Dreams from My Father

glasses, his eyes seemed set in a perpetual squint. As he rose from the booth to shake my hand, he spilled some tea on his shirt.
    “So,” Marty said, dabbing the stain with a paper napkin. “Why does somebody from Hawaii want to be an organizer?”
    I sat down and told him a little bit about myself.
    “Hmmph.” He nodded, taking notes on a dog-eared legal pad. “You must be angry about something.”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know what exactly. But something. Don’t get me wrong—anger’s a requirement for the job. The only reason anybody decides to become an organizer. Well-adjusted people find more relaxing work.”
    He ordered more hot water and told me about himself. He was Jewish, in his late thirties, had been reared in New York. He had started organizing in the sixties with the student protests, and ended up staying with it for fifteen years. Farmers in Nebraska. Blacks in Philadelphia. Mexicans in Chicago. Now he was trying to pull urban blacks and suburban whites together around a plan to save manufacturing jobs in metropolitan Chicago. He needed somebody to work with him, he said. Somebody black.
    “Most of our work is with churches,” he said. “If poor and working-class people want to build real power, they have to have some sort of institutional base. With the unions in the shape they’re in, the churches are the only game in town. That’s where the people are, and that’s where the values are, even if they’ve been buried under a lot of bullshit. Churches won’t work with you, though, just out of the goodness of their hearts. They’ll talk a good game—a sermon on Sunday, maybe, or a special offering for the homeless. But if push comes to shove, they won’t really move unless you can show them how it’ll help them pay their heating bill.”
    He poured himself more hot water. “What do you know about Chicago anyway?”
    I thought a moment. “Hog butcher to the world,” I said finally.
    Marty shook his head. “The butcheries closed a while ago.”
    “The Cubs never win.”
    “True.”
    “America’s most segregated city,” I said. “A black man, Harold Washington, was just elected mayor, and white people don’t like it.”
    “So you’ve been following Harold’s career,” Marty said. “I’m surprised you haven’t gone to work for him.”
    “I tried. His office didn’t write back.”
    Marty smiled and took off his glasses, cleaning them with the end of his tie. “Well, that’s the thing to do, isn’t it, if you’re young and black and interested in social issues? Find a political campaign to work for. A powerful patron—somebody who can help you with your own career. And Harold’s powerful, no doubt about it. Lots of charisma. He has almost monolithic support in the black community. About half the Hispanics, a handful of white liberals. You’re right about one thing, though. The whole atmosphere in the city is polarized. A big media circus. Not much is getting done.”
    I leaned back in my seat. “And whose fault is that?”
    Marty put his glasses back on and met my stare. “It’s not a question of fault,” he said. “It’s a question of whether any politician, even somebody with Harold’s talent, can do much to break the cycle. A polarized city isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a politician. Black or white.”
    He offered to start me off at ten thousand dollars the first year, with a two-thousand-dollar travel allowance to buy a car; the salary would go up if things worked out. After he was gone, I took the long way home, along the East River promenade, and tried to figure out what to make of the man. He was smart, I decided. He seemed committed to his work. Still, there was something about him that made me wary. A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white—he’d said himself that that was a problem.
    The old fluted park lamps flickered to life; a long brown barge rolled through the gray waters toward the sea. I sat down on a bench, considering my options, and noticed a black woman and her young son approach. The boy yanked the woman up to the railing, and they stood side by side, his arm wrapped around her leg, a single silhouette against the twilight. Eventually the boy’s head craned upward with what looked like a question. The woman shrugged her shoulders and the boy took a few steps toward me.
    “Excuse me, mister,” he shouted. “You know why sometimes the river runs that way and then sometimes it goes