stood with my silent mother and looked out the living room window. The first time a black hearse went by slowly, and a line of open touring cars followed. On the radiator cap of each car two blue and white flags were tied, pointing in opposite directions. Inside the cars sat blackdressed men and women holding smaller blue and white flags. I knew instinctively they were of us—Greeks—and that the flags were Greek.

The second time we watched soldiers, dressed like my godfather in his World War I picture, marching down the road, the khaki stripping wrapped around their legs thick with dust. Unshaven miners looked on and boys with mock serious looks on their faces walked stiffly at the side of the moving column, sticks on their shoulders.

Two months later I trotted at my sister Jo's side to my first day of school. Our mother sent us early "to get a good start." All summer long in the Bonacci court I had heard about two black girls pouring kerosene near the school staircase and throwing a match on it; of an Italian mother dragging a teacher by the hair to the school yard and beating her for sending her daughter to the principal who had left welts on her back with a rubber hose; of that dangerous place called the lavatory where the most terrible of all four-letter words was scratched on the gray-painted windows and metal stalls; and of the monstrous thing called recess where Americans and Mormons stood on one side of no man's land and immigrant children on the other, shouting and daring each other to cross over.

Inside the squat brick schoolhouse, I followed Jo down the hall thundering with the footsteps and voices of children. Jo pointed out my room. Two teachers with marcelled hair banged on the desk and ordered us to take turns standing and giving our names. The teachers then looked at each other and said either "High" or "Low." My sister, as the daughter of a businessman, had been put in the High the year before. Quaking, I said my name and one of the teachers said, "Low." When the teachers finished their pronouncements, we of the Low, mostly miners' children, American girls in faded ginghams too short or too long, immigrant girls in homemade dresses, and boys in old bib overalls were told to follow one of the teachers into another room. There I broke into sobs at my disgrace. The teacher put me in a closet and shut the door.

The year was 1922. The Greeks were in a turmoil I knew nothing about. Less than a mile from the schoolhouse, strikers were living in a tent town set up by the United Mine Workers. The miners had joined the national coal strike after the Italian labor organizer, Frank Bonacci, and another worker demanded of the Kenilworth mine manager why wages were cut while coal prices remained steady.

The Greeks, who had been brought to Carbon County nineteen years before as strikebreakers, became the leaders of the strike. They ambushed a train believed to be carrying strikebreakers and in the crossfire killed a deputy sheriff. One of their own had his arm almost shot off. His friends carried him to a doctor, who sewed his wounds while a circle of guns pointed at him, and then spirited him away to a hideout on the Ute Indian Reservation. The National Guard and townspeople rampaged through Greek coffeehouses, boardinghouses, and stores. A Greek striker, the man in the hearse, was killed on the outskirts of Helper by a deputy sheriff. Eight hundred Greeks followed his hearse from the Greek church to the graveyard, holding their Greek flags in defiance. Perhaps the feelings against the Greeks sent me to the Low. It took me five years to work into the High.

Because of the strike the Greek school we attended after American school was suspended for a few months. For one thing, the schoolteacher, the "Cretan Hothead," had fled town to save himself not only from Americans but from fellow Greeks as well. During the funeral march down Price Main Street he had bolted to the head of the procession where two strikers holding Greek and American flags preceded the hearse. Screaming, "They slaughtered our lad!" he struck a match to set fire to the American flag and "fought like a tiger before he was pinned to the ground."

A series of old-country Greek teachers followed, and some took one look at the town and taught long enough to get the fare to leave on the next Denver & Rio Grande Western train.

I kept my Greek school book and tablet far back in my desk at American school. At the ring of the last bell I clutched them with the front covers against me to keep them from being seen. It did not help. All the children knew we went to Greek school, and they followed and taunted us.

The school was held in various places. The black wooden railroad chapel adjacent to the railyards was closed to us because older boys had locked in our mincing, sneering teacher and run around the church throwing pieces of coal and rocks and breaking the windows. Usually the school was held in a store in Greek Town that had once been a butcher shop. A meat hook remained jutting from the wall, and one creative teacher hung recalcitrant boys on it by their bib overalls. We wilted in warm weather and froze in winter when only the teacher, next to the potbellied stove, was coatless. Boys on one side of the room, girls on the other, we struggled to learn a purist Greek we never heard spoken.

I entered Greek school with my book and tablet, dutifully and angrily. Yet, when the anniversary of the Greek revolt against the Turks in 1821 approached and we students from the towns and mining camps gathered in the Price church basement to recite traditional poems of the guerrillas (klefts), I tried to put the same full-blown feeling into my delivery that I had witnessed in my classmate Flora Ossana's emoting "The Village Blacksmith."

Greek school was the symbol of the struggle of our parents to keep their ancient culture and our ambivalent reaction. Like the Bonacci court, it was of me, of my people; but when I said goodbye to my best friend, Helen Barboglio, and she went off to play, to read, to be free, I envied her Americanism, although her parents were immigrants, her mother English, her father Italian. Of all aspects of our culture, attending Greek school made us feel most different from others.

We were safe there, safe in Greek Town, and in the YMCA. A festive air traveled with us on Greek Town excursions when women held bounteous open houses for their husbands and sons on their name days. We walked down Main Street past the Japanese Fish Market, the Japanese Noodle House, Japanese novelty store, Greek coffeehouses, Joe Barboglio's Helper State Bank, the Italian Quilico Furniture Store, and Ricci's Meat Market, the Chinese-American Cafe with two signs in the window: Whites Only and White Help Only, the Greek stores: the Golden Rule, Sanitary Market, Toggery, Grill Cafe with a tank of green water in which trout swam, the Cretan restaurant and coffeehouse, and on beyond the school into Greek Town.

Clusters of houses were set here and there in the dessicated earth, each with a small garden and cascades of silver lace vines on the wooden porches. In the backyards, shiny and smooth from the lye and soap of wash waters, were wash houses, coal and wood sheds, rabbit hutches, chicken coops, pigeons, and domed earth ovens supported on wooden stilts.

The warm, yeasty scent of baking bread hovered over Greek Town, and mothers were quick to cut us large pieces and slather them with butter. The admonition we heard from our mother daily came with the offering: "Bread is holy! If you drop it, make the sign of the cross and kiss it before eating. If it can't be eaten, bring it to me to burn. Never throw bread in the garbage! Bread is holy!"

The mothers used high-pitched voices when visiting and their talk was punctuated with the proverbs we heard throughout each day: "What can you expect? 'An apple from the apple tree falls.' " "Worthless people! 'Stars fell and pigs ate them.' "

There was much making of the sign of the cross over good news, bad news, easy births, and hard ones; when someone survived or someone died; on passing the church, leaving and entering the house, or beginning a task that required skill. The Greek Town fathers always made the sign of the cross three times before slaughtering a lamb to help them do it quickly to spare the animal undue suffering.

The other oasis in town was the YMCA Sunday School. The yellow brick building was the most imposing in Helper. The two-story front faced the railyards; the three-story back had a door that led directly to the basement hall used for Sunday School. On the first floor was a long room with windows on three sides and a bookcase on the fourth wall. From the shelves my sister Jo and I took home Gene Stratton Porter books and Fu Manchu mysteries.

After we began attending Sunday School at the Y, other Greek families also sent their children. We, Helen Barboglio, a Japanese girl, and non-Mormon "Americans"—the Malekars, Holmeses, Metzes— posed for a photographer one day with director Julius Shepherd and several women teachers. Mr. Shepherd may have been a minister, but he dressed in business suits. He was fragile and white haired. When he talked about the American Jesus, that blond, wavy-haired, blue-eyed man who knelt with hands clasped against a rock in the garden, his voice quavered. When we sang in the Y basement, a poignancy held me, sentimental as the words were about the kind, all-loving Jesus who forgave and understood and would lead us to heaven. But it was not the words of "I Come to the Garden Alone," "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord," or "The Little Brown Church in the Vale," it was the sad sweetness of the music that brought me close to tears for something I could not comprehend.

Mr. Shepherd and the American Jesus, the songs at the Y, harmonica and Victrola music were all lumped together for me: they were what America was. The dark, grieving Christ and long-faced saints on ikons, robed priests, incense and candles, Greek school, screeching mothers, men singing of their ancestors waiting to ambush the Turks: they were what Greekness was.

When my father became the coowner of a grocery store on his climb toward American success, we moved across the tracks to a four-room Bonacci house; the rooms were larger and the privy farther away from the house. The tracks were so close we could clearly see extraordinary men and women sitting at white-covered tables, roses in vases, waited on by white-coated blacks. We watched entranced as the trains moved slowly by, gathering steam until they rounded Steamboat Mountain. The freights rumbled along with their cargo of glistening coal. Sheep, cattle, and pigs went by, leaving a stench; grapes, peaches, and pears scented the air briefly with a delicate sweetness. I learned the colors and insignia of all the freight lines: Burlington, Baltimore & Ohio, Great Northern, Union Pacific, Western Pacific, Chicago & Northwestern, Norfolk & Western, Santa Fe, Northern Pacific, Chicago, Milwaukee & Saint Paul, Erie Pennsylvania, and my favorite, the Denver & Rio Grande Western. It was ours.

In this second Bonacci house I came to know that Easter was the most important day of the year, that every day led inexorably to it and then Christ's journey to the cross began all over again. Fasting began in earnest two weeks before Easter for us; other families fasted the traditional forty days. Neither fish, fowl, nor meat could be eaten because of the blood in them, in memory of Christ's shedding his blood. Nothing that came from blooded animals was allowed: milk, eggs, cheese, yogurt. Many Greek families lived on beans, lentils, and greens; some mothers would not even use olive oil because it was holy. Our food was bread, pickled peppers, squid with rice, spinach with rice, beans with rice, lentil and bean soups, and for something sweet, halvah, crushed sesame seeds mixed with honey to form a nougatlike confection. To still hunger between meals we munched on dried, salted chick peas. Bloodless shrimp, crab, and lobster were sold in the Japanese Fish Market at times, but we had little of it. Lent was not the time for delicacies, according to my mother. I lived on peanut butter sandwiches. My father and other Greek men did not fast as their families did. There was a vague dictate that men worked hard and needed meat, eggs, and cheese for strength.

Holy Week came and there was no playing at all, no listening to the new arched table radio or to the hand-cranked Victrola. The green blinds were pulled down. Mourning sighed in the house. Outside Mormon children played and called to one another, and never was the chasm so wide and so deep between them and us than at Easter. Mothers shook their heads over the Mormons. "What does Christ hanging on the cross mean to them? They even marry on Great Friday!"

All week liturgies were conducted in the dimmed church, reliving the events of Christ's life. On Great Thursday women sobbed and knelt on the wooden floor, spotted with years of candle drippings, as the black wooden cross was carried around the church. On Great Friday his flowered tomb studded with spring blooms was carried on the shoulders of four men while the congregation followed, singing the ancient dirges. "O my sweet Springtime," the Virgin's lament began, "my most loved Child, wither has Thy beauty gone?"

On Great Saturday morning, the air quivering, expectant, we talked low, but as the day wore on excitement grew in the house. The waiting was hard. In the kitchen the activity for breaking the fast at midnight went on. Our mother was making the traditional food eaten after the midnight Resurrection liturgy. I would not enter to see the lamb's head with its blue-veiled eye soaking in cold water and my mother's washing the intestines inside and out before cutting them into small pieces to add to the chopped liver with dill, celery, and parsley to simmer. Others would eat the myeritsa; I would eat my mother's pastries, hardboiled eggs dyed red for Christ's blood, sweet sesame-sprinkled Easter bread.

The momentous happening came ever closer as we sat in church while the reading of the Psalms and the chanting of the Odes went on. At midnight, all lights off, babies shrieked and were silenced. My heart pounded. A small candlelight came forward from the altar, the priest's face above it, cavernous. He called out, "Come ye, and receive the light from the unwaning Light and glorify Christ, who rose from the dead!" Dark forms went forward and held out their candles for light; other forms clustered about each new light. In a few moments the church was ablaze with hundreds of swaying flames. Louder and louder the people sang the song of Resurrection: "Christ has risen from the Dead. By death trampling Death, has bestowed life upon those in the tombs." Then we were home, the dining room crowded with unmarried men who lived in hotels. The joy in the house shimmered and would not die.

But other memories in the second Bonacci house were dark. On a cool blue March morning I was standing on the narrow sidewalk in front of the house when the earth moved under my feet once and then again. Mine, town, freight engine whistles shrieked. Women hurried out of their houses, boys ran toward town, women from the railroad houses east of the railyards half ran toward the depot. Our obese neighbor went in to call the telephone operator and came out puffing. "The Number Two Mine at Castle Gate has exploded," she said. Everyone moved toward the rail tracks and looked north where the tracks circled around Steamboat Mountain. In the crackle of burning cedars was a distant sound as of animals lowing. It was the wailing of the miners' wives and children slumped in the debris of the Number Two Mine.

Killarney Reynolds and Dr. McDermid's wife called the town women to bring cooking utensils, food, and blankets. On the devastated ground they made open fires, cooked, and heated canned milk for babies while wives and children waited for the brown-helmeted disaster team to bring up the bodies.

Fifty of the dead men were Greeks, and their black-dressed widows, somber children looking on, sat at the side of coffins and keened the mirologhia, ancient laments for the dead that pierced the air with demands of the saints, the All-Holy, and Christ for taking their men at the peak of their manhood and leaving their families at the mercy of a strange land. They wailed over Charos ("Death"), who had no pity, coming on his black horse to take husbands and fathers, uncaring for those left behind. The dead who were recognizable had the final traditional picture taken in their coffins. These photographs were sent to parents or wives in Greece to prove that they had been given an Orthodox Christian burial.

Girls returned to American and Greek schools with their long braids tied with black ribbons and wearing black dresses that smelled of acrid dye. Boys wore black shirts with the same pungent odor and sweaters and jackets with black armbands sewed on the sleeves. When fights broke out at recess, children chanted, "Orphan! Orphan!"

My father, Stylian Staes—a sheep broker and the Greek vice-consul —and other Greek businessmen brought sacks of flour and left them on the front porches of the widows' houses. Black crepe hung from the doors. Because they were in the forty days of deep mourning, widows remained inside and their children came out and pulled in the sacks. As the school year wore on, the children's black clothes faded to a bleached gray and the smell disappeared.

A year later at night, my mother, sisters, and I stood at the kitchen window and gazed at a cross burning in the railyards. One burned in the front yard of Killarney Reynolds. The next night we saw a cross of fire on a mountainside. On the other side of the narrow valley the Catholics burned a circle for the Irish word nought—a message to the Klan that they were nothing, their organization would come to nothing. The Klan rampaged through stores, forced clerks and waitresses— "white girls" they were called—home and warned them not to work for Greeks. My face burned whenever the Mormon children said it: "White girls working for Greeks" and "Greeks marrying white girls." An Italian farmer surprised Ku Kluxers painting huge KKK signs on his barn, chased them with a rake, and fell dead of a heart attack. Just south of town on a cement railroad abutment a KKK sign dripped hasty white streams and was never removed.

The Klan threatened to kidnap Helen Barboglio whose father was the town banker. Unknown to Helen, bodyguards followed her to and from school. Two second cousins of my father came from McGill, Nevada. We glimpsed them walking behind us on Helper Main Street, but thought they had come on one of their periodic visits. Our father was later than usual coming home. He and Joe Barboglio were warned to take the Greeks and Italians and leave town.

Everyone knew who the Ku Kluxers were. The railroad man living next door to us was one of them. "Don't worry, Mrs. Zeese," he told my mother. "It's not you foreigners we're after. It's the niggers." What horrible things had that small number of blacks who lived east of the railyards done? The blacks were taunted on the schoolyard, and an old-timer told my father, "You ought to keep the niggers out of your store if you want whites to buy from you."

It was in the backyard of the house that I heard children gleefully talking about "the nigger gittin hanged." He had shot a mine guard in Castle Gate and run to the house of another black. On the pretense of getting the hungry man milk and bread, the frightened friend walked to the boardinghouses and buildings on the camp's dirt road and told a barber and storekeeper where his fellow black was hiding. A posse caught him and wedged him onto the back seat of a car where he sputtered that he killed the guard because he had mistreated him. The car, with others following, sped out of Castle Gate, through Helper, Spring Glen, and Price, and stopped at a large cottonwood tree south of town. Men, women, and children in wagons and cars converged about the tree. Men tied a new rope, just purchased at the Price Trading Store, around the black's neck and hanged him slowly. Twenty minutes after he died, the sheriffs arrived.

Not long after, while my mother visited in a Greek house and the women's voices shrieked in my ears, I turned the pages to a Greek house staple, the photograph album. There were the usual pictures of weddings, baptisms, naked boy babies propped against pillows to reveal their incipient maleness, girl babies in embroidered white dresses, picnics with men squatting to turn lambs on spits, dancing in rounds, and on the last page a black man dangling from a tree and under him men, women, children, their arms crossed, smiling for the photographer.

A little over a year later we moved to a large brick home my father built in the section of town where doctors, attorneys, and businessmen lived. We were climbing farther up the fabled ladder America provided immigrants. There were no privies, no coal stoves in the neighborhood, certainly no wash houses, chicken coops, or earth ovens. Saturday nights resounded with parties that would last until morning. Boys, some we knew, delivered bootleg whiskey wrapped in newspapers.

Five years later in 1933, in the deepest misery of the depression, two unions—one Communist, the other the United Mine Workers— vied for the out-of-work miners' membership. Freight trains went by carrying, at first, young men looking for work; then older men crowded among them, each holding a small bundle of possessions; then boys appeared; then families, mothers holding babies, children dangling their feet out of the open freight cars; then old men and women. They were all going to California to look for work. The mines were closed or working half-shift. Mine company houses were boarded up as miners left, heading too for California. We moved to Salt Lake City where my father opened one grocery store after another until he had eleven. For us the depression was a continuation of our mother's old-country frugality. Our parents were modestly well off by American standards, immensely so by those of the impoverished country they had left. But sleep came uneasily for a while. The long calls of steam engines were absent. There was a void in the night.

Sometime during the decades that followed I learned that the trains did not have a life of their own. Those distinctive, haunting calls that had lulled me to sleep were the signals of engineers. Each had his special whistle that alerted his wife to get his food on the table. Sometimes on clear silent nights, the distant blare of a diesel engine comes across the Salt Lake Valley. I regret it is not the call of the old steam whistles, but it is better than nothing.

Today almost all of the Greek Town people are gone. The Greek language is heard less often. Proverbs are seldom used to instruct, to moralize. Bread is thrown into the garbage. The grandchildren of Ku Kluxers and immigrants have married each other. But the faces of those Greek Town mothers and fathers remain deep in my memory, not as they were in their feeble years but as they were in their short-lived era as young matriarchs and patriarchs. A literary critic has complained that the characters in the novels of the great Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis are bigger than life size. That critic would have known better if he had lived in Greek Town.

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