But Smitty continued as if carried away: “This country is virgin—industrially virgin. Five, ten years maybe, it might be the center of gravity of American industry.”
“It could easily be.”
“Good country for industry. Big, warm—low taxes, cheap living—the Pacific opening up the whole Asia market. In ten years the whole auto industry might be located here—if the native fascists haven’t scared off the labor by then.”
“Well—”
“That’s our problem, to keep the workers here. And the only way we can do it is to organize ‘em.”
“That’s right.”
“Lee, you might say the fate of the working class of the world depends on us here. As Comstock goes, the West Coast goes. As the West Coast goes, the nation goes. As the nation goes, the world goes.”
Lee felt a desire to laugh, but he realized that Smitty was serious. “It’s a big job, all right,” he hastened to agree.
“Your people have a big stake in it too.”
“Yes, I know that.”
Smitty nodded approvingly. “I think you’re going to be a great help to us, Lee.”
“Well—I’m going to try.”
“Unionism is the only answer,” Smitty declared dogmatically. “All the rest is so much crap.”
But Lee had finished with echoing.
In silence they passed a drive-in restaurant, possessed of no glamour in the rain; then came into the glass-fronted, neon-lighted extension of a business district. A housing development, seemingly deserted, grew out of the gloom. Beyond was a rolling expanse of gray-green, dimensionless meadowland fusing with the gray horizon. But as they neared, the meadow assumed angles and shape and dimensions, and revealed itself as the huge, flat, sprawling assembly of camouflaged buildings that was Comstock Aircraft Corporation. A knot caught in Lee’s chest. He felt small, insignificant, incapable.
Turning into a muddy driveway beside a one-room, unpainted shack, Smitty parked behind another car. Lee opened the door, stepped out, and stood breathless in the rain waiting for Smitty to come around and lead the way inside.
A white glare coned from a green-shaded droplight over a motley scene. Men and women of varying ages and several nationalities crowded about an oil burner, talking above the voices of each other. All wore the uniform of California, jacket and slacks, with Comstock badges pinned to their lapels. The air was hazy with cigarette smoke, stale with the smell of dampness, rank from the fumes of the oil burner. But the general atmosphere contained a note of militance, the positive character of people assembled for a purpose.
A rough pine table, stacked with union literature, stood along the wall. Two chairs flanked it. One man sat apart on the corner of the table, a foot propped on a chair, stolidly smoking a cigarette. Unlike the others, he wore a shiny blue serge suit complete to vest, a soiled gray shirt, and a green tie. No badge was in evidence on his clothing. About him was the air of settled implacability.
Voices greeted Smitty as he came into the room—quips, curses, questions. But when Lee followed, a silence came. The silence passed as suddenly as it had come. But now the voices had a different sound. There was a quality in the difference that Lee could always hear.
But the first person Lee saw was the man who sat apart. Their glances crossed, and from where he stood Lee could feel the force of this man’s stare—neither hostile nor friendly, but stripping away the layers of all subterfuge.
Then Smitty drew his attention to make an introduction: “Lee Gordon, Marvin Todd. Marv’s our acting chairman of the local.”
Lee extended his hand to a tall, blond man with glassy blue eyes. “Hello, Marvin.”
“Hah!” Todd gave the single explosive epithet and turned away.
Slowly Lee withdrew his hand as silence again descended upon the room. Now it was not fear he felt, but a stricture of the soul, the torture of the damned, a shriveling up inside, an actual diminution of his organs and the stoppage of their functions.
Disapproval fashioned the expressions of the others. But blood reddened Smitty’s face with apoplectic rage. For an instant it seemed as if he would call Todd back. All the workings of his slow, ponderous mind were visible in his face—the furious incredulity at Todd’s outburst of prejudice, the tortured sympathy for Lee’s predicament, the indecision as to what steps he should take, the deep aversion for the entire racial scene, bafflement, hesitancy…Until then, Lee had been watching him. Now he looked away. He did not want to see the compromise he thought might come next, for after that he would not have anything at all for Smitty.
For a moment longer the silence hung, pregnant with expectancy. The man in the blue serge suit slid from the table and crossed the room.
“I’m Joe,” he said, extending his hand to Lee. There was the slight indication of an accent in his voice, which made his words seem battened down.
Lee never shook a hand with more gratitude.
Relief flooded Smitty in red and white waves. “Joe’s the man.” The words poured out of him. “Joe’s the big boss, Lee. I’m only his helper. Joe Ptak, Lee Gordon.”
For an instant Lee was conscious of the attention of the others in the room. Then he forgot them in the hard, calloused pressure of Joe’s grip, in the cold, level scrutiny of Joe’s slate-gray eyes.
“Hello, Joe.”
Joe Ptak nodded without replying. There was an impenetrable aloofness in his manner, an uncompromising rejection of human instability. His body was stocky, barrel-chested, rooted in the earth; his face was blunt with features that seemed hammered and his head was square.
Still scrutinizing Lee, he raised a cigarette with his left hand from which the first two fingers were gone, parked it in the corner of his mouth. Then he ran his two remaining fingers through his bristling shock of iron-gray hair, and turned away.
Voices came back into the room, and Smitty resumed the introductions.
Lee met Benny Stone next, a short, curly-haired Jew with sharp, dark eyes, who was acting financial secretary of the local. Benny’s effusive greeting brought a recurrence of the old troubling question: On what side did the Jew actually play? Was Benny’s effusion a slap at Todd or a pretense for Joe?
But it went from his mind as he turned to meet the others—the three Mexicans and two white women and other white men—all of whom were volunteer organizers, waiting for the day shift to begin. They were cordial but not effusive, and beyond the simple salutation there was nothing any of them had to say.
With the business of the introductions over, Smitty said a few words to Joe and left. Lee was alone; no one spoke to him and no conversation included him. He took off his raincoat and, holding it over his arm, went to stand by the stove. A searing sense of inadequacy assailed him as he struggled desperately against consciousness of his race.
He was too tight, he told himself. Making too much of a mountain from a molehill. There was no need to be so tight, no sense in it. No one was going to shoot him. No one was even thinking about him. That silliness of Todd’s was nothing—a vulgar exhibition by an ignorant white. It had not hurt him, and all it had done for Todd was to bring down disapproval.
But the old suspicion that there is always a conspiracy against a Negro crowded back into him. His thin black skin kept feeling white eyes—measuring him, calculating, conspiring. And his futile, sterile pride was bleeding.
The sound of the whistle came as a reprieve. Quickly the room emptied of all but he and Joe. Hanging up his coat, he turned to Joe.
“Well, what do we do?”
“Take it easy,” Joe replied.
But shortly the room was filled with volunteers form the graveyard shift. Joe did not introduce him, but Lee had the emotional advantage of having been there first, and his manner was more relaxed.
At Joe’s direction, he sat at the table and copied the names, badge numbers, department numbers, and home addresses of workers who had joined, or had promised to join, the union, dictated to him by the various volunteers. As before, several
were Mexicans, but he identified the majority of whites as Southerners by their speech.
At the last, some one said in a softly modulated voice: “I, too, would like to join the union.”
Lee glanced up to see a dark-brown, scholarly appearing man of middle-age, dressed in khaki coveralls and wearing a miner’s cap. His features had the taut-skinned, high-cheekboned structure of an Indian’s, but his eyes were a soft, limpid brown. So many contradictions were apparent in the man that Lee looked startled.
“You are accepting Negro members, are you not?” the man asked in a precise, persistent tone.
“Oh, indeed!” Lee shouted in embarrassment. “Sure, that’s why I’m here. We’re certainly glad to have you. Now what is your name—and let me have your address, too.”
“Lester McKinley,” the man replied, giving him an address on the West Side.
When Lee had finished writing, he extended his hand. “My name’s Lee Gordon. I’m an organizer here.”
“I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Gordon,” McKinley said soberly shaking his hand. “If you require any assistance at any time, please don’t be hesitant in calling on me.”
“Why, thank you,” Lee replied gratefully.
“Labor omnia vincit,” McKinley quoted. “Labor conquers all things.” A smile flickered across his somber features, then he turned, and without looking at any of the others, leisurely left the room.
“Well…scholar or mountebank?” Lee Gordon asked himself.
And then a white voice cut across his consciousness: “…naw, not there, I was in niggertown.” There was no malice in the voice, only the forgetfulness of a Negro’s presence. But it put Lee right back where he had been with Todd.
For a long moment he sat rigid in recurring torture, afraid that if he looked up he’d see a white man’s grinning face. Then he decided to appear as if he had not heard. From the literature on the table he selected a tiny booklet: Your Union at Work. He turned the page and read: “We, the Workers, realize that the struggle to better our working and living conditions is in vain unless we are united to protect ourselves collectively against the organized forces of the employers…We, the Workers, form an organization which unites all workers in our industry on an industrial basis and rank-and-file control, regardless of craft, age, sex, nationality, race—”
At the word race, his mind left the printed page so that now only his eyes were perceiving the words. His mind was lost in the black, senseless, depthless morass of race—gone!
“You ever work in a steel mill?”
The question jerked Lee out of it. Joe waited for his reply.
“No, I never did,” Lee said.
The day-shift volunteers had gone; they were the only two left.
Joe held up his left hand. “I lost these in a steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio.”
Lee looked at the two-fingered hand, then at Joe’s granite-hard face. As it had been with Smitty, again he felt the compulsion to adjust his personality, somewhat in the manner of a foil, to Joe’s; to say the thing that was expected of him. He didn’t know what to say.
“I didn’t get a cent,” Joe grated. “I got fired. The shop wasn’t organized.”
“That was tough,” Lee sympathized inanely.
Joe gave him a look, and a fire lit up in his slate-gray eyes. “A lot of these punks drawing union pay don’t even know what a union is.”
Lee winced. But Joe was not referring to him; for the moment he had forgotten Lee’s presence.
“They could-a had ‘em all organized, if they’d organized the unemployed,” he went on. It seemed to rankle deep inside of him. “They could-a organized ‘em then. They could-a organized ‘em on WPA. Now they got to do it the hard way. So who do they send but me?”
“Oh, you’re from out of town?” Lee again spoke foolishly just to fill the silence with sound.
This time Joe saw him. “Let’s get some beer,” he said abruptly.
“I’ll settle for coffee,” Lee said with a smile.
The rain had stopped. But the gray murkiness of a Los Angeles March morning remained, cold and depressing. They slopped through the puddles silently and turned into a bar and grill. As always, Lee suffered his moment of suspense over whether he would be refused service. But the bartender waved to Joe, and he became relaxed. They sat in a booth and ordered. The coffee went through Lee like a drug, sharpening his brain and refashioning the day with a more rounded perspective.
Tilting the bottle to his mouth, Joe set it down empty and called to the bartender: “Send me two more; that was a boy.”
Lee laughed dutifully. “Say, Joe,” he asked suddenly, “just who am I supposed to take orders from?”
“From me,” Joe replied. “I’m the organizer.”
But this was not what Lee wanted. He knew the general setup. The organizer was assigned by the national union to organize a shop. He was given full charge. But in the locality where he was to work, he could elicit the aid of the local union council, use its resources in the field and its assembly halls for union meetings. In this case, it had been Joe who had asked for help with the Negro workers. The union council had decided to hire a permanent Negro organizer to be used in turn by all locals within its membership.
“What about the local officials? Todd? And Stone?” Lee wanted to know.
“They’re to take orders from you. But who gives the orders and who takes ‘em ain’t what’s important.”
“Well then, am I supposed to work with them? Or do I work alone?”
“You work with everybody. It’s the rank and file that builds membership—the volunteers. No volunteers, no union. You get the volunteers. They’ll get the members.”
“Oh, I can do that all right. I just wanted to know about Todd.”
“To hell with him!” Joe said.
Now Lee felt better. “I just wanted to know.”
Joe gave him a penetrating look. “Forget it.” He dismissed it from the conversation and launched into the vital business: “Now let me define the issues for you. This is how it is. We got mostly new workers here—new to industry, that is. Most of ‘em are from the South, against the union on general principles. They been taught the union is a part of Russia; they believe what they read in the papers. On top of that, they’re making more money than they ever made. And they’re working under better conditions. The company keeps ‘em hopped up on patriotism. Some of ‘em are so ignorant they believe it’s treason to join the union. They got recreation rooms in the joint, bands to play while they eat; and they even have dances. Better’n an Irish picnic. They don’t even have to buy newspapers any more; the company gives ‘em one free—The Comstock Condor—you’ll see it. You read it and you’ll learn what a son of a bitch I am.”
Lee laughed. Joe said: “This is dry talk,” and called to the bartender, “Make it two more.”
Waiting until he was served, he tilted a bottle, emptying it, then went on: “There is a man named Foster.” At the mention of the name, a new quality came into his voice—respect underlined with bitter hatred. “If you want a job making twice as much as you do now, go over and tell ‘im you’re working for me.”
“Looks like they got it in for you,” Lee commented.
“But Foster don’t work like that. He gets the others to do the dirty work—the personnel officer, a little rat named Porter. To hear Foster tell it, he’s the best friend the union’s got.”
“Oh, I thought he was the personnel director.”
“He’s the executive vice-president in charge of production. That means he runs the joint. He’s a retired millionaire from back East. I used to work in his steel mill. He took over the job out here when the war broke out; I guess he owns a lot of stock. There was a piece of crap in the Condor saying: “…he talks softly and carries a big stick. I suppose he thinks he’s another Teddy Roosevelt. But the workers swear by him.
“Now we can’t agitate. That would be unpatriotic. But how the hell can you organize without agitating? The hell of it is, we
don’t have nothing to agitate about. They got the union system of seniority and upgrading in the plant. There ain’t no problem there. Right now labor is at a premium; the company needs ‘em. Employment ain’t no problem. They give ‘em insurance, accident benefits, everything we can offer but future security. Right now they ain’t thinking about the future. And that’s all we got to sell. Foster knows it. So he ain’t worrying. He lets us do the worrying.
“But we got to organize ‘em. We got to build up a strong local and do it fast. In a couple of months we’ll have a labor board election. And we got to win it. It’s important from the long view. This employment ain’t gonna last forever. If we don’t have a strong union when the war’s over, there’s gonna be hell to pay.
“Listen, man—Lee—whatever in the hell your name is—listen, I’ll tell you, it’s so important we can’t afford to lose. It’s more than just my two nubs—I can do more in a steel mill with my two fingers than most men can with six. It’s the future of the world. All those boys dying and these rotten fascist bastards—” Emotion choked him. He swallowed it, and said, “To hell with it! Our work is to get it done, not to talk about it.”
When Joe paused to light a cigarette, Lee noticed that Joe’s hand was trembling. Joe dragged deeply, flicking out the match. Then he was calm again.
“Now this is how it is,” he began again. “They got thirty thousand workers on three shifts. Twenty-nine thousand ain’t never belonged to any kind of union. They ain’t got no company union; that would at least be something we could fight. And ain’t no other union putting in a bid. All we got to fight is high wages and prosperity.” He went off again: “If they’d listened to me five years ago.” Then he came out of it.
“There’s about three thousand colored workers. That’s Foster again. His even ten per cent. Most of ‘em are new workers, hired after the others. Most of ‘em are doing labor—that’s because they’re new, see. Just enough been upgraded to prove there ain’t any discrimination. From what I know about the colored workers, discrimination is most of what you got to work on. So I know your job ain’t gonna be easy.
Lonely Crusade Page 3
