In the last week of July in 1972, the news hit the papers. Many of the men were out on the road on their proletariat vacations, supporting their brothers in the U.A.W. by piloting American-made land yachts across the country, cruising to the Jersey shore, Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, Old Faithful, South of the Border, Niagara Falls. On these journeys, the wives collected brown glass mugs with clumsy wooden handles, ceramic toothpick holders, and salt and pepper shakers, all imprinted with the names of the places they visited.
The men had not even struck when the contract had run out. In good faith, they blindly entered an area as vast as the mid-Atlantic: binding arbitration. The contract was going to expire just before the beginning of the school year. With binding arbitration, their children would be sure to have clothes, shoes, milk and lunch money. The rent or mortgage could be paid. Those workers who wanted to could even take vacations. Their demands were few. They wanted cost-of-living increases for the length of the three-year contract, something they had not had since their 1956 contract. They wanted production to stop for two weeks in the summer so they could all be out of the plants during the hottest weather. The rank and file also wanted to make it clear that it did not support the most ludicrous proposal anyone had ever come up with—that the steelworkers should give up the right to strike.
There were rumors that management was going to try to write a no-strike clause into the new contract. The men never had any right to walk out except when a contract expired. This new proposal would take away the right altogether, except for strikes called over local grievances. There would never be a chance the men could strike on a national level. Though none of the men liked to strike, the very suggestion that the right should be eliminated was outrageous.
Samuel had heard it. It sounded crazy to him. He had told Mary Kate, “I don’t like it, but that union president, Petrovich, got his stupid ideas. I don’t understand him. He used to work in the mills.”
“Ya’ll the ones keep voting him in. This the third time.”
“It ain’t no ‘ya’ll.’ I ain’t vote for him.”
“You ain’t voted at all, pay all them dues, for what? You don’t even keep up with nothing they doing in that union,” Mary Kate said.
“All I know is, there ain’t going to be no need for no union ’cause there ain’t going to be no plant.”
“Don’t say that, Samuel.”
“It’s the truth. They going to keep taking and taking till the next thing you know we going to be paying to work there. Let me tell you something. The union always hold the threat of a strike over management head to keep the companies honest. Neither side want a strike. It sure ain’t a thing I ever wanted, but it’s the only chip we got to throw on the table. Take that chip away, and there go the game, hear me?”
The men worked for three months while waiting for the 1971 contract to come through. The agreement they reached with management did not give the men much. They received cost-of-living increases, but they were given twenty cents an hour the first year, and eleven cents the next two years. The no-strike clause was not in the contract.
Eight months lapsed between that agreement and the headline in the Buffalo Star: MASSIVE LAYOFFS IN STEEL. The caption over the lead story was, “Capital to lay off 2,500.”
Samuel was in the second week of his vacation when the news came. He had spent the time at home because he did not feel well enough to take his family anywhere. In the winter he had developed a chronic cough that a company doctor diagnosed as bronchitis. But Samuel had kept on working, breathing in coal dust, facing the Hawk on the lakefront, the heat of the coke ovens. By spring the cough was worse, but he never went back to the doctor. He worked right into the summer, worked himself into pneumonia. His first week of vacation he slept, Mary Kate shushing the children, chasing them from upstairs, making them tiptoe around. When the news came the second week, Samuel got out of bed.
He went to a meeting called at the union hall. “That lame duck Petrovich has sold us out!” a red-faced man yelled at the crowd of men. Samuel tuned the man out. He did not come to hear a speech. All he wanted to know was if he was going to have a job.
The news he was able to get he passed on to Mary Kate. “They going to be sending out letters right away, by the end of the week.”
“That quick?”
“Yeah, that quick. What’s the point in waiting? I wish they could have just told us today, face to face. It’s cowardly, waiting till so many men on vacation to announce the layoffs. I bet they knew about it before the contract came in.”
“It ain’t just Capital, Sam. It’s everywhere. You read the paper. One hundred thousand men,” Mary Kate said. “You think somebody sat back someplace and waited till now to tell ya’ll?”
“Hell, yeah. You think management was going to say anything like this at contract time? If they know it now, they knew it then. That’s what that binding-arbitration jazz was all about, getting us to work while they got that new contract.”
“They say this at that meeting?” Mary Kate asked.
“Something like that. I wasn’t half paying attention, but I ain’t no fool. You really think somebody sat down last week and decided all this?”
“I don’t know. They not going to lay you off, is they? You been there too long,” Mary Kate said.
“I’ll tell you this, they ain’t doing it just on seniority. I don’t think I’m going to be laid off.”
The men waited for the letters. Black and white, young and old, they were thrown into a lottery. Men who had worked five, ten, twenty years, those who had suffered burns, broken limbs, who had chronic bronchitis, emphysema, asbestos poisoning, black lung, all waited and hoped they would not be turned out.
Capital was “scaling down,” “cutting production.” Temporarily. No man wanted to believe he would be laid off. Even if he was, he would be called back. The truth was that Capital was firing 2,500 men. In order to compete with foreign steel companies, Capital had to cut back on the cheapest part of the machinery.
Germany had become prosperous again. It did not seem the Germans could rise from the broken brick of a nation, from the split will of a people. They did not want war, these new Germans of the West. The West Germans were allies, not enemies. The Japanese were no longer enemies either. Along with the West Germans, they were exporting steel made more cheaply in modern plants, plants built after World War II. With aid from the United States, from companies like Capital, Japan and West Germany had been able to climb aboard the capitalist juggernaut. Now, just twenty-seven years after the war, they were threatening to take over the controls.
The men did not talk about it among themselves. The women did.
“Is Moses worried?” Mary Kate asked Venita, looking off into the night as they sat together on the Taylors’ porch.
“Yeah, girl. He act like he ain’t. He say he ain’t going to be laid off.”
“Samuel the same way, say the same thing,” Mary Kate said.
“They both started there ’bout the same time. If one get let go, the other probably will too.”
By the end of the week no letter had come for Moses or Samuel. The lottery had spared them. It was a matter of luck, of a hawk swooping through their lives, of not being plucked up, not this time. Like all the men who had been spared, they felt guilty. But it was not guilt that caused them to cast their eyes away from their brothers. Their gratefulness, sanguine and sensual, as raw as the passion a man can feel for another man’s wife, caused them to look elsewhere, shamed them into silence.
For those who had not been spared—Jesús’s father, Billie Hines’s husband, and even Jake Zakrezewski, the patriarch of the Chug-a-lug clan—there was anger.
But a man whose anger is white-hot enough to consume the world can be made to stand in line by the church and the state so long—for food baskets, food stamps, used clothing, fuel assistance, unemployment checks, welfare checks, recertification—that his anger can be reduced to a single candlepower. His rage can become a sall
ow wavering flame, barely capable of illuminating the contents of an egg, and susceptible to the slightest wind.
17
Delivering
STANDING in the kitchen, Mikey was washing a bar of Ivory soap. He turned the fat cake over and over in his hands and watched as the blackness dripped from it, forming gray clouds in the sink.
“Your hands look like your daddy’s” was what his mother had said. And Mikey looked at the palms of his hands and hurried to wash them.
He hated the blackness that covered his father’s hands. Sometimes as his father prayed over the dinner table, Mikey kept his eyes open and watched his father’s hands. They were black all over, and the nails were stubby and split. He didn’t want them to touch him. But his brother and sisters didn’t seem to mind. They let him rub his dirty, ugly hands over their heads when he came home from work, and when the praying was over at the table, his father ate with those hands. Mikey watched to see if any blackness rubbed off on the soft white bread, but it never did.
Mikey didn’t want hands like his father’s. His father’s hands were those of an ignorant man, those of a man who helped fuel the coke ovens at Capital. They were the hands of a man who worked by the canal, at the coal stockpiles.
“Why don’t he wash his hands?” Mikey once asked his mother when he was five.
“He do wash them,” his mother said.
“Then why they never clean?”
“Your father work hard, you know,” his mother said. “He don’t got no easy job over ’cross in that plant, no clean job. So what, he ain’t got no pretty hands. He got the hands of a working man.”
“I’m not going to work in the plant when I grow up. I’m never going to have ugly hands like Daddy,” Mikey said.
His mother slapped his face. “Don’t you badmouth your daddy, boy. Don’t you know I’ll slap you into the middle of next week? What’s wrong with you, boy? Your daddy a honest man, not like some ’round here that wouldn’t take a job on a pie train. Don’t you never let me hear you say nothing bad about your father again or I swear before God I’ll wear you out.”
Mikey did not say another bad thing about his father, but he meant what he said. So when his mother said, “Your hands look like your daddy’s,” he went into a silent panic and rushed into the kitchen to scrub them.
It was only ink that covered Mikey’s hands, though, newspaper ink that had rubbed off when Mikey folded his papers in the living room. But Mikey couldn’t even stand that. He had to wash the blackness off, and once his hands were clean, he rinsed the blackness from the soap.
“It’s already a quarter to four. You don’t want to be late,” his mother was calling from the living room.
Mikey dried his clean hands and went out front to load the papers in his wagon. This was his first day. He was the first black boy the Buffalo Star had given this route to, but he was unimpressed. And as he began his route through All-Bright Court with his load of papers, he thought, It’s no big deal.
Halfway through his deliveries a shout came from behind him. “You new on this route?”
Mikey turned, reluctant to have his back to whoever was speaking to him. Just the week before, a meter reader from the gas company had been shot in the back on this block. Everyone said that Isaac did it, that he was strung out and needed the money for a fix. But the man had only three dollars on him.
Mikey saw Isaac every morning. As Mikey waited on Ridge Road for the bus to Buffalo, he saw Isaac and some other young men in front of the new liquor store that was opened on the site of what had been Dulski’s. They would be there when he went home in the afternoon, standing in the same positions as when Mikey left.
“Hey you, paperboy,” the shout came again.
An old man was on the porch of 125. He was wearing blue boxer shorts and a pair of yellow open-toed ladies’ slippers.
“Yes sir,” Mikey yelled.
“Where my paper?” the man asked.
Mikey walked over to the man’s porch. He looked harmless enough.
“What happened to that Polack boy?” the man asked.
“I don’t know, sir. I think his family moved away from here.”
“‘Sir, sir.’ What’s this ‘sir’ shit? And that white boy brung me my paper first. He delivered this row ’fore that one you was on.”
Mikey handed the man a paper. “I guess I came in the opposite direction, sir.”
“Seem like you should know my name. That white boy knew my name. And I knows yours. You the Taylor boy. I’s Woodrow. Shake my elbow.”
Mikey backed up a step. There was liquor on the man’s breath. He smelled as if he had been beaten with a juniper bush.
Woodrow took a step forward with his elbow out, and Mikey looked at the man’s feet. His toenails were yellow and curled under. Mikey thought they looked like the claws of some sneaky woodland creature.
“Go on. Shake it.”
Mikey shook his scaly elbow. “I’m Mikey Taylor.”
“I told you I knows you. I worked with your daddy in the plant when he first come up here. That been years. You wasn’t no bigger than a June bug when I first saw you . . .”
Mikey was no longer listening. He stared around Woodrow and into the house. “Didn’t someone else used to live in this house?”
“What, you crazy, boy? Of course other people lived in this house. You think I just come up from Mississippi and they built this house ’round me? Who you thinking of?” Woodrow asked.
“I don’t know,” Mikey said. “There was a boy and his mother.”
“You talking ’bout that nasty woman that had that boy what was killed. She been gone for years. Where the hell you been, boy? Somewhere with your nose in a book?”
“It’s just that I just thought of it. I—”
“I give up fish,” Woodrow said.
“Pardon me?” Mikey said, having trouble following the drunk man’s logic.
“Pardon you? What you think I is, a priest? I said, I give up fish. I caught me some fish out there on the lake last week and froze them, and when I took them out today, you know what happened?”
Mikey did not say anything.
“I say, you know what happened?” Woodrow said, raising his voice.
“No.”
“They come back to life, was swimming ’round in my kitchen sink, boy. I’m telling you, I caught hold of those bastards and threw they live ass out the back door. That was a sign from God,” Woodrow said.
“I have to be going,” Mikey said.
“I’m telling you it was a sign from God,” Woodrow said, but Mikey was already backing away.
Mikey thought about Woodrow’s fish story as he continued on his route. It shouldn’t have surprised him, he thought.
These people were so backward, always full of fantastic stories, trying to add a dimension, an invisible plane of magic. It was sad, really. They told fantastic stories because they had nothing, were nobody. They had to spin stories out of the air because they had no magic in their lives, no gods or myths. They were not at all like the Greeks and Romans who Mikey learned about in school. They had done nothing to civilize the world, to add to its history and culture. Why, there was only one black man in Mikey’s whole world-history book, Hannibal. And it was said that maybe he wasn’t black. He could have been a Moor.
These people in All-Bright Court reminded Mikey of a girl in his class at his old school. Every day this girl came to school wearing the same faded purple cotton dress. If she did not have that dress on, she had on a pair of worn green pedal pushers and a yellow cotton blouse with tattered sleeves. And she had a story. “I got nicer clothes at home. A whole closet of all kinds of pretty dresses and things, but my mama won’t let me wear them to school.”
This was how these people were, talking, talking, talking with their closets full of nothing.
18
Coveting
HE WAS Venita’s son, mornings. Gloria would bring him to 92 wrapped in layer upon layer of blankets. Each day when Ve
nita peeled back the layers she was amazed anew. It seemed to her he was an angel. When she lifted him from his covers she half expected to find a pair of wings entangled in them. Black ringlets covered his perfectly round head, and his soft and coppery skin shone where Gloria rubbed olive oil into it.
Gloria had married an older man, a man who worked at Capital, cleaning the company offices. She had married him three years after Jesús left. It was said that Jesús had been seen in Buffalo. He was living in his cousin’s store, had gone to Canada, to New York City. There were rumors he was coming back, that he would show up for the wedding. But he never did. If he were coming back, he surely would have come earlier, when Gloria was dating un jíbaro, fresh off the boat.
That man’s name was Regalo, and he claimed he could trace his heritage all the way back to Ponce de León. His bloodline was unbroken and led through the centuries to the night Ponce de Leon had lain with Regalo’s greatest of grandmothers. The sky, moist and warm, had pressed on him like a damp sheet, and hours after Regalo’s greatest of grandmothers was gone, Ponce stayed awake listening to the coquís sing. It was said, even then, that only the male frogs called out. That was the night Regalo’s greatest of grandfathers knew he would go searching for the fountain of youth.
Gloria thought Regalo was the saddest man she ever met. He would disappear for weeks, trapped in silences he could not break out of, and without explanation he would appear again. He wanted to go back to Puerto Rico, he would tell her. When his family had moved to America, they went on welfare. It was a source of shame for Regalo; his family had descended from such lofty heights. On la isla verde, if they could not have money, if they could not have happiness, they could at least have warmth and the coquís singing in the countryside. Gloria thought the place he missed must be heaven, and Regalo was an angel who had stumbled and fallen to earth.
The first time he hit her, she knew he was human. She had given him a cup of coffee that was not hot enough for him, and he had slapped her. She had let it go. He had not meant to do it, he said. It would not happen again. But that was how it began, and when she could no longer hide her bruises from her parents, they forbade her to see him. “He’s crazy,” they told her.
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