Goliath at Sunset

Jonathan Brandow

1.

Despite the stabbing pain that shot up and down her spine, Theresa Shea worked the assembly line at Cambrian Electronics for nineteen years. Most of the two hundred and fifty employees were women. A third of them were island Portuguese with little or no English.

“They are good people,” Theresa told her son, Michael. She gushed to him about Domingas, who covered for her when her back acted up. “I’m so grateful. I’d really like to ask her for dinner.”

Mike shrugged. “Okay.”

Theresa shook her head. “I can’t, Mikey. She’s one of those mixed breed Portagees. People in our building would hurt her walkin’ in the door. Wouldn’t let me forget it.”

Soon after Mike graduated high school, Theresa told him that her union was planning to strike come spring. “We just need more money,” she said, “and a little respect, too.”

The day after the picket lines were breached, she sat him down in their kitchen. “The union’s calling everyone down to the factory to keep out the scabs, Mikey. I’m going in there.”

Michael Shea said, “You’re gonna hurt your back again, Ma.”

“No one will get hurt. The union’s got our side under control and the cops will go easy on us women. Besides, Domingas promised to stick with me on the strike line.”

The picket captain spotted the scab van and blasted an air horn warning. The pickets linked arms, but the cops pulled out truncheons and jabbed at bellies and arms. Domingas tried to hold on, but Theresa was thrust away from the crowd and fell. Domingas lunged and draped her body over her friend. She futilely battled the truncheons. Two cops clubbed wildly at the women and pushed Domingas away. One of them kicked Theresa twice. Her ribs crunched. She went dark.

She lay in Cambridge City Hospital for a month before the pneumonia set in. Shea watched her struggle for breath. She locked feeble eyes on him and said, “You can do more. Find the world.” Unable to move, barely able to talk, she breathed painfully for another week and then died. Shea shook with fury. Why didn’t I go to the line with her?

Shea got a condolence note from his Aunt Bridget in Sturbridge. She had come out some fifteen years before, proclaiming her reality to the collective disgust of her East Cambridge neighbors. Even Theresa distanced herself to protect her young son, whether from Bridget’s sexuality or taunts from the project, Shea never knew. Bridget cursed them all and walked away. She had been Shea’s lifeline to the outside, taking him to see Williams and Jensen at Fenway, the zoos in Franklin Park and up in Stoneham. No one told him why she was gone. No one told him where she was.

At the funeral, it seemed to him that the entire contingent of black Portuguese women from the plant came to mourn. Afterward, a gold-skinned woman with a kindly middle-aged face and flowing black hair approached him.

“I am Domingas, your mother’s friend at work,” she said quietly. She reached out to Shea and hugged him. The feel of her startled him. He had never before touched a colored woman, even a light one like her.

Domingas whispered to him, “Your mother told me you were a good son. The last day on the picket line she tells me that she wants a different life for you. I told her there is work at the shipyard in Quincy. So much even the black Portuguese like me get the jobs. But the place is also difficult for many who work there. Your mother thought a good person like you would be of value. To them and yourself.”

Shea said, “I guess my mom would have said something like that.”

That afternoon Shea looked through the small apartment. He wanted to keep what came down from his nan: a velvet parlor chair, a light veneer hutch with cut glass doors, and a lacquered cabinet inlaid with carved and brightly painted Oriental figures. In the closet he found a sequin purse that held a handful of silver dollars and about five hundred in small bills. He understood that this was savings his mother had meant to use to get them out of the project.

His mom had believed in something strongly enough to stand up and die. He wanted to know how that felt.

In his teens, Shea headed out on Saturdays with his crew from Roosevelt Towers, the bunch of them eager to brandish their white, Irish honor—again—to the other side of town. They hopped the bus from their low-rise East Cambridge project, disembarking to bust bottles in the Sears parking lot below Porter Square, then heading north to lay in wait for black kids from Rindge Towers.

They cornered a broad-shouldered guy coming out of a mom and pop just a few blocks from Rindge. They chased him down and pushed him to the ground. His groceries scattered. Juice and bruised fruit leaked through his torn shopping bags. Shea and four other kids stood in a circle, waiting for him to move. He was big, but he was scared.

“C’mon, you motherfuckers,” he breathed. An angry reddish scar ran from his sideburn to the line of his jaw. He tugged at his doo-rag to recoup some dignity.

One of Shea’s friends pulled out a leather-wrapped sap. “Tough nigger, hunh?” He waved the sap.

Shea looked down at their victim, who looked him back in the eye.

Shea said, “Forget this shit. Let’s go.” He put his hands in his pockets.

“Whatta you, fuckin’ nuts? He’s about to shit his pants.”

Shea started toward home, ignoring calls to come back and have some fun.

He stopped at the kiosk in Harvard Square and stared at the dozens of racked newspapers from around the world, at the browsers who were so much more interested in foreign events than in anyone like his mother.

Well-dressed women drifted by wearing flesh-tone stockings, their blouses clasped with little round collar pins. Scattered among them, college kids glanced at Shea without seeing. From the looks of their biceps curled around books, not one had ever been in a street fight. It seemed to Shea that all of them exuded an insolence he had never experienced in East Cambridge.

Domingas and her friends at the funeral had tried to save his mom. He was convinced that none of these people would have lifted a finger.

2.

Shea was one of those kids that the cops never caught, so there was no sheet to get in the way of his 1-A status.

His first-ever plane flight took him to Da Nang in ‘69, a year that the war killed twelve thousand Americans. The unfairness of it clawed at him every day, being forced to kill incomprehensibly strange little people worse off than he was, watching the guys who protected him die. When the grunts in his platoon talked about what they’d been through, Shea felt greedy, almost lucky. No one was proud of it, but he knew it wasn’t his fault or theirs. Whites and blacks rockin’ in the same boat.

Back home he told people he’d been in logistics, never saw combat. He just wanted to leave the war behind. But at night he was up with the sweats, on the lookout for death.

His anger felt righteous. At the cops giving anyone who got in their way a lesson they didn’t deserve. At commie war protesters. At the VFW or the Legion, so fucking eager to pimp for LBJ and then Nixon, sending off another batch of guys to get shot up for nothing.

He sat and drank for hours over at the Plough and Stars just a stone’s throw from Central Square, then headed over to the Cantab Lounge to scout for tipsy young women. Once a week he stopped into Brookline Lunch with the old gang, where they got meal tickets punched for plates of meatloaf, mashed and peas. Like old times, they told each other. But Shea saw that the Square had begun to turn over to communal houses and professors in search of cheap properties with old chestnut woodwork, driving the old people out. Then a modern dance center and shops selling Frye boots and Birkenstocks popped up just a couple blocks to the north. He knew that no one from Roosevelt Towers would belong there much longer.

He was back from the war on the night that Sean Malley got clubbed over the head by Cambridge cops after throwing a brick through a store window. They dragged Malley into a police wagon and beat him some more. A police captain arrived and ordered the patrolmen to take the kid to Cambridge City Hospital. Three hours later a guard spotted Malley unconscious in a jail cell. He was finally driven to the hospital, dead on arrival.

Malley was a few years younger than Shea, who knew him from Roosevelt. Together they tossed down shots a few times. At the end of every one of those evenings, Malley wound up on the floor. Shea was certain that on the night the kid was killed he’d been too drunk to even stand up by himself. In fact, as far as everyone Shea knew was concerned, Malley was just clubbed to death for throwing a brick through a window—plain as day. Eighteen years old and a sick waste, just like the dead eighteen-year-olds he fought with in Nam.

During five nights of rioting that followed Malley’s killing, young whites from Roosevelt set cars on fire, broke more windows and spray-painted walls with Pigs Suck graffiti.

Samuel Andrews had driven from Rindge Towers to watch it all with friends from the safety of a nearby building. He left on his scooter and was chased down by three Cambridge police cruisers. He crashed and the cops descended. Andrews wrenched himself loose but lost his right eye.

Project mothers, black and white, demanded a City Council hearing to protest Malley’s death and Andrews’ lost eye. Within days a community group calling itself Tough Times plastered handbills for the meeting around Cambridge.

Shea urged his Roosevelt gang to go with him to the meeting. At the last minute they headed to the courtyard at the front of the project to get stoned instead. Shea yelled, “How come you shitkickers can’t get behind anything that means anything?” He stalked off to the hearing alone.

City hall chambers were foul with cigar stink and Lysol. Two organizers in their late twenties huddled in the center balcony section with a dozen or so teenagers, black and white mixed. They’d hung two placards—Justice for Sean and Justice for Samuel—over the balcony. An orange batik banner in the middle announced Tough Times.

A separate smattering of somber black teens spread out on fixed seats to one side of the balcony, their legs propped up on the row in front of them. They nodded back when the black kids around the Tough Times banner turned sideways to catch their attention.

Dozens of white teenagers sauntered in and sat downstairs in a group, their arms folded in front of their jackets. They cast about the room with jutted chins and leaned over to whisper to each other.

Shea was shocked to see so many black faces. Sure they were there for their guy, Samuel Andrews, but to protest the death of a white kid, too.

“Look at that,” Shea motioned to a couple of his gang who had finally filtered in to take seats around him, “They got balls comin’ here now. Good for them.” He gave the black kids a thumbs up.

One of his crew clucked in disgust. “Just niggers,” he said. “Fuck ‘em.” He jabbed two middle fingers at the balcony. The others nodded. Though Shea acquiesced without a word, a wave of unease passed through his gut.

Fuck that, he decided. No reason for that kid to lose an eye any more than Malley bein’ murdered. Bein’ here with the blacks is the right thing to do. Fuckin’ cops.

Around him, two hundred impatient project moms screamed at a hapless row of five City Council people at a long, ornately carved table up front. “Stop stalling! Damn them po-leeces!”

Saundra Granger, the Council’s only reformer, stood up to speak. “We’re here tonight to declare an emergency and have the mayor take command of this killer police department!”

Hundreds of voices from the balcony chanted “Justice! Justice!”

Councilwoman Granger pointed at the other members. “When cops attack black kids, I say fire them and indict! And when they kill Sean Malley, I say the same thing!” The citizens of the Cambridge projects came to their feet.

At a signal from one of the Tough Times organizers, a dozen black women in purple robes stood up in the front rows to one side of the podium. A middle-aged woman sounded a pitch pipe. The room hushed uncertainly. A young woman sang:

If he’s black, or if he’s white, Six to one is just not right!

Without warning a blast of harmony soared over the room:

If he’s black, or if he’s white Six to one is just not right!

By the middle of the chorus, the entire room overtook the choir melody, clapping and stamping rhythmically:

If-he’s-black-or-if-he’s-white! Six to one-is-just-not-right!

Shea rose with them, chanting and yelling until the entire City Council—save Saundra Granger—stalked out. The singing and shouting continued, quieting slowly until the choir closed with a harmonized hush.

One of the Tough Times organizers shouted from the front of the balcony, “Please sign the petition Tough Times is bringing around!” From his seat Shea saw a long reddish scar running from the speaker’s cheekbone to his jaw line.

When the Tough Times people clambered down the balcony stairs with their banners, Shea was waiting and held out his hand.

“Mike Shea.”

The Tough Times guy took his hand. “I’m Robert. I remember you.”

The two of them walked around Fresh Pond while white couples strolling the path watched them uneasily.

Robert wanted to know what had changed. Shea said, “There was that thing near Rindge when my crew knocked you down, right after my mom’s funeral. Then Nam, living and dying with guys like you.”

“I didn’t join up,” Robert said. “Not like these brothers from Rindge, got shot into little pieces for nothin’. I hired in at the shipyard in Quincy but left early a few times to work with these young kids you see here. That was worth more to me than any job. So I didn’t make it past the Shipworks probation. But that’s okay. I was made for this gig with Tough Times.”

“Maybe I could fit in,” Shea said, but Robert didn’t think so. “You’d be stuck arguin’ your whole life with the same people been dragging you down. They ain’t gonna change. Shipyard might be a fit for you, though. It’s a different world. Black people, all kinds of whites, West Indians, Puerto Ricans. All in one big pen trying to figure out how to live with each other.”

Late that night, Shea sat in his nan’s chair thinking about his mom and Bridget and Robert. About Domingas and courage. Each had glimpsed something deep down that was right and important. Each had turned a face to the sun. Shea ached to find a sun of his own. To turn toward it and bathe in the glow.