He tore the cardboard sheet off his picket sign. The stick he was left holding wasn’t as good a weapon as a billy club, but it wasn’t to be despised, either. All around him, his companions imitated his action.
Here came the cops, a solid phalanx of them. Even so, they were outnumbered. They relied on discipline and on being able to create fear to get their way. After gas and machine guns and artillery and Confederate barrels, Martin found absurd the idea that he should be afraid of conscription-dodgers with clubs. He heard laughter from the men to either side of him, too.
In the instant before the red-faced policemen slammed into the picketers, Martin saw surprise and doubt on the features of a couple of blue-uniformed goons. Then he was at close quarters with them, and had no chance to study their expressions in any detail.
One of them swung a nightstick at his head. As if the cop were a Rebel with a clubbed rifle, Martin ducked. Things seemed to move very slowly, as they had in combat in the trenches. As he would have with a bayoneted rifle, Martin jabbed the end of his stick into the policeman’s beefy side. A bayonet would have deflated the fellow for good. As things were, the cop grunted in pain and tried to twist away. Martin kicked him in the belly. He folded up like a concertina, the nightstick flying out of his hand.
Martin wished he could have grabbed the solid club, but it landed on the sidewalk, well out of his reach. He caught another policeman in the throat with the end of what had been the handle for his picket sign. Anyone who’d been in the trenches would have had no trouble blocking that lunge or knocking it aside. The cop let out a gargling shout and went over on his back.
“See?” Martin shouted. “They aren’t so goddamn tough—the Rebs’d eat ’em for breakfast. And we can whip ’em, too.”
“Rally!” one of the policemen shouted. The cops were taking longer than the strikers to figure out what was going on. Not until something close to half their number had fallen or had their nightsticks taken away did another cry ring out: “Drop back and regroup!”
Yelling in triumph, the men from the picket line surged after them. “Down with the scabs!” they roared. “Down with the cops!” They trampled underfoot the policemen who couldn’t fall back and regroup.
Maybe one of those police officers was first to yank out his pistol and start shooting at the men who were stomping him. But after one or two sharp cracks rang out, it suddenly seemed as if every cop in Toledo were drawing his revolver and blazing away at the striking steelworkers.
Against gunfire, the strikers had no defense. Some fell screaming in pain. Some fell silently, and would not rise again. A few kept trying to advance on the police in spite of everything. Most, though, Chester Martin among them, knew how hopeless that was. He was not ashamed to run.
Bullets zipped past his head. Now that the police had opened fire, they seemed intent on emptying their revolvers and slaying as many strikers as they could. In their shoes, Martin probably would have done the same. After the men from the picket line had come so close to overwhelming the cops altogether, they wanted their own back. If strikers got to thinking they could defeat the police, no man in blue would be safe.
“Next time,” somebody not far away panted, “next time we bring our own guns to the dance, by Jesus!”
“That’s right,” somebody else said. “They want a war, we’ll give ’em a fucking war, see if we don’t.”
All Martin wanted was to be able to work and to bring home a halfway decent wage. He didn’t think that was too much to ask. The men who ran the steel mill—the trust bosses with their top hats and diamond pinky rings, so beloved of editorial cartoonists—evidently thought otherwise. A bullet slapped into the flesh of a man close by. Martin had heard that sound too many times on too many fields to mistake it for anything else. The steelworker crumpled with a groan.
Martin dashed around a corner. After that, he didn’t need to worry about getting shot. The people on the street weren’t striking; they were going about their ordinary business. If the cops suddenly started spraying lead through their ranks, they—or their survivors—could complain to city hall with some hope of being heard.
It looked to be open season on picketers, though. Martin realized he was still holding the stick he’d used against the police to such good effect. As casually as he could, he let it fall to the pavement. Pulling his cap down over his eyes (and wondering how it had managed to stay on his head through the melee), he trudged down the street toward the nearest trolley stop.
Several policemen, pistols drawn, ran past him while he stood waiting. His eyes widened; maybe he’d been wrong about how much mayhem the cops were willing to dish out to the general public. Since he didn’t do anything but stand there, they left him alone. If he’d tried to flee…He didn’t care to think what might have happened then.
When the trolley came clanging up to the stop, he threw a nickel in the fare box and took a seat even though it was heading away from his parents’ flat, where he was staying. He rode for more than a mile, till he’d put the steel mill well behind him. When he did get off, he was only a block or so away from the county courthouse.
Across the street from the building stood a statue of Remembrance, a smaller replica of the great one in New York harbor. Remembrance had finally brought the United States victory over the CSA. What sort of statue would have to go up before anyone recognized that the working man deserved his due? How long would it take before he did?
Those were questions that made Martin look at Remembrance in a new way. His left arm bore a large, ugly scar, a reminder of what he’d suffered for his country’s sake. What was his country willing to do for him?
“Shoot me again, that’s what,” he muttered. “Is that what I fought for?”
Teddy Roosevelt made noises about caring over what happened to the ordinary working man. Martin’s brief meeting with the president in the trenches had made him think Roosevelt was sincere. He wondered what Roosevelt would say about what had happened in Toledo. That would tell whether he meant what he said.
Martin wondered if writing him a letter would do any good. He doubted it. He knew what happened when a private wrote a general a letter: either nothing, or somebody landed on the private like a ton of bricks. Roosevelt would do what he would do, and Chester Martin’s view of the matter wouldn’t count for beans.
“That’s not right,” he said. “That’s not fair.” But it was, he knew too well, the way the world worked.
After a while, he took a streetcar back to his parents’ apartment building in Ottawa Hills. His younger sister, Sue, was at work; she’d landed a typist’s job after he recovered from his wound and went back to the front. His father was at work, too. That graveled him some; Stephen Douglas Martin had been a steelworker longer than Chester had been alive. He labored down the street from the plant his son was striking.
He
had a good job and a good day’s pay; Chester wondered if he himself would have to wait till he was gray and wrinkled to say the same. He wondered if he’d ever be able to say the same.
His mother, Louisa, who looked like an older version of Sue, exclaimed in surprise when he came through the door. “I thought you’d be out there all day,” she said. She didn’t approve of his striking, but he was her son, and she stayed polite about it.
At the moment, he knew a certain amount of relief he’d made it here ahead of the news of trouble. “It got a little lively when the scabs came in,” he said, which was technically true but would do for an understatement till a better one came along.
“Were the cops busting heads?” his mother asked. He nodded. She shook her own head, in maternal concern. “That’s why I don’t want you out there picketing, Chester. You could get hurt.”
He started to laugh. He couldn’t help it. It wasn’t that she was wrong. It was much more that she had no idea how right she was. “If I came through the war, I’m not going to let Toledo goons worry me,” he answered.
“You need to worry. You could step in front of a streetcar tomorrow,” his mother said. He nodded. She said that a lot. If he was going to worry, trolley cars wouldn’t go high on the list. Two other questions topped it. One was, had anyone recognized him while he nerved the strikers to resist the police? The second followed hard upon the first: would any of those people let the police know who he was?
Jefferson Pinkard kept a wary eye on the crucible as it swung into position to pour its molten contents onto the Sloss Works foundry floor. The kid handling the crucible had some notion of what he was doing, but only some. Herb Wallace, the best crucible man Jeff had ever known, had gone off to fight the damnyankees—conscription nabbed him early—but he hadn’t come home to Birmingham. His bones lay somewhere up in Kentucky.
This time, the pouring went smoothly. Only a tiny, fingerlike rivulet of molten steel broke through the earth and sand walling the mold, and Pinkard and his partner had no trouble stemming it with more earth. Leaning on his rake afterwards, Jeff said, “Wish they were all that easy.”
His partner nodded. “Yes, suh, Mistuh Pinkard,” Vespasian agreed. The big, bulky Negro—as big and bulky as Pinkard himself—took off his cloth cap and wiped sweat from his forehead. Winter might rule outside, but it was always summertime in hell on the foundry floor. Vespasian pointed toward the crucible operator. “Hope to Jesus Billy up there figure out his job before he kill somebody. Ain’t happened yet, but he come too damn close a couple times.”
“Yeah—one of ’em was me last month.” Pinkard jumped sideways to show how he’d escaped the misplaced stream of metal. “You was right lively, that’s a fact,” Vespasian said.
“Damn well had to be.” Pinkard shored up the edge of the mold at another place where it looked as if it might give way. “The floor did run smoother before the war, and that’s a fact, too.”
Vespasian didn’t answer. He hadn’t been on the foundry floor before the war. Back then, Negroes had fed the furnaces and done other jobs that took strong backs and no brains, but the better positions had been in white hands. Jeff’s partner then had been his next-door neighbor and best friend, Bedford Cunningham.
But the war had sucked white men into the Confederate Army. The CSA had still needed steel—more steel than ever—to fight the damnyankees. Negroes started filling night-shift jobs once solely the property of white men, then evening-shift, and then, at last, day-shift, too.
Back then, before he got conscripted himself, Jeff hadn’t wanted to work alongside a black man. He’d done it, though, for the sake of his country. Bedford Cunningham had come back to Birmingham without an arm. A lot of other steel men had come back as invalids. A lot more, like Herb Wallace, hadn’t come back at all.
And so even now, with the war over for half a year, Negroes remained in some of the places they had taken during the war: they’d gained experience. Pinkard couldn’t argue against experience, not when he’d just been griping about Billy. And Vespasian, who was in his forties, didn’t get uppity the way a lot of younger blacks did. As far as the work went, he made a good enough partner. Jeff still felt uncomfortable working beside him.
He didn’t quit. He’d have felt a lot more uncomfortable unemployed. Steel was all he knew. If he got a job at another foundry, he had no guarantee he wouldn’t be working with another Negro, and one harder to get along with than Vespasian. He didn’t care to move out of Sloss company housing, either (though he wished he didn’t live next door to Bedford any more). He endured.
He never once wondered what Vespasian thought of working next to him.
At shift-changing time, the steam whistle blew a blast that cut through the rest of the din on the floor like a hot knife through pork fat. “See you in the mornin’, Mistuh Pinkard,” Vespasian said.
“Yeah,” Jeff answered. “See you.”
They clocked out separately, and left the enormous foundry building separately, too. It wasn’t the way it had been, when Pinkard and Bedford had sometimes gone home to their side-by-side yellow cottages with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders. Vespasian didn’t have a yellow cottage. His cabin was painted primer red, which was cheaper.
Some of the white men going home waved to Pinkard, as did a couple coming onto the evening shift. He waved back. He was always glad to see familiar faces. He didn’t see that many. Shift changes reminded him how little remained the same as it had been in 1914. Being reminded hurt.
His breath smoked as he hurried home. They’d had snow the week before, which wasn’t common in Birmingham. On top of everything else, it had been a hard winter. The grass was yellow-brown and dead. Somebody sneezed not far from Jeff. He hoped it was from a cold, or from a tickling mustache hair. The Spanish influenza was killing men who’d lived through all the bullets the damnyankees aimed at them—and killing their wives and mothers and children, too.
In spite of the cold, Fanny Cunningham was standing in front of her house, gossiping with the woman who lived on the other side of her from the Pinkards. She waved to Jeff as he walked by. He waved back, calling, “How’s Bedford doing?”
“Right good,” she answered. “He’s been cheerful the whole day through.”
“Glad to hear it,” Pinkard said. He was especially glad to hear Fanny had had her husband under her eye the whole day through.
She said, “You don’t come over like you used to, Jeff. Bedford’d be powerful pleased to see more of you.”
Jefferson Pinkard didn’t answer that. He waved again, almost—but not quite—as if to say he’d think about it, then headed up the walk to his own cottage. He hesitated before opening the door. He had to do it, though, if he intended to go inside. When at last he did, the savory smell of stewing pork made his mouth water.
“That you, darlin’?” Emily called from the kitchen.
“It’s me, all right,” Jeff said.
Emily came out, a smile on her face. She had a barmaid’s good looks and a barmaid’s good buxom figure and hair of a bright shade somewhere between red and gold. Now that she wasn’t working in a munitions plant any longer, she was letting it grow out. Now that she was out of the plant, too, the jaundice working with cordite had given her was gone, leaving her rosy and altogether desirable.