She said later she’d been attracted to me the minute I started talking at Stanislaw’s. I said, “Yeh, that silver voice.” She hated for me to talk like that. To that girl I was somebody up on a pedestal. We lay there talking and smoking. I’d never met a girl like her before. Smart and yet innocent as a baby. I mean innocent about the future. Full of pipe-dreams about brotherhood and communism and a new life. It bothered me to hear her. I’ll tell you why. It got in the way of my loving. That’s why. Talking starry-eyed like she was, got me worrying about the newspaper boys. I kept looking at the door thinking of the photographers piling in and what would I say? Boys, this is the wife and I’m going to sue every one of you bastards for trespass. While she was talking I was investigating the situation under the sheet. Limp as a rag. I had to shut her up somehow. Switch the subject. But it didn’t work. She told me how she’d broken with her family. I said, “I’d heard they were rich.” I joked, “Me with my silver voice, you with your silver spoon.” Me, the big joker, always the big joker. If it ain’t funny it ain’t American. Joking didn’t work. What I said bothered her and what with my worrying and all I was sore. “Never break with your folks if they’re rich,” I said. “Money’s a girl’s best friend even if she’s a red.” Something like that. She got sore, too, and pulled away from me. And me the big joker I asked her if there was something wrong with me. Did I have scarlet fever, get it, scarlet fever? “Women of the world organize,” I said, “you got nothing to lose but your cherries.” She bawled me out, called me stupid. Like a little baby she was. Innocent. You couldn’t kid her about that sacred cow in Moscow. I tried to knock some sense into her head. I said that when you’re down on the bottom, nothing like a joke or a good laugh. She answered some jokes were in poor taste. Talk of your bedroom conversations. Christ, right then and there I had to knock some things into her head about working people. Here she’d left her rich family to join up with the working people but she didn’t know a damn thing about them. I told her about my father who liked nothing better than a beer and a song, and how he got killed when I was eleven. I told her about my jobs in McKeesport. How it was work, work, work, and why shouldn’t I joke when I had the chance? Poor taste or good taste. The main thing was to laugh when you had the chance.
She listened to me, her face soft. That great big dumb baby. Loving me the more I talked, and why? Because my father was a miner and I was an organizer. For what she said was, “Billy, you’re a real hero of the working class even if you don’t know it.” I had to look at her, her eyes shining. It was almost funny. Her putting me up on a pedestal and me worrying about this lovenest. And feeling at myself and wondering if she was going to kill the action with all that talk out of the pamphlets she read. “I’m no hero of anything,” I said. “Billy,” she said, “don’t you see?” — “Sure I see. I see I went to work because I had to.” — “That’s economic determinism.”
That’s just what she said. That’s what you call a bedroom conversation. She had to know why I decided to become an organizer. I said it was because I wanted what was coming to me. Not because I was a li’l tin Christ saving his brothers. And that’s the truth. Go try and save a bunch of working stiffs, they’ll nail you to the cross. Who wants to be saved? All they want’s what’s coming to them. Once the banana leaves the bunch it gets skinned. That’s all the rank and file want. Not to get skinned, the hell with being saved. An organizer like me, a lifetime in the labor movement. Hell, what kept me going is the fight. It’s simple as that. Beat their heads in. The other side. You fight and you dream maybe. I used to dream of going back to McKeesport. A big shot. Spitting in Walt Marik’s eye, and Hank Sievert sorry for siding with him. A big shot like Johnny Mitchell the miners’ hero. Maybe even a Billy Lloyd Day like there was a Johnny Mitchell Day. Yeh, that’s a part of it, too. The glory. And that girl Annabelle with her dumb ideas about heroes of the working class. What we needed was an encyclopedia under the pillow. I kissed her to shut her up and lucky for me I was young and full of the old cat. I saw there was going to be action and I got slaphappy kind of. Full of crazy talk about the dumb sonsuvbitches dumb enough to work in a steel mill. Sons of the working class, but don’t forget the cops because they were sons of the working class too, only nobody’d told them. Things like that which got her mad but I kissed the mad back into her mouth. Then she had nothing more to say. Her eyes, they said it all. And I hollered to throw away the encyclopedia, throw away the pamphlets for it was tapping time in the old mill. “Tapping time,” I hollered like a God damn loon.
Way I tell it, she was just another piece to me. A piece with red trimmings. She wasn’t, although that’s how I felt about her in the beginning. When the strike was called who do you think was with me, right at my side? She was. Out there in front of Stanislaw’s Café on Poland Avenue. It was my lucky hour. Eleven o’clock at night. The same time I’d pulled my first strike in McKeesport. I couldn’t get her to go away. She was crazy about strikes. To that girl it was up on the barricades with the red flag flying and a brave new world around the corner. And like you can imagine I was the tinplated hero. It was my strike. I was out there with the boys. “On the firing line,” as Annabelle used to say. Tim Brannigan was handling the office. The paperwork. The over-all strategy. But the strike itself was my baby. There we were. Me and Annabelle, and two of my strike committeemen. The pickets, they were on the other side of Poland Avenue, singing and yelling. The cops watching. Three carloads of them parked in front of the barber below Stanislaw’s. That picket line was three miles long. Long as the plant itself. And the singing and the yelling. How can I give it to you? They were fierce. Like lions out of a cage. This was Federal Steel. And they were telling off that company who in Youngstown was bigger than God. And they knew it. They were rebels. The sparks. The first to go out. Singing and yelling and waving their lanterns and flashing their flashlights. And their signs. Annabelle, she’d thought up one. The one that said Join the CIO. Rejoin the U.S.A. Whenever she saw it she about hopped out of her skin for excitement. “What time is it, Billy?” Asking me a million times what time.
I let on I was old pokerface himself but I was damn near as excited as she was. For this was the big one. Knock off Federal and all the big companies’d have to sign up. Big Steel. The last hold-outs. She got me nervous asking me what time. I had to lift my hand high to catch the light from Stanislaw’s window. Christ, it was dark on that street. The stores closed up. The only light in Stanislaw’s and a couple rooming houses, and that picket line marching in front of the embankment on Poland Avenue across the way. That embankment was so high you could only see the tops of the stacks but you could hear they were making steel. That whur-a-whur. No pickets could cover up that whur-a-whur.
I forgot to say the main entrance to the plant was opposite Stanislaw’s Café. It was a concrete tunnel through the embankment. Stop 3, the bus-riders called it. High enough for trucks but there was nothing in it now. Just a hole of empty light. Wait a second. I forgot. There was this box inside the entrance that looked like it’d tumbled off a truck. But we’d planted it there. The cops’d let it stay. Those cops in their cars were sitting on their hands. You see, you had the press of the country in Youngstown, in Chicago. Wherever Federal had a plant. Those poor cops just had to be constitutional. But what they’d be when the three-to-eleven shift came into the tunnel was anybody’s guess. The whole God damn strike, all those weeks of meetings and leaflets, it was all a guess. Up in the air. If the three-to-eleven didn’t join the picket line we were in bad shape.
Speaking of cops, I had a towel, a small towel stuffed into my hat. So did Chesney and Duffy, the two boys with me. Some protection if the cops started swinging clubs. I couldn’t forget those cops for a second, sitting in their cars with the headlights off. You can never be sure with cops.
When the first bus showed up on Poland Avenue, the pickets stopped parading. They bunched up in front of Stop 3, waving their signs and hollering to join the CIO. The tunnel filled up with the sh
ift coming out, and the shift going in. The pickets working to get them to strike and those cops not doing a damn. Annabelle hopping with excitement, hooray here comes the revolution. CIO. That’s all you could hear. “Hump it,” I said to Chesney and Duffy. They shot off and picked up the box before it got lost in the mob. See? They were going to make their speeches from that box, and it was me who’d done it all. Christ, that minute I felt the old thrill. No thrill like it. Me, I’d stopped the clock. Busting up incoming and outcoming, scrambling the two shifts like eggs in a pan. Me, it was me talking out of Duffy’s mouth. Sure, he’d worked for Federal his whole life and been blacklisted for signing a union card. But it was me talking through his mouth. It was me. The bus drivers honking their horns, all those crazy flashlights and hollering, the hecklers hollering to go back where you come from. I’d done it like I’d done it before in a lot of other towns. I’d stopped the clock. Me.
That was only the start. Too damned many black sheep still kept on working. Those I ordered the telephone treatment. I’ll give you a sample. “Hello, Missus Blacksheep, your husband better stop scabbing or he won’t work in Youngstown when this strike’s won.” The phones, they rang all day and all night. And the next day. That was my job. Putting on the pressure. Tim Brannigan, he was meeting with the company officials, the Mayor and police chief. That was his job. His specialty. The conference table. Me, I was out on the front line. I was everywhere. I lived and breathed strike. I was with the sound truck we hired. We took it up the big viaduct. Way up high in the sky. The plant down below and me hollering, “Join the strike.” Down in the yards, the engineers poking their heads out of the switch locomotives. No bigger than toys but they heard me. Night and day I was hopping. I only saw Annabelle late at night. She was busy with the strikers’ wives. I’d get back to the room, too dog-tired to untie my shoelaces. “Let me untie ‘em,” she said. That’s how she was. Full of love. I wouldn’t let her at first but she only laughed. That girl from her background. Rich, a college girl. She loved me. She was like a wife, the wife I never had. Always had a snack of something to eat and hot coffee. Or whiskey. Always something. Like I was somebody. Yeh, a hero of the working class. Only she meant it. She was no phony. The fight we had, it was over politics. Our first fight. You see everybody was flocking to Youngstown. Not only the reporters and Government officials but all kinds of characters like this Winchester and this Hartley, if that was their right names. This Winchester was the Communist leader for the State of Ohio. Hartley was editor of The Red Billet, the Communist paper in steel. The one paper we didn’t want on our side.
We argued about it one night and she got mad. I said I didn’t want those reds sticking their dirty nose in and she hollered she wouldn’t take it. Not from me or anybody. I told her to grow up. I tried to show her that some kind of help was poison. But she said we needed all the help we could get. I got so sick arguing. I was so beat, I went over to the dresser where the whiskey was and took a snort. She should’ve left me alone. She didn’t. That whiskey livened me up and I began kidding her. “Comrade,” I said, “I think the comrades stink.” Something like that. It burned her up. Her lips got white. They were like I don’t know what. The witches of Macbeth or something. She called me a stupid fool, a stupid cheap fool, and one name led to another. Just like an old married couple. I got sore and said, “Sure, don’t forget I’m only a cheap proletarian that a millionaire’s daughter is trying to reform in the old bed.” She began to cry. Covered her face. I guess she felt ashamed covering her face for she took her hands away and looked at me. What she said I’ll never forget to my dying day. She said she could see it was a mistake being honest with me. A mistake saying she’d been attracted to me. “I was too easy,” she said, “like some silly girl with her big hero.” I couldn’t calm her down. She had the spunk to call a spade a spade. She said, “What am I to you, Billy? A whore?” She said it right out. Whore. Just what was in the back of my mind. She was something to see. Part baby and part fanatic. I tried to sweet-talk her but she wouldn’t listen. She told me off how I’d read or heard that the Communists all believed in free love and that made her a whore out of Moscow. She said she could see it from the beginning but she loved me so she invented all sorts of excuses for me. I waited until she wore herself out. Then I convinced her to have a li’l drink and when she relaxed a bit I said, “We sure make a funny pair.” We sure did. She with her college education and me up from the mills. She with her rich folks and me out of roughhouse alley. I took a big snort of whiskey to knock myself out. A great big one like I’m taking now, but it’s not the same stuff. You get older everything changes. Even the taste of whiskey. When you’re young you got it all. That girl? Part baby, part fanatic. What was there about her? And what’s the difference? I loved her.
Well, that strike kept us so busy we hardly saw each other. Day and night, around the clock. One long grind. She was organizing the wives of the strikers. She marched a couple hundred of them out on the Centre Street bridge where they could look down in the yard. Screaming at the scabs they knew down there. Screaming women. That’s pressure. We were putting the pressure on all over. My boys cornered those scabs when the cops weren’t around. Up on the hill where they lived, where it was dark. “Sign, you scab bastard, if you want to get home safe.” They signed. The tough nuts we stripped to the waist. And wrote on their chests what they were with black grease. Scab. Yeh, sure, it was violence. Why not? Federal had the cops and the money. We just had ourselves. It was no Sunday school picnic. It was war.
When Tim Brannigan met with the reporters he had his work cut out for him. “We’re against violence,” he’d say and they’d ask who was smearing scab? Who was throwing rocks? Who, who, who? He began calling me in to help him out because my tongue was quicker. Who was smearing scab, throwing rocks? That was easy. “Gentlemen, when you have thousands of men on strike you can’t control every last one.” Who ordered the telephone bombardment? That was easy, too. “Nobody ordered it,” I said. “Just put yourself in a striker’s shoes and wouldn’t you reach for the phone and call up the wife of the guy still working?” But when they asked who called in Winchester it wasn’t so easy. I told ‘em the truth. We hadn’t asked for Communist help but try and keep ‘em out of a hot town like Youngstown. And that brings me back to Annabelle. Tim knew all about us. Two things you can’t hide in this life. Death and love. Tim personally didn’t give a damn. What worried him were the reporters. The headlines, Winchester and Hartley. This red lovenest, this red network. All that stuff. One day after the reporters gave us a hot time about Winchester, he came right out with it. Here I was his chief lieutenant and she was a red. A red with Stalin telling her what to do in Youngstown. That’s how the papers would play it up. “I’ll stick by her as long as she does her work,” he said, “but this other angle, Billy.” I didn’t argue. He was right.
That same day I spoke to Annabelle at headquarters. It was late in the afternoon when you chew over everything that’s happened. The things gone wrong, the rumors, the strategy for tomorrow. She was busy typing, paying no attention. I went over to her and she smiled. That smile went through me like a knife. Giving her the gate. It hurt. “We’re talking business,” I whispered. “The press is after dirt, Annabelle. Tim’s warned me.” She wasn’t smiling any more. She knew what I was going to say. Like she’d gotten a telegram in black. “We better steer clear awhile,” I said and she said, “I guess so.” Only her eyes weren’t saying I guess so.
It was as easy as that. But when I walked into my room and she wasn’t there, I cursed Tim Brannigan and the press and the strike. Then I just slumped into a chair in that furnished room. Dead.
That God damn strike went on and on. By the third week we had six thousand men out but Federal wasn’t done. They hit back with a beaut. They had brains on their side, too. What they did was turn the plant into a flophouse for their God damn loyal workers. A sit-in strike in reverse. They explained it to the press. How their loyal workers, or scab bastards to y
ou, were being forced to stay away from the job. Which was true from their side of the fence. But what could we do? Let the scabs in? Anyway, Federal was bringing in cots and food and medicine. That same trick they pulled wherever they had a plant. Not only in Youngstown. But Chicago and Buffalo. The strategy was simple. To keep the fires going with their handpicked scabs who when the time was ripe’d start a back-to-work movement. We had no choice. We couldn’t let the food trucks in. We had to starve those black sheep out or we were done. There were a couple near riots. But the cops were still playing it constitutional. Some trucks got in late at night. Crashed through the picket lines. I met with my boys and laid down the line. “Keep ‘em out even if hell freezes.” We blocked up the tunnels with lumber and railroad ties. There was fights but everything was still under wraps. The company and the union were like two fighters feeling each other out. Then there were more fights. Hell, how could you stop the fighting? It was war. Something was bound to explode. And it exploded in Chicago.
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