If He Hollers Let Him Go (3 page)

The red light caught me at Manchester; and that made me warm. It never failed; every time I got in a hurry I got caught by every light. I pulled up in the outside lane, abreast a V-8 and an Olds, shifted back to first, and got set to take the lead. When the light turned green it caught a white couple in the middle of the street. The V-8 full of white guys dug off and they started to run for it; and the two white guys in the Olds blasted at them with the horn, making them jump like grasshoppers. But when they looked up and saw we were coloured they just took their time, giving us a look of cold hatred.

I let out the clutch and stepped on the gas. Goddamn ‘em, I’ll grind ‘em into the street, I thought. But just before I hit them something held me. I tamped the brake.

‘What the hell!’ Johnson snarled, picking himself up off the floor.

I sat there looking at the white couple until they had crossed the sidewalk, giving them stare for stare, hate for hate. Horns blasted me from behind, guys in the middle lanes looked at me as they passed; but all I could see was two pecks who didn’t hate me no more than I hated them. Finally I went ahead, just missed sideswiping a new Packard Clipper. My arms were rubbery and my fingers numb; I was weak as if I’d been heaving sacks of cement all day in the sun.

After that everything got under my skin. I was coming up fast in the middle lane and some white guy in a Nash coupé cut out in front of me without signalling. I had to burn rubber to keep from taking off his fender; and the car behind me tapped my bumper. I didn’t know whether he had looked in the rearview mirror before he pulled out or not, but I knew if he had, he could have seen we were a carful of coloured—and that’s the way I took it. I kept on his tail until I could pull up beside him, then I leaned out the window and shouted, ‘This ain’t Alabama, you peckerwood son of a bitch. When you want to pull out of line, stick out your hand.’

He gave me a quick glance, then looked straight ahead. After that he ignored me. That made me madder than if he’d talked back. I stuck with him clear out to Compton. A dozen times I had a chance to bump him into an oncoming truck. Then I began feeling virtuous and let him go.

But at the entrance to the Shell Refinery the white cop directing traffic caught sight of us and stopped me on a dime. The white workers crossing the street looked at the big new car full of black faces and gave off cold hostility. I gave them look for look.

‘What’s the matter with these pecks this morning?’ Homer said. ‘Is everybody evil?’

By now it was a quarter of eight. It was twelve miles to the yard. I gritted my teeth and started digging again; I swore the next person who tried to stop me I’d run him down. But traffic on all harbour roads was heavy the whole day through, and during the change of shifts at the numerous refineries and shipyards it was mad, fast, and furious.

It was a bright June morning. The sun was already high. If I’d been a white boy I might have enjoyed the scramble in the early morning sun, the tight competition for a twenty-foot lead on a thirty-mile highway. But to me it was racial. The huge industrial plants flanking the ribbon of road—shipyards, refineries, oil wells, steel mills, construction companies—the thousands of rushing workers, the low-hanging barrage balloons, the close hard roar of Diesel trucks and the distant drone of patrolling planes, the sharp, pungent smell of exhaust that used to send me driving clear across Ohio on a sunny summer morning, and the snow-capped mountains in the background, like picture post-cards, didn’t mean a thing to me. I didn’t even see them; all I wanted in the world was to push my Buick Roadmaster over some peckerwood’s face.

Time and again I cut in front of some fast-moving car, making rubber burn and brakes scream and drivers curse, hoping a paddy would bump my fender so I’d have an excuse to get out and clip him with my tyre iron. My eyes felt red and sticky and my mouth tasted brown. I turned into the tightly patrolled harbour road, doing a defiant fifty.

Conway said at large, ‘Oh, Bob’s got plenny money, got just too much money. He don’t mind paying a fine.’

Nobody answered him. By now we were all too evil to do much talking. We came into the stretch of shipyards—Consolidated, Bethlehem, Western Pipe and Steel—caught an open mile, and I went up to sixty. White guys looked at us queerly as we went by. We didn’t get stopped but we didn’t make it. It was five after eight when we pulled into the parking lot at Atlas Ship. I found a spot and parked and we scrambled out, nervous because we were late, and belligerent because we didn’t want anybody to say anything about it.

The parking-lot attendant waited until I had finished locking the car, then came over and told me I had to move, I’d parked in the place reserved for company officials. I looked at him with a cold, dead fury, too spent even to hit him. I let my breath out slowly, got back into the car, and moved it. The other fellows had gone into the yard. I had to stop at Gate No. 2 to get a late card.

The gatekeeper said, ‘Jesus Christ, all you coloured boys are late this morning.’

A guard standing near by leered at me. ‘What’d y’all do las’ night, boy? I bet y’all had a ball down on Central Avenue.’

I started to tell him I was up all night with his mother, but I didn’t feel up to the trouble. I punched my card without giving a sign that I had heard. Then I cut across the yard to the outfitting dock. We were working on a repair ship—it was called a floating dry dock—for the Navy. My gang was installing the ventilation in the shower compartment and the heads, as the toilets were called.

At the entrance to the dock the guard said, ‘Put out that cigarette, boy. What’s the matter you coloured boys can’t never obey no rules?’

I tossed it over on the wooden craneway, still burning. He muttered something as he went over to step on it.

The white folks had sure brought their white to work with them that morning.

I climbed the outside wooden gangway from the dock and went aboard through the gangway port, an accommodation opening in the shell that put me on the third of the five decks. The compartment I entered was the machine shop; forward was the carpenter shop; aft were the various lockers, toolrooms, storerooms, and such, and finally the third-deck showers and latrine—all a part of the ship itself—where my gang was working.

The decks were low, and with the tools and equipment of the workers, the thousand and one lines of the welders, the chippers, the blowers, the burners, the light lines, the wooden staging, combined with the equipment of the ship, the shapes and plates, the ventilation trunks and ducts, reducers, dividers, transformers, the machines, lathes, mills, and such, half yet to be installed, the place looked like a littered madhouse. I had to pick every step to find a foot-size clearance of deck space, and at the same time to keep looking up so I wouldn’t tear off an ear or knock out an eye against some overhanging shape. Every two or three steps I’d bump into another worker. The only time anybody ever apologized was when they knocked you down.

Bessie, one of the helpers in my gang, met me at the midship bulkhead with the time cards.

‘Are you evil too?’ she greeted.

‘Not at you, beautiful,’ I grimaced.

All I knew about her was that she was brown-skinned, straightened-haired, and medium-sized; she wore a hard hat, clean cotton waists, blue denim slacks, and a brown sweater. I’d never looked at her any closer.

‘You folks got me almost scared to come to work,’ she was saying.

I ducked through the access opening without answering, came to a manhole, went down a jack ladder to the second deck, threaded through a maze of shapes to the sheet-metal toolroom. The Kelly that Conway had been whipping in the car was our supervisor. He was a thin, wiry, nervous Irishman with a blood-red, beaked face and close-set bright blue eyes. He had fought like hell to keep me from being made a leaderman, and we never had too much to say to each other.

I tossed the cards on the desk before the clerk with the late cards on top. She picked them up without saying anything. Kelly looked up from a blueprint he was studying with Chuck, a white leaderman, and his face got redder. He turned back to the print without saying anything, and I turned to go out. He had given me enough jobs to last my gang another week and I didn’t see any need to say anything to him either. But before I got out he stopped me.

‘How’s that coloured gang of yours coming along, Bob?’

It was a moment before I turned around. I had to decide first whether to tell him to go to hell or not. Finally I said, ‘Fine, Kelly, fine! My coloured gang is coming along fine.’ I started to ask him how were the white gangs coming along, but I caught myself in time.

‘You coloured boys make good workers when you learn how,’ he said. ‘I ain’t got no fault to find with you at all.’

Chuck gave me a sympathetic grin.

‘Now that’s fine,’ I said. I opened my mouth to say, ‘What do you think about the way we’re blasting at Ireland?’ but I didn’t say it.

I turned to the crib girl and said, ‘Let me have S-l4.’

She was a fat, ducky, blue-eyed farm girl with round red cheeks and brownish hair. She widened her eyes with an inquiring look. ‘What’s that?’

‘A print.’

‘What’s a print?’ she asked.

She hadn’t been on the job very long so I said patiently, ‘A print is a blueprint. They’re in that cabinet there. You have the key. Will you unlock the cabinet and give me the print—the blueprint—marked S-14?’

She unlocked the cabinet reluctantly, giving quick side glances at Kelly to see if he’d say anything, and when she saw that S-l4 was marked ‘Not to be taken from office,’ she turned to Kelly and asked, ‘Can he see this?’

My head began heating up again. Kelly looked up and nodded. She took down the print and handed it to me. ‘You’ll have to look at it here,’ she said.

All the leadermen took out prints. I wanted to explain it to her, knowing that she was new on the job. But she had tried my patience, so I said, ‘Listen, little girl, don’t annoy me this morning.’

She looked inquiringly at Kelly again, but he didn’t look up. I walked out with the print. She called, ‘Hey!’ indecisively, but I didn’t look around.

A white helper was soldering a seam in a trunk while a white mechanic looked on. The mechanic and I had been in the department together for the past two years, but we had never spoken. He looked at me as I passed, I looked at him; we kept the record straight. I went up the jack ladder and came out on the third deck again.

There were a lot of women workers on board, mostly white. Whenever I passed the white women looked at me, some curiously, some coyly, some with open hostility. Some just stared with blank hard eyes. Few ever moved aside to let me pass; I just walked around them. On the whole the older women were friendlier than the younger. Now and then some of the young white women gave me an opening to make a pass, but I’d never made one: at first because the coloured workers seemed as intent on protecting the white women from the coloured men as the white men were, probably because they wanted to prove to the white folks they could work with white women without trying to make them; and then, after I’d become a leaderman, because I, like a damn fool, felt a certain responsibility about setting an example. Now I had Alice and the white chicks didn’t interest me; I thought Alice was better than any white woman who ever lived.

When I ducked to pass through the access opening in the transverse bulkhead I noticed some words scrawled above and straightened up to read them: ‘Don’t duck, Okie, you’re tough.’ I was grinning when I ducked through the hole and straightened up, face to face with a tall white girl in a leather welder’s suit.

She was a peroxide blonde with a large-featured,. overly made-up face, and she had a large, bright-painted, fleshy mouth, kidney-shaped, thinner in the middle than at the ends. Her big blue babyish eyes were mascaraed like a burlesque queen’s and there were tiny wrinkles in their corners and about the flare of her nostrils, calipering down about the edges of her mouth. She looked thirty and well sexed, rife but not quite rotten. She looked as if she might have worked half those years in a cat house, and if she hadn’t she must have given a lot of it away.

We stood there for an instant, our eyes locked, before either of us moved; then she deliberately put on a frightened, wideeyed look and backed away from me as if she was scared stiff, as if she was a naked virgin and I was King Kong. It wasn’t the first time she had done that. I’d run into her on board a half-dozen times during the past couple of weeks and each time she’d put on that scared-to-death act. I was used to white women doing all sorts of things to tease or annoy the coloured men so I hadn’t given it a second thought before.

But now it sent a blinding fury through my brain. Blood rushed to my head like gales of rain and I felt my face burn white-hot. It came up in my eyes and burned at her; she caught it and kept staring at me with that wide-eyed phoney look. Something about her mouth touched it off, a quirk made the curves change as if she got a sexual thrill, and her mascaraed eyelashes fluttered.

Lust shook me like an electric shock; it came up in my mouth, filling it with tongue, and drained my whole stomach down into my groin. And it poured out of my eyes in a sticky rush and spurted over her from head to foot.

The frightened look went out of her eyes and she blushed right down her face and out of sight beneath the collar of her leather jacket, and I could imagine it going down over her over-ripe breasts and spreading out over her milk-white stomach. When she turned out of my stare I went sick to the stomach and felt like vomiting. I had started toward the ladder going to the upper deck, but instead I turned past her, slowing down and brushing her. She didn’t move. I kept on going, circling.

Someone said, ‘Hiya, Bob,’ but I didn’t hear him until after I’d half climbed, half crawled a third of the way up the jack ladder. Then I said, ‘Yeah.’ I came out on the fourth deck, passed two white women who looked away disdainfully, climbed to the weather deck. A little fat brown-skinned girl with hips that shook like jelly leaned against the bulwark in the sun. ‘Hello,’ she cooed, dishing up everything she had to offer in that first look.