He cannot picture any of these men behind the wheel of a black Ford LTD. And didn’t Darren say his guy was driving a truck? And wore glasses?
The coffee station is a handful of thermoses lined up on a card table. There’s a photographer hovering nearby. He’s wearing khakis and Top-Siders and a
Just then, the double doors to the union hall slam shut.
Jay hears footsteps on the plank wood of the stage. They belong to a white man in his fifties, who’s graying about the temples in two patches that shoot out like tusks. He’s wearing a checkered button-down shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows and carrying a clipboard, a name tag pinned to his chest. He taps on the microphone twice then points to the crowd of men. “Somebody oughta push those doors back open. Otherwise we like to suffocate in here.”
He waits for two obedient young men at the back of the hall to prop open the double doors using a folding table and a couple of chairs; then the man onstage continues, leaning into the micro phone. “Brothers of the International Longshoremen Associa tion,” he says. “I just got off the phone with—”
“Name please!” a reporter yells.
“Pat Bodine, B-O-D-I-N-E. President ILA, Local Fifty-six, Houston, Texas.” He waits, making sure the press gets it right. Then he smiles and says, “I just got off the phone with Wayne Kaylin, president of OCAW, Local One- eighty, not fifteen min utes ago. If we walk, gentlemen, the oil and chemical workers walk with us.”
The whole black side of the room erupts in applause, plus a good number of whites in attendance. If Jay had to guess, he would put the glee at a little over 50 percent, a thin but real majority. The other men in the room, the ones not clapping, hooting, or hollering, are shaking their heads to themselves or cutting eyes at each other. One of the men down front shouts, “What about the Teamsters!”
“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 dis ease across the humid room. Suddenly Jay is not so sure of his original count, just where the majority lies. He takes particu lar 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 Broth erhood 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 mes sage 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, look ing 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,
“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 dad dy’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 clap ping. 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
