THE STRIKE
Tillie Lerner
Do
NOT ASK ME TO WRITE
of the strike and the terror.
~
am on
a
battlefield, and the increasing stench and smoke sting the eyes so it is im–
possible to turn them back into the past. You leave me only this night
to drop the bloody garment of Todays, to cleave through the gigantic
events that have crashed one upon the other, to the first beginning.
If
I
could go away for a while, if there were time and quiet, perhaps I could
do it. All that has happened might resolve into order and sequence,; fall
into neat patterns of words. I could stumble back into the past and
slowly, painfully rear the structure in all its towering magnificence, so
that the beauty and heroism, the terror and significance of those days,
would enter your heart and sear it forever with the vision.
But I hunch over the typewriter and behind the smoke, the days whirl,
confused as dreams. Incidents leap out like a thunder and are gone.
There flares the remembrance of that night in early May, in Stockton,
when I walhd down the road with the paper in my hands and the
streaming headlines, LONGSHOREMEN OUT. RIOT EXPECTED;
WNGSHORE STRIKE DECLARED. And standing there in the
yellow stubble I remembered Jerry telling me quietly, " ... for 12 years
now. But we're through sweating blood, loading cargo five times the
weight we should carry, we're through standing morning after morning
lik:e slaves in a slave market begging for a bidder. We'll be out, you'll
sec; it may be a few weeks, a few months, but WE'LL BE OUT, and
then hell can't stop us."
H-E-L-L C-A-N-T S-T-0-P U-S. Days, pregnant days, spelling
out the words. The port dead but for the rat stirring of a few scabs at
night, the port paralyzed, gummed on one side by the thickening scum
of prostrate ships, islanded on the other by the river of pickets streaming
ceaselessly up and down, a river that sometimes raged into a flood, surging
over the wavering shoreline of police, battering into the piers and sucking
under the scabs in its angry tides. HELL CAN'T STOP US. That
was the meaning of the lines of women and children marching up Market
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