THE STRIKE
7
bulls around, and flinging yourself out into the street, still lying there in
the hospital today-
LAW AND ORDER-people, watching with horror, trying to
comprehend the lesson the moving bodies were writing. The man stopping
me on the corner• seeing my angry tears as I read the paper, "Listen,"
he said, and he talked because he had to talk, because in an hour all the
beliefs of his life had been riddled and torn awaf-"Listen, I was down
there, on the waterfront, do you know what they're doing-they were
shooting SHOOTING-" and that word came out anguished and! sepa–
rate, "shooting right into men, human beings, they were shootmg into
them as if they were animals, as if they were targets, just lifting their
guns and shooting. I saw this, can you believe it, CAN YOU BELIEVE
IT? ... as if they were targets as if ... CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?"
and he went to the next man and started it all over again....
I was not down ... by the battlefield. My eyes are anguished from
the pictures I pieced together from words of comrades, .of strikers, from
the pictures filling the newspapers. I sat up in headquarters, racked by
the howls of ambulances hurtling by, feeling it incredible the fingers like
separate little animals hopping nimbly from key to key, the ordered steady
click of the typewriter, feeling any moment the walls would crash and all
the madness surge in. Ambulances, ripping out of nowhere, fading;
police sirens, outside the sky a ghastly gray, corpse gray, an enormous
dead eyelid shutting down on the world. And someone comes in, words
lurch out of his mouth, the skeleton is told, and goes again. . . . And
I sit there, making a metallic little patter.n of sound in the air, because
that is all I can do, because that is what I am supposed to do.
They called the guard out . . . "adnitting their inability
t~
control
the situation," and Barrows boasted, "my men will not use clubs or gas,
they will talk with bayonets" ... Middlestaedt ... "Shoot to kill. Any
man firing into the air will be courtmartialed." With two baby tanks,
and machine guns, and howitzers, they went down to the waterfront
to take it over, to "protect the interests of the people."
I walked down Market that night. The savage wind lashed at my
hair. All life seemed blown out of the street; the few peoplo hurrying
by
looked hunted, tense, expectant of anything. Cars moved past as
If
fleeing. And a ltght, indescribably green and ominous was cast over every–
thing, in great shifting shadows. And down the street the trucks rumbled.
Drab colored, with boys sitting on them like corpses sitting and not
moving, holding guns stiffly, staring with wide frightened eyes, carried
