TAYLOR JOHNSON’S LIGHTNING MAN



October, 2008. I’m here in the photo booth on Ellis Island, waiting for you, lightning man.

You’re sailing from London on the ocean liner New York. Your ship docks in one hour, one hundred years ago. We’ll miss each other by a century, I know. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m here anyway, waiting. I have something to tell you.

After you disembark, follow signs to the gift shop. I’m on the first floor, near the water fountains, past the ladies’. Make a right at the elevator. The medical ward where you spent most of your time on the island is closed to visitors now. The room where you argued your case before the Board of Special Inquiry is locked, visible only through glass windows. But the site where you had your photograph taken on Ellis Island is open to tourists, marked by a photo booth. There is still one camera on Ellis Island, and I’m sitting in front of it. I’ll meet you here.

I’m wearing a homburg with a stiff brim and a suit just like yours. The tourists mistake me for a living exhibit, a reenactor. “Who are you?” they ask me. I tell them to guess.

I came up on the train, two days spent on the rails you once rode the other way. This morning, I told my mother I was taking a ferry to Ellis Island. She said, “We didn’t come that way. It was Canal Street for us.”

“I know.”

“There’s no one up there for you,” she said, hanging up.

But I haven’t come looking for family. I’ve come to meet you, lightning man.

* * *

As this is the lightning-rod season, it is the opportune time to put the homeowner on his guard against the wiles of one lightning-rod man, who is now going his rounds in the lower wards equipped with a “reel” of twisted white “ribbon,” some alleged insulators, a few gilded points and spikes, and an enormous quantity of impudent loquacity.

—The Louisiana Electrical Review, January 30, 1909

* * *

You protected us from fires.

My mother invoked you when the weather turned, when hard rain shorted our window units, when jellyfish sucked up into Gulf Power’s turbines fried the circuitry and we lived for days in the dark. When the generator at the corner of Lee and Empire blew, when the neighbor girl dropped her hair dryer into the kitchen sink and the surge protectors tripped one after another down the row of flats, my mother said, “Where’s that lightning man?”

When a storm tracked off the Gulf to New Orleans, she didn’t call on Jesus. She clasped her hands in front of the standing fan, and she said, “Hear us, lightning man.” We climbed into the bathtub, put the mattress there on top and hunched against it for breathing room. We listened to shingles pull away from the roof, to the trees outside popping like cans, to the Keasey family next door singing “Hosanna,” crammed into their tub same as us. We said, “Come on, lightning man. Knock at our door, lightning man. Keep us safe, lightning man. We’re calling you.”

After, in the giddy, permissive days following any storm, I used bungee cords for jump ropes. I skipped with the other kids, singing, “Lightning man, lightning man, where’s your rod?” We tapped coastguardsmen on the shoulder to whisper the question and ran shrieking. We couldn’t have said why it was funny, but we were certain it was.

We made our own lightning rods. We lashed coat hangers to the gutter. We tied Christmas ornaments to brooms with butcher’s twine and dangled them out windows. If the ornament twisted left, a storm was coming. If it twisted right, our mamas were.

We all knew your story. We’d heard it from our mothers over dinners of macaroni eaten before the standing fans. The year was 1920. You appeared in a thunderstorm on the porch of the landlord’s flat. You held a staff of iron from which hung a crystal ball, the sort used for divination. You knocked. The landlord mistook your knocking for thunder. Perhaps your knocking was thunder. You let the thunder do your knocking for you.

You sold lightning rods, iron rods. A dollar a foot. The glass balls you’d throw in free. Four rods would cover the flats, protect them from lightning fires. Forty feet of iron. Forty dollars.

The landlord refused. The landlord was warted, pimpled, bespectacled, every kind of ugly. The landlord was tight as a mule’s ass with his money.

One year later, the flats caught fire. Inside, twenty-four people. Women and children. Four rods would have covered the flats. Forty dollars.

Most ended the story there, with a suck of air through their teeth, one shake of the head. “We may be stingy, but we ain’t cheap.”

Not my mother. My mother went on.

You died in 1932, she said. You were entombed in St. Louis Cemetery No. 3, east of New Orleans. The undertaker, when he stripped your body for embalming, discovered you had been all along a woman costumed with a man’s suit and a smoker’s cough, a Canadian with no U.S. citizenship and no family to speak of.

My mother liked your story because she thought it illustrated the progress made by women of her generation. “These days, you wouldn’t have to hide that way. You could sell a lightning rod wearing a skirt. Might sell more that way.” I liked your story because I suspected even then you weren’t a woman or a man. You were a lightning man with a knock like thunder. I felt close to you.

The other mothers called their children away when my mother started talking about the lightning man. “You’re making things up,” they said. They disapproved of my mother. They disapproved of her flat chest. Twelve years ago, a doctor took my mother’s breasts. Medicare covered her surgery, but they wouldn’t pay for implants. Implants were cosmetic, they said. My mother didn’t mind, claimed she looked younger without the jugs and felt lighter besides. She walked around in denim cutoffs and sleeveless tops with Hello Kitty screen prints, which left the skin of her midriff bare. Going flat, she called it, like pop left too long in the sun.

“You’d do better with a pair of gel forms,” the other women told her when she went out in a dress that hung lower in the front than it was meant to hang. “You’d do better with two balls of newspaper and a nursing bra.”

My mother ignored these suggestions, disdained conformity of any sort. Don’t wear pumps, she told me, they’ll ruin your feet. Don’t wear makeup, it’ll ruin your skin. If you own a car, you should know how to fix one. Don’t rely on anybody outside yourself for anything, and especially not on a man.

When I was fourteen a doctor told me if I wanted my period I’d have to eat more. I’d have to turn myself into a woman if it was a woman I wanted to be. Driving home from that appointment, I boasted to my mother, “I’m too thin to be a woman.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “You’re as much a woman as I am.” For my mother, woman was a word as vast and inescapable as ocean. It encompassed anything. Nothing I did—not binding or wearing boxers or finding an outboard motor on the road and hauling it home—could shake her conception of me. This was the freedom she offered.

I ate less after the doctor’s appointment. I didn’t want to turn myself into anything. When my breasts and hips swelled, I ran them off the way my mother ran off any man looking to lay her down without making a home for her. I swam off the levees in boys’ trunks. I kept my body slim. Stock, like water boiled over bone. I figured you, lightning man, had done the same.

We both prayed to you. When the wind picked up, my mother put her hands together, the knobs of her thumbs pressed against her lips—“Don’t let me down, lightning man.” I prayed for other things. I prayed you were real. I prayed I would find you.

* * *

This is the history of an honest, industrious woman, an enlisted soldier in the army of labor, who found herself almost hopelessly handicapped by a lack of female attractiveness and encumbered with a man’s mustache, fighting for fifteen years a losing battle. Then, as her only alternative, she dons male attire, smoothing pleasantly and profitably the rough road ahead of her.

—“Trousered Woman Arrives at Ellis Island,” Los Angeles Times, October 12, 1908

* * *

I searched for years. I looked in my middle school history books, in St. Louis Cemetery, in the records of the New Orleans Historical Society. You weren’t there. I found you finally at the Louisiana State Capitol. Your story and photo sat side by side within a brochure for Ellis Island. The History Center at Ellis Island was exhibiting the portraits of Augustus Sherman—chief registry clerk, inveterate bachelor, amateur photographer. Augustus Sherman photographed the detained—those waiting for travel tickets, for money, for approval from the Board of Special Inquiry, for the male relative without whom an unmarried woman could not enter the country.

He photographed an Italian seamstress, her hair braided into a crest at her scalp.

An Italian bagpiper. A Romanian shepherd.

Dutch children, boy and girl. Three Dutch women.

Three Slovakian women.

Three Georgian Cossacks, employed by the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show.

Three women from Guadeloupe, en route to Canada.

Eleven Romanians, Gypsies, all deported.

One German stowaway, his nude torso adorned with tattoos, deported.

Eleazar Kaminetzko, twenty-six, Russian, Hebrew, SS Hamburg. Vegetarian.

Vladek Cyganiewicz Zbyszko, strongman, posing on a black wooden stool, one fist at his temple, one fist at his lower back.

Mary Johnson, fifty, came as Frank Woodhull, October 4, 1908, dressed fifteen years in men’s clothes.

There you were.

Frank Woodhull—Rakish in a slouch hat. Stolid. Broad-shouldered. Gray about the temples. Blessed with a mustache, a low-toned voice, size nine feet, and rheumatism, which caused your knuckles to swell and stiffen. Men’s hands, the papers praised you.

Frank Woodhull—Protestant, Acadian, Canadian, moneyed. You were easy for them to love.

And they did. “A desirable immigrant.” “Blameless.” “Law- abiding.” “Adopted men’s clothes to get on in the world.” “Able, by adopting men’s dress, to live a clean, respectable, and independent life.” “Dresses as a man to find honest occupation.” “Refined and somewhat cultured in her manner.” “An alien, but not an undesirable one.” “A testament to strength of mind and determination near superhuman.”

* * *

Women have a hard time in this world. They are walking advertisements for the milliner, the dry goods stores, the jewelers, and other shops. They live in the main only for their clothes, and now and then when a woman comes to the front who does not care for dress she is looked upon as a freak and a crank. With me how different. See this hat? I’ve worn this hat for three years, and it cost me just three dollars. What woman could have worn a hat so long?

—“Mustached, She Plays Man,” New York Sun, October 11, 1908

* * *

My mother knows her own mind, same as you.

Last year, the Plaquemines Parish Support for Survivors Society gave my mother one thousand dollars toward the cost of implants. She took that money to Hell or High Water Tattoos, along with a print of Audubon’s—“Bunting, Painted; 1827.” She paid the artist to ink the buntings there on her chest. It took twelve hours, three sessions, fifteen hundred dollars. She lay on her back with her eyes closed while the artist with her needle detailed one branch of a fruiting persimmon tree and four birds in different stages of feeding or flight.

After her third session, my mother came home brimming. One scar was now the undercurve of a bird’s wing, the other a lip of shadow cupping a ripe persimmon.

I asked her—“Can I take your photo?”

“What would you want to do that for?” she said, but I thought, from the flush of her cheeks, that she was flattered.

I took her portrait with an old Kodak Brownie, developed it in Tupperware baths in the narrow toilet room of our apartment, submitted it to Nikon’s Emerging Photographers contest. It won second place. They want to print it in their winter magazine, one full glossy page. I told her. I thought she’d be pleased.

“I didn’t know you’d sold it,” she said.

“I didn’t sell it. I submitted it. I want people to see it, to see you.”

“People see me all the time. See me at the grocery store. See me pumping gas.”


Copyright © 2022 by Morgan Thomas