Authors: Ralph Ellison
When he left I took a look at the last bunch of samples and got a shock: Instead of the smooth, hard surface of the first, they were covered with a sticky goo through which I could see the grain of the wood. What on earth had happened? The paint was not as white and glossy as before; it had a gray tinge. I stirred it vigorously, then grabbed a rag, wiping each of the boards clean, then made a new sample of each bucket. I grew panicky lest Kimbro return before I finished. Working feverishly, I made it, but since the paint required a few minutes to dry I picked up two finished buckets and started lugging them over to the loading platform. I dropped them with a thump as the voice rang out behind me. It was Kimbro.
“What the hell!” he yelled, smearing his finger over one of the samples. “This stuff’s still wet!”
I didn’t know what to say. He snatched up several of the later samples, smearing them, and letting out a groan. “Of all the things to happen to me. First they take away all my good men and then they send me you. What’d you do to it?”
“Nothing, sir. I followed your directions,” I said defensively.
I watched him peer into the graduate, lifting the dropper and sniffing it, his face glowing with exasperation.
“Who the hell gave you this?”
“No one …”
“Then where’d you get it?”
“From the tank room.”
Suddenly he dashed for the tank room, sloshing the liquid as he ran. I thought, Oh, hell, and before I could follow, he burst out of the door in a frenzy.
“You took the wrong tank,” he shouted. “What the hell, you trying to sabotage the company? That stuff wouldn’t work in a million years. It’s remover,
concentrated
remover! Don’t you know the difference?”
“No, sir, I don’t. It looked the same to me. I didn’t know what I was using and you didn’t tell me. I was trying to save time and took what I thought was right.”
“But why this one?”
“Because it smelled the same—” I began.
“Smelled!”
he roared. “Goddamit, don’t you know you can’t smell shit around all those fumes? Come on to my office!”
I was torn between protesting and pleading for fairness. It was not all my fault and I didn’t want the blame, but I did wish to finish out the day. Throbbing with anger I followed, listening as he called personnel.
“Hello? Mac? Mac, this is Kimbro. It’s about this fellow you sent me this morning. I’m sending him in to pick up his pay … What did he do? He doesn’t satisfy me, that’s what. I don’t like his work … So the old man has to have a report, so what? Make him one. Tell him goddamit this fellow ruined a batch of government stuff—Hey! No, don’t tell him that … Listen, Mac, you got anyone else out there? … Okay, forget it.”
He crashed down the phone and swung toward me. “I swear I don’t know why they hire you fellows. You just don’t belong in a paint plant. Come on.”
Bewildered, I followed him into the tank room, yearning to quit and tell him to go to hell. But I needed the money, and even though this was the North I wasn’t ready to fight unless I had to. Here I’d be one against how many?
I watched him empty the graduate back into the tank and noted carefully when he went to another marked SKA-3-69-T-Y and refilled it. Next time I would know.
“Now, for God’s sake,” he said, handing me the graduate, “be careful and try to do the job right. And if you don’t know what to do, ask somebody. I’ll be in my office.”
I returned to the buckets, my emotions whirling. Kimbro had forgotten to say what was to be done with the spoiled paint. Seeing it there I was suddenly seized by an angry impulse, and, filling the dropper with fresh dope, I stirred ten drops into each bucket and pressed home the covers. Let the government worry about that, I thought, and started to work on the unopened buckets. I stirred until my arm ached and painted the samples as smoothly as I could, becoming more skillful as I went along.
When Kimbro came down the floor and watched I glanced up silently and continued stirring.
“How is it?” he said, frowning.
“I don’t know,” I said, picking up a sample and hesitating.
“Well?”
“It’s nothing … a speck of dirt,” I said, standing and holding out the sample, a tightness growing within me.
Holding it close to his face, he ran his fingers over the surface and squinted at the texture. “That’s more like it,” he said. “That’s the way it oughta be.”
I watched with a sense of unbelief as he rubbed his thumb over the sample, handed it back and left without a further word.
I looked at the painted slab. It appeared the same: a gray tinge glowed through the whiteness, and Kimbro had failed to detect it. I stared for about a minute, wondering if I were seeing things, inspected another and another. All were the same, a brilliant white diffused with gray. I closed my eyes for a moment and looked again and still no change. Well, I thought, as long as he’s satisfied …
But I had a feeling that something had gone wrong, something far more important than the paint; that either I had played a trick on Kimbro or he, like the trustees and Bledsoe, was playing one on me …
When the truck backed up to the platform I was pressing the cover on the last bucket—and there stood Kimbro above me.
“Let’s see your samples,” he said.
I reached, trying to select the whitest, as the blue-shirted truckmen climbed through the loading door.
“How about it, Kimbro,” one of them said, “can we get started?”
“Just a minute, now,” he said, studying the sample, “just a minute …”
I watched him nervously, waiting for him to throw a fit over the gray tinge and hating myself for feeling nervous and afraid. What would I say? But now he was turning to the truckmen.
“All right, boys, get the hell out of here.”
“And you,” he said to me, “go see MacDuffy; you’re through.”
I stood there, staring at the back of his head, at the pink neck beneath the cloth cap and the iron-gray hair. So he’d let me stay only to finish the mixing. I turned away, there was nothing that I could do. I cursed him all the way to the personnel office. Should I write the owners about what had happened? Perhaps they didn’t know that Kimbro was having so much to do with the quality of the paint. Perhaps that is how things are done here, I thought, perhaps the real quality of the paint is
always
determined by the man who ships it rather than by those who mix it. To hell with the whole thing … I’ll find another job.
But I wasn’t fired. MacDuffy sent me to the basement of Building No. 2 on a new assignment.
“When you get down there just tell Brockway that Mr. Sparland insists that he have an assistant. You do whatever he tells you.”
“What is that name again, sir?” I said.
“Lucius
Brockway
,” he said. “He’s in charge.”
I
T WAS
a deep basement. Three levels underground I pushed upon a heavy metal door marked “Danger” and descended into a noisy, dimly lit room. There was something familiar about the fumes that filled the air and I had just thought
pine
, when a high-pitched Negro voice rang out above the machine sounds.
“Who you looking for down here?”
“I’m looking for the man in charge,” I called, straining to locate the voice.
“You talkin’ to him. What you want?”
The man who moved out of the shadow and looked at me sullenly was small, wiry and very natty in his dirty overalls. And as I approached him I saw his drawn face and the cottony white hair showing beneath his tight, striped engineer’s cap. His manner puzzled me. I couldn’t tell whether he felt guilty about something himself, or thought I had committed some crime. I came closer, staring. He was barely five feet tall, his overalls looking now as though he had been dipped in pitch.
“All right,” he said. “I’m a busy man. What you want?”
“I’m looking for Lucius,” I said.
He frowned. “That’s me—and don’t come calling me by my first name. To you and all like you I’m
Mister
Brockway …”
“You … ?” I began.
“Yeah, me! Who sent you down here anyway?”
“The personnel office,” I said. “I was told to tell you that Mr. Sparland said for you to be given an assistant!”
“Assistant!” he said. “I don’t need no damn assistant! Old Man Sparland must think I’m getting old as him. Here I been running things by myself all these years and now they keep trying to send me some assistant. You get on back up there and tell ’em that when I want an assistant I’ll ask for one!”
I was so disgusted to find such a man in charge that I turned without a word and started back up the stairs. First Kimbro, I thought, and now this old …
“Hey! wait a minute!”
I turned, seeing him beckon.
“Come on back here a minute,” he called, his voice cutting sharply through the roar of the furnaces.
I went back, seeing him remove a white cloth from his hip pocket and wipe the glass face of a pressure gauge, then bend close to squint at the position of the needle.
“Here,” he said, straightening and handing me the cloth, “you can stay ’til I can get in touch with the Old Man. These here have to be kept clean so’s I can see how much pressure I’m getting.”
I took the cloth without a word and began rubbing the glasses. He watched me critically.
“What’s your name?” he said.
I told him, shouting it in the roar of the furnaces.
“Wait a minute,” he called, going over and turning a valve in an intricate network of pipes. I heard the noise rise to a higher, almost hysterical pitch, somehow making it possible to hear without yelling, our voices moving blurrily underneath.
Returning, he looked at me sharply, his withered face an animated black walnut with shrewd, reddish eyes.
“This here’s the first time they ever sent me anybody like you,” he said as though puzzled. “That’s how come I called you back. Usually they sends down some young white fellow who thinks he’s going to watch me a few days and ask me a heap of questions and then take over. Some folks is too damn simple to even talk about,” he said, grimacing and waving his hand in a violent gesture of dismissal. “You an engineer?” he said, looking quickly at me.
“An
engineer?”
“Yeah, that’s what I asked you,” he said challengingly.
“Why, no, sir, I’m no engineer.”
“You sho?”
“Of course I’m sure. Why shouldn’t I be?”
He seemed to relax. “That’s all right then. I have to watch them personnel fellows. One of them thinks he’s going to git me out of here, when he ought to know by now he’s wasting his time. Lucius Brockway not only intends to protect hisself, he
knows how
to do it! Everybody knows I been here ever since there’s been a here—even helped dig the first foundation. The Old Man hired me, nobody else; and, by God, it’ll take the Old Man to fire me!”
I rubbed away at the gauges, wondering what had brought on this outburst, and was somewhat relieved that he seemed to hold nothing against me personally.
“Where you go to school?” he said.
I told him.
“Is that so? What you learning down there?”
“Just general subjects, a regular college course,” I said.
“Mechanics?”
“Oh no, nothing like that, just a liberal arts course. No trades.”
“Is that so?” he said doubtfully. Then suddenly, “How much pressure I got on that gauge right there?”
“Which?”
“You see it?” he pointed. “That one right there!”
I looked, calling off, “Forty-three and two-tenths pounds.”
“Uh huh, uh huh, that’s right.” He squinted at the gauge and back at me. “Where you learn to read a gauge so good?”
“In my high-school physics class. It’s like reading a clock.”
“They teach you that in
high
school?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, that’s going to be one of your jobs. These here gauges have to be checked every fifteen minutes. You ought to be able to do that.”
“I think I can,” I said.
“Some kin, some caint. By the way, who hired you?”
“Mr. MacDuffy,” I said, wondering why all the questions.
“Yeah, then where you been all morning?”
“I was working over in Building No.l.”
“That there’s a heap of building. Where’bouts?”
“For Mr. Kimbro.”
“I see, I see. I knowed they oughtn’t to be hiring anybody this late in the day. What Kimbro have you doing?”
“Putting dope in some paint that went bad,” I said wearily, annoyed with all the questions.
His lips shot out belligerently. “What paint went bad?”
“I think it was some for the government …”
He cocked his head “I wonder how come nobody said nothing to me about it,” he said thoughtfully. “Was it in buckets or them little biddy cans?”
“Buckets.”
“Oh, that ain’t so bad, them little ones is a heap of work.” He gave me a high dry laugh. “How you hear about this job?” he snapped suddenly, as though trying to catch me off guard.
“Look,” I said slowly, “a man I know told me about the job; MacDuffy hired me; I worked this morning for Mr. Kimbro; and I was sent to you by Mr. MacDuffy.”
His face tightened. “You friends to one of those colored fellows?”
“Who?”
“Up in the lab?”
“No,” I said. “Anything else you want to know?”
He gave me a long, suspicious look and spat upon a hot pipe, causing it to steam furiously. I watched him remove a heavy engineer’s watch from his breast pocket and squint at the dial importantly, then turn to check it with an electric clock that glowed from the wall. “You keep on wiping them gauges,” he said. “I got to look at my soup. And look here.” He pointed to one of the gauges. “I wants you to keep a specially sharp eye on this here sonofabitch. The last couple of days he’s ’veloped a habit of building up too fast. Causes me a heap of trouble. You see him gitting past 75, you yell, and yell loud!”
He went back into the shadows and I saw a shaft of brightness mark the opening of a door.
Running the rag over a gauge I wondered how an apparently uneducated old man could gain such a responsible job. He certainly didn’t sound like an engineer; yet he alone was on duty. And you could never be sure, for at home an old man employed as a janitor at the Water Works was the only one who knew the location of all of the water mains. He had been employed at the beginning, before any records were kept, and actually functioned as an engineer though he drew a janitor’s pay. Perhaps this old Brockway was protecting himself from something. After all, there was antagonism to our being employed. Maybe he was dissimulating, like some of the teachers at the college, who, to avoid trouble when driving through the small surrounding towns, wore chauffeur caps and pretended that their cars belonged to white men. But why was he pretending with me? And what was his job?