Folly (16 page)

Mary Lou was surprised at Lenore's surprise. It had taken her a couple of weeks to put this idea into words, and it was a relief, finally, to say it, but meantime, she had gotten over her own shock. “I do,” she reiterated.

Lenore was frowning. “That wasn't a question.”

“I know.” Mary Lou was stuck again, panic building all around her heart, but she forced the words out. “I . . . I guess I wanted to ask, are you?”

Lenore's face flushed, and Mary Lou wished she were home in bed or at least had minded the sense to keep to her own business. Lenore looked down at her feet while she spoke. “I never have called myself that, but I guess I am.”

“It's okay with me. I just wanted to know.”

Lenore nodded, pulled herself in tight.

“Who else do you know in Victory who's like that?”

“A few people I guess about.”

“Like who?”

“Well, I wouldn't want to say names. I mean it's not something you go around telling about other people in a town like this.”

“Sure,” Mary Lou said, trying to sound cool. She hadn't thought this part out at all, she realized. “What I don't understand about my ma was that she was married and all. Had us three kids. Now you'd think that would prove something.”

“What happened to your father?”

“He was a bastard.” She said this fast, didn't want to think about her missing father, might make her cry again. “Ran off.”

“Oh.”

“How does a person know this about herself?”

“I don't know, she just does, or she finds out because of being close to some woman.” There was still extra blood in Lenore's face which had now gone to splotches.

“My ma and Martha . . .” Mary Lou said. “They sure are close.”

Lenore kept to herself. The coffee had made her cold sober and her mind raced over all the possibilities. Would Martha have told her if she were involved with Folly? Could it really be that Folly was one too? Did Mary Lou want to know about
her
because she wanted to talk about her mother or Martha or what? Would she go around telling about her? She felt worried about her knowing, lit another cigarette even though she had just put one out.

“I hope we still can be friends,” Mary Lou said, “even if I'm not one.”

“Of course. Of course we can.”

“But I'm not sure. I might be. I sure ain't got much use for boys right now.”

“You got time. Don't worry. You got plenty of time before you have to decide anything. Nobody's saying you ought to get married tomorrow.”

“Me, married? You kiddin'?” The idea sobered her up totally. It was preposterous to her. When she thought of growing up, she thought of working, of having a paycheck, of learning more and being smarter, of driving a car and having her own friends. Never did she think of being married. “You are kidding, aren't you?” she said to Lenore, who laughed at her being so taken off balance. Mary Lou finally laughed, too.

“How old was your ma when she had you?”

“Jeez, you're right. She wasn't no older than I am right now. Wow. Imagine. No way,” Mary Lou said, shaking her hands as if to clear herself from the possibility.

She didn't even have to ask for the book. Lenore offered it to her when she was driving her home. “Where is it? I was looking for it on your shelf.”

Lenore reached down and pulled it out from under the driver's seat. “I thought that might be what you were looking for.”

18.

Mabel and Folly and Jesse hunched over their table in a booth at the luncheonette out on the mill road. “I think this is going to be it,” Jesse said. “It feels like the day we'll come out with a contract to me.” He said it with the vigor of a person who had just had a night's sleep to the two women who had not. Mabel and Folly were both working third shift now and had just gotten off. Mabel yawned into her coffee, then leaned forward and rested her chin on her forearms, keeping her eyes trained on Jesse's face in a way she hoped would make him nervous. She could tell she wasn't succeeding, though, for a couple of reasons: one, her eyes were too droopy; and two, Jesse was too fresh and too deeply and comfortably settled in his own body—his white man's body—to look out at the world from her point of view, ever, unless he was forced to.

“I sure hope what you say is true,” she said. “I'm right tired of sittin' in them sessions and listenin' to them fuss around with us. But I got a feelin' we might be doin' that a long time yet.” Mabel closed her eyes as if to get some sleep in order to prepare for the tedious meeting ahead, and watching her, Folly realized what a worn down state they'd both gotten into through the course of these negotiations. They reminded each other regularly that this was the design of the management, and when they forgot, Jesse reminded them. Still, knowing this didn't keep them from feeling discouraged, and the longer the negotiations dragged on, the more they wondered if having the union really gave them any more power than they'd had before. During the organizing, they'd gone on the assumption that once they had the union they would sit down with management, hand over their demands, and no dillydallying around seven weeks later.

This crew had been functioning as a team since the election. They'd sat there in Bea Jones' beauty parlor and laid out their demands, plus
extras (because Jesse said they had to have room to back down). Mabel and Folly had favored not playing games but Jesse had convinced them no one did it that way. If they wanted to negotiate for a seven percent raise they had to start by asking for ten. So they had asked for ten percent and ten days sick leave for illness of the worker or her dependent.

“Why not try for getting it all for the worker, maybe go for twelve days but keep things simple?”

“We don't want the women having to lie,” Folly had said. “And furthermore, look what got us going in the first place.”

“Okay. I hear you. We'll jack it up to twelve, worker or dependent.”

They decided to ask for a production committee with worker representation, one woman from each shift, to establish a fair production rate.”

“What else?” Jesse asked.

“Protection for us who's doing the organizing,” Mabel said.

“You already have that,” Jesse responded. “By law.”

“You watch them wag that law at us the minute you leave town.”

Having a firm sense of the way things were, Mabel called Jesse on statements like this, often. If he had more faith in what the union could do than Mabel and Folly combined, neither of them were surprised by this. After all, he got his paycheck from them. In spite of Folly's admiration for Mabel's hard and true connection with reality, when Jesse said things about the law or the union protecting them, Folly tended to believe him, out of wishful thinking maybe, out of the need to believe something that would give her the guts to be going in there negotiating.

Jesse had said they needed some throwaways, that they had to pad it and put down three extra numbers on the list. “How about better lighting? Would you be able to work better with better lighting?”

“Sure,” Folly said. “And then they'd up production.”

“We'll have you on the committee by then to fight that.” He winked at Folly, and Mabel guffawed. “We'll also mandate your breaks so they can't be taken away arbitrarily.”

“Good idea,” Mabel said.

“Don't forget, these are throwaways,” Jesse said.

“Well, maybe they shouldn't be. We could use a guarantee for our breaks. Maybe we should think of some others for throwaways.”

Folly agreed with her. “How about increasing the meal break to forty-five minutes.”

“I'm for it.” Mabel sat back and rubbed her stomach. “Time for a little quiet digestion. As it is sometimes you can't hardly get through the lunchroom line 'fore it's time to go back.”

Jesse put it down. “Now you're cooking.” He added another number and listed job security.

“Thought you said we couldn't put that in,” Mabel said.

“We weren't talking about the same thing. They can't fire you for organizing the union right now even without our contract or you'd have a good case against them. But they could make your job pretty miserable, or they could fire you for just about any other thing. We ought to try for a grievance procedure.”

“As a throwaway?” Folly asked.

“No, for real. I'll work that up while you two think of more throwaways.”

Mabel and Folly hadn't been any good at thinking up useless benefits. Each time one of them came up with an idea, the other rejected it as too useful. Finally, they decided to go with what they had down and try to push the whole contract through. Jesse had not been thrilled but had agreed to go along with them. “We're going to have to give a little here and there,” he had said.

Before the first meeting, he'd asked them which one was going to read the demands. “You,” Mabel had answered immediately, pointing at Jesse. “They won't hear them coming from us.” Reluctantly, Folly had agreed. She was relieved that Jesse would be with them, directing the process, but she wished Mabel could read their demands.

She knew it would have to be practically a whole different world before Mabel could do that, but still she longed for it. She felt Mabel had the strongest presence of the three of them, but she knew this feeling was recent. It had come with Mabel saying, “Hey, listen here now, listen to the way I see it,” and Folly taking some screen off of her own vision she hadn't even realized had been there, seeing with a new clarity who Mabel was, feeling also a vacancy in herself—the unreliability of her past. She had to remember that others still saw through that screen, that if she saw Mabel as beautiful—strong and furious and capable, her voice full of round tones rolling gracefully on her tongue which could compress to hisses when needed—Sam might hardly see her at all. It was not so easy to keep this understanding alive daily, since it tended to separate her from other whites. Not that she minded the separation between her and Sam or Fartblossom, which seemed like a breath of air, but there were women even among the organizers whom she didn't think really saw the Black women for who they were. Often she felt like giving up tolerance for them, grabbing them by the shoulders and shaking them, shaking them down to their roots; then other times, she knew they were her, one hair over, and knew they could learn.

What she could do now was open her eyes that had been closed and turn on the sound in her ears and not be surprised if Black folks didn't want to talk to her after all those no listening years. If things were the other way around, she doubted white folks would still be speaking.

The way the first negotiating meeting had gone was miles from the way any of them had imagined. As they entered the room, Sam had put on a great display of welcoming them, especially Jesse, whose hand he had pumped up and down. He had directed Folly and Mabel to chairs. “You all know Mr. Blossom,” he said, indicating Fartblossom who was already seated. “He'll be attending these meetings as our new personnel officer.”

Jesse leaned across the table and shook Fartblossom's meaty hand, then eased into a chair beside Mabel.

So that was why Fartblossom had been replaced as the night shift supervisor. Folly and Martha had been speculating all week long, had even gone to jokingly reading the obituaries. Folly had to adjust herself to the idea he would be present. There wasn't anyone anywhere she'd less like to be sitting across from, which was, of course, exactly why he was there. She squared herself in the chair and checked herself against letting Fartblossom give her the creeps. Mabel didn't really know him. She'd never worked the third shift until after the election when they'd transferred her as a form of harrassment. On Jesse's advice, Mabel had chosen not to fight this until after the contract was signed. Mabel sat, roving her hard eye from Sam to Fartblossom while Jesse read the demands. Sam closed his eyes to listen and appeared downright relaxed. Fartblossom hung his head forward and let his mouth hang open stupidly while his eyes rested on Jesse.

Jesse finished and sat back in his chair during the pause of silence. Sam rose, reached over the table and started pumping Jesse's hand again. “We'll give these some consideration before the next meeting,” he said. “That'll be all for now, girls.” He had turned to them without extending his hand. Mabel and Folly looked to Jesse for a signal and saw him incline his head toward the door. “We'll talk outside.” He gathered them behind his arms and moved them toward the door as if they were hens who had lost their cackle. “I'll just arrange another meeting time.” He stepped back into the office, leaving them at the door, slightly disoriented.

“Jesus! Wake me up to go to sleep. How'd you like that?” Mabel asked.

“I don't understand men,” Folly shrugged. “Here we are ready to fight out a contract and they're shaking hands . . . smiling . . . shaking
hands, sitting down, hardly getting settled . . . then they're up shaking hands again. Sneaky bastards. They got something up their sleeves, I can smell that.”

Jesse came out and huddled them like the coach would his basketball team. “Come on. One last cup of coffee at the luncheonette, then you all can go home and get some sleep.” Coffee nerves were something that Jesse seemed to have a natural born immunity to.

In the booth, Mabel leaned forward. “What's this—you mens lookin' so mighty friendly?”

“Oh, that's standard fare,” Jesse said. “The pretext of civilization. One tries for an amicable sort of relationship in which to negotiate.”

“Not this one,” Folly said, anger churning her impatience. “Not with Fartblossom.”

“I should have anticipated this tactic and warned you,” Jesse said in a professional voice. “They want two weeks for studying the demands before they meet with us again.”

Mabel moved her head in a long, slow, NO. “Two weeks for them two pages? You kiddin' me?”

“I think we have to give it to them,” he answered. “It's a stalling tactic, but if we give it to them now, next time they try for one, we'll have something to squawk about. If we start squawking right away, we won't get anywhere.”

They were all hurting for the settlement, hoping for the seven percent to go toward paying off the debts the strike had forced on them. Folly thought of Mary Lou going off and leaving her pay check, one corner of it tucked under the plate at Folly's place at the kitchen table. The week before she had left most of her earnings in crisp, new bills stuck in Folly's coffee cup. The check had sat there all day until Mary Lou came home. “You don't want this here valuable piece of paper getting dirty,” Folly said. “You better put it away.”

“I left it for you.” Mary Lou had tried her best to sound unconnected to the check. “I thought you could put it toward the grocery bill.”

“Well, I could. But seems like you worked mighty hard to just be turning it over. Why don't you go down and cash it at the store and give over part of it against the charge.”

“I'd rather not. I'd rather you just pay it, Ma.”

“Why? What difference does it make which one of us pays it?”

“It does. It makes a difference to me. You pay it. I don't want to go in there to the same store where the money come from and say, ‘Here, put this to the Burrows' account.'”

“Okay, okay, I'll do it,” Folly had said, “but you have to endorse the check over to me.”

“You mean sign it?”

“Yeah.” Folly had forgotten how young Mary Lou was, she seemed so much older lately. “You have to do that if you turn a check over to someone else.”

“Oh.”

Folly had flipped back to hear Jesse saying, “Two weeks isn't going to make all that much difference to any of us in the long run.” She decided not to comment, to just be grateful that Mary Lou had a job for the summer and didn't seem to resent giving up the money she was making.

“I suppose we ought to be used to bein' broke,” Mabel said. “No, sir, won't make no difference to me. I been poor all my life.” Mabel didn't conceal the sour taste this was giving her.

“I only meant it's important for us to keep in mind that we may get
more
in the long run by giving them the two weeks now,” Jesse said. “I know it's been tough all the way round for you all since the strike started. I understand what you're saying.”

Mabel wondered where he understood: in his head maybe, not in his belly. She and Folly exchanged looks of resolve. They were chewing on and digesting the idea of two more weeks waiting; they were also dog tired.

That was back when they'd had no idea how long this thing could be dragged out by the management, though probably someone should have predicted it. Mabel and Folly were now down to arguing for holding out longer. Jesse was saying they should make some concessions and settle, and Mabel and Folly were saying, “Hell, no. We've gone this far, now we might as well get what we came here for.” After the first two week wait, they'd met once a week, every Wednesday. Folly glowered at Fartblossom throughout the meetings. After the second time, he'd appeared in her dreams to threaten her. She'd be on the picket line and suddenly look up and see the car charging her—Fartblossom popping up from the back seat just as it reached her. She'd wake up too close to the moment of being hit to know whether she had actually encountered the metal. But by the end of the third meeting, she'd gotten him down to size—big feet, big body, pea-sized brain. And meantime, since he was the personnel officer, she didn't have to put up with him on her shift. She'd be sorry when the meetings were over if that meant they'd put
him back to his old job. Mabel never had been very intimidated by him and had been a considerable help to Folly in diminishing him.