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.The union’s national leader came to a rally in Buffalo to help the men celebrate their victory.Samuel went, not because he felt much like celebrating, but because he wanted to see the man who had so much power, a man who had made Eisenhower back down, a man who held the future of a million men in his mouth.Samuel was disappointed.The union leader looked like such an ordinary man, an older white man with silver hair and a two-hundred-dollar double-breasted wool suit.He did not look as if he had ever been inside a steel plant, and he did not look tired.It had been one hundred sixteen days, and he did not look as if he had gone hungry.The men barely let him enter the hall.They surrounded him, hoisted him on their shoulders, and carried him up to the podium.While a band played “Happy Days Are Here Again,” the leader yelled out through a crackling microphone, “Victory is yours!”That had been four years ago.A man can spin silences around himself like eggshells, each silence an opaque, perfect, elliptical world.Enclosed in his own white silence, Samuel sat in the middle of the living room floor among the Easter eggs, his knees drawn to his chest.Over an hour had passed since Mary Kate had gone up to bed.It was cold in the living room, and he got up from the floor.Though he tried to step carefully through the mine field of eggs, he stepped on one and crushed it as he weaved his way.The bedroom was dark.Samuel began undressing.He started when Mary Kate’s voice came to him.“I ain’t mean what I say,” she said.Samuel was still undressing.He turned toward her voice, a small and warm flame.“You right,” he said.“I was sitting downstairs thinking.I’m a get up with you in the morning and make a fool out myself.”“You ain’t got to get up,” she said.“I know I don’t got to.”“Your mind done been busy.There been that hearsay of a strike.”Samuel stood only a few feet away from her, completely naked.“You don’t think I heard it?”Samuel was silent.“Where you at?” she asked.“I’m here.” He walked over to the bed and lay down behind her on his side.“I ain’t know you heard ’bout it,” he said, moving close to her.“I can read.It’s been in the paper, and you know how colored folks talk, anyway.Hear say folks went hungry last time.”Mary Kate turned toward him.She could feel Samuel’s chest rise and fall.“It’s true.Folks went hungry.It was hard times,” he said.“I ain’t want to worry you with no talk like that.”“Seeing you starve yourself was what was worrying me, and lying, saying you was eating someplace else.Wasn’t nothing for me to say.It was for you to say.”The muscles in Samuel’s back were tense.They began twitching, and then there was a soft fluttering, like bird wings.Mary Kate rubbed his back, calming the muscles, trying to free what was trapped inside.“I was scared,” he whispered, his head resting on her shoulder.His tears soaked into her cotton gown.Her fingers flowed over his back.He was pulled into sleep, and when he awoke the next morning to hear his son calling out from his room, he arose in the blue morning light, still a man.5FireHENRY’S MOTHER came home from work to find him with his head in the oven and his friend Skip sitting on the kitchen sink.When Skip saw her coming through the living room, he tried to save himself.He jumped from the sink and dashed out the back door.As he jumped off the porch and into the yard, he let out a yell.“This yard full of shit!”Two men in hip boots were standing nearby.“All the yards are,” one said.“The sewers are backed up.Get out of the yard, boy.We’re trying to work.”“You get in here, Skipper,” Henry’s mother yelled.“Get your butt in here right now.”“Yes, ma’am,” Skip said, and sloshed back through the ankle-deep water.“And you, Henry.Get your head out that oven.”But Henry did not move.“Just one more minute,” he said.Then he began to scream.His mother grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him out.“You look like a fool,” she said.“You satisfied now you look like Skipper?”Skip had just stepped inside the back door.“It look tough, Henry.I think it took
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