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A character in Black Spring

Tom Jordan

A woollen salesman and the old man's drinking companion, forever in the back of the tailor shop having the stains taken out of his trousers.

The book

Cover of Black Spring by Henry Miller
Black SpringHenry Miller, 1936

Ten hallucinatory riffs between Brooklyn's 14th Ward and the Paris streets — Miller at his most purely musical.

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At a glance

In the book
A woollen salesman for Endicott Mumford, and the old man's friend
Where he appears
"The Tailor Shop"

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Tom Jordan is a figure in Black Spring, the 1936 book by the American writer Henry Miller. He belongs to "The Tailor Shop", the longest of the book's ten prose pieces, which is about the narrator's years working for his father in a New York tailoring business.

He sells woollen cloth for a firm called Endicott Mumford, which makes him a supplier to the shop, and he is also the old man's friend and drinking companion. Most of what the book gives him happens in the busheling room at the back, where alterations and cleaning are done, and where he is generally half-dressed.

This profile is drawn from the Grove Press text of 1963, read in the Internet Archive's scan.

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

  • In front of the shop mirrorThe narrator arrives in the morning to find the crack woollen salesman standing in his underwear in front of the mirror, examining the pouches under his eyes.
  • The stains"Tom Jordan is always either taking off his pants or putting on his pants." Buttoning or unbuttoning his fly, having the spots removed and a fresh crease put in.
  • Waiting in the hallway at duskHe stands in the dark hall below waiting for the old man to come down. He has two women with him, and he is helping one of them fix her garter.
  • The night in the old man's bedThe old man comes home too drunk to manage and takes him to bed. The parents wrestle on the floor and a broomstick flies. In the cold morning light Tom Jordan is on his knees begging to be forgiven, and the narrator's mother does not forgive him.
  • The greeting that will not come outTwice the narrator stands in the shop with "Good morning" trembling on his lips and cannot get it said. The whole of the family's history arrives in his head instead, and Tom Jordan waits in his underwear at the far end of it.
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