American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (47 page)

  “Because whether we want them or not, we won’t be able to afford them,” Bauer answered.

  “Of course we won’t be able to afford them. They’re cutting our hours.” Bauer’s smile was full of anything but amusement. “Welcome to the vicious circle.” That circle was anything but welcome to Martin. He hung around the Party hall till he saw no one had any firm notion of how to respond to the bosses’ proposal for cutting hours. No one could decide if it was good because it saved jobs or bad because it cut pay. Martin concluded the proposal would probably go forward. Strong opposition from the workers might have stopped it. If they couldn’t decide whether it was good or bad, they would find out by experiment—on themselves.

  He rode the trolley back to the flat he shared with Rita. His own mood was glum, or worse than glum.

  He’d told Albert Bauer the exact truth. If his hours and pay got cut to three-quarters of what he had now, the only thing that would keep him afloat was his wife’s salary.

  And Rita seemed anything but happy when he came through the door. After a perfunctory kiss, she said,

  “Orders have taken a real tumble since the market started going down. Nobody wants pipe any more—not new pipe, anyway.”

  It was spring, a bright spring, the weather full of new-puppy warmth and hope. Ice walked Chester Martin’s back even so. He tried to remember when he’d known fear like this. The Roanoke front? He shook his head. That terror had been different, and far more immediate: fear of death and pain and mutilation. This was something else. Fear of loss, fear of hunger, fear of endless misery without escape.

  Fear of bills. Fear of moving back in with his mother and father—if this quiet, creeping horror didn’t lay hold of them, too.

  When Martin laughed, he might have been whistling while walking past a graveyard. “It was just a few weeks ago when we figured we could have any old thing we wanted,” he said, and went on to tell Rita about the company’s plan to cut everybody’s hours.

  She listened to that, her face getting longer and longer. “I know what I want,” she said. “I want us to keep our jobs, that’s what.”

  “Yeah,” he said quietly. “That’s about what it boils down to, isn’t it?”

  “It’s hard times when your neighbor’s out of work,” Rita said. “It’s the end of the world when you are.”

  “Maybe if the government really had seized the means of production this wouldn’t have happened,” Chester said, trying to make himself believe it. He couldn’t. Shaking his head, he went on, “No, they couldn’t’ve done it, I don’t think. It would have meant real class war—and it might not have helped.”

  “What are we going to do?” Rita asked. “What
can
we do?”

  “Hang on tight,” he said. “We’re still working. We’re going to lose most of the stocks we bought, though. I hated answering the last margin call—felt like throwing money away. And we probably won’t be able to afford to answer the next one.”

  “We’ve got each other. We’re healthy.” Rita sounded as if she was trying to reassure herself, and not having much luck.

  “It can’t get much worse,” Chester said. “How could stocks go any lower than they have already?

  There’s got to be a floor somewhere.”

  “Yes, but where?” Rita asked, and he had no answer. He felt less ashamed of that than he might have otherwise—for no one else in the USA—no one else in the whole world, by all the signs—had any answer to it, either. No, he wasn’t ashamed, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t frightened.

  He went to work day by day, having nothing else he could do. Before long, his shift did go from eight hours to six. His pay dropped by a quarter, too. He hated that, but he supposed he would have hated being without a paycheck even more. As long as Rita had a job, too, they got by.

  The market continued to sink. Reading the papers, Martin took occasional consolation in noticing Richmond stocks had fallen even further than those on Wall Street. Did misery really love company? He didn’t know about that, either. What he did know was that, every day, there seemed to be more misery to go around.

  People started telling stories about brokers jumping off bridges and diving out of windows. Nobody could say whether those stories were true. People told them anyhow. One day in the middle of June, Wall Street stopped sinking. It dove. Maybe brokers didn’t, but the market did. The wave of sell orders overwhelmed the ticker tape. It lagged ever further behind the tidal wave of disaster. The last few shares Chester had so proudly held on to went then, on what the papers called Swan-Dive Wednesday. By that time, he’d almost stopped caring. Not till almost four hours after the market closed did the chattering tape finally spit out the last of the day’s losses.

  When Thursday dawned, the market didn’t open. An eerie calm prevailed at the steel mill. “Reminds me of the day after a big attack that didn’t work,” Martin said to Albert Bauer as they opened their lunch pails together.

  Bauer had been at the front, too. He nodded. “Or maybe it did,” he said, “only we were on the receiving end.” He took a bite out of his cheese sandwich. He’d usually eaten bologna or pastrami before the market tumbled. So had Martin. His sandwich had cheese in it, too. Cheese was cheaper. Bauer went on, “President Blackford’s got almost four years left in his term, but he’s a lame duck already. Poor sorry son of a bitch.”

  “He’s doing everything he can,” Chester said. “I like what he said in the paper this morning. ‘We have nowhere to go but up.’ That’s good. He means it, too—you can tell.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m not arguing with you,” Bauer answered. “But even if things do go up, what will people remember? They’ll remember how far down we went, and who was in the Powel House when we did.

  Come 1932, he’ll have Democrats lined up six deep to run against him.” Martin thought about that. It made altogether too much sense to be comfortable. “Well, the class struggle takes a step back,” he said. “Or probably takes a step back. You never can tell, not for sure.”

  “Want to bet?” Bauer said. “I’m as good a Socialist as any man around, and I’ve got twenty bucks says there’ll be a Democrat in Powel House after the ‘32 elections.”

  “You won’t get my twenty,” Martin said. “Wish I could, but Rita’d kill me—and I think I’d lose the dough. Times are tough enough without throwing it away.”

  “Of course, by the time ‘32 rolls around, I might have forgotten who I made the bet with,” Bauer said.

  “Fat chance,” Martin answered. “It’s not just that you wouldn’t forget between now and then, Al. It’s that you wouldn’t let me forget.”

  “Who, me?” Bauer did his best to sound indignant. “Come on. Eat up. We’ve got to get back to it pretty goddamn quick.”

  “Right,” Martin said tightly. The company was also cracking down on people who violated its rules. He didn’t want to end up on the street. Six hours’ pay was better than none at all.

  When he got home that night, he found Rita crumpled in tears on the sofa. “Oh, Lord!” he said. “What’s the matter, sweetie?” He feared he knew the answer even without the question he had to ask.

  And he was right. “They fired me,” his wife answered. “They told me to clean out my desk and not come back tomorrow—they can’t afford to keep me any more. I’ve been there seven years, and they threw me out like a piece of dirt. Where am I going to go? What am I going to do? What are
we
going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Chester said dazedly. “So help me God, I don’t know.” In a few weeks, they’d gone from having two paychecks to having three-quarters of one. That was bad enough—was worse than bad enough. But what was worse yet, what was really terrifying, was that, compared to an awful lot of people, they were still well off.

 
I
n the Terry, times hadn’t been good since the last hectic days of the Great War. Back then, with every white man possible at the front, Augusta’s Negroes had filled factory jobs galore. They’d made less money than the whites they were displacing, but even that added up to more money than they’d ever seen in their lives till that time. Then the whites, those who’d lived, came back, and the factory jobs dried up. People began living hand-to-mouth again.

  Erasmus’ place was a case in point. Scipio would have thought a fish market and café in a poor part of town immune from anything so remote as a stock-market panic. After all, the worst had happened in the Terry a dozen years earlier . . . hadn’t it?

  He would have thought that, but he would have been wrong. Erasmus’ wrinkled face got longer with each passing day. His grizzled hair got grayer, too, or so it seemed to Scipio.

  One morning, while Scipio washed the pile of breakfast dishes, Erasmus put his discontent into words:

  “They ain’t comin’ in.”

  “Ain’t that bad, boss,” Scipio said. “They ain’t comin’, where we get all these here dishes?”

  “They ain’t comin’,” Erasmus repeated. “‘Fore all this panic happen, woulda been twice the dishes. Woulda been twice the money, too.”

  He was right, of course. Scipio’s denial meant very little. Erasmus’ place remained busy. It wasn’t packed, not the way it had been before the market plunged. Scipio put the best face on things he could:

  “People’s bein’ careful wid dey money.”

  Erasmus shook his head. “A month ago, say, people was bein’ careful with their money. Ain’t like that no more. Now what it’s like is, folks who come here, they ain’t hardly got no money to be careful with.”

  “Lotta white folks outta work,” Scipio admitted. “Bathsheba, she done lost fo’, five cleanin’ jobs las’ few weeks. De buckra ain’t got the money to give her.”

  “Here in the Terry, ain’t many of us works for our ownselves,” Erasmus said. “We mostly works for the buckra, almost like it was still slavery days. If the buckra outta work,
we
outta work, on account of they can’t afford to pay us no more. How is I supposed to make money when there ain’t no money to make?”

  “Dunno,” Scipio said. He waved. “Doin’ pretty good so far.”

  “Ain’t broke yet,” Erasmus said. “Dunno why not, ’specially the way you eats.” He wagged a finger at Scipio.

  Had Scipio been white, he would have turned red. But taking meals at Erasmus’ place was as much a part of what his boss paid him as the banknotes he got every Friday. It saved him money. The way things were going, the way Bathsheba’s cleaning jobs were drying up, he needed to save all the money he could.

  And Erasmus said not a word when he fixed himself a fried-egg sandwich and a big plate of grits for lunch. He’d just finished when the first lunch customer came in: a cleaning woman whose latest job had been close by the edge of the Terry. “Don’t know how long I kin keep comin’ here,” she said as she took a bite out of a bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich. “White folks is lettin’ people go. Ain’t got no money their ownselves, sure ain’t got none to spend on cleanin’ their houses.”

  “I seen that, too,” Scipio said. “My wife, she done los’ half she people.”

  “World’s a crazy place nowadays,” the woman said. “Lady at the house I was at jus’ now, her husband, he been a Whig forever, an’ his daddy before him, an’
his
daddy before him. She say he talkin’ ‘bout votin’ Freedom when the ‘lections come round this fall. I didn’t say nothin’. You don’t like to tell the lady what’s payin’ you her husband ain’t got no brains.” She took another bite.

  From his station in front of the stove, Erasmus said, “When the white folks see their money goin’ away, some of ’em liable to do some crazy things.”

  “How many of ’em do dem crazy things?” Scipio wondered as he fetched the cleaning lady a cup of coffee. “We gwine have buckra in de streets yellin’, ‘Freedom!’ again? Reckoned we was done wid dat.”

  “God do what He want to do, not what we wants Him to do,” the cleaning woman said. “Thank you kindly, Xerxes,” she added when Scipio set the coffee on the table.

  “You’s welcome,” he answered absently.

  How many whites were losing their jobs or losing money? He had no way of knowing, not for sure.

  More than a few, though; the stories in the
Constitutionalist
made that very clear. So did what was happening to the jobs of Negroes who depended on whites for work. How many of the whites who lost their jobs
would
start voting for Jake Featherston and his party?

  Scipio had no way of knowing that, either, not for sure. But he’d just heard of one, and that was one more than he wanted to know about.

  The cleaning lady gulped the coffee and got to her feet. She left money on the tabletop and hurried away. Over her shoulder, she said, “Can’t be late gittin’ back. Miz Hutton, I reckon she grab the first excuse she find to put me on the street. Don’t aim to give her none.” Out the door she went, in a hurry because her tip was small.

  A man who sold secondhand furniture across the street came in for some fried catfish. As he ate, he remarked, “Had me a couple-three buckra come in the last few days. Ain’t seen none in a hell of a long time ‘fore that.”

  “Buy anything?” Scipio asked.

  “Sure enough did,” the furniture dealer answered. “Sold me a couple beds and a good chest o’

  drawers.”

  “Good for you, Athenaeus,” Erasmus said. “ ‘Bout time I hear of somebody doin’ good right now.”

  “Fellas sellin’ new furniture, they’s the ones wouldn’t be happy if they knowed,” Athenaeus said. “White folks all say they look at the new stuff first, but they can’t afford it, no way, nohow. So they come to me.”

  “Good to hear it,” Scipio echoed; as Erasmus had said, any news of success was welcome. But Athenaeus wasn’t wrong. What would the white furniture dealers whose goods hadn’t sold think?

  And it wasn’t just what they would think. What would they do? What could any man do, when he stared at bills and had no money to pay them? Would they put on white shirts and butternut trousers and start shouting, “Freedom!” at the top of their lungs? If they did, could anybody blame them?