32. By the Sweat of Your Brow

Thomas Carpenter is illiterate. He can neither read nor write in any language in the world. Nevertheless, every morning on his way to work he buys one of the country’s newspapers, folds it several times, stuffs it into his pocket, and proceeds to his work. It remains with him until he goes to bed, when he throws it into a basket or out the window into the street.

Thomas Carpenter is of neither English nor American origin. He is a Syrian, the son of Syrians, descended from Syrians. But that is what he called himself after a year in America. His original name was Ṭannūs Najjār.[115]

Ṭannūs emigrated at twenty. Fate placed him in a village in Vermont, where he remains to this hour, peddling with a satchel. During his first years, he earned a living by laboring in an ironworks.

In those early years, when his honor was still Ṭannūs ibn al-Najjār, he wished to know nothing of America except how to draw money from it. Whenever he saved a few dollars, he went to a Syrian more experienced in that country who helped him send the sum to his parents. He continued in this fashion, working and helping his family, until he grew weary of the factory.

He saw certain satchel peddlers whose travels brought them to Vermont and envied their livelihood and lives. Before their wealth and fine appearance he saw himself as a wage laborer dirty in clothes and person. The convulsions of ambition to join their rank played inside his head. He wrestled with this care until he attained his desire. He left the factory and its hardships with nearly two hundred dollars as his spoil, enough to begin selling and take hold of the ascending paths of progress.

Ṭannūs Najjār’s first ambition toward advancement involved two things: first, changing his name; second, purchasing a new suit from his feet to his neck.

From that day, ambition pronounced Mr. Ṭannūs Najjār to be Mr. Thomas Carpenter, and so he remains today.

Mr. Carpenter wrote his family that he had advanced in life. The factory held no ambition; commerce was more profitable and better for his future. He had begun ascending through its stages: he now sold with a satchel and, God willing, would soon own a store.

In a note at the corner of the letter, his honor dictated to the person writing for him that henceforth the name by which he was known had become Thomas Carpenter.

When this emigrant’s letter reached his family, how greatly they rejoiced at his success! But they exaggerated when telling people about him. His mother explained the change from an Arabic to an English name by saying that her son had become American in every meaning of the word.

Before long, however, his success saddened them. The money he had been accustomed to send at every opportunity ceased to arrive. They assumed this was a natural consequence of establishing his business. His father’s letters carried some complaint about the condition he suffered from poverty. He filled them with prayers that God would grant his son such success that the earth in his hand turned into gold, then asked God to make tenderness stir in his heart so that he would not forget his parents, who after God had no one but him.

At first, Mr. Carpenter’s new profession was hard. During the first days it yielded him no profit at all. Many forces struggled within him: should he return to the factory, where his earnings were secure, or continue training himself in the methods of peddling despite not “centing”—earning a single cent—during those first days?[116]

But a traveler must eventually reach a station. A first sale brought him a profit of several dollars and encouraged him to persist. A second and third followed. He gained customers whom he knew and who knew him, learned which kinds of goods sold more briskly than others, learned to ask a high price in order to secure a small profit, and so forth.

There is no need to say that Mr. Carpenter’s profits were greater than the wage he had received in the factory. Still, he felt that the factory money possessed a greater blessing, while the satchel profits flew away by some route he did not know. Selling required propriety, fine dress, gifts for women customers, and much else. Yet he remained in the profession because he had grown accustomed to it and loved it. He was no longer forced to hear the alarm clock’s warning at five in the morning. Instead he rose late each day; when the weather was bad, he stayed in his room idling. Sometimes he appraised his goods and counted his profits, and sometimes he telephoned customers and made appointments to show them his merchandise.

In the early years—may God bless them—letters from Ṭannūs Najjār went to his family with every post. Later, Thomas Carpenter answered ten of his father’s letters all at once, apologizing that he could not write and found someone to compose a letter for him only after long intervals. The early letters contained frequent money orders in small sums; afterward, the remittances became very few and rare.

During the years of catastrophe that befell Syria, Mr. Carpenter comforted himself with hopes.[117] He supposed that his father’s family had no escape from death by starvation. At first their condition pained him and tore his liver apart, but the days erased this feeling. The belief settled in his mind that his family had no hope of rescue.

He therefore watched for the war’s end and the road’s reopening so that he might take the first ship to Lebanon, gather up his father’s property, and place the house, land, and vineyard entirely in his own name. But for the famine, these would have been divided into six portions, since he was one of his father’s six children.

Mr. Carpenter remained upon this hope for four full years. In his mind, his father, mother, and younger siblings were all counted among the dead. When he mentioned one of them he said, “the late so-and-so,” as though he had received their formal death notice. He told himself that the living was better than the dead—meaning by “the living” himself and by “the dead” every member of his family.

Many emigrants, numbered in the thousands, have taken ship for Syria. Mr. Carpenter, who had promised himself that at war’s end he would take the first vessel carrying passengers from New York to Syria by way of France, Italy, or England, nevertheless remains in Vermont today.

The reason is that, a month after the armistice, he received a letter from those who were dead in his mind. His father, mother, and younger siblings had all been resurrected alive from the departed catastrophe. His father told him that they had sold everything, down to the furniture, in order to preserve their lives. Had the Allies been delayed a single week, they would all have fallen victim to hunger. Then he thanked God that his son was in America: he had therefore been able, after selling everything, to borrow one hundred liras from the neighbors in the hope that his son Ṭannūs in America would repay them when the road reopened.

To this day he works diligently to help his family, as he did when he was Ṭannūs working in the factory. Yet if anyone mentions the catastrophe in Syria before him, he immediately denies it and curses the newspapers that carried reports of famine to the emigrants, for those stories were pure invention. Once he met a friend in another town and learned that twenty members of the friend’s family had died and that the village had lost ninety percent of its population. Mr. Carpenter tried to persuade him that every report he had received was a journalistic lie and fabrication, with the survival of his own family serving as proof.

When he met another friend, their conversation turned to news of home. He said he was very pleased that his family remained alive and deeply displeased with his first friend, who was going to Lebanon to inherit from his family. It was as though the man had asked for it in heaven and found it on earth: his family had died for him to inherit, and no brothers remained to divide the estate.

He ended the conversation by saying there was no good in inheritance. A man ought to enjoy what his own hands gathered, for the best thing a person eats is what has been kneaded with the sweat of his brow.[118]

NOTES

[115] Najjār means ‘carpenter.’ The English name is a literal translation of the Arabic surname, while Thomas approximates the common Levantine Christian name Ṭannūs.
[116] Haddad uses the immigrant coinage yisannis, formed from English ‘cent’: the new peddler does not earn even a cent.
[117] The story refers to the First World War famine in Mount Lebanon and neighboring districts, especially severe from 1915 to 1918. Blockade, wartime requisitioning, crop failure, and a locust invasion combined in mass hunger and death.
[118] The title echoes Genesis 3:19, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’ Thomas turns the maxim of earned sustenance into a moral defense only after his anticipated inheritance fails to materialize.
