only the boy isn’t scared
pencil scrawls in my notebook the scraps of recollection the broken halfphrases the effort to intersect word with word to dovetail clause with clause to rebuild out of mangled memories unshakably (Oh Pontius Pilate) the truth
the boy walks shyly browneyed beside me to the station talks abouthow Bart helped him with his homework wants to get ahead why should it hurt him to have known Bart? wants to go to Boston University we shake hands don’t let them scare you
accustomed the smokingcar accustomed the jumble of faces rumble cozily homelike towards Boston through the gathering dark how can I make them feel how our fathers our uncles haters of oppression came to this coast how say Don’t let them scare you how make them feel who are your oppressors America
rebuild the ruined words worn slimy in the mouths of lawyers districtattorneys collegepresidents judges without the old words the immigrants haters of oppression brought to Plymouth how can you know who are your betrayers America
or that this fishpeddler you have in Charlestown Jail is one of your founders Massachusetts?
Newsreel LXV
STORM TIES UP SUBWAY; FLOODS AND LIGHTNING
DARKEN CITY
Love oh love oh careless love
Like a thief comes in the night
ONLOOKERS CRY HALLELUJAH AS PEACE
DOVE LIGHTS; SAID TO HAVE
SPLIT $100,000
CRASH UPSETS EXCHANGE
Chicago Nipple Slump Hits Trading On Curb
Bring me a pillow for my poor head
A hammer for to knock out my brains
For the whiskey has ruined this body of mine
And the red lights have run me insane
FAITH PLACED IN RUBBER BOATS
But I’ll love my baby till the sea runs dry
This Great New Searchlight Sunburns You Two Miles Away
Till the rocks all dissolve by the sun
Oh ain’t it hard?
Smythe according to the petition was employed testing the viscosity of lubricating oil in the Okmulgee plant of the company on July 12, 1924. One of his duties was to pour benzol on a hot vat where it was boiled down so that the residue could be examined. Day after day he breathed the not unpleasant fumes from the vat.
One morning about a year later Smythe cut his face while shaving and noticed that the blood flowed for hours in copious quantities from the tiny wound. His teeth also began to bleed when he brushed them and when the flow failed to stop after several days he consulted a doctor. The diagnosis was that the benzol fumes had broken down the walls of his blood vessels.
After eighteen months in bed, during which he slept only under the effect of opiates, Smythe’s spleen and tonsils were removed. Meanwhile the periodic blood transfusions were resorted to in an effort to keep his blood supply near normal.
In all more than thirty-six pints of blood were infused through his arms until when the veins had been destroyed it was necessary to cut into his body to open other veins. During the whole time up to eight hours before his death, the complaint recited, he was conscious and in pain.
Mary French
The first job Mary French got in New York she got through one of Ada’s friends. It was sitting all day in an artgallery on Eighth Street where there was an exposition of sculpture and answering the questions of ladies in flowing batiks who came in in the afternoons to be seen appreciating art. After two weeks of that the girl she was replacing came back and Mary who kept telling herself she wanted to be connected with something real went and got herself a job in the ladies’ and misses’ clothing department at Bloomingdale’s. When the summer layoff came she was dropped, but she went home and wrote an article about departmentstore workers for the Freeman and on the strength of it got herself a job doing research on wages, livingcosts and the spread between wholesale and retail prices in the dress industry for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers. She liked the long hours digging out statistics, the talk with the organizers, the wisecracking radicals, the working men and girls who came into the crowded dingy office she shared with two or three other researchworkers. At last she felt what she was doing was real.
Ada had gone to Michigan with her family and had left Mary in the apartment on Madison Avenue. Mary was relieved to have her gone; she was still fond of her but their interests were so different and they had silly arguments about the relative importance of art and social justice that left them tired and cross at each other so that sometimes they wouldn’t speak for several days; and then they hated each other’s friends. Still Mary couldn’t help being fond of Ada. They were such old friends and Ada forked out so generously for the strikers’ defense committees, legalaid funds and everything that Mary suggested; she was a very openhanded girl, but her point of view was hopelessly rich, she had no social consciousness. The apartment got on Mary French’s nerves, too, with its pastelcolored nicknacks and the real Whistler and the toothick rugs and the toosoft boxsprings on the bed and the horrid little satin tassels on everything; but Mary was making so little money that not paying rent was a great help.
Ada’s apartment came in very handy the night of the big meeting in Madison Square Garden to welcome the classwar prisoners released from Atlanta. Mary French who had been asked to sit on the platform overheard some members of the committee saying that they had no place to put up Ben Compton. They were looking for a quiet hideout where he could have a rest and shake the D.J. operatives who’d been following him around everywhere since he’d gotten to New York. Mary went up to them and in a whisper suggested her place. So after the meeting she waited in a yellow taxicab at the corner of Twentyninth and Madison until a tall pale man with a checked cap pulled way down over his face got in and sat down shakily beside her. When the cab started he put his steelrimmed glasses back on. “Look back and see if a grey sedan’s following us,” he said. “I don’t see anything,” said Mary. “Oh, you wouldn’t know it if you saw it,” he grumbled.
To be on the safe side they left the cab at the Grand Central station and walked without speaking a way up Park Avenue and then west on a cross street and down Madison again. Mary plucked his sleeve to stop him in front of the door. Once in the apartment he made Mary shoot the bolt and let himself drop into a chair without taking off his cap or his overcoat.
He didn’t say anything. His shoulders were shaking. Mary didn’t like to stare at him. She didn’t know what to do. She puttered around the livingroom, lit the gaslogs, smoked a cigarette and then she went into the kitchenette to make coffee. When she got back he’d taken off his things and was warming his bigknuckled hands at the gaslogs. “You must excuse me, comrade,” he said in a dry hoarse voice. “I’m all in.”
“Oh, don’t mind me,” said Mary. “I thought you might want some coffee.”