Black Water Rising

by Attica Locke

  “What’d he look like?”

  “A white guy, ’bout your age, I guess, maybe older.”

  “Blond or brown hair? Was he wearing it short or long?”

  Darren shrugs. “He was wearing a baseball cap . . . and glasses.”

  “What kind of glasses? Like sunglasses?”

  “No, like regular glasses.”

  “And you’re sure it was the same guy you saw at the meet­

  ing? Even though it was dark out, and he would have been at least a couple of yards away from where you were laid out on the ground?”

  “The one who was looking at me funny when I left the union hall, that guy was wearing a baseball cap too, just like the dude in the cab of the truck. It was red on white . . . just like the dude in the truck.”

  “If you see him tonight at the meeting, you point him out to me, all right?” Jay says. “Let me handle the rest.”

  “Yes, sir,” Darren says, smiling through his chipped front tooth.

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  They leave the port in different cars, agreeing to meet in front of the union hall a few minutes before eight o’clock. The ILA park­

  ing lot is overflowing, and Jay sees at least two press vans parked by the curb out front. At a pay phone by the doors, he calls over to Evelyn’s and asks to speak to his wife. Without making a big thing of it, he had asked Bernie to stay out to her sister’s for the night. After what happened the other day, he doesn’t want her home by herself. Of course, the story he cooked up for her had something to do with a concern that she could go into early labor and he wouldn’t be anywhere around. Bernie agreed. But now, on the phone, she sounds tired and ready to go home. In the background, Jay can hear Evelyn cackling at George Jefferson on television. He asks Bernie to hold out for a few more hours. He’ll come get her before ten.

  Darren shows his union card at the door, introducing Jay as his lawyer; they let Jay in without a fuss. The hall is already at full capacity. Some of the men are starting to spill out through the double doors. Jay squeezes through a wall of bodies to get inside. The room is hot and packed, the air thick with cigarette smoke and the stench of grown men’s fears, men who have families to feed, rents and mortgages to pay. They are at least four hundred deep in the hall, black and white and a few brown, their skin tight and leathery, cured by the sun and the salt of the Gulf. They’re chain-smoking cigarettes and sipping free coffee and nibbling at iced cookies wrapped in paper napkins, their work caps tucked under their arms. They stand idle, staring at the stage, where a lone microphone waits.

  Jay follows Darren to the black side of the room, over to the left. He recognizes some of the faces. Men from the church meeting, men he met on the night of the shooting on Market Street. They pat him on the back, offer extended hands in his direction. Donnie Simpson is standing against the back wall, Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 153

  drinking black coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. Jay asks about his family, how the kids are holding up. Donnie says the kids are fine, but his wife hasn’t slept good since the shooting. It’s a couple more paydays before he can fix the broken window, and in the meantime they’re sleeping with a thin sheet of plywood between them and the outside world. He offers to get Jay a cup of coffee. Jay waves him off, says he’ll get it himself. Can he get Donnie a refill?

  He takes Donnie’s empty cup and cuts across the room, scan­

  ning every face, looking for one that’s familiar to him. Through the smoky air, he studies every beard and mustache, every hair­

  cut, the cut of everyone’s collar. He cannot picture any of these men behind the wheel of a black Ford LTD. And didn’t Darren say his guy was driving a truck? And wore glasses? The coffee station is a handful of thermoses lined up on a card table. There’s a photographer hovering nearby. He’s wearing khakis and Top-Siders and a Washington Post press badge around his neck. Apparently, this isn’t the only economy sweating over the outcome of one hot, smoky meeting in South Texas. The rest of the country waits too.

  Just then, the double doors to the union hall slam shut. Jay hears footsteps on the plank wood of the stage. They belong to a white man in his fifties, who’s graying about the temples in two patches that shoot out like tusks. He’s wearing a checkered button-down shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows and carrying a clipboard, a name tag pinned to his chest. He taps on the microphone twice then points to the crowd of men.

  “Somebody oughta push those doors back open. Otherwise we like to suffocate in here.”

  He waits for two obedient young men at the back of the hall to prop open the double doors using a folding table and a couple of chairs; then the man onstage continues, leaning into the micro­

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  phone. “Brothers of the International Longshoremen Associa­

  tion,” he says. “I just got off the phone with—”

  “Name please!” a reporter yells.

  “Pat Bodine, B-O-D-I-N-E. President ILA, Local Fifty-six, Houston, Texas.” He waits, making sure the press gets it right. Then he smiles and says, “I just got off the phone with Wayne Kaylin, president of OCAW, Local One-eighty, not fifteen min­

  utes ago. If we walk, gentlemen, the oil and chemical workers walk with us.”

  The whole black side of the room erupts in applause, plus a good number of whites in attendance. If Jay had to guess, he would put the glee at a little over 50 percent, a thin but real majority. The other men in the room, the ones not clapping, hooting, or hollering, are shaking their heads to themselves or cutting eyes at each other. One of the men down front shouts,

  “What about the Teamsters!”

  “Hold on now, hold on,” Mr. Bodine says, waving his hands out across the crowd, signaling everybody to hush. “Hold on now. The Teamsters ain’t come down with a final word yet. But they’re our brothers in labor as much as OCAW. I think in the end they’ll come around.”

  “I heard some local companies are talking about locking the Teamsters out, to put pressure on us,” the man standing down in front says, hands tucked in the back pockets of his Lee jeans.

  “That is a possibility, yes, sir. Something we all got to think about.”

  The head-shakers start mumbling among themselves, slowly drowning out the pro-strikers. Their voices blend into an ugly murmur, full of piss and dissent; it spreads like a contagious dis­

  ease across the humid room. Suddenly Jay is not so sure of his original count, just where the majority lies. He takes particu­

  lar note of the white head-shakers in the room, looking for the Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 155

  driver of the black Ford. Darren, who is also scanning the faces in the hall, his eyes sweeping from the foot of the stage all the way to the back of the hall. When Jay makes it back to the Broth­

  erhood side of the room, the kid whispers, “I don’t think he’s here, Mr. Porter.”

  “All right, all right,” Mr. Bodine says onstage, trying to hush the crowd. “We all know what we’re here to do tonight. And I want to give everyone a chance to talk, them that want to. But let me start by putting my two cents in, speaking on behalf of the board, and also just my personal opinion on the thing.”

  He shifts his clipboard from one arm to the other. “Now, look here. I love this union. I’m proud of my brothers. I’ve seen us come too far to let this kind of thing tear us apart. Overtime is an issue for all of us. Black, white, whatever. We cannot let the stevedores think that we’re still operating as two unions. ’Cause if we do, it’s not going to stop here. Every issue that comes up in the future, every negotiation, they’re gonna frame the argument in terms of race. Divide and conquer. We’ve got to send a mes­

  sage right now, once and for all.” He holds up his index finger to make his point. “We are one union.”

  There is halfhearted clapping across the room, as if no one is exactly sure what being one union means. A black man with a Brotherhood cap on his head holds up his hand. “And the rules got to be the same for e
verybody now!”

  The pro-strikers clap for one of their own.

  “That’s fucking bullshit,” one of the head-shakers calls out. “I don’t get paid what my boss gets, and he don’t get what his boss gets. That’s just the way of the world. People got to work their way up. Everything ain’t gonna be handed to you,” he says, look­

  ing directly at the black side of the room.

  “This ain’t about no handout,” one of the black workers says.

  “I been with Gulf Port Shipping nearly fifteen years now,” a 156 Attic a L o c ke

  man in steel gray coveralls says. “I’ve seen white men younger than me get promoted to foremen or some other management gig. And I’m still out on the docks.”

  “And now we all gotta get out there two, maybe three hours early just to make sure we get a slot for the day,” another black worker says. “Y’all getting paid for that and we not. That’s bullshit.”

  “Hey, man, I’m not management either,” one white man says.

  “I’m out there pulling and loading just like you. But you don’t hear me complaining, asking for special treatment.”

  “You a fool, then,” somebody hollers.

  “Let’s do this one at a time, please,” Mr. Bodine says, pointing to a white man with a drinker’s complexion and thin, greasy hair.

  “I got a kid, seventeen,” the man says, “coming out of Galena Park High School next year.” There are a few catcalls in the room from former graduates. “My boy wants to follow his dad­

  dy’s footsteps. And I want him to have it better than me. If he’s got to put in the extra time, he ought to get paid for it. Period.”

  There is a lot of applause for the sentiment, a man looking out for his son.

  Mr. Bodine points to another man in the room, an older white man, a few years shy of retirement. “We go back a ways, Pat. I voted for you twice. But I think it’s goddamned irresponsible to be talking about a strike right now.”

  This gets the head-shakers stomping on their feet and clap­

  ping. One man stands on a table. “You put us on the picket line tomorrow, and there’ll be a couple hundred Mexicans working our jobs before noon. You mark my words. The ones that’s coming over the border, they’ll scab. They don’t fucking care.”

  More applause from the head-shakers.

  “Fuck scabs,” the man in the back says. “That ain’t even hardly Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 157

  our biggest problem. I know you’re busy up here at the union offices, Pat, but when was the last time you actually set foot on the docks? You see what’s going on here?” He looks out across the room. “Come on, y’all, somebody’s gotta say it.”

  There are nervous faces around the room, men looking down at their shoes, biting their fingernails.

  “Containers,” the man says. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “Now wait a minute, Tom,” Bodine says.

  “Another five, ten years, and it’s all machines loading contain­

  ers onto the ships. We got merchants hiring their own people now, loading the containers right at their home base, getting rigs to drive ’em to the docks, already set to load. The machines do the rest. The Teamsters aren’t stupid. Everybody needs a driver. But the rest of us . . . every one of us in here might be out of a job.”

  This silences everyone, the pro-strikers and the headshakers.

  “That is a trend we’re seeing,” Bodine says, keeping his voice even and calm, even as the dark, wet spots under his arms are spreading fast. “But we believe that full-scale containerization, at seventy-five percent or more, is a good ways off.”

  “The stevedores are hiring less and less every year,” Tom says.

  “Tell the men the truth, Pat. If you’re gonna ask them to dig their own graves, they might as well know what it’s all about.”

  The reporters in the room are scribbling furiously. The photographer from the Washington Post takes a picture of Bodine on the stage, his jaw slack and sweat on his upper lip. “Tom, you’re scaring these men unnecessarily,” Bodine says. “This is about equal wages, not the merchants’ shipping practices. And this thing with the containers . . . it’s out of our control.”

  The room goes silent a moment, the men made painfully 158 Attic a L o c ke

  aware of their precarious situation, the fact that their leader can’t protect them, not really.

  Jay looks at his watch. He’s hot and ready to go home. He hasn’t seen the man from the black Ford, nor has Darren Hayworth seen the man who orchestrated his beating; there is no way of knowing if they’re the same person. He could stay here all night, listening to the rhetoric being lobbed back and forth, but again, this is not his fight. By about a quarter after nine, they start passing the ballots around, even while people are still talking and arguing. A team of union officers passes around shoe boxes full of mismatched ink pens. There are two voting booths on the right side of the room, in front of the stage. A line quickly forms. Bodine, onstage, says he’ll hear from just one more speaker. He calls on a young black man who says he can’t worry about containers and machines and what’s gon’ happen in five years. He needs a good wage . . . right now. Jay tells Darren he’ll be in touch. The kid nods, grabbing a ballot and a Bic pen from a passing shoe box. Jay turns and leaves the hall alone. Out front, most of the reporters are at the pay phones. Jay hears the words “economic crisis,” “a blow to Hous­

  ton’s golden age,” even one man asserting that “there’s no way they’ll vote to strike.” Jay lights a cigarette and waits for a guy from the Post to finish up a call. When the phone is finally free, he dials over to Evelyn’s place.

  “She’s not here,” Evelyn says, right off the bat.

  “What?”

  “Johnny drove her home, ’bout an hour ago.”

  Johnny Noland is Evelyn’s on-and-off-again boyfriend.

  “I told B I was picking her up,” Jay says.

  “Well, I guess she didn’t feel like waiting around. And Johnny was looking for any excuse to get out of here.”

  Jay can hear the television going in the background. Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 159

  “She got home okay?”

  “I’m sure,” she says.

  “She call you?”

  “I’m sure she’s fine.”

  Jay sighs. He can feel himself starting to sweat again.

  “Look, Johnny ain’t right about a lot of things, but he wouldn’t just leave her out on the curb,” Evelyn says. “I’m sure he saw her to the door.”

  “Right.”

  “What you so testy about anyway?” He can hear her sipping at something on the other end, ice cubes clinking against glass.

  “Bernadine told me you broke into your own house. You not running some kind of insurance scam, are you? Don’t you get my baby girl in trouble now.” She takes another sip of whatever it is she’s drinking, sucking an ice cube into her lonely mouth and rolling it around. It occurs to Jay that she is quite possibly drunk.

  “Good night, Evelyn.”

  He hangs up the phone, fishes another dime out of his pocket, and dials home. When his wife picks up, she’s short of breath and in a sour mood. “Where’s that white fan, the little plastic one you brought home from the office?”

  “It’s in the hall closet,” he says, relieved to hear her voice.

  “Don’t fool with it. I’ll get it down when I come home.” He bites at the meat of his thumb. “You all right, then?”

  “I’m eight months’ pregnant, Jay,” she says. “I had the air con­

  ditioner on an hour before I saw you’d left it set to eighty degrees. I tell you every time, it costs more money to cool the place down than if you just left it at seventy-six the whole time. It’s like an oven in here.”

  “I won’t touch it again, I promise.” He smiles. The men are starting to trickle out of the meeting, in twos and 160 Attic a L o c ke

  threes, their heads down, caps pulled low over their brows. Jay ca
n’t read their faces, only their sluggish gaits, the heavy sense that something solemn passed through this hall tonight. Bernie practically reads his mind. “They gon’ strike, Jay?”

  “I don’t know, baby,” Jay says into the phone. “I don’t know.”

  He checks the rearview mirror a few times on the way home, but there’s no one on his tail tonight, and he feels a familiar sense of relief at the end of a long summer day, the bright white sun safely tucked in for the night and the black air around him cool enough to breathe. He cuts the AC to save on gas and rolls down both his windows, leaning across the front seat to reach the one on the passenger side. The air is soupy, fogging up the windshield. Jay wipes at the inside of the glass with the palm of his hand. Then he turns up the radio.

  On 1430 AM, there’s a gal on the line making a breathy latenight confession. Wash Allen is holding all other calls, trying to talk her through it. “I know you got something to say now. Old Wash is right here. I’m listening.”

  “I don’t know if I can tell it,” the girl says. She’s young, maybe eighteen. There’s a jump and shake in her voice, like she can’t sit still, like a kid who’s had to pee for an hour. Finally, she spills it, a sordid story about messing around with her mother’s boyfriend, a man twice her age. They planned to tell her mother a dozen times, but never got around to it. “It just never seemed the right time.” And now, without saying a word to her about it, “That man gone and asked my mama to marry him.” She starts crying.

  “I just don’t know what to do.” Should she confess to her mother or take it to the grave, facing every Christmas and Fourth of July and Juneteenth picnic in the foreseeable future knowing where that man has put his hands?

  Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 161

  At first, Wash is kind of on her side, making a point that the man ought to have known better, that he had no business foolin’

  with a kid, a girl as young and impressionable as this one quiver­

  ing on the line. “He’s a snake, Wash, he is,” she says. “I told him we got to tell Mama, we got to. And he saying if I do, he gon’ tell my husband what I been up to, clubs I be hitting when he’s out of town.”