reverse assimilation

a case of reverse assimilation

By William Rintoul

In May 1970, the police of Big Spring, Texas, booked a shabbily dressed middle-aged transient whom they had taken off a freight train, holding him overnight to see if he was wanted anywhere. In his possession they found
seaman's papers with a faded photograph of the man when he was younger,and a membership card in the St. Louis Newspaper Guild. In the morning, they released the transient, not knowing that he was a prolific writer whose work was being studied in American universities as a supplement to courses in Mexican American literature. The transient was the late American writer who wrote under the pseudonym Amado Muro, and has been described as a man "who seems to have written more good short fiction than any other young Mexican American" (The Chicano, New American Library, 1971), and as "one of the most See Amado Muro page 14 Amado Muro from page 1 promising Mexican-American writers" (Forgotten Pages of American Literature, Houghton Mifflin, 1970). He was neither young nor Mexican-American.

The deception was a gentle one, designed to shield a writer who wanted fame no more than did B. Traven. The writer was Chester Seltzer, 55 years old when he was locked up in Big Spring, self-described as an obscure journalist, and my close friend. Seltzer rode freight trains, worked in the crops, went to sea, lived on skid rows, sometimes worked on newspapers-and, from the time he was 20 until he was 56, when he died in El Paso, wrote short stories that may be the best that have been written in this country about men on the road and in the fields at the missions and in the villages of Mexico. He wrote of men with "eyes so deepset that the shadows around them looked like bruises" ("Two Skid Row Sketches," Arizona Quarterly, Autumn 1971), whose clothes were "so ragged they tied them on with binder twine"("Hungry Men," Arizona Quarterly, Spring 1967), who "bleached the four dollar blood bank's finger marks off with Clorox so they wouldn't have to wait six weeks to put down again" ("Night Train to Fort Worth," The Texas Observer, September 15, 1967). He wrote in longhand, often late into the night, working to make words say what he wanted them to say. He discarded what he did not like in crumpled paper that made rooms in which he worked look as if they had been thoroughly ransacked. He agonized to make words right, once writing in a letter, "I'm just finishing one. This is only seven pages and it has taken
four months." Stories of people who live "on the long, dusty streets in Chihuahua that hold more poor Mexicans than jails do" have begun to make Seltzer famous, but if there is ever a movement aimed at a general discovery of the lives of quiet desperation lived in poverty's dim ranks, Seltzer is going to be even more widely read. He was not interested in commercial success, and the basement of the aging two story house he occupied with his family in the Sunset Heights district of El Paso was filled with manuscripts never offered to any publisher, including countless notebooks with the reportage of a lifetime spent among those whose stories are most often told in the words of others. He chose not to write his own painful story. As a young newspaperman in Bexar County, Texas, Seltzer stood before a judge and said he did not want to kill anybody. The time was World War II. The judge told Seltzer he would be an instrument of the state, and therefore it would be the state, not him,
who was doing the killing. Seltzer thought the distinction would be small consolation for the man he killed. He told the judge, "If you believe that, you need help more than I do." The FBI man asked him where he had gotten his ideas. He had no strong claim of formal religion to fall back on. He knew reporters were supposed to be brash men with press cards stuck in their
hats, hardboiled and hurrying to break the news of the latest murder. He told the FBI man he had gotten his ideas from various sources. He mentioned Tolstoy. The FBI man looked up from his notes and wanted to know where he could get ahold of this Tolstoy. Seltzer told the FBI man that would be hard to do because Tolstoy had been dead for years. He did not wish to cloud Tolstoy's reputation, so he added that Tolstoy had put in his time in the army. The FBI man looked disdainful. He said, "I bet he wasn't an officer." At Lewisburg Penitentiary, Seltzer worked in the quarry, then on Labor Five breaking rock for a guards' parking lot. He joined a hunger strike against racial discrimination in the prison, and it lasted sixty six days. The doctor the prisoners called Dr. Faustus forcefed him with a "garden hose" that cut his nostrils, making him breathe like a dog. When he was released, he went home to Cleveland, where he had grown up in a comfortable home with a father, mother and sister who loved him and whom he loved. His father, Louis B. Seltzer, was the editor of the Cleveland Press, an influential figure in American journalism who could have helped him and wanted to help him, could have gotten him another start. But the son had his own life to live, and after a few days he rode off on a freight train, heading West. It was not the first time nor would it be the last that he would ride the freights, drawn to them by "the lonesome dreary moan of a drag whistling the highball. He would always be fascinated by life on the rails and the hobos he met, like the man who told him: In San Luis Obispo, this mission preacher talked for an hour. Finally he said, When one more comes to God, you can eat.' Nobody knelt down at the altar though. That made him mad and he said he wouldn't let stiffs out until they nosedived. I'm a ram-not a sheep-so I made him open the door. "Going Short," The Mexican American, August, 1968 He froze on a Nickel Plate freight when the temperature was 12 below, and he rode a "hot man" out of Tucson until his throat was so dry he could not talk. He rode an empty with open laths toward Fort Worth with snow hitting him in the face, and once he crawled into a length of big diameter pipe to get out of the rain on a flatcar carrying pipe for a Houston oil company. He knew what it's like to ride behind the Big Jack engine, thundering over a highball stretch so fast the wheels are skipping on the rail joints, and what it's like to ride the tops, and the terrible feeling hanging up there when the train is balling and shaking. He watched out for jackrollers and blindsiders, and the yard bulls, the Denver Bobs and the Texas Slims. And once on a freezing night heading West out of Sierra Blanca, Texas, about a year before Seltzer died, a Texas & Pacific brakeman said, "I can't tell you to ride in there," and smiled and turned away while he climbed into the cab of the diesel, where there was heat and drinking water. He knew the Rescue Missions and the Midnight Missions, the Sunshine Missions and the Sally's Harbor Lights, and Sister Bessie's Mission, where you got three slices of bread and gravy and unsweetened coffee for breakfast, and a stale doughnut if the bakeries came through. On New Year's Day, 1970, TV cameramen went to the Salvation Army's Harbor Light Center at 9th and Market Streets in St. Louis to take the pictures of homeless men that are a standard feature of news coverage during the holiday season. Among the unidentified men whose faces were shown to television audiences that evening was "Amado Muro." At the time, his story "Maria Tepache" (Arizona Quarterly, Winter 1969), was being cited in The Best American Short Stories as one of the distinctive stories of the year. It is about a poor Mexican shopkeeper who feeds a wanderer too destitute to pay. The listing was one of at least seven he had received in the annual since 1944 when "A Peddler's Notebook," published in Southwest Review, was cited. Ironically, his stories were listed in the section reserved for foreign authors publishing in American magazines. Seltzer chopped bumblebee cotton at Big Spring for 50 cents an hour,
made
$1.50 topping carrots at Phoenix, picked peaches at Modesto and cotton
at
Gila Bend, where they would holler "coontail" when they saw a
rattlesnake
and two Mexicans got bitten in one afternoon. He knew labor camps like
Down-the Road Dugan's and Wild Grass Woodie's and Indian Bill's, and
went
out with day haulers like Cadillac Jack, Portugee Joe and Uncle Bill,
and
lived in the Fruit Pickers Cothouse and Red's flophouse with the men who

were caught "in the nightmarish cycle of missions, labor camps, freight
trains and the law and Sweet Lucy." He went to sea for awhile, sailing as an ordinary seaman on long trips to Greece and South America. At Corfu, the White Star Line freighter was on the hook about a mile from the wharves when a group of affluent Greeks came out to confer with the captain, who was a Greek. On that particular day, he was mopping up on the sanitary detail. The visitors were in the forecastle and not knowing this he blundered in with his mop and bucket. The captain ordered him out and in making his exit he inadvertently spilled soapy water on the shoe of one of the visitors. The captain upbraided him crudely. His pride injured, he wrote a poem about the captain. The ending went: "With an ice pack for a pillow and a straitjacket for a bed He'll lie supine as his keepers gently massage his head For he is not a normal man. He delights in discord and strife And a lunatic asylum is the proper stage for his life." He gave the poem to a friend, Louie, an oiler, who posted it on the bulletin board, breaking a promise not to do this until the ship docked at New Orleans. The 25day return trip on the old Liberty ship was a Calvary for him. He recalled the poem as his only literary success since the seamen said they liked it. In between times, he worked on newspapers, at least fifteen of them, including the St. Louis Post Dispatch. He worked in, among other towns, Las Cruces, New Mexico; San Diego and Bakersfield, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; Prescott, Arizona; and Dallas, San Antonio, Galveston, Wichita Falls and El Paso, Texas. While working for the El Paso Herald-Post in the 1940s he met and married Amada Muro, a native of Chihuahua City, Mexico, who had grown up in El Paso. He adopted a variation of his wife's maiden name as his pseudonym. In the later years of their marriage, Amada and their two sons lived in El Paso while he traveled the railroads and farm fields, taking notes or, when money ran low, sought employment on a newspaper, going to a distant city while his family stayed home. Of newspapering, he said, "All I want is a place where they have a Y and a mission or railroad yards." He liked to punch the light bag, run and work out with weights. He was a strong man, big enough to have boxed as a lightheavyweight, and he could still do 235 pounds on the bench press when he was in his fifties; he said it consoled him for growing old. Toward the end of his life, a newspaper in Decatur, Illinois, needed a wire editor. He sent them his rÈsumÈ and they wrote back, interested. They also sent him a handbook of regulations. "It banned use of newspaper stationery," he wrote in a letter, "and said whistling or wrestling' in the office was cause for dismissal. It had strictures on dress, wearing a tie and suit, and not doing outside work of any kind, including writing, unless granted permission by one's supervisor. Nothing was said about the newspaper's policy or ideas on newsgathering so I concluded the trivial was more important than a newspaper's main objectives and thought it was a good place to stay away from. I've never wrestled in a newspaper office. I've whistled, though-sometimes even hummed-so wouldn't be much of a prospect." The managing editor of a California newspaper assigned him to write editorials. Another war came along, this one in Southeast Asia. It was not until the war had gone on for a few years that there was growing resistance to it and to the toll of lives. From the beginning, he was against it. Of students who early opposed the war, he wrote in an editorial, ". . .they make up a moral force any nation should be proud of." It was not popular at that time to say that sort of thing, and what he wrote outraged many, including some who called him a Communist. "The funny thing," he said, "is
I only met one Communist in my life-when I was covering the waterfront in New Orleans, and we discussed a seamen's strike, not ideologies." The owners of the newspaper supported the nation's intervention in Southeast Asia. They told him to dig in on the war protesters. He refused, and another man took his place on the editorial page. His stories found a home in university quarterlies. While he rode the Texas & Pacific freights to Big Spring and chopped cotton, his stories appeared in prestigious literary magazines. They sometimes paid him $20 or $25 a story, but more often paid nothing, as is the custom. Eventually the anthologies found him, and in the last years of his life his stories appeared with regularity in collections, at least two of which were used as supplementary texts at the University of Texas at El Paso where his oldest son, Charles, graduated with a B.A. in English in 1973 and his younger son, Robert, graduated with a B.A. in journalism in 1976. He told his wife Amada he did not write to become famous, that he wrote because he liked to write, that he wrote for his own satisfaction. On a hot July morning in El Paso three months before he died, a morning of the kind he liked to say fitted a man for work as one of Hell's gate-tenders, we sat talking for the last time. The talk turned to old times in Mexico. Once in Mexico City, he recounted, he sat with only a few pesos in his pocket, having breakfast on the balcony of a cafe on the Zocalo, sipping the strong cafe, con leche that is a meal in itself, a newspaper unfolded beside him on the table. Looking out on people stirring peacefully in early morning sunlight, hopefully starting a new day, he said to himself, "Chester Seltzer, you are the luckiest man in the world."On a Sunday morning early in October 1971, he died of a heart attack at Zamora's News Stand on Paisano Drive in El Paso. He had gone there to look at magazines from Mexico City, and to talk. Two days later we buried him in El Paso's Evergreen Cemetery, which is bordered by the main railroad lines. It was a fresh fall day, with gray clouds drifting in a muted sky and a light breeze blowing. He had intended to "catch out" that morning for Odessa, 280 miles down the tracks.