All-Bright Court (25 page)

“Where's Hans?” the film asked. “Where's Oda?”

Hans and Oda had Joe's job. They had worked harder. They had worked longer, for lower wages. They had sacrificed for the good of their nations.

Finally, the film posed the question “Will you be Joe?” The men had grumbled through the movie, but when the final question was asked, a chair winged through the air, its seat flapping shut, and knocked down the pull-up screen. The men began smashing chairs. They tore the reel from the projector and ripped apart the film, as if Oda and Hans were inside it, living in one of the frames, as if their union president, Petrovich, could be strangled by twisting the film.

If only they could get their hands on Petrovich, they would tear his lame-duck wings from his body. After the men had been laid off, without the consent, advice, or even knowledge of the rank and file, Petrovich had met with management and signed their lives away. He had taken away their right to strike.

The agreement he signed was called the ENA, the Experimental Negotiating Agreement. It would be a way of protecting the men, to keep foreign steel from taking advantage of domestic steel. If there was to be a strike, the Germans or Japanese could make inroads by selling their product more cheaply. Strikes were not only obsolete, they were dangerous. Whether or not the men agreed, their amended contract was binding.

Samuel focused his attention on the representative at the podium. “Let me read something to you,” the man said. “This is a quote, now, not my words. ‘I'd like to see democracy exercised to the fullest extent in our union or any other union, but democracy in the labor movement, as in various segments of life, can be carried too far.'

“I probably don't even have to tell you who said that. It was Petrovich, the lousy son of a bitch, lame duck. Too much democracy! That's what he's saying. Where the hell does he think we are, Russia? Petrovich is Russian. You know what I'm saying? You
know
what I'm saying. He's trying to sell us into slavery, the stinking Red.”

Samuel did not know if Petrovich was a Red. He did know he was a redneck.

During the fall of that year Gerald Thompson, a black staff representative, won a nomination as a candidate for international vice president. The then vice president was retiring. Despite the fact Thompson was backed by the black members of the U.A.W., who numbered one third of the union's membership, Petrovich invalidated the nomination. It came to his attention that in 1965, while Thompson was hospitalized with a work-related injury, he had let his dues lapse.

“We will fight, fight, fight!” the union representative yelled. “We have a contract that doesn't say we can't strike. We're going to court because that agreement Petrovich made isn't right and it isn't legal.”

Before the rank and file went to negotiate its new contract, a ruling was handed down on the no-strike policy. The judge hearing the case said, “In any system of self-government, in theory and in practice even the most precious of rights may be waived, assuming that the system established for making such a decision is followed.”

Because the rank and file had voted Petrovich in, what he did might not have been right, but it was legal. The no-strike policy would be in effect until 1977.

Work or leave. Those were the choices the men faced. How could that be considered slavery? No one forced into involuntary servitude had the option of leaving.

When the contract came back, there was a twenty-eight-cent-an-hour raise the first year, and sixteen cents for each of the next two years. In just fourteen years, steelworkers dropped from first to fourteenth on the wage scale of industrial workers.

The men worked while management continued streamlining the industry, combining and eliminating jobs and starting a “speed-up” campaign. There was no featherbedding. And the men's loyalty to the 1974 contract was rewarded. Each worker was given a flat one-hundred-fifty-dollar bonus. Management had no hard feelings.

In the bicentennial year, when sixty-five thousand domestic specialty-steel jobs were threatened by imports from Germany and Japan, Samuel knew Hans and Oda were working, and he was glad to be working, even with emphysema. He was glad he was not Joe.

 

Mikey would not be making the trip, but he was leaving anyway. He was going to graduate the next year, a full year early, and he was going east. Every school he was applying to was in New England.

“Why don't you apply to some college 'round here? They got some good schools in Buffalo,” Mary Kate had said to Mikey one day while he was preparing to go out on his route.

“Mama, there are no good schools around here. I'm not going to go to a state university. I can get into the Ivy League.”

Samuel asked, “What's that?”

“Dad,” Mikey said, “everyone knows what the Ivy League is.”

“I don't,” Samuel said. “Your mama don't know neither.”

“They're the best colleges in the country, the world!” Mikey said.

“If you want to go away to school, you should think 'bout going to a black college, someplace like Southern,” Mary Kate said.

“Southern?” Samuel asked.

Mary Kate said, “Yeah, it's a fine school, and then there's Grambling, Howard—”

“I'm not going to any black college,” Mikey said, folding the last of his papers.

“He right. He ain't going to one of them,” Samuel said, coughing. “If he want to get what the white man got, he better go where the white man go.”

Mikey left with his papers.

That night, when Mary Kate and Samuel were in bed, she asked, “Why you tell Mikey what you did?”

“What?” he asked. He had been half asleep, his back to her.

“You not wanting him to go to a black college.”

“Kate, could you see him at one?”

“Well, I can't see where he want to go. He just want to get away from us.” Her voice was thin, brittle.

Samuel turned to face her. In a wheezing voice he said, “That ain't true. Don't you think that.”

“It is true. I worry 'bout him more than any of our children. Him graduating early, he doing that so he can get away. He going to be lost to us,” she said, her voice cracking.

“Hush, now,” Samuel said, his words floating into the shadows of the room. “He going to be all right. Let me tell you something,” he said, reaching out for his wife in the darkness. “He going to be a blessing to us in our old age.”

26

F
OR JUST
a minute Mikey was lost. Only a few blocks from home, he could have been in a desert, swept up in a simoom, sand becoming sky, becoming air, blinding him, choking him.

But he was on Ridge Road, caught out in the worst storm of the century, the blizzard of '77. Mikey wished the storm was something he had dreamed up. If he were dreaming, someone would come and wake him, and he would find himself safely in bed. He would settle for seeing Isaac, welcome his haunting presence. Isaac could scare him out of this nightmare.

As Mikey had gotten off the bus, the driver had said, “I hope you're close to home. The way it's coming down, you might never get there.”

Only then did it occur to Mikey that he might be in danger. Though it took him five hours to get to Lackawanna, though the two buses he had to take had been late, had stopped and skidded and lumbered along through snow falling at a rate of two inches an hour, though along the lakefront there had been zero visibility and the driver nearly hit seven abandoned cars, Mikey had not let himself believe the storm could harm him.

The storm was not unexpected. High winds and ten inches to a foot of snow had been predicted. The flurries had begun early that morning, a little snow slipping in unobtrusively over the lake.

The headmaster at Essex had decided at ten in the morning there would be a full day of classes. Then it had been snowing steadily, but not heavily. The previous week he had dismissed classes at noon because a heavy snowfall had been predicted. But less than an inch fell, leaving smokelike spirals of snow dancing across the deserted campus, and the headmaster looked foolish. He was not going to repeat that mistake.

As Mikey had sat in his last class of the day, watching as the world was being obliterated by whiteness, he thought that back in All-Bright Court everyone must surely be thinking that the world was ending, that this storm was a plague being visited upon them by God.

His mother had phoned twice. Before he had left school at the end of the day, Mikey had taken down two pink message slips tacked to the bulletin board outside the headmaster's office and stuffed them in one of his books. He knew how worried his mother must be, but he was not going to feed her irrational fears by calling.

Scott had offered to let him stay at his house. It wasn't far from the school, but Mikey had declined. He would show his parents that he was more than capable of taking care of himself.

But when he had gotten off the bus from Buffalo, when the bus had been swallowed by the night and the storm, its red taillights moving steadily away, he began to feel frightened. In that instant he had become disoriented, turned around, unsure of the way.

It was then that he fell. His books scattered, disappearing into the snow. His papers blew from his books, flapping their way skyward.

Mikey lay there a few moments, stunned, the snow enveloping him in a nebulous, cold whiteness. He knew that if he did not get up he would die. He tried to struggle to his feet, but the wind was too strong, the snow falling too heavily. He thought this was how it would be. Him alone. Lost.

After several more minutes he managed to get on his hands and knees. He was out of breath. Snow had gotten down his collar, up his sleeves, in his pant legs, soaking him through. Its coldness was deceiving. It felt like fire. He could not trust his senses. As he turned to face what might be the direction of home, he thought he saw a figure advancing steadily toward him, pressing against the storm.

Again he thought he was in a dream and this was Isaac coming for him, even though he knew Isaac was safely locked away.

The figured loomed closer, no more than a shadow, no more than a ghost, until it stood over him. It was his father.

Samuel helped his son up from the ground. He was saying something to Mikey, but Mikey could not hear a word. The wind was reaching into his father's mouth, snatching his words away, sending them flying into oblivion.

All-Bright Court
and
Imani All Mine
by Connie Porter

 

All-Bright Court

In the upstate New York mill town of Lackawanna, the company-built housing project known as All-Bright Court represents everything its residents have dreamed of—jobs, freedom, and a future. The outcome of those dreams is the stuff of Connie Porter's acclaimed debut novel. Through twenty years, as the promises of the 1960s give way to hardship and upheaval, Porter chronicles the loves, hopes, troubles, triumphs, and ambitions of Mississippi-born Sam and Mary Kate Taylor and their neighbors. As the late 1970s fade the Court's bright colors and a people's optimism, young Mikey Taylor—gifted, ambitious, and proud—comes to embody an entire community's dreams and disappointments.

 

FOR DISCUSSION

1. Porter has said that in this novel “the reader can see the impact of the political life of this country on a group of people.” What impact do the major events and issues in American “political life” have on the people of All-Bright Court? How are some of these political and social issues still important?
   
2. What arguments do the characters present for
   and
   against playing by the white man's rules—for example: getting an education, paying taxes, working hard? In what circumstances are those arguments voiced? What are the desired and actual results of each way of acting? In what ways do the same arguments apply today for black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans?
   
3. In chapter 8, Porter writes that Moses “hid within the shell of his words. They were a way of protecting him from the truth.” How and why do various characters use words both to hide from the truth and to express or expose the truth? How is it that language may be used for both purposes?
   
4. Porter writes, “It was Samuel who challenged” what Mary Kate knew and thought she knew; he “challenged who she thought she was.” In what ways does Sam challenge his wife's view of herself? What are the consequences of Sam's challenge? What additional challenges—emotional, intellectual, and social, for example—are presented to the characters by one another? What are the outcomes of those challenges?
   
5. What southern country ways, habits, and beliefs do the people of All-Bright Court retain? Why? How do these habits and beliefs help these people cope with the demands and circumstances of their lives in the North?
   
6. What are the effects on Mikey of his privileged education? In what ways is Mikey both a personal success and a personal failure? “His parents could both see the learning was changing him, but so was the unlearning,” Porter writes. What does Mikey learn and what does he unlearn, and how do the “learning” and the “unlearning” change him?
   
7. At the union meeting in chapter 25, the union representative quotes the union president as saying that “democracy in the labor movement, as in various segments of life, can be carried too far.” What is your reaction to this statement? In what ways, if at all, can democracy—in any “segment” of American life—be carried too far? What expressions of this attitude have there been in recent American history?
   
8. What are the implications of the novel's final scene, in which—in the midst of a blizzard—Sam looms over his fallen son, “no more than a ghost,” and in which Mikey cannot hear a word that Sam is saying? What are the implications—for Mikey's future, for the future of all young black people, and for the future of all young Americans—of the novel's final sentence: “The wind was reaching into his father's mouth, snatching his words away, sending them flying into oblivion”?