8
PARTISAN REVIEW
down to the Ferry building, down to the Embarcadero to sell out their
brothers and fathers for $2.00 a day. Somebody said behind me, and
I do not even know if the voice was my own, or unspoken, or imagined,
"Go on down there, you sonovabitches, It doesn't matter.
It
doesn't stop
us. We won't forget what happened today.... Go on, nothing can
stop us ... now."
Somehow I am do\\Jn on Stuart and Mission, somehow I am staring
at fiower!l scattered in a border over a space of sidewalk, at stains that
look like rust, at an unsteady chalking-"Police Murder. Two Shot in the
Back," and looking up I see faces, seen before, but utterly changed, trans–
formed by some inner emotion to faces of steel. "N1ck Bordoise ... and
Sperry, on the way to punch his strike card, shot in the back by those
bastard bulls.... "
OUR BROTHERS
Howard S. Sperry, a longshoreman, a war vet, a real
MAN. On strike since May 9th, 1934 for the right to
earn a decent living under decent conditions....
Nickolas Bordoise, a member ot Cooks
&
\Vaiters Union
for ten years. Also a member of the International
Labor Defense. Not a striker, but a worker looking
to the welfare of his fellow workers on strike. . .
Some of what the leaflet said. But what can be said of Howard
Sperry, e:..scn·iceman, struggling through the horrors of war for his coun–
try, remembering the dead men and the nearly dead men lash1ng about
blindly on the battlefield, who came home to die in a new war, a war
he had not known <·xisted. What can be said of Nick Rordmse. Com–
munist Party member, who without thanks or request came daily to the
embarcadero to sell his fellow workers hot soup to warm their bellies.
There was a voice that gave the story of his life, there in the yellowness
of the parched grass, with the gravestones icy and strange in the sun;
quietly, as if it had risen up from the submerged hearts of the world,
as if
it
had been forever and would be forever, the voice surged over our
bowed heads. And the story was the story of any worker's lite, of the
thousand small deprivations and frustrations suffered, of the courage
forged out
of
the cold and darkness of poverty, of the determination
welded out of the helpless anger scalding the heart, the plodding hours
of labor and weariness, of the life, given simply, as it had lived, that
