28
PARTISAN REVIEW
The longshoreman says, "I wasn't in that company. I was on the
farm then, already discharged."
Kaplan nods. "They've got Jim Crow in your local of the
I.L.A.,
I'll bet. When it comes to strike, they use you as strikebreakers if they
c;n, and they scratch up race feeling against the Negroes."
A flicker in the longshoreman's eyes. He says over his shoulder,
"Damn right."
For
a.
half hour Kaplan and I had been talking to him on the hill.
As we had climbed up from the street, he had frozen to the fence. And
now under Kaplan's friendly patient questioning he begins losing his
SuspICIOns. Kaplan, member of the St. Louis John Reed Club, student
working his way through college as assembler and tester in an electric
plant. Rode the freight home tot Houston to learn from the jobless on the
road. Spending his month of vacation by reading 16, 18 hours a day,
having found but a year ago dialectical materialism, the opposing poles
of all life and thought between which the fires of the earth are shak.en,
watered, and replenished.
The longshoreman turns halfway to us. Across the street in a
caf~
a
bunch of whites loafing. Years of hounding have given the Negro worker
skill in playing 'possum. His eyes move, but to one a rod away he looks
as if he were talking weather or horse-racing. He talks of the cut in
wages, how the men get a 'shot at work 2 or 3 days a month, how United
Fruit pays 48 cents an hour, Luckenback 58 cents, cut down from 70 and
80 cents. How truckers got to carry 1600 pounds and no longer .:500, and
you look as if you fell into the canal. Even when there's no work, the
longshoremen come down to the canal. Were else can they come? Maybe
they'll pick up a bit of something like a gull. Even the religion has Jim
Crow. There's the picture of Christ with a white child in his arms and
a black child kneeling at Christ's feet. Why should the black child
kneel?
If
Christ be a father, why not a father's arms to all?
"It's taken us time. We're having it knocked
intd
our heads. It's
like the story about the fellow with the pups. Day after day they
was
blind. He'd
ge~
up in the morning and look at them and cuss. Then
one day he takes one of them and knocks its head against the wall. The
eyes sure snapped open then. That's it. You got to knock the head against
the wall before some of us opens them."
Kaplan gets up and dusts the seat of his pants. He looks across the
street. The longshoreman, turning away, says casually, "Come down
again. I'll get some of the boys over." He leans against the fence and
stares down at the cold staocks and sails.
