Black Water Rising (15 page)

“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 disease across the humid room. Suddenly Jay is not so sure of his original count, just where the majority lies. He takes particular note of the white head-shakers in the room, looking for the
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 Brotherhood 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 message 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 everybody 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, looking 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
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 daddy'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 clapping. 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
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 containers 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 head-shakers.

“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
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 Houston'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.

“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 conditioner 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
threes, their heads down, caps pulled low over their brows. Jay can'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 late-night 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?

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 quivering 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.”

“Wait a minute. You're married?” Wash asks.

Jay turns up the volume.

“You ain't tell the people that part. How old are you, girl?”

“I'll be thirty come October.”

“Oh, Looo-rrd!” Wash whistles into his microphone.

The phone lines are lit up for this one. The first caller to get through is a cat calling himself Mellow Yellow. “That girl gon' have to clean this mess up herself,” he says. “She married and grown. She oughta known better.”

“Yeah, Wash, this is Smokey here. And it's not all that girl's fault. Her mama need to look at what
she
ain't been doing to hold on to her man.”

“You see, Wash, you see how they do us?” the next caller asks, a woman, a frequent caller named Sunshine. “The men always putting it on us.”

And on and on they go, one call after another, turning this gal's very personal, very particular problem into a forum for all manner of grievances men and women have against each other. Before long, the conversation descends into talk about how cheap black men are. To which one caller replies, “Y'all ladies got better jobs than us half the time, shoot. Y'all oughta pay sometime too.”

Wash goes to commercial break, playing a Betty Wright song as the out.

Jay is a couple of blocks from home when the DJ comes back
on the air, claiming to have the girl's lover and future stepfather on the line.

Jay parks in the alley behind his apartment building.

On the radio, Dark 'n' Lovely tells the old man to keep his thing in his pants, to leave the girl and her mother alone.

Solid Gold takes the men's side, turning on her fellow sister, saying gals like that “give the rest of us a bad name.”

Colt 45 wants to know who was better in the sack. The future stepfather says Mom's got some skills, “but twenty-nine-year-old hips are hard to beat.”