TONIGHT IS PART OF THE STRUGGLE
7
carpenter, very gentle and precise speech. She couldn't see him
very well, he must have been half a block away, but his voice
coming out of the delicate shell of his body, and the words made
her think of the iron range on the Mesaba where she was born.
"Who is he?" she asked and the man next her said, "That's
Tiala."
"Tiala ?" she said.
The man next her said, "It's snowing fierce outside now.
Tiala is the district organiser for the Communist Party."
"Two years ago," he was saying, and the voice came large
through the horns and now all the dark bodies were straining
forward, "two years ago we had hunger marches, the seed we
planted two years ago takes root now.' ' He talked in terms of
growing, of yeast in bread, she could understand yeast and seed,
_it excited her.
"The rank and file," he said, "the masses." She looked
down on the great black sea of bodies, heads like black wheat
growing in the same soil, the same wind. Something seemed to
enter her and congeal. I am part, she wanted to say.
The voice was coming into them. You are producers,
wealth is only produced by hand and brain. I am a producer,
she thought with her hand on the protruding belly of the baby,
but not from hand and brain. She thought she was going to cry
and Jock would kick her in the shins and yell at her when they
got home. She heard only some
·of
the words, the ones that her
body's experience repeated to her, the class struggle, militant
workers, the broad masses. They were like words in the first
primer, gigantic, meaningless, but she leaned over with the
others, to see, to hear, to touch, make real, make the lips form
on them.
They no longer thought of going. Something seemed to
have broken behind Jock's eyes, some hard thing and he looked
frightened and open. It was like when you went home after a
long hard trip. She wanted to cry down, "0 Tiala, we are
hungry, we are lonely, we are lonely and hungry. It's dark,
and the snow is falling in March and the night is wide for Jock
and me and we might get old without ... 0 Tiala ..."
No one could say a word. They all sat like a great black
rock. Then suddenly the man in the platform seemed to ask
a question and without warning the great body moved, hands
lifted, mouths opened together and rising suddenly, lifted by
storm and cataclysm, wind and the earth's eruption, the black
