Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama [81]
Throughout the monologue, the union officials shifted uneasily in their chairs. Finally the president stood up and told Marty that his ideas merited further study but that right now the union had to focus on making an immediate decision about management’s offer. In the parking lot afterward, Marty looked stunned.
“They’re not interested,” he told me, shaking his head. “Like a bunch of lemmings running towards a cliff.”
I had felt bad for Marty. I had felt worse for Angela. She hadn’t said a word throughout the entire meeting, but as I pulled out of the union parking lot to drive her home, she had turned to me and said, “I didn’t understand a word Marty was saying.”
And I suppose it was then that I understood the difficulty of what Marty had tried to pull off, and the depth of his miscalculation. It wasn’t so much that Angela had missed some of the details of Marty’s presentation; as we continued to talk, it had become apparent that she understood Marty’s proposal at least as well as I did. No, the real meaning of her remark was this: She had come to doubt the relevance to her own situation of keeping the LTV plant open. Organizing with the unions might help the few blacks who remained in the plants keep their jobs; it wouldn’t dent the rolls of the chronically unemployed any time soon. A job bank might help workers who already had skills and experience find something else; it wouldn’t teach the black teenage dropout how to read or compute.
In other words, it was different for black folks. It was different now, just as it had been different for Angela’s grandparents, who’d been barred from the unions, then spat on as scabs; for her parents, who had been kept out of the best patronage jobs that the Machine had to offer in the days before patronage became a dirty word. In his eagerness to do battle with the downtown power brokers, the investment bankers in their fancy suits, Marty wanted to wish such differences away as part of an unfortunate past. But for someone like Angela, the past was the present; it determined her world with a force infinitely more real than any notions of class solidarity. It explained why more blacks hadn’t been able to move out into the suburbs while the going was still good, why more blacks hadn’t climbed up the ladder into the American dream. It explained why the unemployment in black neighborhoods was more widespread and longstanding, more desperate; and why Angela had no patience with those who wanted to treat black people and white people exactly the same.
It explained Altgeld.
I looked at my watch: ten past two. Time to face the music. I got out of my car and rang the church doorbell. Angela answered, and led me into a room where the other leaders were waiting: Shirley, Mona, Will, and Mary, a quiet, dark-haired white woman who taught elementary school at St. Catherine’s. I apologized for being late and poured myself some coffee.
“So,” I said, taking a seat on the windowsill. “Why all the long faces?”
“We’re quitting,” Angela said.
“Who’s quitting?”
Angela shrugged. “Well … I am, I guess. I can’t speak for everybody else.”
I looked around the room. The other leaders averted their eyes, like a jury that’s delivered an unfavorable verdict.
“I’m sorry, Barack,” Angela continued. “It has nothing to do with you. The truth is, we’re just tired. We’ve all been at this for two years, and we’ve got nothing to show for it.