by Wiley Cash
On a Saturday morning, they’d jump a train to Vicksburg and find the piece of land where his parents’ cabin still sat on the edge of the cotton field. Hampton would take the girl’s hand and lead her down the rows of black earth, the white wisps of cotton—something he’d never seen up close before—gathering like snow around their feet. By now, all these years later, the cabin would have begun to lean one way or the other, and he’d tell the girl that it wasn’t safe, to stay right there in the yard in front of the cabin with the hot sun on her back. He’d take the first tentative step, as if the stairs might collapse under his weight, but sensing their stability he’d go up onto the gallery—for that’s what they called a porch down there—and find that the door had been left open, the sunlight filling the room like a houseguest. He’d creep a little farther, shuffle his feet so as not to upset the fragile state of the settled cabin or its equally fragile place in his family’s history. He’d find the old wooden door where it had been left open against the wall, a spray of buckshot blown right through its middle. He’d step inside, close the door, witness the yellow sunlight blast itself through the myriad holes the shotgun’s work had left behind.
The porch would creak under the weight of a footstep on the other side of the closed door. He would picture Newcomb’s son, the pistol in his hand. His heartbeat would quicken. There was no shotgun for him to reach for. He did not own a gun, had never even fired one. And then he would hear the voice.
“Hampton, baby, you okay in there?”
It was Josephine. That would be her name.
Sitting there, in the colored car of the No. 33 train, Hampton tried to remember that this was not his first trip south. He’d been all the way down to New Orleans dozens and dozens of times. He’d been to St. Louis, Atlanta, Mobile, as far west as Houston. But as a Pullman porter he’d almost always stayed on the train. They’d never stop in a city for very long anyway. Just long enough to restock, take in the sights from the train platform while the passengers swirled around him before the whistle wail meant they were heading north again.
Regardless of whether that old cabin still sat on the edge of the field outside Vicksburg, Hampton’s father’s bravery in standing up to a white man cemented him as someone important in the collective mind of his family. Hampton’s mother had always proclaimed that she was someone too, and she’d always made Hampton and his sister proclaim that they were someone as well.
“You’re somebody, just as good as anybody,” she would say, especially when it appeared that they were as close to being nobodies as anybody could ever be. When the white policeman knocked on the door and told Hampton’s mother that he’d been caught stealing pies from a vendor, stood clenched with his fingers around Hampton’s forearm, saw three-year-old Summer standing behind her, said, “It’s a shame for a boy to grow up without a father,” his mother had watched the policeman walk down the hallway; then she had turned to Hampton and said, “You’re somebody, just as good as anybody.” When Hampton had to feed Summer and wash her and put her to bed while his mother worked in a factory making gloves and his friends all called him a mama’s boy because he no longer roamed the streets, his mother came home from work and kicked off her shoes and sat down and rubbed her feet and said, “You’re somebody, just as good as anybody.” When she began working as a housekeeper for Robert Binkerd, the assistant to the chairman for the Association of Railway Executives, and came home on the evening of her first day to find Hampton still in the sweaty overalls he wore at the loading docks, Summer still damp from her work at the laundry, she kicked off her shoes and sat down and rubbed her feet like she always did and said, “Mr. Binkerd told me it ain’t unusual to have a Pullman porter young as you. He could put in a word. He offered.” And once that offered word had been put in and a nice yet slightly too-small suit had been loaned and a meeting—which Hampton learned upon arrival was more of an audition—had been set up at the association’s office, he stood in their tiny tenement room while his mother smoothed the lapels on the suit jacket and said, “You’re somebody, just as good as anybody, and don’t you forget it.” And Hampton never once forgot.
He’d always known, felt, that he was somebody, and that’s why, three years later, he’d joined the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters after listening to A. Philip Randolph at a meeting of the Porters Athletic Association in Harlem. Everything about the forty-year-old Randolph had seemed deliberate to Hampton, and when Randolph spoke of the need for unionization in the face of increased work and stagnant wages, Hampton had been interested. But it wasn’t until Randolph made clear that no other union would represent the black porters, that other unions had, in fact, treated them like a bunch of nobodies, that Hampton knew for certain that he wanted to become a union man.
And that was how it had all started.
From the night he first heard Randolph speak about worker solidarity, Hampton followed in his footsteps and joined the Socialist Party. It was on the sidewalk after a party meeting one night two years later that Hampton met a pretty white girl named Sophia Blevin. It was mid-August of 1927. Humidity smothered the city like a wet blanket.
“Hey, brother,” she said. She stood before him, her hip cocked to one side as if it alone could keep him from passing. She held a bucket in one hand, dozens of leaflets in the other. “Help your brothers and sisters on the Passaic picket line?” She rattled the bucket. Coins jingled inside. Hampton had never heard a white person address him as “brother.” He smiled at the girl, dug into his pocket for a dime, and tossed it into the bucket.
“How old are you, sister?”
The girl looked down into the bucket, turned it so that the light from the streetlamp overhead caught the glint of the copper and silver inside. She studied the coins, puckered her lower lip as if satisfied with Hampton’s contribution. She looked up at him, shook the dark curls away from her eyes, smiled, handed him a flyer.
“I’m seventeen,” she said. “How old are you?”
She was the first white friend he’d ever had, and she introduced him to her other white friends, and then he had more. She was a communist. Her friends were communists.
“If you care about workers,” Sophia said, “you’d better hook your wagon to the Communist Party. Socialism is acclimation through accommodation. It takes too long.” She spoke in slogans, snatches of passages she’d read in books, heard from speeches, taglines party leaders had taught her to remember. Hampton didn’t mind. He found her interesting, this young white girl from Pittsburgh with foreign parents and a heart for justice. “What this country needs is radical transformation,” she said. “Workers’ rights. Gender equality. Integration.” The more he listened to her, the more Hampton agreed, and the more he saw it all as completely possible.
Sophia introduced Hampton to party leaders: Secretary Alec Weisbord, one of the organizers of the Passaic strike and the only one among them who’d traveled outside the country after the party had sent him to Mexico and Moscow; Velma Burch, a fellow organizer; and eventually Fred Beal, who was from Lawrence, Massachusetts, and who, by the autumn of 1928, had organized the textile strike in New Bedford, which everyone except Beal viewed as an embarrassing failure.
“What the party needs is diversity,” Sophia said. “What it needs are more people like you, Hampton.”
So, in the fall of 1928 Hampton set out to recruit his fellow Pullman porters into the Communist Party. A few of the men he worked with, most of them much older than Hampton and with wives and children to support back home, would attend the occasional meeting with him, nod their heads, even speak if they felt led to speak, but they slowly drifted away, begged off when he invited them to more meetings or organized rallies. One night, after a meeting of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Hampton understood what was happening.
At the conclusion of the evening, Randolph called Hampton’s name and asked him to come down to the speaker’s stand at the front of the room. Then, as the hall emptied out, Hampton watched Randolph gather his papers a
nd file them into a suitcase before reaching for his hat. He turned and looked at Hampton.
“Mr. Haywood,” he said, “would you walk with me?”
They left the hall and turned west on 139th Street, walked toward the river. It was January 1929. Mounds of dirty snow were piled beneath the streetlamps. Christmas decorations still hung in shop windows. Hampton tipped his hat toward his eyes and pulled up his coat’s collar. He put his hands into its pockets. Randolph walked beside him.
“What are you doing, Mr. Haywood?” he asked.
“I’m not sure what you mean, sir,” Hampton said.
They kept walking, their shoes stepping alternately on cement, ice, compacted snow.
“This girl,” Randolph said, “this Blevin; how long have you known her?”
“A year,” Hampton said, caught off guard at the mention of Sophia’s name. “A year and a half, maybe.”
“How long have you known of her affiliations with the Communist Party?”
“For as long as I’ve known her.”
“I see,” Randolph said.
They stopped on the corner of Broadway. The night sky had begun to release tiny ribbons of snow. A diner sat on the corner. Inside, a young black boy and a man who could have been his father, a man about Hampton’s age, were drinking something hot from the same mug. They passed it back and forth across the table. The boy said something, the man laughed. Hampton recalled his father’s face, the sound of his laugh, the feel of his father’s hand spread across his chest that morning on the train, his fingers passing over Hampton’s head before he disappeared forever.
“You could have a future in the Brotherhood, Mr. Haywood,” Randolph said. “You’re young, hungry, smart. Don’t ruin it. Don’t encourage your brothers to ruin it.”
“What are you saying?” Hampton asked.
“I’m suggesting that you stick with whom and what you know.”
“You’re telling me not to mix with white people,” Hampton said.
“Not the ones who will get you killed. And, Mr. Haywood, there are many kinds of death.”
With that, Randolph turned the corner and headed north on Broadway. Hampton watched him go; then he looked at the table inside the diner where the boy and the man had been sitting. They now stood by the cash register. The man let go of the boy’s hand, reached for his wallet. The boy turned, saw Hampton staring at him through the window. He waved. Hampton waved back.
Hampton decided to leave the Brotherhood and threw himself into the Communist Party. He wanted to be bold, heroic. He wanted to lift all workers, not just himself and those who looked like him. He knew a story would be concocted about him somewhere along the way, a story that would take the form of some kind of official grievance against him. He’d be dismissed from his job as a Pullman porter. His coworkers would raise their eyebrows and shrug their shoulders as if in disbelief, but everyone knew that when you left the Brotherhood you left your job as well.
It had been more than five months since his walk with Randolph, and he’d stayed on the job as a Pullman porter so far, but he was certain the job wouldn’t be there for him once he returned north after this trip to Gastonia.
Hampton had asked for an extended leave. He’d tried to keep his reason quiet from his supervisor, but it wouldn’t be long before his coworkers knew what it was about, especially with his traveling by train, which is how the union decided he should travel. Randolph had already found out that Hampton knew Sophia Blevin, had found out that he’d joined the Communist Party. Surely he’d find out that Hampton was traveling south to organize black workers at the behest of Weisbord, who’d become secretary of the National Textile Workers Union. It was a secret too big, too political, too incendiary to keep.
The sunset burned outside the train’s window. He’d reached North Carolina. The train had already passed through Greensboro, stopped in High Point. He’d traveled this route as a porter too many times to count, and he ticked off the stations as the train slowed down and passed through them: Thomasville, Lexington, Linwood. Spencer was next, then Salisbury.
A week ago he’d received a telegram from Sophia. “Sec. Weisbord says integrate,” it read. “Beal says no. If Sec. asks please come.”
A few days later, a note from Secretary Weisbord was delivered, and Hampton met with him the next day. Hampton found Weisbord at a park off West 124th Street. It was the last Friday in May. The city had returned to life after the long winter and the chilly spring. Weisbord sat on a bench that overlooked a pond. A fountain pulsed at its center, tossing sprays of water that were misted by the breeze. Weisbord was a short, dark-haired man who wore spectacles, but the measured way in which he spoke made him seem more commanding. Hampton sat down beside him.
“Thank you for coming,” Weisbord said. He finished eating a sandwich of some kind and crumpled the paper that had been wrapped around it. He slipped the paper into his pocket. “I know it’s sudden.”
“I was glad to hear from you,” Hampton said. “Sophia mentioned that I might.”
“Good,” Weisbord said. He reached into his coat pocket for a packet of cigarettes. He offered the cigarettes to Hampton, but he shook his head. Weisbord lit a cigarette and settled his back against the bench. “So you might know that I’m concerned about the situation in North Carolina. Like you, I’ve been in communication with Miss Blevin. Loray is back at full production.” He took a drag on his cigarette, picked a piece of tobacco from his tongue. “The strikers are leaving the picket line and going back to work until payday, and then they’re walking out again. As you can imagine, Mr. Haywood, a cycle like this will not keep a strike alive. Loray has no incentive to respect us if profit is not affected. Creating a nuisance isn’t enough, but a nuisance is all we are. Beal isn’t being honest with himself, or us.”
“It seems that Mr. Beal has a history of not being honest with himself, sir,” Hampton said.
“I would agree,” Weisbord said. “His new plan is to hold a rally on the night of June seventh, which is a payday, the day workers are most willing to walk off the job. Beal wants to gather a mass of strikers to march down to the gates of Loray and demand that the night shift walks out.” He smoked, uncrossed his legs, leaned forward so that Hampton couldn’t see his eyes.
“It’s a fine plan, not unlike other plans Beal has had, but the party has a plan as well.” Weisbord stopped speaking and looked at Hampton for a moment, then he looked back toward the pond. He took a final drag on his cigarette and dropped it at his feet, crushing it with the toe of his shoe. “The Comintern wants to integrate all branches of the National Textile Workers Union, even our Gastonia Local,” he said. “They believe it’s time. So do I, but Beal doesn’t agree. His argument is that white strikers are not prepared to work alongside blacks. He worries that it could make trouble.”
Hampton’s mind exploded with images he’d seen on postcards and in the newspapers: black bodies, some of them burned, hanging from trees or lying in roadside ditches, riddled with bullet holes. He thought of the cabin in Mississippi, the flight through the cotton field, the long, dark night beneath the floorboards of the strange house.
As if he’d been able to see the thoughts as they roiled across Hampton’s mind, Weisbord said, “We can’t let fear and oppression win, Mr. Haywood.” He put his hand on Hampton’s shoulder. “Especially when fear and oppression are propagated by our brothers and sisters in this struggle,” he said. “Imagine if, on June seventh, the Loray bosses look out their windows and find hundreds, maybe thousands, of black and white workers walking the picket line, side by side. What kind of message would that send to the bosses? What kind of message would that send to other mills, other workers, white and black? The Loray strike could become a general strike all across the South. We could turn the tide for labor.”
He leaned back against the bench.
“Mr. Haywood, I do not know you well, but I know your story well enough to know that you are a son of the South. Regardless of what brought you here, to the Nor
th, the South is your homeland, and the black men and women there are your people. They need a leader. Could it be you?”
Hampton looked at the pond at the center of the park. Two white children, brothers perhaps, in blue sailor suits pushed small sailboats out into the water. Hampton watched the boys and thought of Weisbord’s proposal. He dropped his gaze from the pond and took a breath, nodded his head yes.
“Wonderful,” said Weisbord. “Wonderful.”
“When?” asked Hampton.
“Monday,” Weisbord said. “Your ticket will be ready.”
The train’s brakes squealed, and Hampton felt the cars slow as they drew closer to the Salisbury station. It was almost 9 p.m. He’d be in Charlotte in a few hours. After that, he didn’t know what would happen.
The train stopped. Outside, the night was dark but for the few lights that lit the station. Hampton could see the shapes of people milling about the platform. He kept his seat and watched as a few people around him gathered their things and exited the colored car. Some of them had been traveling with him since New York, but he hadn’t spoken to anyone aside from the few porters he knew. He looked up to see one of the porters, a middle-aged man named Gerald, walking toward him. He’d spoken to him when he’d first boarded. Hampton had brought a sandwich with him and had asked for nothing during the trip, although Gerald had brought him a cup of coffee that afternoon.
Gerald looked around as if waiting for more people to exit the train, or perhaps he was looking to see who would enter the car.
“Hampton,” Gerald whispered, “there’s some white men on the platform. They’re asking for you.”