Black Water Rising

Reverend Boykins raises a hand next. This gets the black marchers’ attention. They shh each other and wait politely for the Rev to speak. “I think what the men are trying to say is that the policy put forward by the mayor does not redress the wrongs that have already been perpetrated against them.”

“I’m sorry, Pat, but I got to say something here,” one of the white picketers says, a man in a dirty T-shirt, sleeves rolled up to his shoulder bones. “This is what I don’t like about this,” he says, pointing to Reverend Boykins. “Y’all are listening to people who don’t have a damn thing to do with this union. Y’all are getting into all this political crap when the rest of us just want to go back to work.”

“We want to work too,” one of the black marchers says.

“But we got to get some black men in management right now,” Kwame Mackalvy says. The white union men turn to stare at this interloper in a colorful dashiki, a black man who invited himself into the dockworkers’ broken family. “Now look,” Kwame says, writing policy off the top of his head. “If the stevedores were willing to say that the next, say, twenty or thirty foremen they hire over the next year will be black, or hell, Mexican even, then that’s one thing. If there was something in place that said these companies had to hire so many blacks—”

“Well, wait a minute now,” the man with the rolled-up sleeves says. “Why should y’all get promised something we ain’t guar­ anteed?”

“Putting some of us in management right now is the only way to make it equal right now,” Donnie Simpson says above the buzz­ ing crowd. “Y’all had your time. It’s our time now.”

“Let me see if I’m getting this straight,” the man with no sleeves says. “We stuck our necks out for you, walked out on the docks for you, and now you’re saying that this whole time what you really wanted wasn’t to be treated equal, but to be treated better than everybody else.”

“Fuck that,” one of the white picketers hollers.

“I got eight years on the job, eight years toward management. I’ll be damned if I’m gon’ stay on strike so a black man can come take my job,” one of the picketers says, letting his white poster board slide to the floor in defiance.

“You’d think people who say they’re always getting discrimi­ nated against wouldn’t want to turn around and do that to some­ body else,” No Sleeves says. “Well, I don’t think it’s right. I didn’t think it was right when white folks was doing it, and I don’t think it’s right if blacks are the ones doing it either.”

The white men in the room applaud him loudly. Across the union hall, another man boldly drops his sign to the floor. Two more follow. It starts to catch on around the room. One by one, the white men drop their signs.

The black dockworkers seem stunned, hurt even.

Pat Bodine waves his hand over the crowd. “I will say this, men. It will not be easy to go back into that negotiation room and push for more than what’s already been offered.” He looks out at the black dockworkers, talking as if the debate were already over. “This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Getting the stevedoring companies out of the habit of automatically putting whites first is not a little thing. We can build on that. Now look, we dragged OCAW into this with us. I don’t know how much longer those men are going to walk with us if we’re turning down what could be a workable solution.”

One of the white longshoremen down front climbs onto the stage without invitation, startling Bodine, who immedi­ ately looks into the audience for somebody to come physically remove the guy. “We got to go back to work, y’all,” the man onstage yells. “For all of us, the whole union. If we hold out for too long, they gon’ have them machines down there running everything. And then ain’t nobody gon’ have a job. They say­ ing they gon’ judge us by what we got inside,” he says, speaking directly to the black men now. “If y’all can’t live with that, I mean, if you don’t think you got what it takes to be manage­ ment, then, hell, don’t apply. But don’t keep the rest of us from going back to work.”

The black men wave him off the stage, booing loudly.

The whites clap and laud the man’s plainspoken sense.

At the back of the room, there’s an ILA officer dressed in slacks and a button-down. He motions to Bodine, then points to a wall clock overhead.

The Rev nudges Jay. “It’s time,” he says.

Onstage, Pat Bodine tells the men they’ll have to put this pro­ posal to a vote before the whole union no matter what, something the officers will organize in short order. In the meantime, they’ll need to hear more from the Maritime Association on what the stevedores are willing to put in writing. He reminds the men about the port commission meeting at five o’clock. “Those that want to join us might want to think about heading that way in the next few minutes or so. Get y’all selves something to eat, as the thing is likely to run long. Public officials do love to talk,” he says, which elicits universal soft chuckles throughout both sides of the room. “Also, you boys remember now . . . they gon’ have cameras at this thing. They’re talking about getting press from up north. You boys make sure and represent this union well.”

As the dockworkers make for the double doors, Bodine walks across the room to where the ILA officer has been waiting for him, next to a door marked private. Both men look up as Rev­ erend Boykins, Darren, and Jay approach. Pat Bodine takes one look at Jay and asks, “Who the hell is he?”

“I’m the boy’s lawyer,” Jay offers, which in this instance means nothing more than the fact that he’s not going to let the kid walk into this situation unprotected. Bodine, upon hearing the news of an attorney in their midst, sighs and shakes his head. They follow him down a long and dimly lit hallway.

This part of the building smells like stale coffee, tinged with the metallic edge of cigarette smoke so thick that it’s gotten into the curtains and the carpet on the floor. The union officers’ pri­ vate offices are at the end of the long hallway, the vice president, secretary, and treasurer all sharing one large room to the right, and the president housed in a dim, windowless room to the left. Two men are already waiting inside: Wayne Kaylin, president of OCAW, and Carlisle Minty, vice president of the same union. Jay remembers Minty’s picture from the paper. He is thinner in person. He’s wearing glasses, and behind them, his eyes are like two white clouds, pale and shape shifting. At first sight, Jay doesn’t like the man. The way he’s got himself leaned against Bodine’s desk, the way he doesn’t even bother to stand up straight and off the man’s property when Bodine walks into the room. He acts as if this whole meeting is beneath him. Jay immediately looks at Darren to see if there’s some recognition there, now that the two men are face-to-face again, to be sure once and for all if this is the same man who orchestrated the attack on Darren from the cab of his pickup truck. Minty isn’t wearing a baseball cap today, and he hardly looks twice in Darren’s direction, as if the boy were a stranger. Still, Jay can see the kid’s back stiffen in