by Audre Lorde
All the help in the plant, with the exception of the foreman and forewomen, were Black or Puerto Rican, and all the women were local, from the Stamford area.
Nobody mentioned that carbon tet destroys the liver and causes cancer of the kidneys. Nobody mentioned that the X-ray machines, when used unshielded, delivered doses of constant low radiation far in excess of what was considered safe even in those days. Keystone Electronics hired Black women and didn’t fire them after three weeks. We even got to join the union.
I was hired to run one of the two X-ray machines that read the first cuttings of raw quartz. This enabled the cutters to align their machines in such a way as to maximize the charge from each rock. Two machines were therefore stationed directly outside of the cutting room, open to the noise and mud and grit flying from the stone-cutters. These were the least desirable jobs for women because of the working conditions, and because there was no overtime or piecework bonuses to be made. The other machine was run by a young woman named Virginia, whom everybody called Ginger. I met her the first morning in the luncheonette across the street from the plant where I stopped to get coffee and a roll to celebrate my first day on the new job.
We worked from 8:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. with ten-minute coffee breaks at 10:00 A.M. and 2:30 P.M., and a half-hour lunch break at noon.
The cutting ‘boys’ made the first cut through the thick grease and mud of the machines, and then brought rough two-inch slabs to Ginger or me to be read for an electrical charge before they set the axis of their machines. The reading was obtained by a small X-ray beam passed through the crystal. There was a hood to be flipped to cover your fingers and prevent the X ray from touching you, but the second that it took to flip it down was often the difference between being yelled at for being too slow and a smooth-working relationship with the cutters.
The rock was then sliced along the axis that had been marked with an oil pencil. We read it again, and it was sliced into slabs. Ginger and I read these slabs, tossing them, thick with grime and mud, into the barrels next to our machines. Those slabs were then taken away, washed in huge trays of carbon tetrachloride and cut into squares for the X-ray ‘reading room.’ This was a cleaner, quieter place to work, where the crystals were read one last time and stacked according to degree charge.
The women in the X-ray reading room made piecework bonuses over a large base expectation output, and these jobs were considered desirable. By cutting corners, saving time and not flipping the hood, it was possible to make a small weekly bonus.
After the first week, I wondered if I could stick it out. I thought that if I had to work under those conditions for the rest of my life I would slit my throat. Some mornings, I questioned how I could get through eight hours of stink and dirt and din and boredom. At 8:00 A.M. I would set my mind for two hours, saying to myself, you can last two hours, and then there will be a coffee break. I’d read for ten minutes, and then I’d set myself for another two hours, thinking, now all right, you can last two hours until lunch. After lunch, when the machines behind us kicked over, I felt a little refreshed after my sardine sandwich, but those two hours were the hardest of the day. It was a long time until the 2:30 break. But finally, I could tell myself, now you can make it for two more hours and then you’ll be free.
Sometimes I stood waiting for the freight elevator in the early morning half-dark with the other workers, anxiously hoping it wouldn’t stall and the time clock tick over into red. I tried to propel myself back out of the alley and toward home, because I knew I could not possibly go through another day like the day before. But the elevator came, and I got on with the others.
There were women who had worked at the plant for the entire ten years it had been open.
I would not get paid for three weeks, and my meager hoard of money was running dangerously low. (It was customary in factories in Stamford to hold back your first week’s pay until you left your job, as a deposit, so to speak, on your space.) It did not cover coffee breaks. Sometimes I would stay right at the machines and read the book I brought. Ginger would bop off to the relative cleanliness of the reading room to talk with the other women. One day she clued me in.
‘You better get your bottom off that chair in your breaks, girl, before you get stuck to it. You can go crazy like that.’
Those were my sentiments, exactly.
With different motivations in mind, my forewoman, Rose, also advised me on my off-work habits. Pulling me aside at lunchtime, and with an archly significant smile, she told me that she thought I was a bright girl and could go places except I went to the bathroom too much.
The cutters made piecework bonuses on their work, but Ginger and I did not. One day the men had hassled me all morning, saying I was not giving them their readings fast enough, and was holding up their cuttings. At 10:00 A.M. they trooped downstairs for coffee, leaving their machines running. Under the cover of the noise, I dropped my head over the nape of the X-ray machine and burst into tears. At that point, Ginger appeared, having forgotten her change purse under the hamper of her machine. She punched me gently on the arm.
‘See that? What’d I tell ya? You can go nuts with all that reading. What do ya take in your coffee? I’ll buy you a cup.’
‘No, thank you.’ I wiped my eyes, ruffled to be caught crying.
‘No, thank you.’ Ginger giggled, mimicking my tone. ‘You sound just like a lady. C’mon, girl, please have some coffee. I can’t handle these motherfuckers by myself for the rest of the day and they’s out for blood this morning. Hurry up, what’ll you have?’
‘Very light with sugar.’ I smiled in gratitude.
‘Atta girl,’ she said, with her usual jocular laugh, and rolled on down the narrow aisle separating our machines from the cutting-room din.
That’s how Ginger and I became friends. That Thursday, she invited me to drive downtown with her mother and her to cash our checks.
It was my first paycheck from Keystone.
Since Thursday was payday, the shops on Atlantic Avenue were lively and open late. Everybody turned out to market and shop and cash checks and socialize downtown. People parked on the main streets and chatted with the passersby, no matter that tomorrow was a Friday workday to contend with.
Ginger told me she had spotted me in town the first Thursday I was there, before I even came to work at Keystone.
‘That’s right. Blue jeans and sneakers on Atlantic Avenue on Thursday night! I said to myself, who’s this slick kitty from the city?’
I laughed at the idea that anyone could call me slick, and held my peace.
Ginger invited me home for dinner that Thursday night, and I realized, as I had a third helping of mashed potatoes, that I had almost forgotten what home-cooked food tasted like. I could see red-headed Cora, Ginger’s youngish brash mother, looking at me half in amusement, half in annoyance. Ginger had four younger brothers at home, and Cora had a lot of hungry mouths to feed.
Sometimes Ginger would bring me a roll from home in the mornings; sometimes she would walk over to my house on Mill River Road in the evening after work and invite me out for a hamburger at the White Castle near the bridge, the only place in town open after 6:00, except on Thursdays.
Ginger had a battery-powered portable radio, a gift from her now-divorced husband, and before the weather turned cold, we would go out in the beautiful autumn evenings and sit by the embankment of the Rippowam River that faced my house, and listen to Fats Domino on WJRZ. His ‘Blueberry Hill’ was tops on the hit parade through most of that fall, and Ginger had a special place in her heart for him anyway, since they looked so much alike. She even walked like Fats, with a swing-bopping step.
Ginger talked, and I listened. I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too.
The old Ford swooped elegantly into the curb at the corner of Atlantic and Main, just the other side of the railr
oad tracks.
‘End of the line, girls.’ CeCe, Ginger’s brother, pulled loose the rope that held the front passenger door in place. Ginger and I clambered out into the autumn afternoon sun, bracing but not yet chill. Up and down Atlantic Avenue, schoolchildren were painting garish and ghostly murals in brilliant tempera and soap paint onto the windows and doors of the shops that had agreed to participate in the Halloween pageant and parade. Tomorrow was Halloween. The parade would wind through most of the downtown area, Ginger explained, and include most of the town’s children.
‘One big treat. The stores figure it’ll save on tricks. They do it like that every year. Keeps the windows from being scratched and marked up. Watercolor’s easier to wash off than housepaint. They don’t do it in the city, do they?’
We walked into Gerber’s Department Store looking for stockings for Ginger, because Cora insisted Ginger wear nylons to church on Sunday.
‘I’ve never seen Halloween celebrated like that before.’
‘Well,’ Ginger drawled, fingering the nylons on display. ‘That’s small-town stuff. There’s a lot you haven’t seen goes on here different from the big city. Like fo’instance, these stockings ain’t shit. Let’s go see at Grants’.’ We crossed the avenue and walked back up the other side of Main Street. From the record shop, snatches of Rosemary Clooney’s voice singing ‘Come on a my house, my house a come on’, mixed with the Saturday afternoon traffic.
A tow-headed boy on a bike rolled past us, sucking a bright green pickle. The sharp smell of knife-clean dill and garlic pulled a rip-cord in my head, dropping me into the middle of Rivington Street, between Orchard and Delancey.
Bright Sunday morning on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York’s eager and determined bargain-hunters searching through the sidewalk bins for good buys and old friends. On the corner of Orchard Street, the Pickle Man presided over wooden vats of assorted sizes and shades of green and succulent submarines, each hue denoting a different stage or flavor of picklement. Half-submerged beneath the floating bits of garlic and peppercorns and twigs of dill, schools of pickles drifted like spiced fish waiting belly up for a bite. Nearby, sawhorse tables extended onto the sidewalk under a striped awning, holding flats of dried apricots, dark orange and mysteriously translucent. Beside them on the tables, long square wooden boxes half-open, waxed paper pulled back over the long slabs of halvah, ground sesame-paste candy. There were boxes of vanilla, smooth chocolate, and the crazy-quilt mixture of the two – my favorite, marble.
Over all, in the sharpening autumn air, the smells from Ratner’s Dairy Restaurant drifting around the corner and over the rooftops, cheese blintzes and freshly baked onion rolls. They mingled with the heavier smells of the delicatessen next door, where all-beef garlic sausages and stuffed derma nestled alongside of the kasha knishes in the window-warmer. To the noses on the busy street, religious and dietary separations did not matter, and Sunday morning shopping on Rivington Street was an orchestra of olfactory delights.
I wondered where the boy had gotten a half-dill pickle in Stamford, Connecticut.
‘Do they sell pickles in Grants’, Ginger?’
‘What a great idea!’ Ginger grinned as she took my arm. ‘You like pickles, too? Big sour juicy ones, and the little – hey, watch it!’ Ginger yanked back on my arm as I glanced up the avenue absently and stepped down into the street. ‘Speedy Gonzales, you get tickets for jay-walking around here, and New Yorkers get most of them. You don’t have anything better to do with your money?’ She grinned again as the light changed. ‘How’d you hear about the job at Keystone, anyway?’
‘At the West Main Community Center.’
‘Good ole Crispus Attucks.’
‘What’s that?’ We turned the corner onto Main Street and headed for Grants’.
‘The center, stupid. It was just renamed in honor of a Negro, so we shouldn’t mind that they don’t want us using the center downtown.’
‘Who’s it named for?’
‘You mean you don’t know who he is?’ Ginger screwed her face up, unbelieving. She cocked her head and wrinkled her brow at me.
‘I haven’t been around here that long, you know,’ I countered, defensively.
‘Well I’ll be dipped. Slick kitty from the city! What kind of a school was that you-all went to?’ Her round, incredulous eyes almost disappearing into the folds of her wrinkled-up face. ‘I thought everybody knew about him. The first cat to die in the Revolutionary War, in Concord, Massachusetts. A Black man, name of Crispus Attucks. The shot heard ’round the world. Everybody knows that. They renamed our center after him.’ Ginger squeezed my arm again as we entered the store. ‘And they got you the job at Keystone. I’m glad they did something useful, after all.’
Grants’ didn’t sell pickles except with sandwiches. But there was a sale on nylons, three pair for $1.25, or fifty cents a pair. The Korean War was already pushing prices back up, and this was a good buy. Ginger tried to decide if she wanted to spend that much.
‘Come on, girl, get a pair with me,’ she urged. ‘They’re real cheap, and your legs are going to get cold, even in pants.’
‘I hate nylons. I can’t stand the way they feel on my legs.’ What I didn’t say was that I couldn’t stand the bleached-out color that the so-called neutral shade of all cheap nylons gave my legs. Ginger looked at me, pleadingly. And I relented. It wasn’t her fault I was feeling so out of sorts all of a sudden, so disjointed. Crispus Attucks. Something had slipped out of place.
‘Oh, buy them,’ I said. ‘You want them and you can always use them. ’Sides, your mother will never let them go to waste.’ I ran my fingers over the fine mesh of the display stockings hung from a T-rack on the counter. The dry slippery touch of nylon and silk filled me with distrust and suspicion. The effortlessness with which those materials passed through my fingers made me uneasy. They were illusive, confusing, not to be depended upon. The texture of wool and cotton with its resistance and unevenness, allowed, somehow, for more honesty, a more straightforward connection through touch.
Crispus Attucks.
Most of all, I hated the pungent, lifeless, and ungiving smell of nylon, its adamant refusal to become human or evocative in odor. Its harshness was never tampered by the smells of the wearer. No matter how long the clothing was worn, nor in what weather, a person dressed in nylon always approached my nose like a warrior approaching a tourney, clad in chain-mail.
I fingered the nylon, but my mind hammered elsewhere. Crispus Attucks, Boston?! Ginger knew. I prided myself on my collection of odds and ends of random information, more and less useful, gathered through avid curiosity and endless reading. I stored the garnered tidbits on the back-burner of consciousness, to be pulled forward on any appropriate occasion. I was used to being the one who knew some fact that everybody else in the conversation had not yet learned. It was not that I believed I knew EVERYTHING, just more than most people around me.
Ginger handed three pair of tissue-wrapped stockings to the woman behind the counter, and stood waiting for her change. I wondered where that half-dill pickle had come from.
Crispus Attucks. How was that possible? I had spent four years at Hunter High School, supposedly the best public high school in New York City, with the most academically advanced and intellectually accurate education available, for ‘preparing young women for college and career’. I had been taught by some of the most highly considered historians in the country. Yet, I never once heard the name mentioned of the first man to fall in the american revolution, nor ever been told that he was a Negro. What did that mean about the history I had learned?
Ginger’s voice was a cheerful, soothing murmur over my thoughts as she talked me part way up the hill back to my room on Mill River Road.
‘What’s wrong with you today? Cat got your tongue?’
Before long, I was totally dependent upon Ginger for human contact in Stamford, and her invitations to Sunday dinner represented the only real food I ever ate. She built up an incredible
mythology about me and what my life had been in New York, and I did nothing to dissuade her. I told her that I had left home when I was seventeen and gotten my own apartment, and she thought that was very daring. She had gotten married when she was twenty, in order to get out of her mother’s house. Now she was back, divorced, but with a certain amount of autonomy, purchased by her weekly contributions to the family income. Her mother worked as a bench-press operator at American Cyanimid, and her father was diabetic and blind. Her mother’s lover lived with them, along with her four younger brothers.
For some time, I had known that Ginger was flirting with me, but had ignored it because I was at a loss as to how to handle the situation. As far as I knew, she was sweet and attractive and warm and lovable, and straight as a die.
Ginger, on the other hand, was convinced that I had everything taped. She saw me as a citified little baby butch – bright, knowledgeable, and secure enough to be a good listener and to make the first move. She was sure that I was an old and accomplished hand at the seduction of young divorcées. But her inviting glances and throaty chuckles were never enough to tempt me, nor were the delicious tidbits she would sneak out of Cora’s kitchen and wrap up in handkerchiefs, persuading Uncle Charlie to drive her over to Mill River Road in the truck on his way to his night job. I remained determinedly oblivious to all this for as long as possible.
Ginger, perfumed and delectable, perched on my desk chair in the tiny second-floor room, watching incredulously as I sat crosslegged on my bed, wolfing down her mother’s goodies.
‘I don’t believe you’re only eighteen. Come on, how old are you, really?’
‘I told you already.’ The chicken was crisp and delicious and totally preoccupying.
‘When were you born?’
‘Nineteen-thirty-four.’ Ginger calculated for a minute.
‘I never met an eighteen-year-old like you before.’ Ginger spoke with the lofty advantage of her twenty-five years.