Authors: Ralph Ellison
“You weren’t
sent
into the meeting?”
“No, sir, I didn’t know about any meeting.”
“The hell he says. None of these finks ever knows!”
“Throw the lousy bastard out!”
“Now, wait,” I said.
They became louder, threatening.
“Respect the chair!” the chairman shouted. “We’re a democratic union here, following democratic—”
“Never mind, git rid of the fink!”
“… procedures. It’s our task to make friends with all the workers. And I mean
all.
That’s how we build the union strong. Now let’s hear what the brother’s got to say. No more of that beefing and interrupting!”
I broke into a cold sweat, my eyes seeming to have become extremely sharp, causing each face to stand out vivid in its hostility.
I heard, “When were you hired, friend?”
“This morning,” I said.
“See, brothers, he’s a new man. We don’t want to make the mistake of judging the worker by his foreman. Some of you also work for sonsabitches, remember?”
Suddenly the men began to laugh and curse. “Here’s one right here,” one of them yelled.
“Mine wants to marry the boss’s daughter—a frigging eight-day wonder!”
This sudden change made me puzzled and angry, as though they were making me the butt of a joke.
“Order, brothers! Perhaps the brother would like to join the union. How about it, brother?”
“Sir … ?” I didn’t know what to say. I knew very little about unions—but most of these men seemed hostile … And before I could answer a fat man with shaggy gray hair leaped to his feet, shouting angrily.
“I’m against it! Brothers, this fellow could be a fink, even if he was hired right this minute! Not that I aim to be unfair to anybody, either. Maybe he ain’t a fink,” he cried passionately, “but brothers, I want to remind you that nobody knows it; and it seems to me that anybody that would work under that sonofabitching, double-crossing Brockway for more than fifteen minutes is just as apt as not to be
naturally
fink-minded! Please, brothers!” he cried, waving his arms for quiet. “As some of you brothers have learned, to the sorrow of your wives and babies, a fink don’t have to know about trade unionism to be a fink! Finkism? Hell, I’ve made a study of finkism! Finkism is
born
into some guys. It’s born into some guys, just like a good eye for color is born into other guys. That’s right, that’s the honest, scientific truth! A fink don’t even have to have heard of a union before,” he cried in a frenzy of words. “All you have to do is bring him around the neighborhood of a union and next thing you know, why, zip! he’s finking his finking ass off!”
He was drowned out by shouts of approval. Men turned violently to look at me. I felt choked. I wanted to drop my head but faced them as though facing them was itself a denial of his statements. Another voice ripped out of the shouts of approval, spilling with great urgency from the lips of a little fellow with glasses who spoke with the index finger of one hand upraised and the thumb of the other crooked in the suspender of his overalls:
“I want to put this brother’s remarks in the form of a motion: I move that we determine through a thorough investigation whether the new worker is a fink or no; and if he is a fink, let us discover who he’s finking for! And this, brother members, would give the worker time, if he
ain’t
a fink, to become acquainted with the work of the union and its aims. After all, brothers, we don’t want to forget that workers like him aren’t so highly developed as some of us who’ve been in the labor movement for a long time. So
I
says, let’s give him time to see what we’ve done to improve the condition of the workers, and then, if he
ain’t
a fink, we can decide in a democratic way whether we want to accept this brother into the union. Brother union members, I thank you!” He sat down with a bump.
The room roared. Biting anger grew inside me. So I was not so highly developed as they! What did he mean? Were they all Ph.D.’s? I couldn’t move; too much was happening to me. It was as though by entering the room I had automatically applied for membership—even though I had no idea that a union existed, and had come up simply to get a cold pork chop sandwich. I stood trembling, afraid that they would ask me to join but angry that so many rejected me on sight. And worst of all, I knew they were forcing me to accept things on their own terms, and I was unable to leave.
“All right, brothers. We’ll take a vote,” the chairman shouted. “All in favor of the motion, signify by saying ‘Aye’ …”
The ayes drowned him out.
“The ayes carried it,” the chairman announced as several men turned to stare at me. At last I could move. I started out, forgetting why I had come.
“Come in, brother,” the chairman called. “You can get your lunch now. Let him through, you brothers around the door!”
My face stung as though it had been slapped. They had made their decision without giving me a chance to speak for myself. I felt that every man present looked upon me with hostility; and though I had lived with hostility all my life, now for the first time it seemed to reach me, as though I had expected more of these men than of others—even though I had not known of their existence. Here in this room my defenses were negated, stripped away, checked at the door as the weapons, the knives and razors and owlhead pistols of the country boys were checked on Saturday night at the Golden Day. I kept my eyes lowered, mumbling “Pardon me, pardon me,” all the way to the drab green locker, where I removed the sandwich, for which I no longer had an appetite, and stood fumbling with the bag, dreading to face the men on my way out. Then still hating myself for the apologies made coming over, I brushed past silently as I went back.
When I reached the door the chairman called, “Just a minute, brother, we want you to understand that this is nothing against you personally. What you see here is the results of certain conditions here at the plant. We want you to know that we are only trying to protect ourselves. Some day we hope to have you as a member in good standing.”
From here and there came a half-hearted applause that quickly died. I swallowed and stared unseeing, the words spurting to me from a red, misty distance.
“Okay, brothers,” the voice said, “let him pass.”
I
STUMBLED
through the bright sunlight of the yard, past the office workers chatting on the grass, back to Building No. 2, to the basement. I stood on the stairs, feeling as though my bowels had been flooded with acid. Why hadn’t I simply left, I thought with anguish. And since I had remained, why hadn’t I
said
something, defended myself? Suddenly I snatched the wrapper off a sandwich and tore it violently with my teeth, hardly tasting the dry lumps that squeezed past my constricted throat when I swallowed. Dropping the remainder back into the bag, I held onto the handrail, my legs shaking as though I had just escaped a great danger. Finally, it went away and I pushed open the metal door.
“What kept you so long?” Brockway snapped from where he sat on a wheelbarrow. He had been drinking from a white mug now cupped in his grimy hands.
I looked at him abstractedly, seeing how the light caught on his wrinkled forehead, his snowy hair.
“
I said, what kept you so long!”
What had he to do with it, I thought, looking at him through a kind of mist, knowing that I disliked him and that I was very tired.
“I say …” he began, and I heard my voice come quiet from my tensed throat as I noticed by the clock that I had been gone only twenty minutes.
“I ran into a union meeting—”
“Union!”
I heard his white cup shatter against the floor as he uncrossed his legs, rising. “I knowed you belonged to that bunch of troublemaking foreigners! I knowed it! Git out!” he screamed. “Git out of my basement!”
He started toward me as in a dream, trembling like the needle of one of the gauges as he pointed toward the stairs, his voice shrieking. I stared; something seemed to have gone wrong, my reflexes were jammed.
“But what’s the matter?” I stammered, my voice low and my mind understanding and yet failing exactly to understand. “What’s wrong?”
“You heard me. Git out!”
“But I don’t understand …”
“Shut up and git!”
“But, Mr. Brockway,” I cried, fighting to hold something that was giving way.
“You two-bit, trouble-making union louse!”
“Look, man,” I cried, urgently now, “I don’t belong to any union.”
“If you don’t git outta here, you low-down skunk,” he said, looking wildly about the floor, “I’m liable to kill you. The Lord being my witness, I’LL KILL YOU!”
It was incredible, things were speeding up. “You’ll do what?” I stammered.
“I’LL KILL YOU, THAT’S WHAT!”
He had said it again and something fell away from me, and I seemed to be telling myself in a rush:
You were trained to accept the foolishness of such old men as this, even when you thought them clowns and fools; you were trained to pretend that you respected them and acknowledged in them the same quality of authority and power in your world as the whites before whom they bowed and scraped and feared and loved and imitated, and you were even trained to accept it when, angered or spiteful, or drunk with power, they came at you with a stick or strap or cane and you made no effort to strike back, but only to escape unmarked.
But this was too much … he was not grandfather or uncle or father, nor preacher or teacher. Something uncoiled in my stomach and I was moving toward him, shouting, more at a black blur that irritated my eyes than at a clearly defined human face, “YOU’LL KILL WHO?”
“YOU,
THAT’S WHO!”
“Listen here, you old fool, don’t talk about killing me! Give me a chance to explain. I don’t belong to anything—Go on, pick it up! Go on!” I yelled, seeing his eyes fasten upon a twisted iron bar. “You’re old enough to be my grandfather, but if you touch that bar, I swear I’ll make you eat it!”
“I done tole you, GIT OUTTA MY BASEMENT!
You impudent son ’bitch,
” he screamed.
I moved forward, seeing him stoop and reach aside for the bar; and I was throwing myself forward, feeling him go over with a grunt, hard against the floor, rolling beneath the force of my lunge. It was as though I had landed upon a wiry rat. He scrambled beneath me, making angry sounds and striking my face as he tried to use the bar. I twisted it from his grasp, feeling a sharp pain stab through my shoulder. He’s using a knife, flashed through my mind and I slashed out with my elbow, sharp against his face, feeling it land solid and seeing his head fly backwards and up and back again as I struck again, hearing something fly free and skitter across the floor, thinking, It’s gone, the knife is gone … and struck again as he tried to choke me, jabbing at his bobbing head, feeling the bar come free and bringing it down at his head, missing, the metal clinking against the floor, and bringing it up for a second try and him yelling, “No, no! You the best, you the best!”
“I’m going to beat your brains out!” I said, my throat dry, “stabbing me …”
“No,” he panted. “I got enough. Ain’t you heard me say I got enough?”
“So when you can’t win you want to stop! Damn you, if you’ve cut me bad, I’ll tear your head off!”
Watching him warily, I got to my feet. I dropped the bar, as a flash of heat swept over me: His face was caved in.
“What’s wrong with you, old man?” I yelled nervously. “Don’t you know better than to attack a man a third your age?”
He blanched at being called old, and I repeated it, adding insults I’d heard my grandfather use. “Why, you old-fashioned, slavery-time, mammy-made, handkerchief-headed bastard, you should know better! What made you think you could threaten
my
life? You meant nothing to me, I came down here because I was sent. I didn’t know anything about you or the union either. Why’d you start riding me the minute I came in? Are you people crazy? Does this paint go to your head? Are you drinking it?”
He glared, panting tiredly. Great tucks showed in his overalls where the folds were stuck together by the goo with which he was covered, and I thought, Tar Baby, and wanted to blot him out of my sight. But now my anger was flowing fast from action to words.
“I go to get my lunch and they ask me who I work for and when I tell them, they call me a fink.
A fink!
You people must be out of your minds. No sooner do I get back down here than
you
start yelling that you’re going to kill me! What’s going on? What have you got against me? What did I do?”
He glowered at me silently, then pointed to the floor.
“Reach and draw back a nub,” I warned.
“Caint a man even git his teeth?” he mumbled, his voice strange.
“TEETH?”
With a shamed frown, he opened his mouth. I saw a blue flash of shrunken gums. The thing that had skittered across the floor was not a knife, but a plate of false teeth. For a fraction of a second I was desperate, feeling some of my justification for wanting to kill him slipping away. My fingers leaped to my shoulder, finding wet cloth but no blood. The old fool had
bitten
me. A wild flash of laughter struggled to rise from beneath my anger. He had bitten me! I looked on the floor, seeing the smashed mug and the teeth glinting dully across the room.
“Get them,” I said, growing ashamed. Without his teeth, some of the hatefulness seemed to have gone out of him. But I stayed close as he got his teeth and went over to the tap and held them beneath a stream of water. A tooth fell away beneath the pressure of his thumb, and I heard him grumbling as he placed the plate in his mouth. Then, wiggling his chin, he became himself again.
“You was really trying to kill me,” he said. He seemed unable to believe it.
“You started the killing. I don’t go around fighting,” I said. “Why didn’t you let me explain? Is it against the law to belong to the union?”
“That damn union,” he cried, almost in tears. “That
damn
union! They after my job! I know they after my job! For one of us to join one of them damn unions is like we was to bite the hand of the man who teached us to bathe in a bathtub! I hates it, and I mean to keep on doing all I can to chase it outta the plant. They after my job, the chickenshit bastards!”