All-Bright Court (16 page)

Mrs. Taylor held the glossy brochure. On the cover was a picture of a lone black boy surrounded by a group of white boys. All of them were laughing.

Mrs. Brezenski explained the organization while the Taylors tried to read the information they had been presented. “You see, they are concerned with giving children a viable education, ‘viable' being the operative word. The acronym is not just clever, but apropos. Your son has the chance to be a little ambassador, a dove of peace who can teach so much to the other boys at Essex.”

“What school?” Mr. Taylor asked.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” Mrs. Brezenski said, handing them a catalog. “The Essex Academy is one of the finest prep schools in western New York. I'm going to be honest with you. Michael is a very bright boy. I don't have to tell you that. There's not much we can do for a boy like him in a ghetto school. He's gifted, and he deserves a chance to have a quality education. If you let him go to Essex, he will give the boys there a chance to learn that Negroes are real people, just like white people. A boy like Michael can help change the future, help bring about a truly colorblind society, and he will receive a fine education, one of the best educations money can buy. He's been accepted to a wonderful school, and he can go for free.”

“Things seem kind of rushed,” Mr. Taylor said. “When we got to let you know?”

“As soon as possible. Tomorrow would be great. I'm sorry about the haste, but this slot opened up suddenly when a boy from Niagara Falls canceled out,” Mrs. Brezenski said. “Think it over. This is the chance of a lifetime.”

Mikey's parents discussed it that night when the children were in bed.

“Sam, I want him to have a good education, but he too young to go all the way to Buffalo to school.”

Samuel said, “I think he need a good education too. Do you see him getting one out here?”

“I don't know. He getting more of a education than we got at his age.”

“What's that saying? Segregated schools, not enough books, not enough nothing. We ain't had nothing.”

“I know you right,” Mary Kate said. “But Sam, he just a little boy, and we fenna send him to a school full of white people, and that teacher, the way she was carrying on. He going to be a dove. Look at this little book the teacher give us. How many coloreds you see? What's going to happen to my baby all alone?”

“Come on, Kate. He ain't no baby. I think that teacher was just saying they got the best there. We want the best for him. Maybe he can teach them white boys something. It's probably
some
Negro boys there. They just didn't put them in the book. He be all right. And I think he can handle it. He a smart boy. You heard what his teacher said. The boy got a gift. We got to give him a chance. We never had no chance. It ain't going to cost us nothing. How can we hold him back? If he not happy, we can always take him out.”

They agreed to let Mikey go after they toured the campus. Samuel took the next day off from work. Mary Kate had Venita come over and sit with the children while she, Samuel, and Mikey went. All three were impressed by what they saw.

The fifty-acre campus was tucked in the northwest corner of Buffalo. The gray stone, slate-roofed buildings were surrounded by well-groomed lawns, perfectly cut hedges. There was a football field, lacrosse field, baseball field, a field house, a swimming pool, tennis courts, squash courts. The splendor they saw was blinding. They had entered a different world. Their guide was a white boy dressed in a blue blazer, khaki pants, a white shirt, blue-and-gray-striped tie. They didn't ask any questions.

Essex arranged for Mikey's transportation. Mrs. Cox would take him until he learned how to catch the bus. Mrs. Cox was a cafeteria worker at Essex who lived in Lackawanna, not that far from All-Bright Court, in one of the old houses on School Street.

On the first morning Mikey was to go to Essex, he put on his uniform and stood before his mother for inspection. She decided his neck looked dirty. She was out of alcohol, so she scrubbed his neck with Clorox.

“My neck clean,” Mikey said.

“It don't look too clean to me,” his mother said, “and you wearing that white shirt. I can't have you going off to that school having white people thinking you nasty. They not going to think it's just you nasty. They going to think all black boys is nasty. They think that anyway, that we nasty.”

“How you know what white people think, Mama? You don't know no white people,” Mikey said.

“Don't you give me no back talk, boy. You go to that school and mind your manners. Hear me? Don't go there asking a whole bunch of questions.”

“I won't, Mama. I'm going to be good, and I'm going to make friends. You'll see.”

“I'm not sending you to this school to make friends. I'm sending you to learn. Your friends right here in this house, hear me?” his mother said.

His sisters laughed. Their mother had descended on them before with a bottle of alcohol and a rough cloth. She had attacked their knees and elbows, their necks, their feet. She tried to scrub some of the blackness from their small bodies.

“Why your knees so black? I don't believe they that black. Go get me the alcohol and a washrag,” she would say. And she would scrub her children until they were raw, but very seldom would she find any dirt on them.

“I guess your knees really that black,” she would say if she found no dirt. If she found dirt, she would say, “See here, you nasty,” and she would show them the cloth to prove it.

This morning his sisters watched Mikey squirm, and so did his baby brother, Martin. The baby took the cue from his sisters and laughed when they laughed.

“Ya'll don't be laughing at me,” Mikey said.

“Don't ya'll be laughing,” their mother said. “I'll get ya'll next.”

There was no dirt on Mikey's neck. “I guess your neck really that black,” their mother said.

“Now I smell like bleach, Mama,” Mikey said. He wanted to cry because his neck was burning. And there was a horn blowing outside, Mrs. Cox.

Mikey's mother wiped off his neck with a wet cloth. She kept wiping and sniffing until the smell was gone. “Now let me take a look at you,” she said. She sucked her teeth. “Dorene, run upstairs and get the Vaseline.”

“What's wrong, Mama?” Mikey said.

“What's wrong? What's wrong? You look like a ash cat. You ain't put no grease on your face and hands. You can't leave out of here like this. What them white people going to think?”

Dorene came down with the grease, and there was a knock on the front door. Dorene let Mrs. Cox in.

She was a thin woman dressed in a white uniform. She smiled as she entered the house. “Is your mother in?”

“Good morning,” their mother said, entering the living room, wiping her hands on a towel. “We running a little late, ma'am.”

“Call me Sue. And your name is Mary, right?”

“Yes ma'am, Mary Kate.”

“She said call her Sue,” Mary said.

“Hush your mouth,” their mother said. “Wasn't nobody talking to you. You speak when somebody speaking to you.”

“These are all your children?”

“Yes. This is Mary, Dorene, Olivia, Martin, and you met Michael. He ready,” their mother said, wiping a thin film of Vaseline on his face and hands until they shone like a polished cherry.

“What a beautiful family, and another on the way. When is the baby due?”

“After the first of the year . . . Ya'll better be going.”

“Yes, you're right, Mary Kate. We wouldn't want him to be late his first day,” Mrs. Cox said, catching hold of Mikey's hand.

“Now, you be a good boy,” their mother said as Mikey and Mrs. Cox left the house. “You do your best and you be all right.” She thought she was going to cry, but she held it in. He looked so smart in his blue blazer, his khaki pants, his blue-and-gray-striped tie. He was a gift.

As he came to the end of the sidewalk, he turned Mrs. Cox's hand loose and ran back to his mother. He hugged her, and she bent and kissed him.

“I'm going to try, Mama,” he said. And then he was off and running.

16

B
LITZKRIEG
. That is what it seemed like to the men of Capital. Industrywide, one hundred thousand steelworkers were losing their jobs. That many men being displaced did not seem to be a random strike of lightning. The loss seemed deliberate, planned and executed to catch them unawares. Blitzkrieg.

In the last week of July in 1972, the news hit the papers. Many of the men were out on the road on their proletariat vacations, supporting their brothers in the U.A.W. by piloting American-made land yachts across the country, cruising to the Jersey shore, Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum, Old Faithful, South of the Border, Niagara Falls. On these journeys, the wives collected brown glass mugs with clumsy wooden handles, ceramic toothpick holders, and salt and pepper shakers, all imprinted with the names of the places they visited.

The men had not even struck when the contract had run out. In good faith, they blindly entered an area as vast as the mid-Atlantic: binding arbitration. The contract was going to expire just before the beginning of the school year. With binding arbitration, their children would be sure to have clothes, shoes, milk and lunch money. The rent or mortgage could be paid. Those workers who wanted to could even take vacations. Their demands were few. They wanted cost-of-living increases for the length of the three-year contract, something they had not had since their 1956 contract. They wanted production to stop for two weeks in the summer so they could all be out of the plants during the hottest weather. The rank and file also wanted to make it clear that it did not support the most ludicrous proposal anyone had ever come up with—that the steelworkers should give up the right to strike.

There were rumors that management was going to try to write a no-strike clause into the new contract. The men never had any right to walk out except when a contract expired. This new proposal would take away the right altogether, except for strikes called over local grievances. There would never be a chance the men could strike on a national level. Though none of the men liked to strike, the very suggestion that the right should be eliminated was outrageous.

Samuel had heard it. It sounded crazy to him. He had told Mary Kate, “I don't like it, but that union president, Petrovich, got his stupid ideas. I don't understand him. He used to work in the mills.”

“Ya'll the ones keep voting him in. This the third time.”

“It ain't no ‘ya'll.' I ain't vote for him.”

“You ain't voted at all, pay all them dues, for what? You don't even keep up with nothing they doing in that union,” Mary Kate said.

“All I know is, there ain't going to be no need for no union 'cause there ain't going to be no plant.”

“Don't say that, Samuel.”

“It's the truth. They going to keep taking and taking till the next thing you know we going to be paying to work there. Let me tell you something. The union always hold the threat of a strike over management head to keep the companies honest. Neither side want a strike. It sure ain't a thing I ever wanted, but it's the only chip we got to throw on the table. Take that chip away, and there go the game, hear me?”

The men worked for three months while waiting for the 1971 contract to come through. The agreement they reached with management did not give the men much. They received cost-of-living increases, but they were given twenty cents an hour the first year, and eleven cents the next two years. The no-strike clause was not in the contract.

Eight months lapsed between that agreement and the headline in the
Buffalo Star:
MASSIVE LAYOFFS IN STEEL
. The caption over the lead story was, “Capital to lay off 2,500.”

Samuel was in the second week of his vacation when the news came. He had spent the time at home because he did not feel well enough to take his family anywhere. In the winter he had developed a chronic cough that a company doctor diagnosed as bronchitis. But Samuel had kept on working, breathing in coal dust, facing the Hawk on the lakefront, the heat of the coke ovens. By spring the cough was worse, but he never went back to the doctor. He worked right into the summer, worked himself into pneumonia. His first week of vacation he slept, Mary Kate shushing the children, chasing them from upstairs, making them tiptoe around. When the news came the second week, Samuel got out of bed.

He went to a meeting called at the union hall. “That lame duck Petrovich has sold us out!” a red-faced man yelled at the crowd of men. Samuel tuned the man out. He did not come to hear a speech. All he wanted to know was if he was going to have a job.

The news he was able to get he passed on to Mary Kate. “They going to be sending out letters right away, by the end of the week.”

“That quick?”

“Yeah, that quick. What's the point in waiting? I wish they could have just told us today, face to face. It's cowardly, waiting till so many men on vacation to announce the layoffs. I bet they knew about it before the contract came in.”

“It ain't just Capital, Sam. It's everywhere. You read the paper. One hundred thousand men,” Mary Kate said. “You think somebody sat back someplace and waited till now to tell ya'll?”

“Hell, yeah. You think management was going to say anything like this at contract time? If they know it now, they knew it then. That's what that binding-arbitration jazz was all about, getting us to work while they got that new contract.”

“They say this at that meeting?” Mary Kate asked.

“Something like that. I wasn't half paying attention, but I ain't no fool. You really think somebody sat down last week and decided all this?”

“I don't know. They not going to lay you off, is they? You been there too long,” Mary Kate said.