by Robert Ward
“That’s fine,” he said. “Well, I feel a little tired. Guess I’ll take me a nap.”
“Okay,” I said.
He got up slowly, nodded to me again, then turned and headed toward the stairs.
I sat at the table, stunned by what I’d learned. I had heard nothing of this and wondered why my father hadn’t told me about it long before. That was his way, of course. He rarely told me anything about his own life. I knew virtually nothing about what he had done in World War II, beside the fact that he’d served in Pearl Harbor after it was bombed. I knew very little about his relationship with his father, except that it had been tense and sometimes violent … but now I wondered about that as well. Could this kind, sweet, and rather sad old man have been a violent drunken maniac? I supposed it was true, but it seemed like a long time ago and very far away. Maybe I could get to know him …
But it wouldn’t be easy. I knew he’d sleep for a long time. About an hour after he’d gone to bed, I went upstairs to get a book from my room, and I could hear him through his door, listening to his ship-to-shore radio. I suddenly realized that he never wanted to come to shore. Locked in his bedroom (read “bunk”) with his radio on, he was only nominally home. Grace had told me many years ago that he was happy only aboard a ship, and now I understood that playing it this way, radio on, door locked, lying in bed (with a secret bottle?), he never had to “come home” at all.
On the third day he was home, Cap came out of the bedroom, dressed neatly in a white shirt, a dark blue tie, dress pants, and the always shined shoes. I ran into him as I was leaving the bathroom.
“How you doing, boy?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said. “I’m doing fine. Going out?”
“Yep. Gotta go check up on a couple of things downtown at the Seamen’s Union Hall. Ship’s going out in a week or so, and I want to see if I can get me a berth.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling deflated. He was going away again, and I doubted if I would learn another thing from him. I started to walk past him when he tapped me lightly on the shoulder.
“You want to go down with me?” he said.
“Really?” I said.
“Sure. We can get us some lunch down there. Awww, but you probably got better things to do than hang out with a buncha old broken-down sailors.”
“Not at all,” I said. “Just let me get my clothes on.”
“Fine,” my grandfather said. “See you downstairs.”
The Seamen’s Hall was one streetcar and one bus trip away. We caught the yellow Number 8 streetcar, the last of its line, just down the street on the York Road. I remember walking down its wide aisles, aisles that felt like a spacious hallway. My grandfather sat near the window and looked out at the houses and the Boulevard Theater as I stared at the people on the streetcar. Workers, housewives, a man in a seersucker suit, with scuffed shoes … curiously out of place in the coming winter. Negroes, whites, two children playing peekaboo with each other, they all seemed happy, as the old yellow streetcar rolled along. In my hand was the pink transfer ticket to the bus, which I dreaded. The streetcar rocked along, pleasant, gentle, yet fast enough. The new Baltimore city buses made a horrible coughing sound as they started, and their sickening fumes always floated in the window, making me nauseated, as did the incessant rude braking of the bus. I could not understand why the city tore up the tracks, why the foul-smelling, ugly buses were replacing the streetcars. I asked my grandfather about it. He looked at me and rolled his eyes.
“Progress, son,” he said. “They are putting them in ‘cause they’re cheaper to maintain, and they can go out to the suburbs. That and Henry A. Barnes, the traffic genius. Fella they brought in from New York. He made all the streets one way, and that doesn’t work for streetcars. So you are riding on the last one.”
I was astonished how much he knew about it. All my life my family had portrayed my grandfather as a kind of heathen, a natural man who knew the sea and nothing else. At home, so the myth went, he was a drunk and a fish out of water. I’d never thought of him as a man of feeling or intelligence. I had heard my father say many times, “Cap never even reads a newspaper.” And yet it wasn’t true, or at least it didn’t seem true to me now. He had talked movingly of his own father’s death, he was knowledgeable about the transportation changes in our city … who knew what else he might tell me?
We rode on down the line, and as we crossed into the Negro district, I began to see whole families sitting out on their white marble stoops. Badly clothed in the cold weather, their faces unblinking as they stared into the traffic, I wondered for the first time who they really were behind the masks. I thought of Rosa Parks and of the Reverend Gibson, and wondered for the five hundredth time why my grandmother hadn’t yet embraced the civil rights movement. Again I felt that chill in my chest. What would my grandfather think of all this? I had never heard him speak of Negroes at all, but it was easy to imagine that he wouldn’t like her being involved. Maybe her reluctance had something to do with him. With their marriage.
We rode up Eastern Avenue, past the cheap and ugly little shops. It seemed funny to me; my grandmother and grandfather were working-class people, but their home in Waverly was far nicer than the ones we passed on Eastern Avenue. And the people here, mostly sailors and steelworkers, who worked down at the Sparrows Point plant, were rougher looking, with sloped jaws and shapeless shirts they wore hanging out of their baggy, shiny-cloth pants. The women on the street wore tons of makeup and bright red rouge that made them look tawdry.
Even then I knew that the people I saw on Eastern Avenue were different from my family, though we were only one generation away from poverty. During the Great Depression Gracie had given piano lessons in the homes of the rich, over in Guilford, and Cap, when he was unable to catch a ship, had worked in F.D.R.’s federal parks program. But my family, especially my grandmother, had read books, had listened to great music and fought to understand it, and now as I passed by the endless poor whites loitering on the street, I gave a silent prayer of thanks to God that Gracie had been my grandmother, for without her I would have been here myself, with the lost, faceless crowd on Eastern Avenue.
The International Seamen’s Union Hall was a huge dark building near the corner of Broadway and Register Avenue. The place looked dreary and depressing from the outside, but once we went in, I began to understand why my grandfather wanted to hang out there. All over the place men played checkers and dominoes, and swapped stories. As my grandfather went into the big, ramshackle place, men called to him, smiled, shook his hand.
“Hey, Captain Rob.”
“ ‘Morning, Robert.”
“Hey, Cap, you gonna get to run down to the Gulf on the Saint Esmerelda next week?”
“Going up north, clear to Newfoundland, with a ton of coal, Cap. You oughta consider making the run.”
Everywhere he went my grandfather was sought out, greeted with respect, humor, and affection.
I was amazed. The place was not only where you signed up for your next job, but it was a club, a clearinghouse for gossip, legends, stories. As we walked through the large, airy hall, gap-toothed men with leathery skin came up to my granddad and asked, “This your grandson?”
“You gonna become a sailor, Bobby?”
“Think this lad is ready for his first voyage?”
I found myself answering questions, smiling. “Yeah, I’d like to get out to sea. This summer, I’m gonna get Cap to hire me on.” A little man with a broken nose smiled and looked into my face.
“Lemme tell you, you’ll never go to sea with a better man than your granddad. Cap’n Rob knows every buoy in this bay, can sail the whole thing with his eyes closed, and I been with him when he’s done it.”
Which got a great happy laugh from my grandfather, who I suddenly realized was enjoying himself immensely.
As for me, I was so surprised by the friendliness and the camaraderie in the place that I could barely contain myself.
I was delighted by the men’s obvious affection fo
r my grandfather and thought once again of how his life had been presented to me, as a loner, no friends, only attached like a barnacle to the bow of his ship. Instead, he seemed to have a rich, full life among his sailor friends. I remembered going to my father’s office once when he worked at IBM. The place was quieter than a cemetery, the camaraderie among the men nonexistent. My father had a little cubicle where he worked, and a sixty-five-year-old female assistant whose face had the look of a prune. White shirts, rep ties, short hair: you had to conform to be an IBM man. My father hated the place and lasted only a year. I vowed that day I would never take my father’s path, no matter what.
My grandfather smiled and walked across the room to the registrar, who gave him a green card. “Now let’s check the board and see what jobs are coming up,” he said.
We walked across the room, past the tables and the men playing cards and talking. I saw one man waving his arms, obviously telling some huge lie, as a thin, sallow-faced man in denim held his stomach and laughed.
Cap and I walked to the end of the hall and looked up at the big board. First were the names of the ships—the Excalibur, the Worthy, the Athena, the Cape Washington …
“See, you got the names … then the type ships. You got your container ship, your liberty ship, your victory ship. Then you got the runs … foreign, coastal, which means runs sometimes all the way down to New Orleans, and then you got intercoastal, which is inland waterways … might be just down to Norfolk. Then you got the type jobs in the next part … the boatswain, maintence, master, O.S., which is ordinary seaman and wiper. Now that’s one hot job.”
“And you’re the captain?” I asked.
“I been a pilot and a captain. See, a pilot takes the boat through all the inland waterways. The captain can’t do that alone.”
He shook another man’s hand, and I felt an overwhelming affection and pride for him. All my life I had heard only what problems he had, and yet he could do this work, work my own father could never do … dangerous and hard work … and I thought that I now understood why my grandmother put up with him. In this world he was a man, and there was no doubt about it.
Things were so friendly, so chummy in the union hall that when they turned bad, I was unprepared. My grandfather was taking out a chaw of chewing tobacco from his pocket when he stopped abruptly and got a hard look on his face. His entire body stiffened, as though he were coiling himself, ready to strike. I blinked, confused, then looked to my left and saw Jerry Watkins come walking across the room. He had a couple of his pals with him, one younger, in his forties, and one Cap’s age. Jerry himself was pushing sixty-five and he had a gut, but he was still big and rough, with a shock of striking white hair and a big ruddy face. He looked over at my grandfather and said nothing, but then he eyed me and gave a derisive little smile.
I felt my face redden, and I knew at once that Buddy Watkins and his brother Nelson had been laughing at me at home. Of course, they’d told Jerry about roughing me up and how my grandmother had to save me.
The whole encounter was over in half the time it takes to write about it, but it left its impression on both myself and my grandfather. I felt foolish, cowardly, and vowed that someday I’d get back at them.
“Big Jerry Watkins,” Cap said. And his breath came hard.
“Jerk,” I said.
“Tough guy, long as he’s got his boys around,” my grandfather said.
I didn’t know exactly what he meant by that. I imagined he was referring to one of their legendary bar fights, but I hoped I’d never have to see one. My granddad was too old for that kind of thing, and the Watkins family, scum that they were, was capable of anything. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all to see Nelson Watkins with a knife or a gun.
As we left the union hall, a big man ran up to my grandfather and the two of them hugged. He was maybe a year older than my grandfather, and he had a blowsy red face. When he turned I saw a piece of his left ear was missing.
“Hi, Rob. This young Robert?”
“Yessir,” my granddad said. “Bobby, this is Terry Banks.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’ve talked to you on the phone, Mr. Banks.”
Terry smiled; one of his front teeth was missing, too. “Yeah, I guess we have at that. Rather talk to you than Grace, that’s for sure.”
He laughed, but Cap barely cracked a smile.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Banks said. “Your grandmother is a good woman. But she has a little problem with us boys having fun.”
“Grace don’t take much to fun,” Cap said. “You doing all right, Terry?”
“Get me a ship I’ll be doing better. Delores is driving me crazy. She got a new TV set, and she wants every damned thing they sell on it.”
“Which is why I will never have one,” my grandfather said. “They’re just boxes made to sell junk, far as I can see.”
He reached into his pocket and to my surprise pulled out a ten-dollar bill.
“This help you?”
“Hey, Cap, I can’t take that,” Banks said, making a face.
“Don’t see why not,” Cap said. “You buy the beer next time, okay?”
Banks smiled bashfully and took the money. He looked at me and nodded. “See a lot of your granddad in you. And that’s a good thing. See you ‘round, fellas.”
He ambled off, an old sailor with the seaman’s wobbly gait. I looked at my granddad.
“Old friend?”
“The oldest. Getting to be fewer and fewer of the old timers left.”
We headed out through the big doors and walked into the suddenly chilly winds from the harbor.
“Let’s go down and look at the ships,” I said. I didn’t want the afternoon to end.
We headed down Broadway, once one of the finest streets in old Baltimore. My mother had lived in this area of old Southeast as a child, and I remembered her telling me about the fabulous Easter Parades on Broadway, with “floats which towered to the sun.” Now the blocks were inhabited by poor Negroes. Old bottles of rotgut lay broken in the street, and a few mangy dogs ran in a pack down the center grass plot, which grew wild with crabgrass.
My grandfather and I walked down past Aliceanna Street, where a boy with red hair threw a ball to an older, heavyset man who smiled down at him in a tender way that somehow crushed my heart. The sea air was strong, and I breathed in deeply.
“How long have Mr. Banks and you been friends?” I said.
My grandfather rubbed his jaw. “Reckon that would go back even before we had the union … long time ago.”
We walked past a shop that sold Polish hot dogs. The smell of the grill was delicious, and I wanted to stop and eat, but not if it meant interrupting the story.
“Didn’t plan on getting involved in no union stuff. But Terry and a couple of others did, and pretty soon there weren’t no other way to go.”
“You were involved in starting the Seamen’s Union,” I said. “But you never told me about that.”
“You never asked,” he said, turning toward me. There was an edge to his voice.
“Well, okay. Fair enough. I’m asking now,” I said.
“Other reason I don’t talk about it is it was a bad time. I mean we got a union going, but at a heavy price. You sure you want to hear all that old history?”
“Yes,” I said. “All of it.”
“Well, guess the best way of starting is to say that things wasn’t always like you seen in there today. Guys happy to see each other, friends. Not that it’s perfect now, not by a long shot. But in the beginning, it was really dog eat dog … this was back in 1929. In those days, there was no union.”
“How’d you get jobs then?” I asked as we walked down the narrow streets toward Fells Point.
“Tell you how. Jobs was given to you by Mr. William Feeny. He was the crimp who could get you a ship or leave you standing at the dock.”
“The what?” I said.
“The crimp,” my grandfather said. “Crimps. That’s what we called them, though I�
��m not sure how they come by it. They were the shipping agents who worked directly for the shipowners.”
We headed down the cobblestone streets, past the No Name Tavern. Outside two old sailors sat on a parking pylon and passed a bottle of rotgut back and forth. My father stopped and pointed toward the dock.
“The crimps also owned half the bars around here, and the rooming house. You would go down to the dock to shape up—that means hanging around the crimp who had a list of the ships and jobs available. And how it worked was if you’d spent a good amount of money in the crimp’s bar, he’d give you a ship. Especially if he’d extended you some credit, which he could take right out of your salary. If not, he’d just as likely pass you over.”
“So it was like a monopoly,” I said.
“Just about. And half the time the shipowners was in secret ownership with the crimps in the boardinghouse. The whole damned thing was rat lousy, I can tell you that. Not to mention the grub on board ship, which you wouldn’t feed to your worst enemy. Food had maggots in it, and there were more rats on board than sailors. And the bunks was so small a midget woulda been crowded.”
“So that was why you never slept on board ship?” I said.
“Yessir,” my grandfather said, as we turned down Thames Street and saw a big Greek ship, the Aegean, sitting by the dock. “Was damned few guys who could sleep on those ships.”
“How much did you make?” I said.
“Not much. I had a master’s license so I got maybe … let’s see—1933, eighteen dollars a week.”
“God,” I said. “How did you and Gracie live?”
“Poorly,” my grandfather said. “Damned poorly.”
He saw the shock and dismay on my face and gave me a little smile.
“Then the union come along. The Marine Workers’ Industrial Union, or M.W.I.U., started up. The owners said they were all Communists, and I suppose there was truth in it. But the guys I knew, Frank Walsh and the fella you just met, Terry Banks, they were just sailors, friends of mine, and they told me they were gonna get a union started and try and break the back of the owners. I never thought it would work, ‘cause I knew some of those owners, Jim Gundy, Jake Guzman. There were as mean and hard as any man you can name. I knew right from the start there was gonna be big trouble, and I didn’t want any part of it. But things happened to change my mind.”
