Remembering Norman

In the summer of 1968, a friend of mine, Ignatius Coffey, and I came to New York for the first
time. We were students in University College Dublin, part of an early wave of young Irish kids on J-1 visas, taking advantage of the summer earning possibilities in the United States. 1968 was an awful year – Martin Luther King was assassinated in the spring; Bobby Kennedy was taken down in the early part of our stay in New York; and the national argument about the Vietnam War was raging throughout the country.

We got a job through family connections in a warehouse in Harlem. We were part of a unionized workforce of about 300, all of whom were engaged in filling and packing orders for company stores throughout the United States. The workers and the bosses were nearly all white, mostly Irish and Italian. The shop stewards in the Teamsters’ Union were very powerful guys who made sure that management rarely asserted themselves. Eventhough we were at the bottom of the pecking order for overtime assignments, we were able to earn extra money because most of the other workers felt they would be paying too much tax on the overtime money. Our basic salary was $125 a week, and we earned enough that summer to pay our fees and living expenses the following year.

You could count on one hand the number of non-white workers in the warehouse. They kept their heads down and said little to anybody. Except for Norman! He was a tall Black man, a Vietnam veteran, who for some unknown reason, wore both shoulder braces and a belt to keep his pants in place. He was a gregarious, loquacious fellow who spoke to all comers. Unfortunately, his bonhomie evoked a blatant racist response from many of his workmates. “Hey, Norman, were you up any trees with your friends, picking bananas, this morning! Ha! Ha! Ha!” was one fairly-common morning greeting that he heard regularly. Ignatius and I were certainly not part of the super-enlightened at the time, but we were shocked to hear such awful denigration of another human being. Norman sensed our shock and would spend time with us, talking and joking.

We often wondered why he tolerated such abuse. Why didn’t he lash out at one of the ignoramuses? Maybe he sucked up the abuse because he wanted to hold on to his Union job at any cost. Whatever the reason, he responded to the taunts and put-downs in a way that might well suggest to his tormentors that he was enjoying their “banter.”

Ignatius and I are still good friends. He is now principal of a large community high school in Dublin. We meet fairly regularly, and, occasionally, we talk about Norman, still speculating about what made him tick, what kept him going, in the summer of 68, the year that we first came to New York.

I thought of Norman this historic month when, in the memorable line of the poet Seamus Heaney, “ Once in a Lifetime Hope and History Can Rhyme.” I hope Norman is still around to celebrate what seemed impossible a mere forty years ago.