Then came the history books, not recent history but musty old volumes which speculated on ancient civilizations. We made a game of reciting the names of old cities and making up the adventures of people who lived there, as we sat over an obsolete map in one of the tattered books donated to the Butchertown Library.
The only science we studied was astronomy. At night, we sat on my rock outcropping (the highest point overlooking the Bay) while Erika talked about the solar system and the immense distances of space. She taught me the names of the constellations and how to recognize the ones visible from Hunters Point.
A less interesting part of my education was handwriting. I practiced for half an hour every day, the way some more fortunate children practiced music lessons. Each lesson consisted of copying sentences from a foreign language in a dozen different “hands,” each with its own slant, flourishes, and loops.
As soon as newspapers were regularly being printed again, she urged me to read one every day but to ignore the local news and political articles. I was to search for items used as filler—obscure incidents in exotic places.
Certain things were completely missing from Erika’s educational program. One was simple arithmetic. could barely count beyond making change, and Erika deliberately kept me ignorant of the practical ability to figure. Keeping accounts was to be her job. “You needn’t trouble your head.” Another gap was in those sciences requiring laboratory experiments, which were unavailable to us. Also, Erika was weak or uninterested in the natural sciences. We both knew more, I suppose, about the flora and fauna of Hunters Point than most children know today, but Erika never encouraged my spending time in, say, observing the habits of the many birds migrating to and from the Point in those days.
She carefully avoided books of Christian thought or any other religious thought. This was one area where Erika and Miss Harrington agreed. Whatever poor immigrants Miss Harrington dealt with, at the school or at the library, their religion always seemed to clothe the customs which held them back from better health and more learning. As for trying to give me the religion of my mother, Miss Harrington stated loudly that any religion which existed peacefully within a culture that practiced footbinding could not be any better than the superstitions of the Polish immigrant who made signs against the evil eye every time she saw Miss Harrington cultivating tomato plants in her garden. (I think this must be the only instance of closed-mindedness I ever saw in Miss Harrington.)
Actually Erika’s reasons for keeping religion out of my education were less idealistic. I heard her tell Miss Harrington that her research indicated there were two trends in spiritualism, the religious and the scientific. The religious clients could fit almost anything from a seance into their religious system, but the scientific ones might be turned away by any religious talk. Therefore it was best to keep me as ignorant as possible of rituals or gospels of any religion in order to broaden the appeal of my performance.
Poor Miss Harrington, who eagerly supplied books in the hope that, despite Erika’s purposes, I would be educated, choked, turned away and said, “You are teaching a gifted child to turn her gifts into lies.”
And Erika, through clenched teeth, “I am teaching her to survive, and you know more than anyone how few gifted children have done so!” Then she turned to me and reminded me again that I was never to allow myself to be seen reading, never to speak of our lessons. As far as the rest of the world would know, I had attended school less than two years and was otherwise as ignorant as the seagulls that hovered over the slaughterhouses.
When the streetcars started running-bright new trolley cars with crackling electric wires overhead-Erika took me downtown. I was almost twelve years old, and I had never left Butchertown, never gone further north than Sixteenth Street, never crossed Potrero Avenue, though I had climbed the hill to overlook the Mission District factories and warehouses. My first real view of the city of my birth was a walk through its ruins. First we rode the Southern Pacific train to the Third and Townsend depot, then a streetcar up Third, up Market to the Ferry Building, which stood like a grave marker above the charred wreckage. Since the cable cars were still not running, we decided to walk up California Street.
Much of the debris had been carried away—we had watched trainloads of it being dumped in the Bay off the south shore of Hunters Point—but jagged remains of brick walls were still being pulled down, while in the cleared areas, concrete foundations were being poured. The air was thick with dust and noise, all very exciting for me but depressing for Erika. “That was …” she would say, pointing to a black foundation wall and naming a theater or restaurant or elegant shop.
“We’re in Chinatown now,” she said, as we crossed Du Pont Avenue through a completely bare, charred wasteland, not one building standing. Everywhere Chinese men were working at rebuilding. They looked different from the men who fished off the Point—smaller, hunched, harried, silent. I had heard about Chinatown from my father and once, from a bully at school who had yelled at me to “go back to Chinatown.” For a while after my mother died I had dreamed of running away and finding Chinatown, where, by some miracle, I would find my mother still alive and where I would live surrounded by people who looked like her. Now, looking at these intent little men—Erika towered over them—I felt completely alien to them. I knew that I would never be completely accepted by the Europeans at the Point, butthis wasthe first time I suspected that I might be unacceptable to the other part of my heritage, the part which, as embodied by my mother, I had thought I loved best.
“Look, that was the Towne Mansion. My God.” We had reached the top of the hill at Taylor Street, and Erika was pointing to the only thing left standing, a tall marble-columned portico which was the entry to … nothing. We stood there for a while as she pointed to the locations of what had been the homes of the rich. She knew them all, but when I asked if she had been in these homes, she said, “Oh, no. The gentlemen who owned these homes came to visit me, and they will again, May, but only to meet you, to help launch your career.” We started downhill. “Tired? We’re almost there.” I shook my head. I was too excited to feel tired.
Just before we reached our destination, she pointed south toward the black skeleton of the City Hall tower and said, “The house where I worked was down there.” Then she briskly turned away from the sight. “Here we are.” We had reached Van Ness Avenue, the line at which the fire had been stopped and where, in rented houses and temporary buildings and tents, the shops of downtown San Francisco had set up in business.
During the months after the quake, it was common to see people in ash-streaked formal wear, growing rapidly more shabby and dirty, or in ill-fitting, old fashioned clothes. Many had escaped the fire with only the clothes they wore and could get others only from the donated clothing brought by relief trains. Erika had only the dark blue silk she was wearing when the fire caught up with her, and the underwear she carried in her small case. Around the house she wore only a shift or, on cold mornings, a black velvet, gold fringed robe which my father eyed disapprovingly. Her blue silk was repeatedly aired, sponged, and pressed to keep it as fresh as possible for street wear, but on the rough roads of Butchertown it looked almost as out of place as her velvet robe would have.
The first thing Erika bought on Van Ness Avenue was a hat because “a woman downtown without a hat might as well be naked.” The shop woman laughed and agreed, “You’re right, Miss Violet.” All the shop owners knew her, called her Miss Violet, and all of them she corrected with a menacing look. “You have mistaken me for someone else. I am Mrs. Newland.” They nodded gravely. She represented herself as a widow from then on. Of course, all records of her marriage had been lost in the fire. Erika was one of many who snatched a new identity from those flames, it being necessary only to fill out an order for new documents. At the same time that she recorded her “marriage,” she obtained new birth certificates which scrupulously recorded the correct known facts. “Never lie without a reason,” she told me.
She bought dresses, shoes,