Freedom by: slick riddles March 01, 2006 at 08:05:15 America
I missed "Racism Awareness Day" a couple of days ago, unless you count this earlier Elvis Diary But it got me thinking about race in America and now it's Ash Wednesday and Black History Month is over and I've got time so I'm putting together my late contribution.
Much of American life is still segregated. And since I'm a northern European mutt, I've lived most of my life among white people. But a lot of American life is also integrated so there have been points where I have escaped those boundaries.
Until I was twelve I didn't personally know a single black person. Then we moved to Flatbush and I joined the Flatbush Boys Club. The next two years I spent playing pool and dogeball and swimming with a diverse bunch of kids. I still remember walking down Flatbush Avenue one day and getting that "what's up nod" from a black kid named Johnson. This would have been 1966 and to me it was, not a big deal, but significant. I had begun to play folk songs on my brother's guitar and was beginning to uderstand what the civil rights struggle was all about.
In junior year of high school because of some scheduling thing I was in a different lunch period than the other juniors. The only kids I knew were the black and hispanic kids who were in the "B" band with me. So I sat with them. And by that time Black Power and the Panthers were in the news and I was attracted to that and these guys were very funny and it was "all good" as they say. Of course, they lived in different neighborhoods, so we didn't really socialize outside of school. After I left that school I lost contact with them all.
Later, in the mid-70s I was doing political work on a "Jobs for Youth" campaign and my roomates were a black guy and a Puerto Rican guy. This also was no big deal, yet significant. One more barrier broken down.
In July of 1978, I was hired at the Edison NJ Ford Plant and assigned to dept. F (F troop) on the chassis line. The plant drew workers from two sources south Jersey working class suburbs (and the pine barrens) and Newark and its suburbs. I have no idea how the workforce brokedown on racial lines but there were many African Americans as well as hispanics and recent European immigrants etc. Pretty much what you would expect to find 40 minutes away from NYC.
The first week they put me on an easy job screwing in shields over the headlights. This was just to get me used to working on a constantly moving assembly line, it wasn't going to stay that easy. One night they had me screwing this chrome trim around the wheel wells with self tapping screws. The next day I couldn't hardly move my arms.
The first payday they shorted me and I got into an argument with this stupid white foreman. It wasn't a big argument but he was wrong and I think it pissed him off. Shortly after that he assigned me to the dreaded tire job. I think he was hoping I'd quit.
We were building 1979 Pintos. The line was running at about 52 cars an hour. The company got 6 mandatory Saturdays per model year and 10-hour days whenever they needed them. I was on probation so I couldn't take any time off. The tire job, or the left side tire job which is what I did, required you to pull a tire from a chute, carry it to the car, load four lugs in this big ass gun suspended from a track, and bolt the tire on, then the same for the rear, and also put every other spare in the trunk. Nothin' to it right?
When they sent me to the job, there were two utility men doing it and they were falling behind. Apparently, not everybody could do this job and I'm certain Jim (the foreman) was hoping I wouldn't be able to do it. But the contract gave me 3 or 4 days to get it and at first I had a helper. So I got used to hanging the tires first while someone else did the bolting and then I'd handle the gun for a while and they hung the tires. But putting it all together seemed immpossible.
The right side tireman was a tall black guy with a moderate afro. He was nicknamed Supe and it was short for superstar and he was the center on the UAW locals basketball team. The whole time I was struggling to learn the job, I gradually became aware that Supe wasn't carrying any tires. He was bouncing them and then slapping them on to the wheels. He gained so much time with this technique that it hardly seemed he was working.
I don't recall exactly how this happened, I may have gone over to his side on a break and talked a little, but Supe decided I was alright for a white guy, and it would be in his interest to have me on the other side 58 hours a week. So what he would do is work up the line and then come over and show me how to bounce the tires. I'm pretty sure he even devoted some of his break time to the task of schooling me. It worked. As far as Supe knew I was the only white guy that ever learned to do the job his way. And doing it his way turned a horrible job into a position of power in the plant.
I worked that job from the summer of '78 to December of 1980, when I went days (big mistake). So I spent thousands of hours across the line from Supe and we talked about every fucking thing. We shared joints, he showed me how he could read a book a sentence or two at a time. So I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. We gossiped, talked about our love lives, discussed cars, union politics, education. He had some Essex CC I had three semesters at Brooklyn College. In short we became really good friends. And because I was Supe's partner I had entre to a whole black social scene. Which was very valuable because the white social scene such as it was was either far gone hippies or redneck peckerwoods.
I quit Ford in the Spring of 1981. I shouldn't have gone to the day shift and Supe actually warned me about it but I wanted a life outside the plant and the nite shift wasn't going to do that. Anyway I began to lose contact with Supe when I went days and after I quit I totally lost him. But when I was reading the Rascism awareness diaries I thought of Supe because he represents a real breakthrough for me. And it's significant that it happened at work.
Freedom. Almost everything I know about this concept, what it means, how you win it, in what ways can it be resticted, how valuable it is, comes from the struggles of African American people. Those years working alongside Supe got me thinking about our freedom. There we were two free men who had arrived at this freedom by different paths. My Irish and German forbears had to somehow escape serfdom or English oppression to get themselves to America. His family was brought here to be enslaved, had ended up in North Carolina, emancipated by the Civil War and then around WWII moved to NJ to get away from segregation.
But how free were we. Bouncing tires made the job a little easier, but 10 hours a day, sometimes six days a week, that's a lot of work. And what were we doing? Building Pintos the crappiest car ever (remember exploding gas tanks?) We had a strong union so we could get away with a lot of little crap but like most jobs it was still a bit of a dictatorship. I didn't feel free. I felt as though I was chained to this giant machine and actually had daymares where the line was starting and I wasn't ready.
We all certainly enjoy a great deal of freedom but I think there are a few more steps to take. I think we should be free, as a people, to decide if we want 52 Pintos/hour, or 7 kinds of Pepsi Cola, or any of the other crap that gets created because someone can make a profit and has the capital to force some people to make that crap. Yeah that would be freedom -- democratic decisons instead of "whatever will make a buck"
"...and before I'd be a wage-slave, I'd be buried in my grave..."
