by Gina Yashere
When I got to Canary Wharf, construction had already begun on the tower as well as several other buildings. The foundations were finished, and the first ten of the fifty floors were up. Otis would construct the lift shaft as the building went up, and I would be one of the team.
Otis not only had engineers from all over the UK on the project but also had brought them in from Central Europe and the US. Over four thousand engineers, electricians, plumbers, and various building contractors were on the site, but there were few Black people, and the only women I saw were in the canteen serving food and our onsite nurse. Because of this, the toilet facilities were dire. I had to hike fifteen minutes across the large site to find the only ladies’ room. Most of the time, I just pulled my hard hat down over my face and used the men’s. I wasn’t welcomed by my fellow engineers. The introduction I’d had with Pete paled in comparison with what I went through at Canary Wharf. You could say it was a baptism by fire. I couldn’t understand the level of resentment directed at me. I worked hard and could lift anything they could, proven when they publicly challenged me on several occasions.
The men made a point of telling the most misogynist and racist jokes while looking at me sideways for a reaction. Porn was openly consumed in front of me, and men loudly commented on women’s physical attributes. There was a large hut where each engineer had their own station to hang their work gear to change in and out of. I didn’t have separate changing quarters, nor did I ask for one, for fear of differentiating myself further, and in the morning I’d often find pictures of monkeys stuck above my station, and banana skins. I’d pull them down while the men sniggered behind me. I refused to let them see how much it bothered me. I learned to develop different coping mechanisms. Every weekend I would hit my favorite nightclub, The Fridge, in Brixton or another nightclub, called Dance Wicked, under the railway arches in Vauxhall and dance my aggression out. The Running Man became my anti-racism outlet.
At Otis, there were three men in particular whom I hated the most. One was Bill, a skinny, pale English bloke whose entire face was covered in red welts and pockmarks. He was loud and often very funny, roasting his fellow engineers relentlessly, but his humor was much more mean-spirited when it came to me. One of his favorite lines was to tell me that my name backwards was “a nig.” I didn’t tell him my full name was Regina. He would have had a field day with that.
Bill made a point of constantly trying to humiliate me in front of the other guys but disguised it as just friendly workplace banter. All of his jokes about me were based on my race. When I would challenge him, he’d say he wasn’t racist, as his wife was brown and from Mauritius. I’d often fantasize about pushing him down a lift shaft or smashing his head in with a hammer.
Timothy was a young guy, just a few years older than me, who lived in an area of southeast London called Eltham. This area was to become infamous a few years later with the deadly stabbing of a young Black man named Stephen Lawrence by a gang of racist thugs. Timothy would openly proclaim that he would not tolerate niggers moving into his neighborhood, among other, equally unsavory comments. He’d make statements about Black people’s criminality, that we smelled, and that we were animals.
I argued with Timothy constantly, but he never raised his voice. When you imagine racists, its often violent men, with their faces screwed up in hatred and fury—skinheads, hooded KKK members burning crosses, carrying out beatings and lynching. English racism could at times be a lot more genteel. Timothy was very calm and matter-of-fact when he made his statements, as if the things he was saying were just obvious facts. If you only watched his body language as he spoke, you would have thought he was discussing something as innocuous as the weather. This infuriated me more than Bill and his racist jokes, because some of my colleagues agreed with Timothy and were emboldened by his seemingly logical delivery.
Eventually, after months of listening to him spew his shit, the next time we were alone, I informed him that I knew where he lived and I had two brothers I would be glad to send to his house if I ever again heard the word “nigger” come out of his mouth. I think he got the message, as he never uttered another word to me, and I was glad for it.
I hated Timothy, but the person I spent every working hour wishing death upon was Clinton. He was a dark-skinned Black man, three years older than me. He was good-looking and he dressed well, and he had his hair straightened and slicked back. When he arrived on the site a few months after me, I was overjoyed, as I thought I now had an ally, someone whose very presence would help me keep the racist banter under control, if not end it completely. Within a few days, he began making derogatory comments about my appearance. “Man, you Africans are so ugly!” Timothy and Bill sniggered. Emboldened by the laughter of his white coworkers, Clinton continued his onslaught. “Careful you don’t eat your fingers while you’re biting that chocolate bar. You might like it! You damn cannibal!” Oh, how the white guys laughed. They patted him on the back, and he reveled in their acceptance. I returned fire, calling him a fool if he didn’t know that his origins were in Africa just like mine. He scoffed. “White people rescued us from Africa, and they mixed with us, so we don’t have your big noses and fat lips!” I was speechless. I spent the next few miserable weeks getting into screaming arguments with Clinton. He triggered my fury more than any of those white men ever could, because I felt so hurt, betrayed, and stupid for believing that our Blackness would be our bond.
One day while Clinton and I verbally abused each other, I looked at Timothy, Bill, and the others and took stock of them standing back and laughing at us both. My mouth snapped shut, and I resolved to just keep my head down, work, and no longer be goaded. I stopped speaking with Clinton that day, but that didn’t stop me fervently praying that Clinton’s sperm were all duds and he would never have children. Now, when I look back, I feel sad and embarrassed for him. I still despise him, though.
This was my work environment for two years. Despite the abuse, I learned a lot on that job, and I enjoyed the actual engineering. I was somehow able to compartmentalize so as not to let my coworkers affect my performance. Funnily enough, I got on quite well with the American engineers, who took me under their wings, and I spent the last few months of the job working with them and avoiding the Brits. I grilled them about opportunities for work as an engineer in the US, as my childhood plan was never far from my mind. Two engineers in particular provided the most solace. James Williams, better known as Rocky, was a stocky African American from Brooklyn, New York. A happily married Christian, with a son the same age as me, he adopted me as his on-site daughter and often took me to work areas of the site with him, shielding me from my tormentors. He is still my adopted dad to this day. I’ve been a guest of him and his wife, Berniece, in Brooklyn on several occasions, and they have also been guests of mine in both Los Angeles and London.
There was also Big Dave, a huge white guy with a head of thick dark hair and a moustache to match. He looked like a bear and a lumberjack had a baby. Despite his gargantuan proportions, he was a kind, sweet-natured guy who took pity on the weird little Black girl with blond dreadlocks, and we remained in touch for several years after he’d gone back to the US. A couple of years after we worked together I visited New York on vacation with a group of friends, and I called him to see if he remembered me. He was not only happy to hear from me but also invited me to meet him at his new job, as chief elevator maintenance engineer at the World Trade Center. Perfect! The world-famous Twin Towers were at the top of our tourist-destination list. When we met, he asked my friends if he could borrow me for an hour, and then he took me on a lift-engineer tour of the buildings.
Otis had provided all the lifts for the World Trade Center, and Big Dave was in charge of a team who kept them running, repaired any breakdowns, and regularly serviced them. We went up to the control room, and I observed the sheer size of the motors these lifts were attached to. Remember, our tallest building in the UK at the time was Canary Wharf Tower, which was the same height as the two
baby towers that flanked the Twin Towers. These motors carried thousands of visitors a day over 110 floors at speeds up to nearly 40 miles per hour. They were huge. Each one was the size of a midsize office. I’d never seen anything like them.
Although I had left the company by that point, Big Dave decided to risk his career and put me in an Otis uniform. He wanted to take me for a ride on top of one of the lifts. We did not put it in service mode but rode it, while it carried passengers, so it traveled at its full speed. Holy shit! No roller-coaster ride will ever top that. As the lift careened towards the top floor, Mike stood at his full height. Having worked on lifts where I’d often had to duck to make sure I wasn’t crushed between the lift and the ceiling of the lift shaft, I began to do just that.
Big Dave teased me, “Stand strong!”
“Fuck no.” I ducked. There ended up being plenty of clearance, but I didn’t give a shit.
I would later watch in horror and fear when those towers came down on 9/11, hoping that my friend Mike was not at work that day. I spent the day desperately trying to get ahold of him and Rocky, but as was to be expected, the phone lines were jammed with desperate callers from all over the world. Finally, after two desperate days, I got through to Rocky to ask him if Mike had been at the Twin Towers that day. A flood of relief washed over me when he said, “Probably not. We lost the maintenance contract last year.”
* * *
After my stint at Canary Wharf, my training as a lift engineer was complete, and I was promoted. This meant that if I stayed in construction, I would now be able to manage a small site of my own, and if I went back to service and maintenance, I would have my own service route, complete with a company van, a pager, and a mate. I’d already been told by supervisors and managers that my chances of managing my own construction site were slim to none, as “the lads ain’t gonna take orders from a bird.” And after the two years I’d had at Canary Wharf, I had no intention of continuing to work with large groups of men.
I opted to go back to callouts and maintenance, and I ended up paired with a young engineer of Indian heritage, Salim. Salim had completed an apprenticeship with Otis and had been newly promoted like myself. We were not meant to work together—each of us should have had our own service route—but he found himself in the same position Pete had been in two years earlier, stuck with an engineer the company had no idea what to do with. (Otis had enjoyed the cachet of having their first female engineer. They’d even put my face on their diversity brochures and had me do newspaper interviews for them, but they were unwilling to afford me the responsibility my position entailed, choosing instead to palm me off to various babysitters.) Salim and I came to a compromise: some days we worked together, and some days I’d drive my own car to one of his buildings, where I’d service the lifts there by myself, while he’d go and do the lifts somewhere else. This arrangement came to an end when one day, while working on the lifts in a home for senior citizens, I came out to find a van load of police officers waiting for me. The residents of the building had assumed that this Black woman was impersonating an engineer with a view to rob them of their peppermints and Uno cards. I became extremely frustrated with the situation, and so I met with my manager several times to try to gauge when I would finally get my own route. “I’m sorry, Gina,” he told me one day. “The company would rather you work with another engineer, just in case you have an accident. You know, you could fall down a shaft and hurt your womb or something and then sue Otis if you can’t get pregnant later. It’s for your own good.”
“Oh, really,” I responded. “Do you say the same to male engineers, that they could fall and squash a testicle?”
“Don’t be crass, Gina.”
It was at that point I decided to bypass my manager and go to the top echelons of the company to set up a grievance hearing due to discrimination. No other Otis engineer of my grade had ever been denied the right to do the job for which they were qualified. I wrote a statement and went through the internal channels. A date was set. I contacted my union rep, whose job it would be to represent my interests as a four-year paying union member. He refused. “I don’t know anything about this women’s lib stuff,” he told me. When the date of my grievance hearing came, I went alone and unrepresented. Unsurprisingly, I was overruled, by yet another room of white men, and I was sent back to engineering purgatory with Salim. We limped on for a few months, but I no longer wanted to be in this job. I was fed up and could see no future with this company.
In the mid-1990s, the building industry in the UK went through a slump, and Otis was affected. They began to lay people off in the construction department. On hearing this, I marched into my manager’s office and demanded they make me redundant, even though I was no longer in construction. I made it clear that I no longer wanted to be their token Black female face on their diversity brochures, and that it would be in their best interest to let me go away quietly. Obviously with a redundancy package.
They agreed. A week later, I walked away from engineering with a lump sum of approximately three months’ salary, and what turned out to be for good. Salim was sorry, but not sorry to see me go, and without a Black-woman-shaped albatross around his neck, Salim rose through the ranks at Otis; he is now a high-ranking manager.
I became a bore at the movies whenever there were elevator crash scenes, as I would loudly proclaim where they had made technical mistakes or had used artistic license for Hollywood effect. To date, the movie Speed is the only film to handle technical details correctly.
Oh yeah, and I’m no longer afraid of lifts.
12
Success Is 10 Percent Ability and 90 Percent Sweat
After I left Otis, I decided to take the summer off, because for a long while I’d been either studying or working or both. I’d never had much time or the freedom to explore my own interests. I figured this finally was my chance. I had always been bad with money, and with a lump sum in the form of a decent severance pay, I thought, I’m going to enjoy this summer, probably blow the money, and then come winter, I’ll get another job. Being a qualified engineer meant I’d have no problem finding employment. There was always the good old Evening Standard with their engineer listings on Thursdays. I would still look through them every week, keeping an eye out. But I was going to spend the summer just enjoying myself.
I had a little black Honda CRX sports car that I loved and had bought with cash, so my only large monthly expenditure was my monthly rent. I had finally moved out of my mum’s, out from under her watchful eye, when I was in my early twenties. She had grown tired of my constant weekend clubbing routine. As far as I had been concerned, I worked hard during the week and contributed towards the household expenses with my monthly rent payment to her, therefore, as a working adult, I should have been allowed to spend my weekends however I pleased. This had meant recording every episode of the hip-hop TV show Yo! MTV Raps and spending hours practicing the dance moves in the videos to unleash Friday and Saturday nights at various nightclubs around South London till the early hours of the morning, then sleeping all day Sunday before returning to work Monday morning. I did not drink, smoke, do drugs, or disappear with random dudes. As I had been the only one in the household with a car, Mum had often dragged me out of bed to drop her places, which I had done with only some complaint. As far as daughters go, I thought I was in the top percentile. All I had wanted to do was meet up with my friends on the weekends and dance my ass off. She had had major issues with this, and after one too many shouty “You treat this place like a hotel” lectures, I had decided to leave home.
Through my good friend Bev, I had managed to secure an interview with a housing association. In the UK, housing associations are private nonprofit organizations that provide low-cost social housing for people in need of a home. They are regulated by the state and often receive public funding. In the mid-1990s, before government cuts adversely affected the young, the poor, and the middle class, housing help was readily available. Bev, who already had her own heavily
subsidized one-bedroom flat, talked me through the process of being considered for one of these coveted properties. A hard-luck story was a must. “My mum doesn’t like my clubbing” wasn’t gonna cut it. I had to have a better story. After coaching from Bev, at the housing association interview, I told a story of evil stepfathers, abusive partners, and unwanted pregnancies, followed by abortions. It worked! I was given a room in a hostel, a shared private house with four other girls, with super-cheap rent, where I lived for eighteen months. Afterwards, I qualified for my own cute one-bedroom garden flat in Tottenham, North London, where I lived for three years (after which I was making enough money as a comedian to buy my first property).
With my redundancy payoff and cheap rent, I was able to spend a summer experimenting with different activities and interests, and I decided to try my hand at drama again. I took a free acting workshop, which ended in a performance. I was never one of the main actors, more of a glorified extra, but the experience reminded me how much I liked to perform. The other young adults in the class were actual students of drama, and I was in the background with no lines. I’d always thought plays were boring and didn’t relate to me, but the one we performed used music from the album Diary of a Mad Band, from the hottest R&B group at the time, Jodeci. The music was great, I was in a show, and even though I never uttered a word throughout the performance, I couldn’t have enjoyed the experience more. I hadn’t been on a stage since I was thirteen, when my mother had put a stop to it. I’d forgotten how good it felt.
After the workshop ended, I figured that I’d have a few weeks of frivolity, then get another job and return to real life.