Working

by Studs Terkel

  Then they just didn’t want to give us the promotion which was due us anyhow. They just don’t want to give you anything. The personnel man, all of them, they show you why you don’t deserve a promotion. The boss, the one we converted—he came on board, as they call it, after we sweated to meet the deadline. So he didn’t know what we did. But he told us we didn’t deserve it. That stayed with me forever. I won’t be bothered with him ever again.

  But our grievance man was very good. He stayed right on the case. We filed a civil rights complaint. Otherwise we woulda never got the promotion. They don’t want anybody coming in investigating for race. They said, “Oh, it’s not that.” But you sit around and see white women do nothin’ and get promotions. Here we’re working and they say you don’t deserve it. The black men are just as hard on us as the white man. Harder. They get angry with you because you started a lot of trouble. The way I feel about it, I’m gonna give ’em all the trouble I can.

  Our boss is black, the one that told us we didn’t deserve it. (Laughs.) And our union man fighting for us, sittin’ there, punchin’ away, is white. (Laughs.) We finally got up to the deputy director and he was the one—the white man—that finally went ahead and gave us the promotion. (Laughs.) So we went from grade 4 clerk-typist to grade 5 processing clerk.

  We had another boss, he would walk around and he wouldn’t want to see you idle at all. Sometimes you’re gonna have a lag in your work, you’re all caught up. This had gotten on his nerves. We got our promotion and we weren’t continually busy. Any time they see black women idle, that irks ‘em. I’m talkin’ about black men as well as whites. They want you to work continuously.

  One day I’d gotten a call to go to his office and do some typing, He’s given me all this handwritten script. I don’t know to this day what all that stuff was. I asked him, “Why was I picked for this job?” He said his secretary was out and he needs this done by noon. I said, “I’m no longer a clerk-typist and you yourself said for me to get it out of my mind. Are you trying to get me confused? Anyway, I can’t read this stuff.” He tells me he’ll read it. I said, “Okay, I’ll write it out as you read it.” There’s his hand going all over the script, busy. He doesn’t know what he’s readin’, I could tell. I know why he’s doing it. He just wants to see me busy.

  So we finished the first long sheet. He wants to continue. I said, “No, I can only do one sheet at a time. I’ll go over and type this up.” So what I did, I would type a paragraph and wait five or ten minutes. I made sure I made all the mistakes I could. It’s amazing, when you want to make mistakes, you really can’t. So I just put Ko-rect-type paper over this yellow sheet. I fixed it up real pretty. I wouldn’t stay on the margins. He told me himself I was no longer a clerk-typist.

  I took him back this first sheet and, of course, I had left out a line or two. I told him it made me nervous to have this typed by a certain time, and I didn’t have time to proofread it, “but I’m ready for you to read the other sheet to me.” He started to proofread. I deliberately misspelled some words. Oh, I did it up beautifully. (Laughs.) He got the dictionary out and he looked up the words for me. I took it back and crossed out the words and squeezed the new ones in there. He started on the next sheet. I did the same thing all over again. There were four sheets. He proofread them all. Oh, he looked so serious! All this time he’s spendin’ just to keep me busy, see? Well, I didn’t finish it by noon.

  I’m just gonna see what he does if I don’t finish it on time. Oh, it was imperative! I knew the world’s not gonna change that quickly. It was nice outside. If it gets to be a problem, I’ll go home. It’s a beautiful day, the heck with it. So twelve-thirty comes and the work just looks awful. (Laughs.) I typed on all the lines, I continued it anywhere. One of the girls comes over, she says, “You’re goin’ off the line.” I said, “Oh, be quiet. ‘I know what I’m doin’. (Laughs.) Just go away.” (Laughs.) I put the four sheets together. I never saw anything as horrible in my life. (Laughs.)

  I decided I’d write him a note. “Dear Mr. Roberts: You’ve been so much help. You proofread, you look up words for your secretary. It must be marvelous working for you. I hope this has met with your approval. Please call on me again.” I never heard from him. (a long laugh.)

  These other people, they work, work, work, work and nothing comes of it. They’re the ones that catch hell. The ones that come in every day on time, do the job, and try to keep up with everybody else. A timekeeper, a skinny little black woman. She’s fanatic about time. She would argue with you if you were late or something. She’s been working for the government twenty-five years and she hadn’t gotten a promotion, ’cause she’s not a fighter.

  She has never reported sick. Some days I won’t come. If it’s bad outside, heavy snow, a storm, I won’t go. You go the next day. The work’s gonna be there. She thinks my attitude is just terrible. She’s always runnin’, acts like she’s scared of everybody. She was off one day. She had a dental appointment. Oh, did the boss raise hell! Oh, my goodness! He never argues with me.

  The boss whose typing I messed up lost his secretary. She got promoted. They told this old timekeeper she’s to be his secretary-assistant. Oh, she’s in her glory. No more money or anything and she’s doing two jobs all day long. She’s rushin’ and runnin’ all the time, all day. She’s a nervous wreck. And when she asked him to write her up for an award, he refused. That’s her reward for being so faithful, obedient.

  Oh, we love it when the bosses go to those long meetings, those important conferences. (Laughs.) We just leave in a group and go for a show. We don’t care. When we get back, they roll their eyes. They know they better not say anything, ’cause they’ve done nothing when we’ve been gone anyhow. We do the work that we have to do. The old timekeeper, she sits and knits all that time, always busy.

  I’ve been readin’. Everything I could on China, ever since he made that visit. Tryin’ to see how people live and the ideas. It changed me a lot. I don’t see any need for work you don’t enjoy. I like the way the Indians lived. They moved from season to season. They didn’t pay taxes. Everybody had enough. I don’t think a few should control everything. I don’t think it’s right that women lay down and bear sons and then you have a few rich people that tell your sons they have to go and die for their country. They’re not dying for their country. They’re dying for the few to stay on top. I don’t think that’s necessary. I’m just tired of this type of thing. I just think we ought to be just human.

  ORGANIZER

  BILL TALCOTT

  My work is trying to change this country. This is the job I’ve chosen. When people ask me, “Why are you doing this?” it’s like asking what kind of sickness you got. I don’t feel sick. I think this country is sick. The daily injustices just gnaw on me a little harder than they do on other people.

  I try to bring people together who are being put down by the system, left out. You try to build an organization that will give them power to make the changes. Everybody’s at the bottom of the barrel at this point. Ten years ago one could say the poor people suffered and the middle class got by. That’s not true any more.

  My father was a truckdriver with a sixth-grade education. My uncle was an Annapolis graduate. My father was inarticulate and worked all his life with his hands. My uncle worked all his life with his mouth and used his hands only to cut coupons. My father’s problem was that he was powerless. My uncle’s problem was that he was powerless, although he thought he was strong. Clipping coupons, he was always on the fringe of power, but never really had it. If he tried to take part in the management of the companies whose coupons he was clipping, he got clipped. Both these guys died very unhappy, dissatisfied with their lives.

  Power has been captured by a few people. A very small top and a very big bottom. You don’t see much in-between. Who do people on the bottom think are the powerful people? College professors and management types, the local managers of big corporations like General Motors. What kind of power do these guys really have
? They have the kind of power Eichmann claimed for himself. They have the power to do bad and not question what they’re told to do.

  I am more bothered by the ghetto child who is bitten by rats than I am by a middle-class kid who can’t find anything to do but put down women and take dope and play his life away. But each one is wasted.

  “I came into consciousness during the fifties, when Joe McCarthy was running around. Like many people my age—I’m now thirty-seven—I was aware something was terribly wrong. I floundered around for two years in college, was disappointed, and enlisted in the army. I was NCO for my company. During a discussion, I said if I was a black guy, I would refuse to serve. I ended up being sent to division headquarters and locked up in a room for two years, so I wouldn’t be able to talk to anybody.

  “At San Francisco State, I got involved with the farm workers movement. I would give speeches on a box in front of the Commons. Then I’d go out and fight jocks behind the gym for an hour and a half. (Laughs.) In ’64, I resigned as student body president and went to Mississippi to work for SNCC. I spent three years working in the black community in San Francisco.

  “At that point, I figured it was time for me to work with whites. My father was from South Carolina. We had a terrible time when I visited—violent arguments. But I was family. I learned from that experience you had to build a base with white people on the fringe of the South. Hopefully you’d build an alliance Between blacks and whites . . .”

  I came to East Kentucky with OEO. I got canned in a year. Their idea was the same as Daley’s. You use the OEO to build an organization to support the right candidates. I didn’t see that as my work. My job was to build an organization of put-down people, who can control the candidates once they’re elected.

  I put together a fairly solid organization of Appalachian people in Pike County. It’s a single industry area, coal. You either work for the coal company or you don’t work. Sixty percent of its people live on incomes lower than the government’s guidelines for rural areas.

  I was brought in to teach other organizers how to do it. I spent my first three months at it. I decided these middle-class kids from Harvard and Columbia were too busy telling everybody else what they should be doing. The only thing to do was to organize the local people.

  When I got fired, there were enough people to support me on one hundred dollars a month and room and board. They dug down in their pockets and they’d bring food and they’d take care of me like I was a cousin. They felt responsible for me, but they didn’t see me as one of them. I’m not an Appalachian, I’m a San Franciscan. I’m not a coal miner, I’m an organizer. If they’re gonna save themselves, they’re gonna have to do it themselves. I have some skills that can help them. I did this work for three years.

  The word organizer has been romanticized. You get the vision of a mystical being doing magical things. An organizer is a guy who brings in new members. I don’t feel I’ve had a good day unless I’ve talked with at least one new person. We have a meeting, make space for new people to come in. The organizer sits next to the new guy, so everybody has to take the new guy as an equal. You do that a couple of times and the guy’s got strength enough to become part of the group.

  You must listen to them and tell them again and again they are important, that they have the stuff to do the job. They don’t have to shuck themselves about not being good enough, not worthy. Most people were raised to think they are not worthy. School is a process of taking beautiful kids who are filled with life and beating them into happy slavery. That’s as true of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year executive as it is for the poorest.

  You don’t find allies on the basis of the brotherhood of man. People are tied into their immediate problems. They have a difficult time worrying about other people’s. Our society is so structured that everybody is supposed to be selfish as hell and screw the other guy. Christian brotherhood is enlightened self-interest. Most sins committed on poor people are by people who’ve come to help them.

  I came as a stranger but I came with credentials. There are people who know and trust me, who say so to the others. So what I’m saying is verifiable. It’s possible to win, to take an outfit like Bethlehem Steel and lick ’em. Most people in their guts don’t really believe it. Gee, it’s great when all of a sudden they realize it’s possible. They become alive.

  Nobody believed PCCA53 could stop Bethlehem from strip mining. Ten miles away was a hillside being stripped. Ten miles away is like ten million light years away. What they wanted was a park, a place for their kids. Bethlehem said, “Go to hell. You’re just a bunch of crummy Appalachians. We’re not gonna give you a damn thing.” If I could get that park for them, they would believe it’s possible to do other things.

  They really needed a victory. The had lost over and over again, day after day. So I got together twenty, thirty people I saw as leaders. I said, “Let’s get that park.” They said, “We can’t.” I said, “We can. If we let all the big wheels around the country know—the National Council of Churches and everybody start calling up, writing, and hounding Bethlehem, they’ll have to give us the park.” That’s exactly what happened. Bethlehem thought; This is getting to be a pain in the ass. We’ll give ’em the park and they’ll shut up about strip mining. We haven’t shut up on strip mining, but we got the park. Four thousand people from Pike County drove up and watched those bulldozers grading down that park. It was an incredible victory.

  Twenty or thirty people realized we could win. Four thousand people understood there was a victory. They didn’t know how it happened, but a few of ’em got curious. The twenty or thirty are now in their own communities trying to turn people on.

  We’re trying to link up people in other parts of the state—Lexington, Louisville, Covington, Bowling Green—and their local issues and, hopefully, binding them together in some kind of larger thing.

  When you start talking to middle-class people in Lexington, the words are different, but it’s the same script. It’s like talking to a poor person in Pike County or Missisippi. The schools are bad. Okay, they’re bad for different reasons—but the schools are bad.

  The middle class is fighting powerlessness too. Middle-class women, who are in the Lexington fight, are more alienated than lower-class women. The poor woman knows she’s essential for the family. The middle-class woman thinks, If I die tomorrow, the old man can hire himself a maid to do everything I do. The white-collar guy is scared he may be replaced by the computer. The schoolteacher is asked not to teach but to baby-sit. God help you if you teach. The minister is trapped by the congregation that’s out of touch with him. He spends his life violating the credo that led him into the ministry. The policeman has no relationship to the people he’s supposed to protect. So he oppresses. The fireman who wants to fight fires ends up fighting a war.

  People become afraid of each other. They’re convinced there’s not a damn thing they can do. I think we have it inside us to change things. We need the courage. It’s a scary thing. Because we’ve been told from the time we were born that what we have inside us is bad and useless. What’s true is what we have inside us is good and useful.

  “In Mississippi, our group got the first black guy elected in a hundred years. In San Francisco, our organization licked the development agency there. We tied up two hundred million dollars of its money for two years, until the bastards finally came to an agreement with the community people. The guy I started with was an alcoholic pimp in rhe black ghetto. He is now a Presbyterian minister and very highly respected.”

  I work all the way from two in the morning until two the next morning seven days a week. (Laughs.) I’m not a martyr. I’m one of the few people I know who was lucky in life to find out what he really wanted to do. I’m just havin’ a ball, the time of my life. I feel sorry for all these people I run across all the time who aren’t doing what they want to do. Their lives are hell. I think everybody ought to quit their job and do what they want to do. You’ve got one life. You’ve got,
say, sixty-five years. How on earth can you blow forty-five years of that doing something you hate?

  I have a wife and three children. I’ve managed to support them for six years doing this kind of work. We don’t live fat. I have enough money to buy books and records. The kids have as good an education as anybody in this country. Their range of friends runs from millionaires in San Francisco to black prostitutes in Lexington. They’re comfortable with all these people. My kids know the name of the game: living your life up to the end.

  All human recorded history is about five thousand years old. How many people in all that time have made an overwhelming difference? Twenty? Thirty? Most of us spend our lives trying to achieve some things. But we’re not going to make an overwhelming difference. We do the best we can. That’s enough.

  The problem with history is that it’s written by college professors about great men. That’s net what history is. History’s a hell of a lot of little people getting together and deciding they want a better life for themselves and their kids.

  I have a goal. I want to end my life in a home for the aged that’s run by the state—organizing people to fight ’em because they’re not running it right. (Laughs.)

  BOOK SEVEN

  THE SPORTING LIFE

  EDDIE ARROYO

  There was an accident at the track today and I don’t know really how the boy came out. At Hawthorne today. His horse fell and he just sailed. I don’t know if he was conscious or not. The ambulance picked him up.