The Drifters (22 page)

It was about dawn when I finished reading the challenge, and before I could ask any questions, the thin man returned with a most beautiful young Negro girl, whose relationship to the three men I was never to get straightened out. Apparently she was not the girl of the thin man who had fetched her, but Akbar Muhammad treated her with such indifference, if not contempt, that I doubted she would have been long content with his sponsorship. Young Cato, on the other hand, was painfully careful not to express an interest in her, so I judged that one of the other men must have warned him away, but I could sense that he was deeply affected.

She was like a young forest animal, sleek, innately graceful, fawn-colored and somewhat petulant. Her features were Grecian in their regularity, as if carved from some precious golden marble from North Africa. She was comely, in the words of the Bible, and it required little imagination to see her standing coolly under an Arabian palm while Solomon sang to her.

‘You got the labor union material typed?’ Akbar Muhammad asked as she joined us.

‘Like I tol’ you, it’s in Paul’s room.’ Impatiently she left us and climbed to another floor, where I could hear her rummaging about. In a few minutes she returned with a sheaf of papers, which Akbar handed me. They presented his demands on the labor unions of Philadelphia, similar to those planned for the churches but in my opinion more justified.

First he recited the adroit chicanery by which the white unions had forbidden Negroes to learn the basic skills that might have supported them. No Negro could be a bricklayer,
an electrician, a plasterer, a roofer, a carpenter, a structural-steel man. ‘But I’ve seen Negro carpenters,’ I protested. ‘Read on,’ Akbar growled.

He then quoted from the rules of the various unions, citing high-flown pharses from constitutions which ensured all honest men a fair entrance to the unions, if only they served their apprenticeship, mastered the basic skills and paid their union dues. Next he cited the actual figures of union membership, after fifteen years of Negro agitation for a fair deal:

The list went on and on, with one very large construction unit having more than four thousand members, of whom seven were Negro. This union was training 218 apprentices, of whom three were black. No one could look at these disparate figures without seeing the oppression that was sanctified by the union movement. What made the figures doubly insane was that this was happening in Philadelphia, where the working population was at least fifty per cent Negro.

‘And there’s no sign that things will ever be better,’ Akbar said coldly. ‘At least not until we sock the unions for eight million dollars, which we shall do.’

‘Here’s the real trouble,’ Cato broke in, and as he spoke with rapier efficiency, I got the idea that he was interested more in impressing Vilma than me. ‘The one avenue which the Negro has for escaping his ghetto is work. Yet here in Philadelphia his opportunity to work is totally blocked by the unions. And who are the unions? Good Catholics, good Protestants whose churches have condoned this evil state of affairs. And who are these good Catholics and Protestants?
Italians, Poles, Germans and white immigrants from the south who fear we’ll take their jobs. Can you see the pressure cooker they keep us in? No taxes so that we can run our own city. Nothing but eternal frustration.’ He turned to me and asked, ‘Now do you understand why these documents are needed?’

I asked Akbar, ‘Could we send the man out for some coffee and doughnuts?’ I handed the thin fellow five dollars, and later he returned with a fistful of paper bags. ‘There ain’t any change,’ he said. ‘I got sandwiches for the men upstairs.’

I sat on the bed and recalled certain experiences I had had in this field. ‘You’re interested in what a practical-minded white workman thinks about the problem?’ They nodded. ‘I want to say four things. You’ll agree with three of them and thank me for having told you. I can imagine you using them in your speeches later on. You’ll despise me for the fourth, and when I leave, it will be with mutual animosity. But here goes.

‘First, some years ago I was on the border of India and Tibet, watching a gang build a difficult mountain road. They were using woman-power. Thousands of women at the mountain face quarrying rock by hand. Thousands of other women with little reed baskets carrying large rocks. Thousands of still other women sitting in the roadbed breaking the rocks into pebbles. They laid about two feet of road a day, but that was all right, because they had nothing better to do, until you figured that with proper machinery and direction, a few men could have done in one day what these five thousand women would accomplish in one month. I spoke to the foreman about this, and he said, “But we get the women for almost nothing.” He was ruining his whole project because the labor was so cheap. Wherever I went in Asia after that I looked at the work force and found the same thing. In Japanese steel mills before the war they used hundreds of workmen instead of one machine, because they got the workman cheap, and they also got a cheap product that couldn’t compete in the world market. In China they used thousands of workmen where ten would suffice, because they got them cheap, and the results suffered. I concluded that the most expensive product in the world is cheap labor, because it lures you away from rational operations. You pay a man a high wage, you demand a high return, and from high returns you pick
up a good profit. So ever since, I’ve believed in paying a man high wages, then taxing him like hell for the welfare of the state. The thing that appalls me about America’s philosophy regarding the Negro workman is that we’re doing with him what the government in India was doing with the five thousand women, misusing them because they’re cheap. And we hurt ourselves more than we do the Negro. I’d pay every Negro at least five dollars an hour, and then tax hell out of him for schools and public parks.’

Akbar and Cato had followed my reasoning with delight; it was what they had already figured out. ‘Man, you see the problem,’ Akbar cried enthusiastically. ‘The white honkies that keep the brothers out of the labor unions are hurting themselves as much as they hurt us.’

‘Second,’ I said, ‘when I was working with the navy in Guadalcanal—in the bad days, that was—we didn’t have enough men to go around. Anyone who could shoot a rifle was needed on patrol, because those Japanese were murder. Henderson airfield posed a difficult problem, because we had to keep it operating to give our planes a place to land and refuel. You know what we did? It still sounds incredible, but we did it. We took Stone Age cannibals from the nearby island of Malaita … this is the most backward island on earth, believe me. And we took these men right out of the jungle and put khaki shorts on them and within two weeks we had them driving ten-ton trucks and refueling airplanes. Nothing infuriates me more than the argument of the white American unions that blacks can’t learn. If the plantation system of the south still prevailed—with Negro slaves—you can be dead sure that Negroes would be the electricians, the plasterers, the bricklayers. They were in the old days, and they would be now. And they’d be better technicians than the free whites in the neighborhood, because to be so would be a source of pride. So the simple skills you can perform. What about the complicated ones?

‘That brings me to the third point. When I was connected with that big dam in Afghanistan, I saw our people take men from the desert, train them for three months, and then turn over to them one of the most complicated of modern machines. It’s a big dredge … thousands of tons. It goes into swampy land and cuts drainage channels. How does it keep from sinking into the mud? It carries its own highway with it … great chunks of steel marsden matting.
With a long crane it lays a length of matting, crawls out onto it, then swings the crane around to the back, picks up the matting it has just used and lays it through the swamp ahead. At the end the damned machine is a mile out in the middle of the swamp, marooned on the platform it built for itself. Would you believe that we could teach Afghans from the Stone Age to operate that machine? We did. Today you can teach a capable man almost anything. With less than a year of training, Negroes could man every union job in Philadelphia, and the output would scarcely suffer.’

This theory met with wild agreement. Even the thin man said, ‘My brother, he can fix television like you never saw.’ Vilma also spoke for the first time. ‘The brothers could learn. I know they could learn.’

‘What’s your last point?’ Akbar Muhammad asked.

‘The one you won’t like,’ I said. ‘The one thing that prevents the Negro from accomplishing these things when the white man does allow him to try …’

‘Goddammit!’ Akbar shouted, leaping from the bed. ‘Don’t speak like that! The day is past when you white people are going to
allow
us anything. We’re going to take things like jobs. And if you try to stop us, there has got to be blood.’ He raged about the room, kicking at discarded mimeographed sheets containing his manifesto. ‘If a man like you, who understands the problem … if you still speak of allowing us to try our skills … goddammit, what hope is there?’ He ended with his pugnacious beard a few inches from my nose.

‘I’m sorry. I understand.’

‘No, you don’t understand!’ Akbar shouted. ‘Damn it, you do
not
understand. I am telling you right now that I expect to be shot down in the streets of Philadelphia … before I’m thirty years old. You, tell him!’

The thin man said in a voice I could scarcely hear, ‘I expect to be gunned down. But I’m gonna take half a dozen white men down with me.’

‘You! Cato! Tell him!’

‘I’m positive we’ll have to go into the streets to win equality. We realize you have the guns … you got us outnumbered … I expect to die fighting here in Philadelphia.’

‘Wait a minute!’ I shouted. ‘Akbar, you have a college
degree. Cato, you’re getting one. There’s a place for you in our society.’

‘You don’t seem to understand. It’s no longer enough for me to get a job. I want every black man to have a fair chance. I want the brothers to be free, and I’ll die for it.’

Vilma had said nothing while the others uttered their manifestos, but now she did something that was even more dramatic. She crossed the room, yanked open a closed door, and showed me a small arsenal of guns and ammunition. Standing like a black Joan of Arc beside this lethal cache, she said nothing, then closed the door and resumed her place on the bed beside the thin man.

‘What was your fourth point?’ Akbar asked.

I pointed to the arsenal and said, ‘After that it would be anticlimactic.’

‘I want to hear it.

‘It’ll only make you angry.’

‘No angrier than I already am.’

‘Here goes. Up till yesterday I had an office manager named Nordness. Brought him with me from Geneva. He quit. Why? He told me that all he got from the Negroes in Philadelphia was ulcers. Because at levels lower than you and Cato, he found no sense of responsibility. If he gave a man a job on Monday, the man took off for three days on Friday. If he opened a branch on the edge of town and staffed it with Negroes, next week it might or might not be open for business. Nordness believed that union leaders were dead right whether you like it or not when they said, “Sure, the Negro can learn, but you never know whether he’s going to report for duty.” So until your inner society is restructured, this dreadful self-condemnation will haunt you … and keep you from the good things you want.’

To my surprise, Muhammad listened to my criticism, pursed his lips thoughtfully, and said, ‘Nordness was right. We know this—painfully—and only our program will change things … I mean, change the character of the black.’

‘What program do you have?’ I asked, pointing to the two sets of papers, which seemed determined to isolate the Negro further.

‘Self-respect,’ Muhammad said ‘When blacks are able to organize things their own way … do their own thing …’ He stopped, fumbled for a concept that apparently he had not adequately formed, and said nothing.

‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘And I agree. Negroes must erect their own citadels of self-respect. In all things. All men have to do that. But if you think this means you can run a grocery store on Negro principles, or a factory, or an insurance office, and that you can ignore cost efficiency studies or reporting to work regularly and on time … You know, Mr. Muhammad, there will not be special rules for you Negroes.’

‘There you miss the whole point,’ he said eagerly, as if recovering the standards of thought he had lost. ‘We are going to establish enterprises whose primary motives will be to instill self-respect in the blacks who run them and patronize them. Competing with white stores in the neighborhood will be secondary.’

‘One hundred per cent wrong,’ I said flatly. ‘The inescapable motive of every store, black or white, is to earn a profit which will enable it to keep functioning. You establish your Negro store and run it as poorly as I see Negro establishments run, and every Negro in your district will patronize the white store, because it’ll be a better store.’

‘Will you give our committee a hundred thousand to try it our way?’