A Thousand and One Afternoons in ChicagoHecht, Ben
General
A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago
Hecht, Ben
Chicago (Ill.) -- Literary collections; Hecht, Ben, 1893-1964 -- Homes and haunts -- Illinois -- Chicago
The nose of this shuffling one is larger than the noses in the city
streets. His fingers are larger, his neck is larger. There is a curious
earthy look to this shuffling one seldom to be seen about men in streets.
He is a huge creature with great thighs and Laocoön sinews and he towers a
head above his brothers in front of the employment office. He is of a
different mold from the men in the street. Strength ripples under his
tattered mackinaw and his stiff looking hands could break the heads of two
men against each other like eggshells while they rained puny blows on his
dull face.
And yet of all the men moving about on the pavement in front of the
Clinton Street bulletin boards it is this shuffling one who is the most
impotent seeming. His figure is the most helpless. It slouches as under a
final defeat. His eyes are the dullest.
He stops at the corner and stands waiting, his head lowered, his shoulders
hunched in and he looks like a man weighed down by a harness.
* * * * *
A curious exile from whose blood has vanished all memory of the country to
which he belongs. A faraway land, ages beyond the sun-warmed roads of
which his Mexican brother dreams as he stands under the bulletin boards. A
land which the ingenuity of the world has left forever behind. This is a
land that once reached over all the seas.
For it was like this that men once looked in an age before the myths of
the Persians and Hindus began to fertilize the animal soul of the race. In
the forests north of the earliest cities of Greece, along the wild coasts
tapering from the Tatar lands to the peninsula of the Basques, men like
this shuffling one once ranged alone and in tribes. Huge, powerful men
whose foreheads sloped back and whose jaws sloped forward and whose stiff
hands reached an inch nearer their knees than today.
This giant in the tattered mackinaw is an exile from this land and there
is no dream of it left in his blood. The body of his fathers has returned
to him. Their long, loose arms, their thick muscles and heavy pounding
veins are his, but their voices are buried too deep to rise again in him.
The mutterings of warrior councils, the shouts of terrible hunts are lost
somewhere in him and he shuffles along, his sloping forehead in a pucker
of thought as if he were trying to remember. But no memories come. Instead
a bewilderment. The swarming streets bewilder him. The towering buildings,
the noises of traffic and people dull his eyes and bring his shoulders
together like the shoulders of some helpless captive.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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