I settled into my seat and looked around. The hall was filling up and the noisy crowd was growing noisier. The atmosphere was more reminiscent of a carnival than a public hearing at City Hall.
As I scanned the gallery behind me, the first housemate I spotted was Kevin O’Neill, his red hair a beacon in the sea of faces. He caught my eye and waved his sign enthusiastically. It read “Artistic Freedom for All.” I had asked him whether he didn’t feel compelled to maintain public neutrality as a bartender at Arnold’s, that hotbed of public debate and clandestine maneuvering, but he said, a bit indignantly, that bartenders had rights, too.
Sitting next to him were two more housemates, Al and Mel, who lived in the upstairs apartment over Kevin’s at the small apartment building I owned, known to my friends and acquaintances as the Catatonia Arms. Melanie Carter was a potter by profession and had recruited Kevin to swell the ranks of the artistic contingent in the gallery, which consisted of professional artists, local art teachers, and University of Cincinnati art students. Her first recruit had been her partner and roomie, legal eagle Alice Rosenberg, who could usually be persuaded to trade her briefcase for a protest sign in a good cause. If they hadn’t been sitting next to Kevin, I might not have recognized them at this distance because they, like many of their cohort in the artists’ bloc, had painted their faces and were sporting pigs’ ears.
Yes, pigs. This was 1988, Cincinnati’s bicentennial year, and a certain city council member had called this meeting to permit a public airing of grievances against the design for the Cincinnati Gateway installation down on the riverfront at Sawyer Point. Particularly the pigs.
The Contemporary Arts Center had formed a committee of prominent artists, philanthropists, and businesspeople to oversee a competition. By an overwhelming majority, the committee had chosen a design by Minnesota artist Andrew Leicester because it incorporated so many aspects of the city’s unique history. The entrance to the installation would feature four columns modeled on steamboat smokestacks to pay tribute to Cincinnati’s colorful past as a river city. The smokestacks would be surmounted by crowns for the Queen City. Atop each crown would dance a winged pig, trotters raised in hallelujah, to commemorate the city’s former incarnation as a meatpacking center, source of its one-time nickname, Porkopolis.
Some citizens were outraged. The mayor was not happy. The installation would incorporate seventeen aspects of the city’s history and identity. But it all came down to the pigs. And now, here we were, pro-piggers and anti-piggers, prepared to go mano a mano, or maybe I should say trotter a trotter, over these porcine angels. We had been assured that this meeting would make no difference; the design had been approved and the production had begun. Whatever was said here today, the pigs would stay. But we couldn’t let it go: like our piggy brethren, we loved a good scrap. Including me, Cat Caliban. That’s why I had taken time off from my budding career as a private investigator to attend this hearing.
And I was glad to be distracted from my misery. Here it was, still February, and something had detonated an allergy bomb in my head. I felt like one of those deep-sea divers who wore a helmet like an upside-down goldfish bowl and heard exterior sounds under the roar of my own hollow breath in my ears. People said things to me like “you should take an antihistamine for that, Cat” (I do) and “maybe you ought to try taking allergy shots” (I do). Now I was packing a handkerchief in both pants pockets and both handkerchiefs were soaked. “It’s nod fair!” I’d tell anybody who would listen, which meant basically nobody. “The damn trees don’t eben hab their damn leabs yed!” I was spoiling for a fight, and since I couldn’t take on Mother Nature, I would have to be content with vicarious participation in the Great Bacon Brouhaha.
At the front of the room, three city council members were wearing pig hats. One held a poster featuring a portrait of Miss Piggy and a caption that read, “All we are saying is give pigs a chance.” Behind me, taped to the wall, were banners that read, “Keep the Pigs — Throw the Bums Out” and “Don’t get taken. Back the bacon.” All around me were people wearing pig snouts and pig ears, holding pig balloons, and adding to the cacophony with pig squeals, oinks, and snuffling sounds (though some of these might have been contributed by my fellow allergy sufferers). I spotted a Miss Piggy impersonator, all blonde curls and false eyelashes like awnings, surrounded by reporters. The pig detractors were conspicuous by their sobriety or apoplexy.
My fourth housemate and business partner in Fogg and Caliban Investigations sat next to me, placidly enjoying the spectacle. Moses Fogg had refused to carry a sign, and following his gaze to a police officer attempting to mollify an irate participant, I suspected that, as a retired cop, his sympathies were all with the poor patrolmen tapped to keep order in this three-ring circus.
I was saving the seat between Moses and me for Kevin, who had promised to come down and provide the color commentary once the meeting got under way. As a bartender at Arnold’s, Kevin knew everybody who was anybody in Cincinnati’s high, middle and low society, so he wasn’t the next best thing to a program or cast list, he was better. I had to fend off prospective seat occupants, as well as people trying to guilt-trip me into moving in toward the middle of the row. If they persisted, I began sneezing.
Okay, I sneezed anyway.
I leaned across the empty seat to say to Moses, “Who knew pigs had such a following?” He grunted in response.
I felt an odd tickle on my hand and turned back to the aisle, prepared to defend my seat. Standing by my elbow was not an importunate latecomer but an honest-to-god pig, small and dark, with a low-slung belly, underhung jaw, and short spindly legs that seemed poorly engineered to provide both support and mobility. A deeply furrowed brow seemed to suggest worry. Then our eyes met, and I saw — what? Excitement? Curiosity? Terror? No, scratch that; this pig was not afraid. He was a pig-about-town, a sophisticated pig, a pig who was relishing his role as the star of the show. Then a city council member nudged him from behind and he was gone, promenading up the aisle in the direction of the podium.
Glancing up again to see if my housemates had caught the exchange, I saw Mel looking wistfully in the direction of the vegetarian contingent, who had been galvanized by the appearance of a live pig and were shouting accusations of animal abuse. My own daughter Franny, who was sitting with her cronies from the health food store where she worked, was contributing to the din. Mel and Al were vegetarians, so Mel’s feelings on the pig controversy were mixed. I sympathized. I was an uneasy meat-eater myself so receptive to arguments against commemorating Cincinnati’s bloody past as a slaughterhouse. If the vegetarians were plotting to rescue this pig and send him to live out his days in a sunny farmyard far from the butcher’s knife, I hoped they succeeded.
Meanwhile, the angle of my head when I looked up caused an ebb tide within that stemmed the flow to my runny nose. Temporarily.
Someone had given the instigating city councilmember a gavel — an ill-advised move in this contentious mob, I thought. He was banging for quiet while attempting to maintain his composure, as well as his purported neutrality. Eventually, the din died down to a few oinks and some soft snuffles and sneezes. He thanked everyone for coming and enjoined civility in the discussion to follow, which had about as much chance as the Reds winning the World Series. He first called on the City Manager, who had apparently drawn the short straw for repeating the bad news that the sculptural components of the gateway installation were already in production and could not be canceled, a message that made him wildly popular among the rowdiest contingent in the room.
Kevin slid in next to me, barking my shins with his artistic freedom sign.
“Who’s speaking now?” I whispered, giving my nose a swipe with my hanky. I’d ducked my head for the whisper but it was a bad idea.
He leaned to look past an obstructive pig’s ear. “That’s Ken Cross of the Queen City Bank. He’s on the Chamber of Commerce, maybe even chairs it.”
At the podium, Cross was reading from a written statement. He stood about medium height and boasted a full head of styled slate-gray hair swept back from his forehead, with matching heavy monitory eyebrows that he deployed to punctuate his harangue. He had been scrupulous to clarify that he was not speaking for the Chamber but only for himself. He predicted dire economic consequences for the future of the city if the pigs were installed in this monument to its illustrious past.
“Mark my words!” He raised a finger, glaring down at us over his reading glasses. But the words didn’t come. The finger hung in mid-air and his face contorted and spasmed. The crowd fell silent. Cross’s other hand shot up from below the podium just as a sneeze exploded into his handkerchief, blowing the pages of his speech into a small tempest around him. The crowd applauded and cheered, muffling the loud honk that followed. I applauded enthusiastically, gratified to witness another allergy sufferer in the spotlight.
Cross looked down at the fallen papers, re-set his glare, and raised his finger once again. No apology; I was impressed. “Mark my words!” he repeated. “We will become the laughingstock of the nation and the world. We will not be taken seriously by those whose opinion matters. When the time comes to choose a new factory site, much less a site for a world headquarters, do you really think that corporate executives and investors will select a city known for its frivolity, a city that has become an international joke? From long experience, I can tell you they will not. They will look for a city with aspirations for a distinguished future, and that means a city that knows how to celebrate its distinguished past.”
I became aware of a voice behind me, rising above the din of mutterings and oinks. “Oh, yeah, here it comes. Our distinguished past. And that’s all you’re going to get from this bicentennial crew, ladies and gentlemen — a fairytale. They’re all wallowing in pig shit, believe me, but they’re going to mount a spectacle they think will dazzle everybody and keep us from noticing.”
I turned around and spotted a reporter I knew from the Enquirer. He was scribbling in a notebook, and so were the two people sitting to his right. He nodded at me and went on writing. The person who had spoken appeared to be the man sitting to his left, arms crossed across his chest, a sardonic grin on his face. Middle-aged, average height and weight, unruly dark hair, bad shave, dark-framed glasses, open collar, no tie.
One of the scribblers, a woman, said, “Gotta admit, Max, as spectacles go, this is a pretty darn good one.”
The one on the end said, “And let’s don’t forget, if we weren’t sitting here, we’d be back at our desks writing one more story about Federated.”
I sympathized. Department store mergers are not inherently interesting, and if these folks were as bored with writing about our local one as I was with reading about it, I pitied them.
“You poor saps,” the cynic said. “Investigative reporting to you means ferreting out the latest bid. I’ll bet it’s riveting.”
“Sshh,” said the woman on the other side of him, a television news reporter I recognized. “I want to hear this.”
Since I also wanted to hear the next speaker, I tuned out the cynic and his cohort.
“Mimi Wechsler,” Kevin informed me. “Married to Wechsler Insurance. Owns an art gallery on Third Street.”
“— respectfully beg to disagree with you, Ken,” she was saying. Despite her height, she had a well-heeled gamine look that only some women could pull off, and she was one of them. “With all our world-class arts organizations, Cincinnati is poised to join the vanguard of American cities. This design, which was, let’s remember, the unanimous choice of the selection committee, will draw exactly the kind of recognition we want.” She nodded her head for emphasis or maybe to show off how her sleek hairstyle fell back into place following a disturbance. “It’s fresh and exciting and, yes, whimsical in part, but only in part. It beautifully captures the history and spirit of the Queen City. I for one want us to be known for our forward-thinking artistic sophistication, not for repressing artistic freedom of expression.”
“God forbid!” said the cynic behind me, but he must have raised his voice to be heard over the clatter of verbal approval all around us.
I applauded because Mimi Wechsler’s speech had been mercifully short. Another man was already making his way to the podium.
“This should be good,” Kevin said, shifting in his seat in anticipation.
“Why? Who is it?”
“His name’s Harlan Goose.”
I sat up straighter and craned my neck. “You mean there really is a Harlan Goose? I’ve seen that name on the op-ed page lots of times, but I figured it was just a nom de plume — or maybe a nom de guerre, since he was always complaining about something.”
“No, he’s real. There’s a whole family of Gooses. Some of them are even buried in Spring Grove.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “If you think only maidens and angels can drape themselves over funerary urns, that’s because you haven’t seen a drooping goose on a tombstone.”
“You’re making that up!”
“Go see for yourself.”
“So is he pro-pig or anti-pig?”
“Impossible to predict.”
The man at the podium contrasted with the previous male speaker, a corporate suit, in every respect. He wore corduroy pants, a corduroy jacket, a flannel shirt, and a porkpie hat, and both his graying blonde hair and his wild eyebrows were overdue for a trim. When the noise died down, he began. He had a distinctive gravelly voice, like muddy water running over shoals.
“They used to call this city Porkopolis. At that time, pigs put food on a lot of its tables and clothed its kids and paid its rent. And I’m not just talking about pork, though there was plenty of that around. There was also tallow for candles back when folks depended on them for light and pigskin for leather goods. And let’s not forget soap, which two fellows named Procter and Gamble made up there along the Mill Creek and sold all over the world.” He raised one arm in an expansive gesture. “Now they got a fancy new building downtown, a ‘world headquarters,’ they call it, and they also call it a gateway to the city. Well, sir, I’m here to remind you that pigs built that building!”
Someone shouted, “You tell ’em, Harlan!”
I sneezed and missed a sentence or two in Harlan’s harangue. Moses handed me a clean handkerchief and I accepted gratefully.
“And while we’re on the subject of buildings, let’s don’t forget that when the old courthouse burned down back in 1870, they moved the courts into one of the slaughterhouses, where the strong odor of pig permeated every trial.” He looked down at us over his bifocals. “There’s some folks say the local lawyers and judges have not been so aptly accommodated to this day.”
He waited for the laughter to die down and then raised his voice again. “So now, there’s folks who want to erase all that history — just wipe it out!” His arm turned into an oversized windshield wiper. “Well, I say, they wouldn’t any of ’em be sitting in their fancy offices, wearing their designer suits, and driving their BMWs if it hadn’t been for those pigs. So I say, give those pigs their due!”
The hall erupted in applause, whistles, squeals, and oinks. Someone was playing “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” on a kazoo. The cynic behind me had seized hold of the back of my seat to pull himself up to a standing position and applaud.
The next speaker, a woman in a business suit, had to wait several minutes before she could begin.
“Who’s that?” I asked Kevin.
“I think it’s Ruth Reynolds. She’s married to Reynolds of Reynolds Macauley, the property developer, but she’s a civic busybody in her own right. Chairs committees and so on. But she’s also Mimi Wechsler’s sister-in-law, if I remember correctly.”
Reynolds’s style might be described as matronly chic, definitely less dramatic than that of her female predecessor.
She had to repeat her opening line several times. “Mr. Chairman, I want to speak on behalf of the children.” Her gaze swept the crowd. “Your children, the future of the city. As many of you know, I have been privileged to assume responsibility for the citywide children’s events to celebrate the bicentennial. I can tell you that the children are eager to learn about and celebrate their heritage, and they are eager for role models. They like to have fun, of course, as we all do. But they take seriously their sacred responsibility to honor the city’s past in a way that will do it credit, both now and in the future.”
I almost missed the second half of the sentence, the cynic’s snort was so loud behind me. “Sacred responsibility, my ass,” he scoffed.
It’s also possible that my hearing was being affected by the cement hardening inside my skull while the excess dripped from my nose.
“I urge you to consider how you want your children and their children and their children to see the city and its history. The monument we are contemplating will stand for generations. This is not the time and place for levity.”
The applause from some sectors of the audience was drowned out by the vocal derision of others as Reynolds returned to her seat, her face serious, her head held high.
“Easter dinner should be interesting in the Wechsler-Reynolds family,” Kevin said under his breath.
Ruth Reynolds was followed by a spokeswoman for the vegetarians, who painted a gruesome picture of a nineteenth-century city where terrified hogs crowded the streets as they were driven to the slaughterhouses lined up along a canal that ran red with their blood. I saw a city councilmember lift the small pig to his lap and cover its ears with his hands. “Is this the part of our history you want to commemorate?” she asked. Her speech sobered the crowd, and while there was a shout of, “Aw, lighten up, why don’t ya?” it seemed tepid compared to the previous heckling.
At this juncture in the proceedings, a historian pal of mine, Malvina Deeds, rose to speak. Malvina and her friend Constance Perry were working on a book about Cincinnati’s Black history. A former history teacher and school principal, Malvina was no stranger to boisterous audiences, but I could tell she was nervous. Still, her race gave her some cachet with this crowd, who didn’t want to be accused of oppressing her or treating her unfairly compared with the white speakers.
She said that she didn’t have a strong opinion one way or the other about the pigs. As a historian, she inclined to favor representations that spoke the truth.
“But not simply the truth,” she added, “but the whole truth, because a half-truth is tantamount to a lie. So when I read about this elaborate installation, with its references to the first native occupants of this land and to the ways in which the river shaped both the land and the history of the city, I wonder why we have chosen to ignore the role of the river and the city in the shameful business of slavery. No, Ohio was not a slave state, but we profited from the evil traffic in human misery by transporting slaves from the markets upriver to the ones downriver, including the most notorious ones in New Orleans. And under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, we at best condoned and at worst abetted the return of hundreds of souls to slavery.
“I have no objection to paying tribute to the pigs. But why can we not also pay tribute to the more than 700 Black men who in 1862 volunteered to build fortifications to safeguard this city against a Confederate attack? Previously rounded up and incarcerated in labor camps for this purpose, when subsequently released and asked to volunteer, they did so, in spite of the city’s complicity with its slaveholding neighbors to the south and in spite of the treatment they had previously received. These men are heroes in my book. So while we are debating whether to leave the pigs in or out, I want us to think about others who have been left out.”
The room had not been this quiet all morning. Then someone stood and began the applause and soon the whole crowd was on its feet, applauding. Several city council members were late to join in because they were taking notes.
To break the mood, the pro-pig faction sent in one of its heavy hitters, a local artist of some national repute whose humor always made him a crowd-pleaser. He deftly acknowledged the wisdom of Malvina’s advice and then went on to rally his troops with punny calls for artistic freedom. Kevin resurrected his poster, which had been languishing on the floor, and waved it enthusiastically.
Under cover of the din, I blew my nose.
It went on like that for another forty minutes, long after every argument had been wrung dry. You might think that the crowd would have thinned out, but nobody left because nobody wanted to miss a moment sufficiently hilarious or dramatic or even tragic to make its way into city legend, should such a moment occur. But no fights broke out, and when it finally became clear that everybody who had wanted to have their say had had it, the chair gaveled the meeting to a close and the crowd departed, leaving city council chambers littered with pig tails and cardboard snouts.