第 22 页

“The truth is,” one of the priests told me, “most of us out here are looking to get a transfer. The only reason I’m still around is that nobody’s willing to replace me.”

Morale was even worse among the laity, black folks like Angela, Shirley, and Mona, the three women I’d met at the rally. They were spirited, good-humored women, those three, women who-without husbands to help-somehow managed to raise sons and daughters, juggle an assortment of part-time jobs and small business schemes, and organize Girl Scout troops, fashion shows, and summer camps for the parade of children that wandered through the church every day. Since none of the three actually lived in Altgeld-they all owned small houses just west of the project-I had asked them once what motivated them to do what they did. Before I could finish the question, they had all rolled their eyes as if on cue.

“Watch out, girl,” Angela told Shirley, causing Mona to chuckle merrily. “Barack’s about to interview you. He’s got that look.”

And Shirley said, “We’re just a bunch of bored middle-aged women, Barack, with nothing better to do with our time. But”-and here Shirley threw a hand onto her bony hip and raised her cigarette to her lips like a movie star-“if Mr. Right comes along, then watch out! It’s good-bye Altgeld, hello Monte Carlo!”

I hadn’t heard any jokes from them lately, though. All I’d heard were complaints. The women complained that Marty didn’t care about Altgeld. They complained that Marty was arrogant and didn’t listen to their suggestions.

Most of all, they complained about the new job bank that we had announced with such fanfare the night of the rally, but that had turned out to be a bust. As Marty had planned it, a state university out in the suburbs had been assigned to run the program-it was a matter of efficiency, he explained, since the university had the computers already in place. Unfortunately, two months after it was supposed to have started, no one had found work through the program. The computers didn’t work right; the data entry was plagued with errors; people were sent to interview for jobs that didn’t exist. Marty was livid, and at least once a week he would have to drive out to the university, cursing under his breath as he tried to pry answers out of officials who seemed more concerned with next year’s funding cycle. But the women from Altgeld weren’t interested in Marty’s frustrations. All they knew was that $500,000 had gone somewhere, and it wasn’t in their neighborhood. For them, the job bank became yet more evidence that Marty had used them to push a secret agenda, that somehow whites in the suburbs were getting the jobs they’d been promised.

“Marty’s just looking out for his own,” they grumbled.

I had tried my best to mediate the conflict, defending Marty against charges of racism, suggesting to him that he cultivate more tact. Marty told me I was wasting my time. According to him, the only reason Angela and the other leaders in the city were sore was because he’d refused to hire them to run the program. “That’s what ruins a lot of so-called community organizations out here. They start taking government money. They hire big, do-nothing staffs. Pretty soon, they’ve become big patronage operations, with clients to be serviced. Not leaders. Clients. To be serviced.” He spit the words out, as if they were unclean. “Jesus, it makes you sick just thinking about it.”

And then, seeing the still-fretful look on my face, he added, “If you’re going to do this work, Barack, you’ve got to stop worrying about whether people like you. They won’t.”

Patronage, politics, hurt feelings, racial grievances-they were all of a piece to Marty, distractions from his larger purpose, corruptions of a noble cause. He was still trying to bring the union in then, convinced that they would replenish our ranks, deliver our ship to shore. One day in late September, he had asked Angela and me to join him at a meeting with union officials from LTV Steel, one of the few remaining steel operations in the city. It had taken Marty over a month to set up the meeting, and he was brimming with energy that day, talking at a rapid clip about the company, the union, and new phases in the organizing campaign.

Eventually the president of the local-a young, handsome Irishman who’d been recently elected on a promise of reform-entered the hall, along with two husky black men, the union treasurer and vice-president. After the introductions, we all sat down and Marty made his pitch. The corporation was preparing to get out of the steelmaking business, he said, and wage concessions would only prolong the agony. If the union wanted to preserve jobs, it had to take some new, bold steps. Sit down with the churches and develop a plan for a worker buyout. Negotiate with the city for concessionary utility and tax rates during the transition. Pressure the banks to provide loans that could be used to invest in the new technology needed to make the plant competitive again.

Throughout the monologue, the union officials shifted uneasily in their chairs. Finally the president stood up and told Marty that his ideas merited further study but that right now the union had to focus on making an immediate decision about management’s offer. In the parking lot afterward, Marty looked stunned.

“They’re not interested,” he told me, shaking his head. “Like a bunch of lemmings running towards a cliff.”

I had felt bad for Marty. I had felt worse for Angela. She hadn’t said a word throughout the entire meeting, but as I pulled out of the union parking lot to drive her home, she had turned to me and said, “I didn’t understand a word Marty was saying.”

And I suppose it was then that I understood the difficulty of what Marty had tried to pull off, and the depth of his miscalculation. It wasn’t so much that Angela had missed some of the details of Marty’s presentation; as we continued to talk, it had become apparent that she understood Marty’s proposal at least as well as I did. No, the real meaning of her remark was this: She had come to doubt the relevance to her own situation of keeping the LTV plant open. Organizing with the unions might help the few blacks who remained in the plants keep their jobs; it wouldn’t dent the rolls of the chronically unemployed any time soon. A job bank might help workers who already had skills and experience find something else; it wouldn’t teach the black teenage dropout how to read or compute.

In other words, it was different for black folks. It was different now, just as it had been different for Angela’s grandparents, who’d been barred from the unions, then spat on as scabs; for her parents, who had been kept out of the best patronage jobs that the Machine had to offer in the days before patronage became a dirty word. In his eagerness to do battle with the downtown power brokers, the investment bankers in their fancy suits, Marty wanted to wish such differences away as part of an unfortunate past. But for someone like Angela, the past was the present; it determined her world with a force infinitely more real than any notions of class solidarity. It explained why more blacks hadn’t been able to move out into the suburbs while the going was still good, why more blacks hadn’t climbed up the ladder into the American dream. It explained why the unemployment in black neighborhoods was more widespread and longstanding, more desperate; and why Angela had no patience with those who wanted to treat black people and white people exactly the same.

It explained Altgeld.

I looked at my watch: ten past two. Time to face the music. I got out of my car and rang the church doorbell. Angela answered, and led me into a room where the other leaders were waiting: Shirley, Mona, Will, and Mary, a quiet, dark-haired white woman who taught elementary school at St. Catherine’s. I apologized for being late and poured myself some coffee.

“So,” I said, taking a seat on the windowsill. “Why all the long faces?”

“We’re quitting,” Angela said.

“Who’s quitting?”

Angela shrugged. “Well…I am, I guess. I can’t speak for everybody else.”

I looked around the room. The other leaders averted their eyes, like a jury that’s delivered an unfavorable verdict.

“I’m sorry, Barack,” Angela continued. “It has nothing to do with you. The truth is, we’re just tired. We’ve all been at this for two years, and we’ve got nothing to show for it.”

“I understand you’re frustrated, Angela. We’re all a little frustrated. But you need to give it more time. We-”

“We don’t have more time,” Shirley broke in. “We can’t keep on making promises to our people, and then have nothing happen. We need something now.”

I fidgeted with my coffee cup, trying to think of something else to say. Words jumbled up in my head, and for a moment I was gripped with panic. Then the panic gave way to anger. Anger at Marty for talking me into coming to Chicago. Anger at the leaders for being short-sighted. Anger at myself for believing I could have ever bridged the gap between them. I suddenly remembered what Frank had told me that night back in Hawaii, after I had heard that Toot was scared of a black man.

That’s the way it is, he had said. You might as well get used to it.

In this peevish mood, I looked out the window and saw a group of young boys gathered across the street. They were tossing stones at the boarded-up window of a vacant apartment, their hoods pulled over their heads like miniature monks. One of the boys reached up and started yanking at a loose piece of plywood nailed across the apartment door, then stumbled and fell, causing the others to laugh. A part of me suddenly felt like joining them, tearing apart the whole dying landscape, piece by piece. Instead, I turned back toward Angela.

“Let me ask you something,” I said, pointing out the window. “What do you suppose is going to happen to those boys out there?”

“Barack…”

“No, I’m just asking you a question. You say you’re tired, the same way most folks out here are tired. So I’m just trying to figure out what’s going to happen to those boys. Who’s going to make sure they get a fair shot? The alderman? The social workers? The gangs?”

I could hear my voice rising, but I didn’t let up. “You know, I didn’t come here ’cause I needed a job. I came here ’cause Marty said there were some people who were serious about doing something to change their neighborhoods. I don’t care what’s happened in the past. I know that I’m here, and committed to working with you. If there’s a problem, then we’ll fix it. If you don’t think anything’s happened after working with me, then I’ll be the first one to tell you to quit. But if you all are planning to quit now, then I want you to answer my question.”

I stopped there, trying to read each of their faces. They seemed surprised at my outburst, though none of them was as surprised as me. I knew I was on precarious ground; I wasn’t close enough to any of them to be sure my play wouldn’t backfire. At that particular moment, though, I had no other hand to play. The boys outside moved on down the street. Shirley went to get herself more coffee. After what seemed like ten minutes, Will finally spoke up.

“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think we’ve talked about this same old mess long enough. Marty knows we got problems. That’s why he hired Barack. Ain’t that right, Barack?”

I nodded cautiously.

“Things still bad out here. Ain’t nothing gone away. So what I wanna know,” he said, turning to me, “is what we gonna do from here on out.”

I told him the truth. “I don’t know, Will. You tell me.”

Will smiled, and I sensed that the immediate crisis had passed. Angela agreed to give it another few months. I agreed to concentrate more time on Altgeld. We spent the next half hour talking strategy and handing out assignments. On our way out, Mona came up and took me by the arm.

“You handled that meeting pretty good, Barack. Seems like you know what you’re doing.”

“I don’t, Mona. I don’t have a clue.”

She laughed. “Well, I promise I won’t tell nobody.”

“I appreciate that, Mona. I sure do appreciate that.”

That evening, I called Marty and told him some of what had happened. He wasn’t surprised: several of the suburban churches were already starting to drop out. He gave me a few suggestions for approaching the job issue in Altgeld, then advised me to pick up the pace of my interviews.

“You’re going to need to find some new leaders, Barack. I mean, Will’s a terrific guy and all that, but do you really want to depend on him to keep the organization afloat?”

I understood Marty’s point. As much as I liked Will, as much as I appreciated his support, I had to admit that some of his ideas were…well, eccentric. He liked to smoke reefer at the end of a day’s work (“If God didn’t want us to smoke the stuff, he wouldn’t have put it on this here earth”). He would walk out of any meeting that he decided was boring. Whenever I took him along to interview members of his church, he’d start arguing with them about their incorrect reading of Scripture, their choice of lawn fertilizer, or the constitutionality of the income tax (he felt that tax violated

the Bill of Rights, and conscientiously refused to pay).

“Maybe if you listened to other people a little more,” I had told him once, “they’d be more responsive.”

Will had shaken his head. “I do listen. That’s the problem. Everything they say is wrong.”

Now, after the meeting in Altgeld, Will had a new idea. “These mixed-up Negroes inside St. Catherine’s ain’t never gonna do nothing,” he said. “If we wanna get something done, we gonna have to take it to the streets!” He pointed out that many of the people who lived in the immediate vicinity of St. Catherine’s were jobless and struggling; those were the people we should be targeting, he said. And because they might not feel comfortable attending a meeting hosted by a foreign church, we should conduct a series of street corner meetings around West Pullman, allowing them to gather on neutral turf.

I was skeptical at first, but unwilling as I was to discourage any initiative, I helped Will and Mary prepare a flyer, for distribution along the block closest to the church. A week later, the three of us stood out on the corner in the late autumn wind. The street remained empty at first, the shades drawn down the rows of brick bungalows. Then, slowly, people began to emerge, one or two at a time, women in hair nets, men in flannel shirts or windbreakers, shuffling through the brittle gold leaves, edging toward the growing circle. When the gathering numbered twenty or so, Will explained that St. Catherine’s was part of a larger organizing effort and that “we want you to talk to your neighbors about all the things y’all complain about when you’re sitting at the kitchen table.”

“Well, all I can say is, it’s about time,” one woman said.

For almost an hour, people talked about potholes and sewers, stop signs and abandoned lots. As the afternoon fell to dusk, Will announced that we’d be moving the meetings to St. Catherine’s basement starting the following month. Walking back to the church, I heard the crowd still behind us, a murmur in the fading light. Will turned to me and smiled.