“Joe”

From Robert Coles, Middle Americans

“WE ARE PROUD OF OURSELVES, that’s what I’d like to say. We’re not sure of things, thought; we’re uncertain, I’m afraid, and when you’re like that—worried, it is—then you’re going to lose a little respect for yourself. You’re not so proud anymore.” There he goes, like a roller coaster; he is up on minute, full of self-confidence and glad that he is himself and no one else, and the next minute he is down, enough so to wish he somehow could have another chance at his life, start in again and avoid the mistakes and seize the opportunities and by God, “get up there.”

Now, where is “there” for him? In the observer’s mind the question is naturally asked, but the man who speaks like that about his destination would not understand why anyone would feel the need to do so, require a person to say the most obvious things in the world. In fact, if the question were actually asked, the man would have one of his own in return, which out of courtesy he might keep to himself: you mean you don’t know? And that would be as far as the man would want to take the discussion. He has no interest in talking about life’s “meanings,” about his “goals” and his “values.” At least, he has no interest in a direct and explicitly acknowledged discussion of that kind. He feels more comfortable when he slides into such matters, when he is talking about something quite concrete and of immediate concern and then for a few minutes finds himself “going off.” It is not that he minds becoming introspective or philosophical or whatever; he likes to catch himself “getting carried away” with ideas and observations. What he dislikes in the self-consciousness and self-congratulation and self-display that go with “discussions.” Perhaps he is “defensive” about his lack of a college education. Perhaps he feels “inferior,” suffers from a poor “self-image.” Sometimes a visitor slides into that way of looking at a person, even as sometimes the person being branded and pinioned comes up with considerably more than the self-justifications he at first seem intent upon offering: “Maybe we should ask ourselves more questions, Doris and me, like you do. I don’t have time for questions; and neither does my wife. Mind you, I’m not objecting to yours. They’re not bad questions. I’ll have to admit, there’ll be a few seconds here and there when I’ll put them to myself. I’ll say, Joe, what’s it all about, and why in hell kill yourself at two jobs? I’ll ask myself what I want out of life. My dad, he’d do the same, I can remember.”

He can indeed remember. At forty-three he can remember the thirties, remember his father’s vain efforts to find work. He can remember those three letters, WPA; he can remember being punish, shouted at, and grabbed and shouted at some more, because he dropped an ice-cream cone. Did he know what a nickel meant, or a dime? Did he know how few of them there are, how hard they are to come by? Now, his youngest son has a toolbox, and once in a while tries to pound a nail through a nickel or a dime, or even a quarter. The father gets a little nervous about such activities, but soon his apprehension gives way to those memories—to an amused, relaxed moment of recall. Indeed, it is just such ironies, both personal and historic, that get him going. And that is how he often does get going, with an ironic disclaimer: “I don’t want to go on and on about the depression. My dad will do that at the drop of a hat. We’ve never had another one so bad since the Second World War started, so I don’t believe we’re in danger. But you can’t forget, even if you were only a kid then. When my kids start complaining, I tell them what it was like in America then; but they don’t take in what you say. They listen, don’t get me wrong. No child of mind is going to walk away from me when I’m talking. I have them looking right at me. But they think I’m exaggerating. I know they do. My wife says it’s because they were born in good times, and that’s all they’ve ever known. Maybe she’s right. But even now for the workingman, the average, it’s no picnic. That’s what I really want my kids to know: it’s no picnic. Life, it’s tough. You have to work and work and work.”

Then adds that he likes work. No, he loves work. What would he do without it? He’d be sitting around. He’d go crazy. He’d last maybe a few weeks, then go back and be glad to be back. True, he’d like to get rid of his second job. That’s not work, what he does in the evenings—after supper, or on weekends and some holidays. He needs the extra money. The bills have mounted and mounted. Prices are not merely “up”; they are “so high it’s a joke, the kind of joke that makes you want to cry.” So, he find “odd jobs,” one after the other, but when he talks about them he doesn’t talk about his work; he refers to the jobs, and often enough, the damned jobs.

He can even be heard talking about the “slave time” he spends, and his mind is as quick as anyone else’s to pursue that particular image: “You’ve got to keep ahead of the game, or you drown. The more money you make, the more you spend it, even if you’re careful with money; and we are. We’ve so far kept up, but it’s hard. I get odd jobs. I’ll work around the clock sometimes, with just a few hours off to nap. I wire a building. I can do plastering and painting. I’m a steam fitter, but I’m handy at anything. A man wants some work on his house and he gets me to do it. He doesn’t want to pay high union wages and doesn’t want to register every change he makes in his house with the city officials, who’ll make him lose his shirt doing unnecessary things—or paying them off. If he could do the work himself, like I can, he wouldn’t hire anyone—because he’s in the same tight squeeze I’m in, we’re all in. But he’s a schoolteacher, you see, or he works in an office, and he can’t do anything with his hands, so I get the work. I feel bad taking the money from them, I mean it. But I do the job good, real good, and I’ve got to have the extra money. I get a good salary every week. We live in a real good house. We live as comfortable as anyone could ever want. I work for on eof the biggest real estate companies in the city. They keep me going. I’ll be one building, then I move on to the next one. I put in heating systems, fix boilers. I do everything. In the winter there’s emergencies, a pipe has frozen, you know. In the summer we get ready for the winter. Doris and I, we go wild with those bills. I tell her we’ve got to stop buying everything. Once I said we’re going into the woods and live in a tent and hunt our food and grow it. She said that was fine with her, and I had no argument. So, I laughed; and she did, too.

“No, I guess we’re where we are and we have to stay here, and so long as I’ve got my health, my strength, we’ll do all right; we’ll get by. The niggers are moving toward us, you know. They’re getting big ideas for themselves. I hear they’re making more money than ever before. They’re pushing on us in the unions. They want to be taken in fast, regardless of what they know. A man in the trades, he’s got to prove himself. You can’t learn to be a good steam fitter or electrician overnight. But they’re pushing for quickie jobs, that’s what. I say to hell with them. Let them take their turn, like everyone else. That’s another reason to make more money on the side. If we ever had to leave here, because they started coming in, then we could. There are times when I feel like a nigger myself: Joe, you’re a goddamn slave, that’s what you are; you might as well be picking cotton or something like that. And my face is black, too, from the dirt in the cellar!”

He smiles and moves toward a cup of coffee nearby. He stretches himself on a leather chair, the kind that unfolds in response to the body’s willful selective pressure and has the occupant no longer sitting but lying back, “in the perfect position for television.” He watches television when he can, and if he were home more he would watch more television. He likes to view sports—football, basketball, hockey. He will watch golf, but not very enthusiastically. He has never played golf. The game is too slow for him, and there is, too, a touch of the fancy in those clubs and the carts and the caps a lot of golfers wear. So he thinks, anyway; and he knows shy. His father used to tell him that golf was a rich man’s game. He now knows better; even his father knows better. But knowing is not being convinced. In his words: “You can know something, but you can’t change the way you feel.”

As a matter of fact when he is feeling reflective and not pushed into a liberal corner by anyone, Joe will come up with some rather strong-minded rebuttals of his own assertions: “I can see how the niggers feel cheated out of things. If I was a Negro, I’d be madder than hell. I’d stand up to anyone who tried to keep me away from my share. We have a couple of them, carpenters, working with us on the job now. They’re the best guys you could want. They work hard, and they’re smart. They speak good, as good as anyone I know. If all the Negro people were like those two, then I can’t believe we’d be having the trouble we are. A man is a man, that’s what I believe; I don’t care what his skin color is, or where he goes to church. This country has every kind of people in it; and it’s all to the good, because that way n one group runs the show. The thing that bothers me about the Negro people is this; they’re not like the rest of us, and I don’t mean because their skin is a different color. I drive through their neighborhood. I’ve worked in the buildings where they live. I’ve listened to them talking, when they didn’t even know I was listening. I’d be work on the pipes and I’d hear them from another apartment or down in the cellar. (The sound carries!) If you ask me, they’re slow, that’s what I think. They’re out for a good time. They want things made easy for them—maybe not all of them, but plenty of them. They actually want relief. They think they’re entitled to it!”

He stops. He lifts his head up, ever so slightly but noticeably nevertheless, and significantly. He is about to reminisce. After several years of visiting his home and getting to know him and his family, one can anticipate at least that much, the several directions his mind will pursue, if not the particular message he will deliver on a given day. So, he takes a slightly longer swallow of beer, and waits a few seconds, as if to pull them all together, all his memories. And then he is on his way: “I remember my father, how it killed him to take money from the government, the WPA, you know. I remember him crying. He said he wished he was never born, because it’s not right that a man shouldn’t be able to earn a living for his family. He could have stayed on relief longer, but he got off as fast as he could. He hated every day he didn’t work. I guess they made some work for people, the WPA did; but no one was fooled, because it was phony work. When a man really wants to do something, and instead he’s raking leaves and like that, he’s even worse off than sitting on his porch all day—except that without the money, I guess we all would have starved to death.

“Now with the niggers it’s different. They want all they can get—for free. They don’t really like to work. They do work, a lot of them, I know. But it’s against their wish, I believe. They seem to have the idea that they’re entitled to something from the rest of us. That’s the big thing with them: they’ve suffered, and we should cry our heads off and give them the country, lock, stock, and barrel, because we’ve been bad to them, white people were. I have friends, a lot of them; and let me tell you, not one of them goes along with that way of thinking. You know why? It’s an insult, it’s an insult to you and me and everyone, including the niggers themselves. If I was a Negro, and someone came up to me and told me how sorry he was—sorry for what he’d done, his people had, and sorry for the Negro people—I’d tell him to get away fast, real fast, if he wanted to keep his good health. Pity is for the weak; my grandfather used to tell us kids that. But your niggers, a lot of them want pity; and they get it. You know who gives it to them? The rich ones out in the fancy suburbs, they’re the ones—the bleeding hearts, always ready to pat people on the head and say you’re wonderful, and we love you, and just sit back, we’ll take care of you, with welfare and the rest, just like we do with out pet dogs.”