As secretary-general of the union, Doudou had been responsible for the conduct of the strike in Thiès, and the difficulties had been even greater than he feared. In the six weeks that had passed since the battle with the troops on the first day he had become more and more conscious of the burden of his new position. His shoulders were no longer broad and straight, his chest seemed to have shrunk into his body, and when he walked his head drooped toward the ground, like a fruit too heavy for its branch. The excitement and the agreeable sense of euphoria that had buoyed him up in the first days of the strike had long since passed. Now he could see only the hunger etched around the rim of the children’s eyes; and when he looked at the men and women around him he asked himself constantly if he was right in urging them to stand firm and go on with the struggle. They had no food, no money, and no credit, and the help that came to them from the outside was far from enough even to fill their stomachs.
On the evening of the day he and Lahbib had made the decision to distribute what rations there were directly to the women, he returned home very late. The children were already asleep, but Oulaye, his wife, was sitting on the bed, waiting for him.
‘You weren’t sleeping?’ Doudou asked.
‘No. Dieynaba, Penda, and Maïmouna came by to see me. Have you eaten? There’s still a little left, if you want something. Magatte never eats here any more – I don’t know where he finds whatever it is that he puts in his stomach.’
‘Oh,’ Doudou said wearily, sitting down on the bed, ‘boys always manage somehow.’ He did not want to disturb his wife, so he added, ‘I’ve already eaten. I stopped at your mother’s and she gave me something.’
Oulaye had started for the kitchen, but she turned and came back to sit beside him, avoiding the center of the room where the five children and the apprentice Magatte were stretched on the floor. The single cloth which covered them had slipped down around their feet, and they were huddled together in a confused mass of arms and legs.
Oulaye lay down on the bed and pulled the patchwork cover up around her chin, so that only her eyes and the handkerchief she still wore on her head were visible. She studied her tired, motionless husband thoughtfully. He was no longer very handsome, and his forehead was heavily lined. Looking at the profile of this aging man beside her, she couldn’t help thinking of the first years after they were married. They had been happy then. Bakayoko had taken them to see a motion picture one day – a story about some miners. There had been a scene of a cave-in in the mine, with men shouting and women weeping. Oulaye had not understood what was happening very well and was puzzled by the fact that the men on the screen looked like Negroes. But, at the end, the one who seemed to be the leader had been embraced by a pretty white woman who kissed him on the lips. Oulaye had been tempted to laugh, but now, looking at her husband, she suddenly wanted to put her arms around him that way and kiss him on the lips. She turned over in bed nervously, with the supple movement of a wild animal.
‘Do you want something?’ Doudou asked, trying to break the somber spell of his thoughts.
Oulaye pretended to be asleep. She was ashamed of herself, and of her abnormal and incomprehensible desire. Doudou had never embraced her like that, but she was still thinking about the kiss in that film when at last she fell asleep.
Doudou, however, was unable to shake off the problems that had weighed on him so heavily in the past weeks. He had volunteered to be secretary of the strike committee, and his offer had been accepted immediately, both because he knew how to read and because Bakayoko’s and Lahbib’s other responsibilities made it impossible for them to assume the position. From the very first he had thrown himself into the work, which was entirely new to him, with all the zeal and enthusiasm of a beginner. Holding meetings, traveling from one station to another, he had given everything he had to the task of bringing to the workers the realization that a new life was being born out of their present misery. He was completely convinced of the rightness of what they were doing, and he did his best to convince others, but he was an awkward speaker. Words came to him with difficulty, and his phrases crashed against each other like freight cars that had not been properly coupled. One day, after such a meeting, he had met Bakayoko, who had remonstrated with him.
‘I’ll give you books to read,’ he had said. ‘Take the time to study them carefully. We can’t afford to risk defeat now, just because of our own ignorance. The way you were talking to those men you wouldn’t even convince Ad’jibid’ji.’
But in spite of this warning Doudou had gone on in the same manner, carried away by his own fervor and by the enthusiasm of his audiences. Crowds of men always came to hear him, pressing around him and asking questions, and the thought that they looked up to him and respected him was a heady incense to the nostrils of the lathe operator. His heart had known the pleasurable sensation that stems from a gratified pride – even when Lahbib had added his voice to that of Bakayoko.
‘You’re weaving the wrong kind of cloth,’ he had told him one day.
‘What do you mean by that?’ Doudou demanded. ‘I’m talking to the men about the strike, that’s all.’
‘That isn’t part of your job. Each one of us has his own work to do, and you should stick to yours.’
The watchfulness of Lahbib and Bakayoko might not have held Doudou back from the pursuit of a popularity which had made him better known than they – he had even envisaged the possibility of undertaking discussions with the management on his own authority – but at just about this time he had suddenly been overwhelmed by a sense of his personal responsibility for what was happening. The duties he had assumed so lightly became burdensome, and the wine of his new renown took on a bitter taste. Sometimes, in the course of the meetings, he would just sit silently by, like a man who has been thrust by destiny into a position of leadership and is bewildered by the suddenness of it all. He would have liked to recapture the spirit of the first days of the strike, but he could no longer do it. He knew that, from this point on, he would never be able to free himself from the thought of the thousands of men and women who had listened to him and trusted him, and to whom he no longer knew what to say. Bakayoko’s patient and thorough preparation for just such a time as this was a thing he had never known.
The strike had lasted now for more than forty days, and the management had not even consented to talk with them, so there could be no hope of an early return to work. The men were growing restless and nervous from the constant spectacle of their hungry families. Quarrels broke out within the family, and particularly between the wives of the same man. When a striker received his portion of the ration of food or money, he gave it sometimes to one wife and sometimes to another, and this had been the cause not only of quarrels but of actual battles. It was because of this that they had decided at last to distribute the rations directly to the women, but they could not be sure that this would make things any better.
Doudou stretched out on the bed beside the sleeping Oulaye, but all of these things were still turning over in his mind, and it was a long time before he went to sleep.
*
He went to the union office early the next morning and found the little room already crowded. In addition to Lahbib, there was Séne Maséne, the foreman from the carpenter shop, Bachirou, the ‘bureaucrat’, Samba N’Doulougou and his inseparable companion, the giant Boubacar, old Bakary, and several others. Doudou was in no mood to join in their ceaseless arguments and discussions, and since there was nothing that had to be done at the moment he left almost immediately.
His steps carried him instinctively in the direction of the station, and when he arrived in the square he stood there for some time, looking around him at the familiar scene – the warehouse and the workshops; the big, hangar-like sheds, whose doors were standing open; the pile of rails; and the silent mass of the locomotives. In the yards he could see some of the white workmen who had been brought in from France to perform the necessary work of maintenance and to operate the trains on the one day each week when they still ran.
Lost in his thoughts, Doudou turned around and started back to the office, but he had scarcely entered the labyrinth of walls and courts surrounding the houses when he found himself face to face with a white man. It was Isnard, the supervisor of the repair shops. Like a man long accustomed to the heat of the tropics, he was wearing nothing on his head. His face was the color of red leather, and his powerful neck was as deeply ridged as the hide of an old buffalo. Although he had shaved that morning, a black stubble already covered his jaw and cheeks. His hairy arms bulged with muscle beneath the short sleeves of a carefully pressed work shirt.
He held out his hand to Doudou, who was so surprised by the gesture that he returned it automatically. It was the first time in the fifteen years he had worked for Isnard that they had ever shaken hands.
‘Well, Doudou,’ the supervisor said, ‘I didn’t expect to see you around here. But then I keep forgetting about your work with the strike committee. How does it feel to be the chief of the whole thing? You know, I can’t help feeling proud that the men picked out someone from our group. At least I can tell myself that after fifteen years in the colony I’ve finally accomplished something! When I think of how you started out …’
Isnard launched into a highly imaginary biography of Doudou, but Doudou scarcely heard what he said. In all the years he had worked under Isnard’s orders, the only words he had heard him speak before this were, ‘Have you finished yet?’ or ‘See that this gets to section three.’ Among the men in the shop, Isnard had been known as ‘No Pay Today.’ Whenever one of the workmen came in late, the supervisor would write down his name and number in a notebook and when evening came he would announce to the guilty party, ‘No pay for you today.’
When he realized that anyone who saw he was going to be late simply stayed at home, rather than put in a day’s work for nothing, he found another way to ‘punish them’, as he expressed it. To prepare their morning tea, the men had to go to the forge at the end of the building and leave their pots there to steep. And in some way Isnard always managed to overturn the pot of anyone who had been late that morning.
One day Doudou had had an argument with Dramé, the lynx-eyed deputy supervisor of the shop. ‘Why should the white men have ten minutes off for their tea when we don’t?’ he had demanded. Dramé had reported the words to Isnard, who immediately summoned Doudou and told him, in front of all the other men, ‘Go and make yourself white and you can have ten minutes, too!’ Doudou had controlled his anger, but the humiliation had never left him. He had never again spoken a word to the supervisor except when it was absolutely necessary.
His meeting with Isnard now caused him considerable uneasiness. His old feelings about him were mingled with his fear of being seen talking to a white man, and he tried to pass it off by staring fixedly at the blackened tips of his sneakers.
‘The strike is really annoying,’ Isnard was saying. ‘The appointments for the new positions on the staff have come in, and I saw your name on the list. Of course I knew it would be there because I proposed you for it a long time ago, but I wanted to keep it as a surprise.’
Isnard had prepared his speech carefully. He knew all of Doudou’s weak points, and he knew that one of them was his love of flattery. He put a hairy hand on the other man’s shoulder, and at the same time glanced rapidly around him, in the hope that someone would be there to see them together. Doudou had noticed Bachirou and Séne Maséne at the corner of the rue du Marché, and he bent over hastily, pretending to be tying a shoelace, but in reality just to escape the contact of the white man’s hand.
Isnard understood the meaning of the trick perfectly and went back to his other arguments. ‘The appointments are effective as of four months ago. That means you would get the pay rise for the whole time all at once – a nice little bundle. You could afford a new wife! I’m damned if there aren’t times when I wish I was an African and could have four wives! But don’t misunderstand me – you know me, and you know that I respect your customs.’ He paused for a moment and then went on, seeming very serious. ‘But that isn’t all. I saw Monsieur Dejean, the director, the other day. You don’t know him now, but you will. He knows you, and we talked about you. You know, I’m going to be retiring soon and – well, it’s you who are going to take my place. It should be Dramé, because of his seniority, but he doesn’t know how to read. So you see, you will soon be taking my place, and then you can have three or four wives if you like, not just two. You’re a damned lucky fellow.’
Isnard’s hand was resting on Doudou’s shoulder again, and his fingers were tapping gently against the collarbone, but Doudou still said nothing. He had scarcely looked at the other man, and when he raised his eyes from studying his shoes he seemed to be looking over his head at the faraway clouds.
‘Ah,’ Isnard said hastily, ‘you almost made me forget the most important thing. Monsieur Dejean told me that I could put three million francs at your disposition right away. It’s not a bribe – I know the African too well for that, and I know it would never work with you. It’s just an advance. What do you think about that? Three million francs in the company’s money – good for anything you want around here.’
This time Doudou looked him straight in the face. The supervisor’s countenance was even redder than usual, and he ran his fingers nervously through his hair. Since Doudou had still said nothing, he was already reproaching himself for having gone too fast. The other man’s silence annoyed him.
Doudou felt a warm glow flooding through his veins, and he flashed a triumphant smile at two astonished passers-by. ‘Neither my grandfather, nor my father, nor myself, in our three lifetimes, could ever have had that much money at one time,’ he thought, and then, aloud, he said, ‘Are you trying to buy me?’
‘No, of course not! I told you that already! It’s just an advance against your seniority rights and your new job. Look, Doudou, you are going to be on the management staff – it’s in your own interest to get the others to go back to work. This strike isn’t doing anyone any good – you or me or the company or your comrades. You’re the secretary of the strike committee, and as soon as the men go back to work it will be you who will work things out with the management.’
‘Three million francs is a lot of money for a Negro lathe operator,’ Doudou said, ‘but even three million francs won’t make me white. I would rather have the ten minutes for tea and remain a Negro.’
For a moment Isnard was silent, but when Doudou started to walk away he walked beside him. ‘You’ll get the ten minutes, and a lot of other things, but the main thing now is to get the men back to work. After that I’m sure that we can work things out. You know that you can trust my word, and I consider the Negro workers just as good as the whites. More than that, I like them.’
Doudou thought he saw his chance for revenge at last. ‘Ibrahim Bakayoko, who is one of our leaders, says that anyone who says, “I like the Negroes”, is a liar.’
‘Ah, that one!’ Isnard growled. ‘He’ll see, when the strike is over …’ Then, as if Doudou had really upset him, he said, ‘Are you saying that I don’t like the Negroes?’
‘Well, if you do, tell me why you do. A black man isn’t an object to be liked or disliked like an orange or a pear or a piece of furniture. So why should you say, “I like them”?’
The simple question perplexed Isnard. He had never thought of Negroes as anything but children – often contrary children, but easily enough managed if you knew how. He sought for a subterfuge. ‘Negroes are men, just like white men, and just as capable – sometimes more so.’
‘Then why don’t we have the same advantages?’
The discussion was beginning to irritate the supervisor, and his expression hardened. He was no longer even thinking about the fact that his three million francs had been turned down; he was too concerned with the whole nature of this astounding rebuff. The structure of ideas on which he had based his life and his conduct in all these years had been shaken, and a rage so great that he doubted his ability to control it surged through him. And then, as if he were to be spared nothing in this moment of humiliation, he saw Leblanc approaching them. He was staggering and waving his arms as he walked, and obviously very drunk. His khaki suit was stained and spotted, and his jacket was hanging open, revealing his naked chest. Isnard clenched his fists.
Leblanc halted when he came up to them and weaved back and forth unsteadily, his bloodshot eyes regarding the two men curiously.
‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘If it isn’t our hero. Just the man we need to make these backward slobs knuckle under. And you, black man, don’t listen to a word he says – he’s a bloody liar.’
‘That’s enough, Leblanc – go home to bed!’ Isnard’s voice sounded as if he were strangling.
‘I’m going – don’t worry, I’m going. But you, black man, tell me something – you know I don’t like you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re right – do you know anything about Greece?’
‘No,’ Doudou said. ‘I don’t.’
‘There – you see! You’re nothing but an ignorant slob!’
‘That’s enough, Leblanc,’ Isnard repeated.
Leblanc ignored him. ‘I tell you, you are ignorant – but you’re not alone in that either. No one has ever been able to tell me why the Greeks knuckled under to the Romans. When you find the answer to that, black man, come and see me!’
Isnard’s anger was now centered entirely on his drunken colleague. He seized him by the shoulders, turned him around, and pushed him violently toward the corner of the nearest street. Doudou turned his back on them and started to walk in the direction of the market place, but had taken only a few steps when Isnard rejoined him.
‘Doudou,’ he said urgently, ‘listen to me! You’re a smart man – you should be with us in this thing, do you understand? … If you don’t want to stay here, in Thiès, we can have you transferred … make you the supervisor in some other town on the line …’
Doudou turned to face him. ‘Do you remember the day you told me that if I wanted the ten minutes all I had to do was to make myself white? And now you’re offering me three million francs … Well, you can keep them; and tell Dejean that whenever he wants to talk about the men going back to work the committee will be at his disposition.’
Then he walked off abruptly, leaving Isnard standing in the middle of the street, muttering angrily to himself, ‘You pig … you dirty son of a bitch … you’ll pay for that!’
*
On his way back to the union office, Doudou passed Bachirou and Séne Maséne, who had been watching his encounter with the supervisor from a distance. He held out his hand to them.
‘It’s not so bad, what I just did,’ he announced cheerfully. ‘I turned down an offer of three million francs. Maybe I should have taken it and turned it over to the committee! Are you coming to the office?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Bachirou said, ‘but we’re not going to the office. We have an errand we have to do. We’ll see you later.’
A little bewildered by this reaction to his news, Doudou continued on his way. Several of the strikers were seated on the steps outside the union office, and in the little room he found Lahbib, sorting mail, and Boubacar, Samba N’Doulougou, and Balla, the welder, sitting about waiting for something to happen.
‘Oh Doudou,’ Lahbib said, ‘I’m glad to see you – there is some news from Bakayoko. He’s on his way here, going to Touba and Djourbel first. There’s also a letter that was mailed here in Thiès, with a ten-thousand-franc note in it. It’s the second time that has happened.’
‘It’s hard to believe that it was a white man who sent it,’ Boubacar said.
‘But they’re the only ones who have that much money right now …’
Lahbib had noticed the smile on Doudou’s face and the gleam of pleasure in his eyes immediately. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Do you have some news?’
Doudou told them in detail about his meeting with Isnard, and, when he had finished, Samba began leaping with joy. He hurled his old cap at the ceiling and caught it again repeatedly, laughing like a child.
‘Hurrah for Doudou!’ he shouted. ‘We’ll have to put this in the newspaper!’
‘I didn’t know you had a newspaper,’ Boubacar said, in his stolid fashion.
‘We don’t, but that doesn’t make any difference. We’ll make up a pamphlet.’
‘And with the money we get for the pamphlet we can go and see the Syrian.’
‘Ha! Listen to him! Listen to my father, Boubacar!’ Samba cried.
‘What did I say now?’ Boubacar demanded.
‘Nothing wrong, brother; nothing at all. Listen, all of you – we’ll take up a subscription for the pamphlet, and then we’ll use the money to buy rice.’
‘But that isn’t honest…’
‘Honest! And Doudou isn’t honest? If the men don’t subscribe for the pamphlet, he’ll have to sell himself for three million francs!’
The room had filled up rapidly, as the news was already being spread through the city, and Doudou was forced to retell his story a dozen times. Suddenly Lahbib, who had been listening thoughtfully, lifted his head.
‘For weeks now,’ he said, ‘I have been wondering where the first crack in their armor would appear. And now we know – this is the first time they have tried anything like this. Now we can beat them!’
Doudou was still talking. ‘… and then Leblanc came up. He was loaded from the bottom and started asking me questions about Greece.’
‘He has been drunk ever since the strike began,’ Balia said.
‘Excuse me, Balla,’ Samba interrupted. ‘Brother Lahbib, you should think about this business of the pamphlet and the rice.’
‘We’ll hold a meeting about it tomorrow, and you can take charge of it, Samba.’
‘Hurrah!’ Samba cried. ‘Hurrah for Doudou! Hurrah for Lahbib! Hurrah for everybody! I’m going to look for Bachirou and Séne Maséne.’
‘No!’ Doudou said. ‘Leave them out of it!’
He wasn’t sure why he had said it, but he didn’t want anyone there who might spoil the pleasure of this moment of rediscovered acclaim. For the first time in weeks he was happy again.