The Last Ballad(87)
The porch would creak under the weight of a footstep on the other side of the closed door. He would picture Newcomb’s son, the pistol in his hand. His heartbeat would quicken. There was no shotgun for him to reach for. He did not own a gun, had never even fired one. And then he would hear the voice.
“Hampton, baby, you okay in there?”
It was Josephine. That would be her name.
Sitting there, in the colored car of the No. 33 train, Hampton tried to remember that this was not his first trip south. He’d been all the way down to New Orleans dozens and dozens of times. He’d been to St. Louis, Atlanta, Mobile, as far west as Houston. But as a Pullman porter he’d almost always stayed on the train. They’d never stop in a city for very long anyway. Just long enough to restock, take in the sights from the train platform while the passengers swirled around him before the whistle wail meant they were heading north again.
Regardless of whether that old cabin still sat on the edge of the field outside Vicksburg, Hampton’s father’s bravery in standing up to a white man cemented him as someone important in the collective mind of his family. Hampton’s mother had always proclaimed that she was someone too, and she’d always made Hampton and his sister proclaim that they were someone as well.
“You’re somebody, just as good as anybody,” she would say, especially when it appeared that they were as close to being nobodies as anybody could ever be. When the white policeman knocked on the door and told Hampton’s mother that he’d been caught stealing pies from a vendor, stood clenched with his fingers around Hampton’s forearm, saw three-year-old Summer standing behind her, said, “It’s a shame for a boy to grow up without a father,” his mother had watched the policeman walk down the hallway; then she had turned to Hampton and said, “You’re somebody, just as good as anybody.” When Hampton had to feed Summer and wash her and put her to bed while his mother worked in a factory making gloves and his friends all called him a mama’s boy because he no longer roamed the streets, his mother came home from work and kicked off her shoes and sat down and rubbed her feet and said, “You’re somebody, just as good as anybody.” When she began working as a housekeeper for Robert Binkerd, the assistant to the chairman for the Association of Railway Executives, and came home on the evening of her first day to find Hampton still in the sweaty overalls he wore at the loading docks, Summer still damp from her work at the laundry, she kicked off her shoes and sat down and rubbed her feet like she always did and said, “Mr. Binkerd told me it ain’t unusual to have a Pullman porter young as you. He could put in a word. He offered.” And once that offered word had been put in and a nice yet slightly too-small suit had been loaned and a meeting—which Hampton learned upon arrival was more of an audition—had been set up at the association’s office, he stood in their tiny tenement room while his mother smoothed the lapels on the suit jacket and said, “You’re somebody, just as good as anybody, and don’t you forget it.” And Hampton never once forgot.
He’d always known, felt, that he was somebody, and that’s why, three years later, he’d joined the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters after listening to A. Philip Randolph at a meeting of the Porters Athletic Association in Harlem. Everything about the forty-year-old Randolph had seemed deliberate to Hampton, and when Randolph spoke of the need for unionization in the face of increased work and stagnant wages, Hampton had been interested. But it wasn’t until Randolph made clear that no other union would represent the black porters, that other unions had, in fact, treated them like a bunch of nobodies, that Hampton knew for certain that he wanted to become a union man.
And that was how it had all started.
From the night he first heard Randolph speak about worker solidarity, Hampton followed in his footsteps and joined the Socialist Party. It was on the sidewalk after a party meeting one night two years later that Hampton met a pretty white girl named Sophia Blevin. It was mid-August of 1927. Humidity smothered the city like a wet blanket.
“Hey, brother,” she said. She stood before him, her hip cocked to one side as if it alone could keep him from passing. She held a bucket in one hand, dozens of leaflets in the other. “Help your brothers and sisters on the Passaic picket line?” She rattled the bucket. Coins jingled inside. Hampton had never heard a white person address him as “brother.” He smiled at the girl, dug into his pocket for a dime, and tossed it into the bucket.
“How old are you, sister?”
The girl looked down into the bucket, turned it so that the light from the streetlamp overhead caught the glint of the copper and silver inside. She studied the coins, puckered her lower lip as if satisfied with Hampton’s contribution. She looked up at him, shook the dark curls away from her eyes, smiled, handed him a flyer.
“I’m seventeen,” she said. “How old are you?”
She was the first white friend he’d ever had, and she introduced him to her other white friends, and then he had more. She was a communist. Her friends were communists.
“If you care about workers,” Sophia said, “you’d better hook your wagon to the Communist Party. Socialism is acclimation through accommodation. It takes too long.” She spoke in slogans, snatches of passages she’d read in books, heard from speeches, taglines party leaders had taught her to remember. Hampton didn’t mind. He found her interesting, this young white girl from Pittsburgh with foreign parents and a heart for justice. “What this country needs is radical transformation,” she said. “Workers’ rights. Gender equality. Integration.” The more he listened to her, the more Hampton agreed, and the more he saw it all as completely possible.