My First Boss

EARLY in 1919 the war-swollen U.S. Marine Corps notified its “duration” enlisted men that those who planned to return to school could apply for discharge on that basis. Certain papers of recommendation and, I believe, an oath of intent had to be provided. Mine was filed, declaring a purpose to return to Vanderbilt University at Nashville, Tennessee, where I had been a freshman at the time of enlistment, and I was discharged about mid-March.

It was too late to enter spring term, but I went to Nashville and arranged to be on hand in September. I also applied for a student loan and put my name on the list of those who would need parttime jobs. After a brief visit with former classmates, I went on to my home at Chattanooga.

There, through my father’s assistance, I got a job. It was one about which I often find myself thinking today, as the deep-South racial tensions, fanned by unreasoning fanaticism and exploited recklessly and cynically by politicians, take on preposterous proportions. I was the only white member of the working crew with which I had a job, and the foreman was, of course, a Negro. I worked with him from late March through August, and it was a pleasant and rewarding summer.

My father was a minor officer and sales manager of a small heating and roofing company in Chattanooga. The approaching recession of 1920 was beginning to be felt, and there were not many summer jobs. I wanted one which would be outof-doors hard work, as in the fall I intended to try for the football team. After three days of job hunting my father looked at my discouraged face and said, “One of the roofing crews is short a man.”

“Could I have it?” I asked.

“It’s Charlie’s,” he said. “You mind working under him?”

“No,” I said, “Charlie’s fine.”

The real rough work of roofing was done by Negroes, with white sheet-metal workers doing the flashing, gutter, and ventilating jobs. Charlie I knew rather well. He had been with the company a long time, and I had been seeing him around for years when I would go by to see my father. In elementary and secondary school years I frequently rode the two miles from our suburb to the Chattanooga Carnegie Library for books, and I’d always drop by the company office before the journey home.

Charlie White was a humpbacked man, quite black, of indeterminate age. He must have been in his early sixties. His arms, I suppose, were no longer than average, but because of his hump, which caused him to seem to be thrown forward in posture, the arms dangled and appeared, at least to my boy’s eyes, abnormally long. Despite his deformity he had powerful arms and was as agile as anyone else. He had a deeply lined face and an almost aquiline nose. His bright, quizzical eyes gave him a quaint, almost elfin look. I remembered that the first time I saw him, years before, I was startled by a sort of coincidence. I had just finished reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and when I walked to the back of the shop and saw Charlie, I was, for a moment, almost afraid. But then he came over and asked me who I was, and I saw he was just a kind man with a humped back. On days of heavy rain the roofing crews would come into the shop, and Charlie, when he saw me there, would always have some pleasant word with me. So, when my father said it would be Charlie’s crew, I told him it would be fine. He nodded and added, “You’ll come in with me early tomorrow.”

In these last several years of tensions I have tried hard to recollect any rationalization I may have gone through about working with a Negro roofing crew. I have been unable to recall any. Now and then, in the weeks that followed my going on the job, the president and chief owner of the company, a smug sort of man who wore a collar later to be made famous by Herbert Hoover, would see us come in from an early finish on a job. Two or three times he stopped me and said, “How are you and Charlie getting on?” “Fine,”I’d say. I recall he had a somewhat questioning look on his face. It never occurred to me that he was probing for some answer about how it felt to be working with, and under the direction of, a Negro.

Certainly I was asking myself no questions on that first morning when I went down to begin the job. We — my parents and I — were from east Tennessee farm backgrounds and Scottish and Welsh ancestry. We were strict Presbyterians, with prayers at meals and Bible reading at night. On the farm, from which we had moved to Chattanooga, any house help we had was from the white tenants on the place. I did not see a Negro until l was six years old. I was never taught any prejudice about them since that was not according to Scripture. I knew, in school, of course, that many boys thought otherwise, but somehow it always seemed some problem of their own.

So I wasn’t bothered when I went to work. Nor was I troubled during that pleasant summer, though the work was dirty and hard and often exhausting.

Charlie was waiting by the old Ford truck, and three Negro men, all older than I, were standing nearby talking. The truck was loaded with shingle-width bales of composition roofing, ladders, sections of gutters, sheets of galvanized iron, and two fire pots of the kind used by sheet-metal workers to heal their soldering irons. The talk was desultory. Charlie teased me a bit, saying that he doubled if a college boy could do the work without “white-eying,” a phrase used to describe being overcome by heat. I told him that once, when I was about thirteen and was spending the summer back on my grandmother’s farm, I had white-eyed pitching hay into a loft on a very hot afternoon. My uncle had told me the phrase had come into use because when a person collapsed from the heat the eyes rolled back until only the whites showed. Charlie asked me a few questions, and I told him I wanted to get my legs and back in shape for football. He chuckled and said, “Imagine that.” I went on to tell him I had played guard as a freshman and explained how important it was for a lineman to have good legs. He found this amusing, chuckling over it. And I guess, in retrospect, he had a right to be amused.

The first job was to roof a new house, a singlestory one and not too large. Charlie backed the truck up close by the house. Then he and two of the other Negroes put up two ladders, tied on carpenters’ aprons with pockets for the roofing nails, filled them about half full, took their hammers and heavy scissors, and went up to the roof. The third Negro, the youngest, and I were to carry the baled shingles up the ladders to the roof as they were needed. It looked simple. One balanced a bundle on a shoulder and, holding it lightly with the finger tips, climbed on up with it. One of the men had such a fine sense of balance he could go right up without putting a hand to the load until he was at the top and had to put it on the roof. But for me, it was difficult. The bundle bit into my shoulder, and the roughness of the edges chafed my neck and cheek. On the first trip up I almost fell backward with it. But I persevered. I knew they, and especially Charlie, were watching me.

They may have had some questions about my willingness to do a full share of work. And Charlie, though he never said so, must have thought I was a fool talking about working to strengthen my legs. Late that day he said to me, as I started to climb, “This sorta thing will help yo’ legs.” I looked down at him, but his face was impassive. That night when we came in, Charlie walked over with me toward my father, who was looking at us inquiringly. “This young man,” he said, “he is goin’ to be a good helper, yes, sir, a good one.”

I think I was. I began to look forward to the days and my ride out to the jobs beside Charlie. We talked endlessly. At noon we ate our packages of lunch together. He talked to me about the trade of roofing as if he believed I would follow it. He had a strong, honest pride in his work because he was expert at it.

The worst part of the work for me was the tar and gravel roofs. They meant pulling up huge buckets of gravel and smaller ones of pitch with block and rope. The “cooker,” a dirty monster coated with glistening tar spilled on it from past jobs, had to be set up, fired, and filled with lumps of tar cut from their containers.

The roof first had to be covered with a composition material which had a felt like texture and smelled of tar. It came in rolls. Once it was down, the whole thing was covered with hot pitch, spread with mops. In the worst rags of old work shoes to be found, our feet wrapped in sacking, we toiled like demons in the smoke and heat, spreading the hot pitch. There could be no delay. Nor could the pitch be too thin or too thick. Charlie, a hunched, black Mephistopheles with his own mop, tarred and sticky. was everywhere, directing here, giving a spot there a needed touch. The gravel had to be spread into the first coating of still soft tar. And that, too, was last and demanding. And then came another pouring and spreading of tar. It was furious, backbreaking, armwearing work, and the heat was sometimes dreadful. But none of us white-eyed, not even in August when the thermometer was around ninety-five in the shade.

By midsummer I realized I had become very fond of Charlie and he of me. Neither of us expressed it, but we knew that each of us understood. Two or three times when we were too late getting in from some distant job to go into the shop, which would be closed, Charlie took me to his house. His wife was a large, motherly woman who always had a pitcher of iced tea and graham crackers waiting. They had no children. We’d sit on Charlie’s small front porch, with the summer dusk about us, and drink the tea, grateful for the end of the day and the departure of the sun. There were houses crowded close on either side, and their occupants, too, were on the porches seeking coolness. It always seemed to me that Charlie talked a little louder than usual, to be sure they would hear. He would talk of the job, and he never failed to brag mightily about me, declaring I was the best helper a man could have. I had caught on quick, he vowed, and could make a good roofer if I wanted to. He never mentioned my legs, after the first day, and I was grateful for that.

In my last week on the job we both began to talk sadly of my quitting to go off to school at Nashville. I, of course, was eager but had a real regret at parting with him. He knew I had to have a job there and that I would borrow some money. I had explained the student loan system. He worried, as did I, that I hadn’t saved more out of my pay. He was inclined to blame my spending habits on my having been in the Marines.

There were to be two or three days between my quitting and my departure on the Dixie Flyer. It came through around midnight, and Charlie insisted he would bring the old truck out and take me and my trunk down to the station. He came about ten thirty. My parents and I were sitting on the front porch, waiting. Charlie was wearing a neat, dark suit of what certainly was not summer material. He spoke to my mother in an old-fashioned Chesterfieldian manner, and then he and I carried the trunk out and into the truck. He waited there while I went back and bade my parents good-by.

I climbed into the familiar front seat, with the old smell of tarred composition roofing about it, and we went to the station, saying little. We checked the trunk and then stood outside talking, since the waiting rooms were segregated. Mostly we recollected amusing things about some of the jobs and some of the near-accidents.

The train came, backing in as it did at Chattanooga’s old Union Station, and it was time to go. We walked over by the gates. I looked at him and he at me. Suddenly he moved up and put his arms around me and I put mine about him, feeling, with a sort of shock, the hard thrust of the hump on his back. “Don’t forget me,” he said. “I’ll never forget you, Charlie,” I said. “You are one of the finest men I’ve ever known.”

He stepped back, reached in his inside coat pocket, and took out an envelope.

“Don’t you open this till you get on the train,” he said, “and it’s out of the station.”

We shook hands, with the people who were waiting for arrivals looking on curiously, and I turned so he wouldn’t see my eyes and walked hurriedly up the train to my car.

When the train was out of the station, I opened the envelope. There was a folded five-dollar bill and a scrawled note. “For my helper to spend at school,” it read. It was then I wept.

I wrote Charlie and thanked him, and later I wrote him about making the first football squad. I told him the legs were strong from climbingladders. My father wrote me that Charlie read the letters to his crew and made his new helper, a young Negro, unhappy with stories of his college helper.

During the Christmas holidays I went to see him, disturbed to hear he had been sick during November with pneumonia but had gone to work. He was bright and gay and pleased with the present I had brought. His wife had baked a chocolate cake for me.

In January I had a letter from my father. Charlie had gone home ill again and had died two days later of a second attack of pneumonia. I sat there in the fraternity house room, remembering him with his arms tight about me at the station and hearing him say, “Don’t forget me.”