Parenthesis
Page 7
For the rest of my time in the Materials-Handling Department I was usually assigned to work with one of the clerks (noncollege-graduates) or young trainees, helping them post their figures, make their calculations. When I mentioned my Henry Jones day to the others, they laughed, made some joke to the effect that Henry thought he was “going to own the company” some day (he never took coffee breaks); but none of the clerks or trainees were disturbed that they knew nothing concerning the motions I’d been through. “I don’t want to know any more than I’m supposed to,” was the standard line. People who wanted to know about things that went beyond their own desks were either crazy (“Where’s it get you—?”), or to be distrusted (“He must be after somebody’s job.”). In the lower echelons of the salaried division of the corporation (the same thing proved generally true in the hourly division), brownnosing, industry, and enthusiasm were as scorned, were considered as dangerous as Henry’s futile dedication.
My position was different. I was, as the Personnel Director had put it, to “get the lay of the land.” I was to know what was forbidden to all others, even Henry Jones: i.e., I was to know, within a year, how—in Chevrolet-Indianapolis and similar plants—jobs, departments, men, functions, budgets, materials, and decisions were interrelated. The workers and executives under me, it followed, would then have faith in my actions and decisions because they would be able to assure themselves of what was indisputably true—that I had access to information they didn’t have.
From the offices of the Materials-Handling Department I was sent to the factory, where I trucked parts, walked floors with the foremen, filled out forms in the factory office, and loaded boxcars. I don’t remember which department I went to after Materials-Handling, but I do remember that the time I spent in the factory working a six-thirty to three o’clock shift always went by more quickly than the time spent in the offices. By my second or third day in the Materials-Handling offices I had become a professional clock watcher—inventing time games, dividing hours into minutes, counting seconds in my head to test my brain’s accuracy against that of the world, measuring minutes to lunch hour, to coffee breaks, going to the bathroom every hour on the hour.
The days I spent at Chevrolet-Indianapolis were the longest of my life; this is what I remember above all else when I think of the months I spent there—the heaviness, the surreal slowness of time—and then, what seems, still, anything but surreal: the solidity of the factory itself—the substantiality of the concrete and steel structures, the size of the open “bays,” the weight of body-stamping presses, the power of the scrap-baler, the texture, color of boxcars, overhead cranes, oil-slicked steel rolls, conveyor belts, forklift trucks, pressed-out truck sides, blackened floors, toilets, noises, girders.
The single picture that stays with me most vividly, replacing all others: four men wearing oversized safety mittens, one at each corner of a mammoth three-storey-high body-stamping press, touching two buttons twenty or twenty-five times an hour, eight hours a day, five days a week, making the press move, the die fall.
During my first few months at GM I lived by myself in a large wood-frame house on the northeast side of Indianapolis. The house belonged to Ralph’s mother, and he offered it to me in order to help me out (he charged me forty dollars a month), and, at the same time, to have somebody living in the house while his mother was away in Michigan, staying with an invalid sister. Although I would sometimes sit in the downstairs living room at night, reading, I spent most of my time in the four-room apartment that constituted the upstairs part of the house. I had my own kitchen and bathroom, and I immediately turned the living room into my writing room, setting my typewriter and paper on a desk by the front window, stacking my books around me, sending my new address to the publisher then considering my novel.
Two or three weeks after I moved there, Ralph asked if I minded letting one of the other new trainees share the apartment with me for a week. Only when I saw how gladly I welcomed the offer did I notice how isolated I was already feeling. The other trainee—he was married and had two children—was pleasant and easygoing, and we got along well, shopping together for supper, playing basketball in a local schoolyard after work. Every evening, after dinner, he would help with the dishes, then say “See ya—“and head downstairs, where he would sit, watching television until one or two in the morning. He “really admired” me, he said on the way to work one morning, for all the books I had.
He went home to his family for the weekend, and I went to Bloomington to see Ginny. By the second weekend after I’d begun work, I remember telling her that something was wrong, that I knew I’d made a mistake. How could anyone, especially someone our age, someone who’d been chosen for the same job I’d been chosen for, watch five and six hours of TV five nights a week? How could grown men sit at desks, stand at presses, performing the same operations day after day? The job, the people, the house, the neighborhood—none of them were for me.
But what else could I do? This is the way most Americans lived, I said (a “discovery” I dwelt on with morbid passion), and, like them, I too was trapped: I dreaded returning to graduate school, I could conceive of no alternatives beyond those of being a student or taking a job (and all jobs, I was sure, were the same), I was doing no writing and felt that I would do none, I had nothing accepted for publication, I had no money saved, and I owed the Business Men’s Clearing House of Indianapolis, the employment agency which had sent me to GM, 75 percent of my first month’s salary, a debt I was paying off in monthly installments. In their office, a fifty-dollar bill had been scotchtaped to the pillar next to the desk of the man who interviewed me; the agent who placed the most people each week got the fifty dollars.
I tried to become friendly with my neighbors, and they were pleasant enough. They seemed, however, to have only one topic of conversation: the niggers were moving in. Sometimes, in the evenings, the little boy who lived next door would come and sit on my porch and we’d talk. In September, he would tell me that he didn’t like kindergarten because his class was “full of them niggers.” I showed no surprise and made a few comments designed to subvert his feelings, but he remained adamant in his hatred. The reason he hated nigger-children was simple—and he ran down from the porch, turned, and shouted it at me when I’d asked him why: “Because they’re black!”
Each day that I worked, returned home, ate, tried to write and couldn’t, I became more depressed. Away from the factory, insignificant things began to have the power to destroy me. One night—a few weeks after the other trainee had moved out—I decided to treat myself to something unusual. I took a walk to the supermarket and looked through the section of special foods, finally selecting an authentic imported Mexican dinner. After dinner, I told myself, having broken the routine of my meals, I would be able to get right to work.
The Mexican dinner was authentic—I burned the inside of my mouth almost raw on the first few bites, struggled through a few more, and then gave up and dumped the rest in the garbage. Why wouldn’t anything work out right anymore? I screamed to myself. I was furious, overwhelmed by anger—and then, suddenly, I felt weak, alone, and—I couldn’t believe it—there were tears dribbling down my cheeks: the dinner proved what I already believed—I had failed, I was failing, I would continue to fail; what I’d written would never be accepted for publication, and, the corollary: I would never write again.
Another evening at about the same time, unable to write, I walked to a bowling alley which was eight or nine blocks away in order to pass the time until sleep. I was confronted at the desk with a sign I’d never seen before: WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE. I asked the woman at the desk what the sign meant. “Just what it says, son,” she replied. She was an elderly woman, her silvered hair pressed tightly to her skull in tiny curls. “You mean you refuse the right to serve Negroes, don’t you?” I said.
She looked at me, stopped chewing her gum, then shrugged, gave a quick high-pitched laugh, and went back to her newspaper, her gum chewi
ng. I turned and left, and as I walked the dark streets back to my house I felt that someone was following me. I ran the last few blocks.
I began to live only for the weekends, for the time I spent with Ginny. She would cook for me, we would go for long drives together, sleep late, talk endlessly—she tried to keep me from becoming too discouraged by the fact that I wasn’t writing (“You’ll be published,” she kept telling me. “You’ll be published. Don’t worry.”). I could get outside myself and my self-pity somewhat on weekends, telling GM stories and joking about my nascent political consciousness (Read all about it: YOUNG NOVELIST DISCOVERS RACISM IN MIDWEST…Extral Extra! ASSEMBLY LINES DO EXIST STATES NOVELIST NEUGEBOREN…), but what objectivity I gained was buried on Monday morning.
I hated the factory deeply—but what, I would ask, had anyone ever promised me? What had I ever expected? The fault lay as much in me, in my expectations, as it did in the job.
My symptoms were manifold: some time during the first or second week I noticed that I felt vaguely sick to my stomach every day—the sickness beginning in the morning and ending only when I would wash up to leave work. By the end of the second month, from the time I woke until I reached the plant, I would also live with the fear that it was going to be that day on which I would do something marvelously antic at the factory (organize all the union men to wear white shirts and ties, give copies of Das Kapital to the Plant Manager and all Department Heads, invite all the Negro janitors to eat with me in the executive dining room.)
When I left the plant it was with a sublime sense of relief: eight hours had actually passed. I was always surprised. By the middle of the second month, my depression was deep and continuous: what I couldn’t understand was how others, whom I assumed were not so different from myself, could push themselves through a lifetime of eight-hour days like the few I’d already pushed myself through. I projected each eight-hour day ten and twenty and thirty years ahead—by which time, I felt, my outer and inner selves would surely be equal to one another. When I looked around each day at the workers pressing their buttons and tightening their bolts (would I ever have the courage to suggest that the Personnel Department give a showing of Modern Times for all union men?), I had to conclude that they could perform their daily tasks only if—and this went against all the feelings that I thought had driven my desire to write novels—their external and internal worlds were equal; only if, that is, they had no inner lives.
My memories of these days at Chevrolet-Indianapolis are not all unpleasant. I enjoyed doing physical work-shoveling coal, loading boxcars, trucking tubs of parts from one section of the factory to another; and I enjoyed even more the times I would be assigned as a helper to an individual worker. It gave me a chance to talk, to get to know somebody, and to thereby regain the belief that each of the several thousand men around me was, in fact, a particular human being. I remember the pleasant feeling of my body resting against the inside of an empty coal car, relaxing under an August sun outside the factory, sweat dripping down my face, my neck, my arms, my back. The worker I was with was a husky black of twenty or twenty-one years old, handsome, with large thick lips, a bullethead, steady open eyes. During the day he shoveled coal and at night, he told me, he went to school, working toward a high school diploma.
The flush of the physical work, the adventure involved in doing the kind of apprentice work novelists were supposed to be doing—everything conspired to make me feel easy, free, good. The coal car was adrift, the noises of the factory were distant.
About a third of the factory workers at Chevrolet-Indianapolis were black, most of them in the lowest salary categories, and most of the white workers, their origins in Kentucky, Tennessee, and southern Indiana, hated them. (The Indiana Ku Klux Klan had had its headquarters in Indianapolis in the twenties.) The workers all seemed to have a special hatred for those blacks who had recently come from the South. “Even their own kind don’t like them niggers,” they’d tell me. Until those months in Indianapolis I had only read about the sign I began to see there everywhere—in bars, motels, restaurants, amusement parks: WE SOLICIT WHITE PATRONAGE ONLY. If such signs, attitudes, were prevalent in a northern city in 1960, my imagination was able to confirm its worst beliefs about the South, about what things had been like for blacks in all the years before 1960.
Our talk that day in the coal car was generally easy—about sports, the factory, living in “Naptown.” He was from Louisiana, and when I asked him how he’d gotten as far north as Indianapolis, he told the story quickly, without changing the level of his voice. His grandfather, his father, his older brothers had all worked in a factory in his home town, owned by a white man. After dropping out of high school, he’d worked there also. A few years before—when he’d been about seventeen—the owner had accused him of stealing. “I didn’t do it, man, and I told him so. He kept yelling at me I did it and I kept telling him to yell at somebody else, I didn’t do the fucking thing. When I got home that night my old man took a strap to me. I told him I didn’t do it, but he strapped me anyway. ‘Don’t you be talking back to a white man,’ he said, and my brothers just ate their meal and didn’t say nothing. The next morning I took my money and got on a bus and come north.”
That was all. We worked the rest of the day, and I remember that, like other workers, he offered me a ride home. As always, I accepted. We’d stop, as we did that day, in a bar along the way for some beers, and the guys would release cursing, stories, shoptalk of a kind I didn’t often hear in the factory. “This the color skin God give me,” he said at one point, angrily shoving his muscled forearm in front of my eyes. “If any man don’t like it, that’s his tough shit. It’s mine, see—? A man wants to be my friend, that’s fine with me. He don’t, that’s okay too.”
Another worker I became friendly with was a millwright—a kind of jack-of-all-trades, earning the highest hourly salary in the plant—and we were assigned to “troubleshoot” a row of presses. I worked with him for about a week. He had a reputation among the workers for being a “character.” Just to have him walk by was enough to make most of them shake their heads and chuckle. He sang “My Old Kentucky Home” off-key, endlessly; he goosed any worker who didn’t see him coming; he started wetted-down paper towel fights in the toilets.
The favorite part of his repertoire came at the end of a day’s work. After putting his holster and tools away, he’d begin to edge toward the punch-out clock. All eyes would be on him. His own eyes would move this way and that, wary, on the lookout for his foreman, and when the siren went off and the mad rush took place to get in line and punch out, he’d always be first. After he’d rung out, he’d stand with me and chide the other workers, still in line, for “doing overtime.”
He was a wiry little man, a plug of tobacco set in his cheek. He had his own home, outside Indianapolis, and two daughters, the oldest of whom (at sixteen), he told me, had just been “knocked up.” “You’re lucky,” he said to me on my last day as his helper. “You won’t have to do this kind of shit when you get to be my age.” We’d finished washing up, with the usual horsing around, and for no apparent reason, as if he thought I might appreciate an explanation: “They expect me to be their clown, so I’m their clown.”
And a bit later, over beers: “Even if you’re a skilled worker like me, what do you have to look forward to in life? Same stuff, day-in, day-out, and maybe the union gets you a raise in pay every couple years. But nothing really changes, you know what I mean? You’re lucky, kid—you take good care of yourself.”
My friendliness with some of the workers in the plant led to my first and only run-in with my superiors. One day I was summoned from the factory to Ralph’s office; he told me that he’d heard that I’d been riding to and from work with “hourlies.”
“We all think it would be a good idea if you wouldn’t,” he said. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Jay?”
I nodded, but I made no promises—and I continued, afterwards, to ride home with the guy from Louisiana, a
nd with other “hourlies.” Ralph could tell I didn’t like the “advice” he’d had to give me, and he tried to soften it by explaining that it would make my own position—and that of the workers—so much more difficult someday if I were, say, to become foreman of a man I’d been riding home with. I remained silent.
The interview ended with the information that, over and above the commonsense reasons for not riding home, for not becoming “too friendly” with hourlies, plant policy forbade it. “An executive,” one of the GM pamphlets I’d read that first week had stated, “has a lot in common with a jockey, a racing driver or a fighter pilot. They all have the same job—to get maximum performance from the machine, animate or inanimate, that has been entrusted to their care.”
At the end of the summer I accepted an invitation from one of the other trainees, Mike McComas, to rent an apartment with him. He made all the arrangements, and in mid-September we moved into a newly furnished four-room place in The Meadows. The Meadows was a new development on the north side of Indianapolis—“niggers ain’t got this far north yet,” neighbors were to tell me—composed of parking areas, gardens, and several dozen modern three-storey red-brick buildings.
Most of the residents were young executives, schoolteachers, career girls; there were a lot of young divorcees (more than I’d imagined existed), a few young married couples. Mike and I got along well; he was the only one of the young executives who made jokes about the nature of organization life. I was civil in my dealings with our neighbors; but generally I preferred, at the end of a day’s work, to stay by myself. I read, I took walks back and forth across the empty field that joined our development to the Meadows Shopping Center. I drank, I ate. I telephoned Ginny, I accrued a mild quantity of guilt by getting involved with some of the local girls, I waited for the weekends.