On the Waterfront (17 page)
Only Luke Tucker, a big Negro extra-man, came over and openly expressed his sympathies. There was a wall between the races that worked the docks; the Irish and Italians—the Micks and the Guineas—were clannish and held to their own. And of course the “niggers” on the bottom were the lepers of the port. But Luke was, in the opinion of Runty and the rest of them, a proud, two-fisted, independent nigger who was honey-easy to get along with until you tried to push his face in the race thing. He was the acknowledged leader of the Negro minority that picked up the odd hatch jobs and the extra-gang work that was left at the bottom of the work barrel. As such, Luke had gained a certain status in the eyes of Big Mac who hated shines like poison but needed the black boys as extra men. Luke had come out of the Alabama share-crop country as a fourteen-year-old kid running away from home. “I jest hopped me a choo-choo and sayed, ‘No’th here I comes,’ ” Luke had told the boys. Luke had done a little cheap-circuit wrestling and a little time for some vague crimes associated with strong, wandering, penniless boys who had never learned a trade. When he drifted to the docks he found a double-kickback system for the colored. They not only kicked back five bucks to the hiring boss, double the head-tax of their white fellow workers, but an extra dollar or two to the Negro gang-boss who rounded them up. Luke was able to lick the colored straw boss, a slickster called Hotstuff, and could have moved in on the dollar-racket and made himself fifty to seventy-five a week. But Luke had said, “If I gotta rob the poor t’ get rich, I’d ruther stay poor.” He was a rebel without quite knowing he was one. He came up to Pop now and slapped him on the back roughly, forever underestimating his wrestler-strength, and he said right out, “Ah feel bad about Joey. It aint a right way.”
“Thanks, Luke,” Pop said. He knew in the Missal what they said about everybody bein’ brothers, but it was askin’ a lot for a Kerry man to brother-up to a garlic-smellin’ guinea or some big buck yellow-streakin’ nigger. Just the same Luke was half accepted, like Max the Jew, an old orthodox winchman, the only Yiddle workman Pop had ever heard of outside of the garment workers who rolled it up for Dubinsky.
“I took up a little collection among the brethren,” Luke said, meaning the two dozen Negro casuals who shaped up for extra work.
“Tell ’em thanks for me, Luke,” Pop said and took the money, though he didn’t want to. “I’ll give it to Father Donoghue to say Masses for Joey.”
“Looks like we all see a little change today,” Luke said, nodding toward the South-American freighter that had just docked. “Bananas.”
Bananas meant hand labor, carrying the heavy stalks on your shoulders. Thousands of stalks, a whole deep hatch full of bananas. This was old-fashioned unloading with hundreds of men moving in and out of the hatch doors like streams of ants.
“Bananers,” Runty said. “I got a poimanent groove in m’ shoulder from too many years of bananers. I wish I had as much money as I hate them bananers.”
“As long as it pays off at two-thirty-four an hour, I’d carry manure,” Luke said cheerfully.
“For shit you should get double-time, like ammo,” Jimmy Sharkey said. “Falls under the provision of ’noxious cargo.’ ”
“A lot Johnny Friendly cares what we carry,” Moose shouted. “Lookit that caustic acid. That’s noxious in every other port. Down in the hold it makes yer eyes water and ya feel like you wanna puke. But good old Interstate pays you the regular rate.”
“Thanks to Johnny Friendly and Charley the Gent, those great labor leaders,” Runty Nolan laughed. “Charley’s really lookin’ out fer our interests on the Negotiatin’ Committee.” He drew his finger across his neck and the others chuckled.
Sonny, who was in on a pass because he was a brother-in-law of Specs Flavin, the hardware man, always kept an eye on this bunch and now he came over smelling trouble.
“Hey, better watch that talk. Whattid you say?”
“I was jus’ sayin’ how thankful we should be to Johnny Friendly fer bein’ such a pisser of a labor leader ’n doin’ so much t’ improve our conditions,” Runty laid it on thick, grinning up at the big, stupid-faced Sonny Rodell.
“Don’t get wise now,” Sonny warned.
“Wise,” Runty ho-hoed at him. “If I was wise I wouldn’t be no longshoreman fer forty-years an’ poorer now than when I started. Hell no, I’d be gettin’ my six hundred a month from the International, wind-baggin’ with Willie Givens, our esteemed president.”
“Whaddya mean, steamed?” Sonny demanded. “Ya better not shoot ya mouth off about Willie Givens.”
Sonny was one of the hand-picked delegates to the Longshoremen’s Convention, at a hundred bucks a day expenses, and he was annually impressed with the heights of oratory to which Willie Givens laboriously ascended.
“Anyway,” Sonny concluded, “it aint Willie Givens or Johnny’s fault ya drink all your money away. Now ya watch yerself now.” He walked away with the air of a prep-school housemaster.
“Big bum,” Runty muttered when Sonny was out of earshot. “If it wasn’t for Specs and his cannon, he’d be beggin’ handouts at the back o’ saloons.” His friends, who looked to him as their own dockside Durante, got a good laugh out of that.
Mutt Murphy came over and warmed himself by the fire. He never expected to work, but he almost always gathered with the others for the shape-up, drawn here either by sheer habit or foggy-minded sociability.
“Mornin’, Pop,” he mumbled. He was wearing a torn suitcoat picked up from a local mission and he looked as if he should have been chilled to the bone; his lips and hands were blue, but he seemed unaware of the cold. “God bless ya, ya Joey was a saint.” He crossed himself elaborately and began to shout in his harsh, croaking voice,
“Joey died fer us an’ Jee—sus’ll save us …”
Truck Amon, whose two hundred and twenty pounds were pushed into five feet eight inches, and whose neck had the muscular thickness of a prize boar’s, came waddling over to grunt at Mutt, “C’mon, knock it off.” He shoved the one-armed drifter away from the pier entrance. “They’re gettin’ ready to blow the whistle. You’re a pimple on the ass o’ progress. Disappear.” Truck’s thick face pushed together in a grin of self-amusement. He was continually amazed at the comic sayings that popped into his head. His latest filled him with good feeling and he reached into his pocket and flipped a quarter to Mutt. “Here, go drink ya breakfast,” he said, and his fat, muscular tub of a body shook with mirth.
Captain Schlegel, popularly called “Schnorkel,” an ex-German submariner who bossed the pier for Interstate, had just given Big Mac the cargo breakdown on the
Maria Cristal:
two loft gangs, six regular gangs and two hundred extra banana carriers. Captain Schlegel gave Big Mac a box full of metal tabs covering the number of jobs to be filled. There was bad blood between the pier boss and Big Mac because the German was a discipline-minded Prussian recruited by Tom McGovern when Schlegel settled in Bohegan after his sub was held there at the end of the First World War. Schlegel didn’t like Big Mac’s sloppy ways and the fact that he held his job because of his prison record and his influence with the mob and not through any particular loading skill. There was an art to loading, both as to speed and placement, and Schlegel was generally respected as a master at it, even though he was commonly regarded as an inhuman sonofabitch. It had been Captain Schlegel who had said arrogantly to the press, “I have no special love for gangsters, but I can tell you one thing, you need a strong arm around here to keep in line the kind of working force we’ve got to deal with on the docks.” Captain Schlegel, on orders from Interstate, slipped a Christmas envelope to Johnny Friendly every Christmas, as well as to Charley the Gent and their subordinates, because Interstate was grateful for their co-operation. Oh, sure they shook you down once in a while, but it was quicker and cheaper to pay ten thousand on the line than to deal with the complicated demands of a genuine union. With a shop steward like Specs Flavin you didn’t have to worry about the little everyday breaches of the contract that could run company savings into hundreds of thousands. Sure, if you had to have unions, Captain Schlegel preferred Johnny Friendly’s kind to the real thing. Just the same he loathed having to deal with a “getrunkener dumbkopf ” like Big Mac McGown. Right now, for instance, Big Mac was still sweating off the effects of the load he always took on Friday evenings. It was only when he was on one that he referred to Captain Schlegel as “You Heinie bastard.” Captain Bateson, Captain Schlegel’s superior in Interstate, and Mr. McGovern could call the former U-boat officer a Heinie bastard because their position entitled them to this or any privilege. But Big Mac was just a vulgar red-neck who would have been an ordinary longshoreman if he hadn’t risen to power as a henchman of Johnny Friendly. Captain Schlegel despised him, especially since he had no choice but to tolerate him as part of the Friendly set-up on the piers of Bohegan serviced by Interstate. In theory a hiring boss was an employee of Interstate and subject to Captain Schlegel’s approval. In practice he was given the nod by Johnny Friendly. If Big Mac wasn’t acceptable, Johnny could pull his men out and shut down the pier. Captain Schlegel had a horror of that as he tried to push his pier to the highest yearly tonnage rate on the Jersey shore. So he only reddened and pushed his lips together when Big Mac gave him “Heinie bastard.”
A few minutes before, Captain Schlegel had been surprised when an Irish priest from across the park at St. Timothy’s had come in with Joey Doyle’s sister and asked if they could see a shape-up. Privately Captain Schlegel had considered Joey a trouble-maker, an agitator, the sort of smart-aleck who quoted back to you the union-stevedore agreement. But he hastened to assure the priest and the girl that her brother had been well liked by the company, a good worker, a fine boy. In behalf of Interstate Captain Schlegel extended his sympathies. Although the accident was off-hours, away from the pier and the company was in no way involved, Captain Schlegel was going to recommend that Interstate send Mr. Doyle a check for $100 as an official expression of company condolence. As to the shape-up that they wished to see, he frankly wondered why they should want to bother themselves watching a routine hiring practice. But if they wished to take the time, he would be happy to have a guard escort them to the entrance to Pier B where the morning hiring was about to take place. However, it would be better, he suggested, if they did not stop to ask Mr. McGown any questions, as he would be extremely busy with his morning duties. Captain Schlegel was anxiously unsure as to just what this priest and this girl were getting at, and Big Mac with a load on wasn’t the man to satisfy their curiosity.
The shape-up is often criticized unfairly, Captain Schlegel explained as he walked them to the door of his office. Obviously men cannot be given regular jobs when three hundred are needed one day, only one hundred the next, and perhaps none at all the third day when the outgoing ship is gone and the incoming vessel not yet arrived. In practice our hiring boss tries to pick the most competent and deserving men, and the majority of them average out pretty well in a month. So the system is not quite as haphazard and inhuman as a few alarmists have tried to make it sound. “Of course they have to sell papers and if it helps to exaggerate a little, who can blame them?” No system is perfect. He had been in nearly all the great ports of the world and this shape-up, as they called it, worked as well as any. Privately over beer at the Hofbrau Haus with his fellow-stevedore captains, Schlegel had said, “When we call five hundred men for two hundred jobs and each fella sees with his own eyes there’s at least two or three of ’em for every job, then by golly we can keep them towing the mark like we want ’em.”
He didn’t like this Father snooping around. He’d have to check into this. And the Doyle girl coming down was not a good sign either. Actually Interstate employees had been responsible for much of the dock violence in Bohegan, but the name of McGovern was a powerful one and Interstate had never been mentioned in connection with waterfront crime. But Captain Schlegel knew how to be correct with a Roman collar and a young lady. He bowed and brought his heels together in a habit-hardened courtesy, and assured them of his eagerness to show them any phase of the stevedore operation they wished to see.
So Father Barry and Katie were looking on when Big Mac came out to the pier entrance with the cigar box full of brass tabs. The only reason the hiring boss wasn’t swaggering or swaying was because he was a big-bodied man who could absorb a fifth a day with beer to wash it down and still walk a reasonably straight Une, even if his movements became uncertain and his behavior unpredictable from minute to minute.
McGown’s cheeks puffed out as he blew on his whistle. Some four hundred men fell into a dutiful, silent horseshoe around him.
They shaped according to custom, with the deck men on the left, the hold men to their right, then the dock men, hi-low drivers and on the extreme right the longshore casuals, the extra men. Father Barry and Katie saw how they pressed forward, begging with their eyes for the coveted jobs as Big Mac approached them. First he called out the men for the loft, mostly old men no longer fit for the heavy work, but scattered among them a few youthful privileged characters to whom Johnny Friendly owed some favor. “Hogan—Smith—Krajowski—Malloy—” Big Mac shouted. Terry caught his tab with a Willie Mays flourish and winked to Chick and Jackie as he started toward the entrance where he sang out his number to the timekeeper.
Then Big Mac began filling the regular gangs, looking for familiar faces and the kickback matches, and saying, “You—yeah you—okay you …” When he got down to the banana carriers the desperation mounted. Men jostled his arm in their eagerness, their frost-bitten faces challenging him, expressing an odd mixture of obsequiousness and defiance. “C’mon, Mac, I need a day bad …” “I got five kids home, Mac, I gotta work t’day …” “Hey, Mac, remember me, you said next time you’d …” And Runty, half begging but always saving his pride, “Who d’ya have t’ know t’ get a tab around here, fat boy?”
Watching this, Father Barry felt ashamed. He had seen the shape-up from the distance of a block and a half when he had come out into the park for a breath of air after the 7-o’clock Mass. But he had never come close enough to look into these desperate faces. Here was depersonalization, here was indignity, across the park from St. Timothy’s, under his very nose. It was one thing to hear abstract criticism of the shape-up. It was quite another to stand here, close enough to see the cold breath of the men, and to look into their eyes, pleading—for what? For a four-hour job, about nine dollars to lug two-hundred-pound banana stalks in a late November wind. No wonder some of the faces were blank and defeated and some of them were already sodden with drink. He looked at Katie, who was staring in fascinated disbelief as she watched her father offering himself to Big Mac like the others. The priest thought again of Xavier and how the little Basque would’ve lowered the boom on a deal like this. Man is such a noble creature, his mind snatched from some familiar text, that only God is his master.