We were on the side of a highway, for Christ’s sake. There was no public to engage with pamphlets and handshakes and signatures on petitions. But there was no office window through which our chants might annoy an executive or foreman as he curled his lip and glared down at us through the slats of blinds he parted with two anxious fingers. The point was to be seen withholding labor otherwise we could have been somewhere riding go-karts and eating soft ice cream. Our picket line hoped to “demonstrate” that we were there at the workplace, without deceit, simply refusing to work. Another objective of the picket line, though, is to shame the agents of power with the picketers’ conspicuous discontent and, through that display, to gain public sympathy and support. If the purpose of a picket line is to obstruct passage in and out of the offending place of business, then our presence there, along Routes 1 and 9, skirting the airport, was entirely symbolic, since we obstructed nothing. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID HANDSCHUH PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID HANDSCHUH “What I’m asking is this: Are your cars, toilets, and entertainment more important than your safe passage from A to B on an airliner?” In the context of the impending strike, the question was less rhetorical than it was a threat.Īir-traffic controllers on strike in Ronkonkoma, New York, in August, 1981. “I’m not suggesting that these jobs don’t have value,” he assured readers. Writing with the patronizing tone of a high-school disciplinarian, he listed several occupations that are better paid than controllers. In the week leading up to the strike, before negotiations failed to produce an acceptable contract for the union, a Los Angeles-area controller named Gerald W. Convection blurs our view of the terminals in the distance. We tramp the gravel, level the asters, and sedge grass on the roadside. When I woke up this morning my mother confirmed that the word was out: strike! Seven thousand flights across the U.S. How long had they been preparing for this? It’s been the center of concern in our house for weeks. The stretch marks beneath his sweat-stained shirtsleeve scribble a polygraph on the trunk of his bicep. Sun catches in the penumbra of his hair when he turns to face me, and I squint until I fit into his shadow. Vaguely overweight, his beard and Afro round out his chubby face.
In this, at least, I hold my father infallible. Nothing, though, causes me to question the righteousness of our mission. Although many cars honk in solidarity with the air-traffic-controller strike, odds are the honk will precede a driver’s flipping us the bird. Highway grit settles across my brow and our picket line warps in the heat. Uncharacteristically reckless now, he heaves them with neither accuracy nor discrimination at the passing traffic. He no longer needs them, confident his enemies will notice the deft lacerations of his wit in some later moment of quiet reflection. As the world’s leading scholar on Gregory Pardlo, Sr., I know these pronouncements he’s polished, these homemade koans impenetrable to reason, that were once the punch lines of tired jokes. Of everyone here, I’m the one who has the least trouble deciphering his private meanings. “Figure it out,” he tells me when he mistakes the look on my face for confusion. And when he throws his hands up and cries, “What, and leave show business?” he brandishes his placard like a spear. “I take it you’re not in this for the sport!” he shouts. Notice the downward cast of my eyes as my father bellows at the frothing traffic in response to the hecklers strafing us from passing vehicles. We are the only two black people in the group, but this isn’t why we stand out. “United,” we cry, “we will never be defeated.” I’m the one with the Phillies cap and the sky-blue Keds, Little Greg, walking the picket line beside his father, Big Greg.
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A group of air-traffic controllers, their wives, and kids, we carry signs emblazoned with the logo of PATCO, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, and chant a medley of protest slogans most of us are learning for the first time. Around two-thirty in the afternoon the eggs land wide of us along the highway.
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