Chapter 156: Harold’s Purple Crayon

There are books I read to my children decades ago and while many are forgotten, some are recalled, Goodnight Moon. Cat in the Hat. Especially Harold and the Purple Crayon has been on my mind recently, because I cannot wait to read it to my granddaughter and because it captures as nothing else quite does the work I am doing just now: world building.

You may recall the story. It begins: One night, after thinking it over for some time, Harold decided to go for a walk in the moonlight. A walk in the moonlight needs a moon. So Harold, purple crayon in hand, draws one. He needs a path to walk on. So he draws that, too. Step by step, Harold draws the world, his world, into being. Writers also get to do this. It is one of the most fun things we do.

I know writers for whom the greatest delight is in observing, in having work that allows them to be there. But that is not always possible. Things have happened, recently or long ago. Witnesses have died. Memories fade or are unreliable. Buildings have long since been torn down, and no physical evidence remains of the place and time. Yet you somehow need to get there, to see it as it was, fully. How else can you tell your story?

I need to go to a vanished New York. Specifically, I need to journey to New York as it existed on May 12, 1912, the day my grandfather disembarked from the S.S. Amerika along with another 1700 passengers in steerage, the lowest class of service, joined the throngs at the entry point of Ellis Island, and with his papers stamped, boarded the ferry that carried him across New York Harbor, to his new world. 

He was sixteen. He was barely five feet tall and it would be years before he began rounding into the portly man I knew – not until he began finding success selling butter and eggs.

I saw grandfather most every day when I was young and I loved him dearly. We lived upstairs from him and my fragile, prickly grandmother until I was fifteen, and even then we moved only four blocks away in Brooklyn. My grandfather was at once a familiar presence and a mystery. He revealed little about himself – about the place he came from, about his childhood, his passage to America and how he came to make a success of himself here, with a wife, three children, a business that survived the Great Depression (answer: people always needs eggs) and the big house he put in my grandmother’s name. Her dream house.

What little I knew came from my mother, who so worshiped her father that she became a notoriously unreliable narrator. My mother did not veer toward exaggeration so much as she elevated his story to hagiography. Never was there a smarter businessman than her father, a success story foretold when he was still a boy and, his father dead and his mother remarried to a man he hated, he began his own lumber business – hiring grown men to cut down trees. 

I wanted to believe this, too, and though I saw evidence of his achievements -- the big house, the two stores, his handsome wardrobe – it was not until many years later, in the course of reporting a story about the once-vibrant but since-vanished butter and eggs market in Lower Manhattan that I met one of the last of that breed. I mentioned my grandfather's name and he took a while to place him. “Harry Ackerman, Harry Ackerman,” he said, turning the name over in the dusty recesses of his memory until he found it. “Harry Ackerman. Small potatoes.”

Small potatoes? WTF? I dug a little more and began to learn more of that world, and where he fit in. Indeed, compared to the big players, the machers – Yiddish was the Lingua Franca of a market dominated by Jewish immigrants – he was “small potatoes.” To be more would have meant being someone else, someone whose memory I would struggle to embrace. But that still left the question of who he was, and how the New York he stepped into that Sunday morning in May so long ago shaped him.

I had originally planned to travel to the village he left behind, a village called Stratyn which in 1912 was a backwater in Galicia, a province in the vast and soon to crumble Austro-Hungarian Empire. Stratyn is now in Ukraine; the war made travel hazardous. But in time I came to see that while my grandfather’s story originates in Stratyn, it does not begin until the day he set off for America.

In the beginning I did not need a purple crayon. Unlike Harold, I subcontracted out the first stage of world building. I found the world’s foremost – only? – authority on the history of turn-of-the-20th-century Galician railway system and paid her to pour through her timetables and give me the route my grandfather likely took from Stratyn to Hamburg, where he boarded the Amerika. Her report was thorough, with the details on precise departure times, travel times, overnight stays, all the way across Poland and Germany. Her meticulousness gave me room to imagine this journey, at sixteen, alone. My imagination, however, was strained by the thought of what it must have been like, thrilling and frightening – the vaulted ceilings of the great station at Lviv, the bells announcing departures, the touts ready to prey on rubes like him. She even found what I had been unable to locate: his arrival documentation at Ellis Island; she was able to decode it; his name was impossibly garbled by the immigration official who granted him entry. She was also the one who told me that contrary to the stories my mother told, he did not leave behind his mother. Your grandfather, she reported, was an orphan. 

What else did he hold back from telling? He moved in with his uncle, aunt, cousins and his older brother, who had preceded him to America by a year. And while his brother, who now went by Charlie, found a factory job in the Bronx and fell into a marriage that broke his heart, my grandfather had bigger plans. My mother’s mythology would do me no good. 

Purple crayon in hand, I set off to see what he had seen.

Like Harold I started simply. He needed a moon. I needed dates. Ancestry.com had them. Ancestry, like chronology, is a writer’s BFF, and I am forever indebted to those wonderful unseen and unnamed people who made it possible for me to find among other gems: years of my grandfather’s census information; his World War I draft registration; his Naturalization papers. Those documents begat more documents: the address where he lived with his relatives gave me the names of the other people who lived in the same building and their census information which led to discovering where they came from (Galicia!) what they did (there was a butter and egg man in the building) as well as its proximity to the building where my grandmother lived (right around the corner! He couldn’t miss her).

I accumulated facts and together they began to form the outermost of the concentric circles that would create the superstructure of the world I needed to recreate. 

Early on I’m not assessing the facts so much as hoovering all I can and placing it all on a Google doc (pro tip #1: add a brief explanation to any links because otherwise you will forget why you added it). I can determine their value later. I note that he gives the census takers different birth dates. Which reminds me that we never celebrated his birthday, not even the one on his notarized and witnessed Naturalization form. Facts lead to questions and the questions begin taking me in directions I could not have otherwise anticipated which necessitate shifting my focus from the worm’s eye view to that of the bird.

I begin to read. Books. Scholarly articles. I read newspaper accounts of the days, weeks and months before and after his arrival. I need to understand who built the infrastructure of his new world and what shape it had taken. Who were the people who created the conditions that allowed him to turn from a past he would almost never want to talk about and so embrace America that he would accept no criticism of her? (Pro tip #2: if you’re using Google Books, add screen shots of the pages you think you might need; it forces you to discern what’s essential). 

The pattern repeats itself: a name surfaces; you pivot to do a quick dive on that person or event, and with your expanding knowledge, assess whether this new discovery will matter. A name may lead to another name, or to an otherwise overlooked moment that might figure in your world building. 

Like Harold you are driven by need: in order to accomplish A I need to draw/find B. And so on and so on.

I am halfway there. Or maybe less, I cannot be sure because I am still gathering, still discovering. I will know I am close to being done when the world I am searching for comes more clearly into focus. Right now it is still hazy. I don’t mind. Crayon in hand, I keep drawing.

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If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be tortur