Road to Nowhere. Ch3. The Sign.
Madeline meets Mr. Walker, whose gas station is threatened by a road-widening project.
An ACORN member stands in front of a tractor in 1979. Photo by United State of ACORN newsletter
1975-1976
As I drove through Pine Bluff’s small downtown and out Ohio Street to the southeast side, my thoughts were racing.
I came to ACORN for its vision, but its reality was a bit more mundane. They charged me $50 a month rent out of my $200 monthly paycheck for my living space on the second floor of the house that served as our office. The pay was low even for back then, below minimum wage, and that was not even counting the extreme seven-day workweek. But they had a plan to make America a real democracy, so I stayed.
My ACORN predecessor had spent a few minutes orienting me before he drove out of town.
“The files are in this cabinet,” he pointed. “Here’s a list of board members. Most of our neighborhood groups need to be re-organized, because some of them are kind of dead. We supported the firefighters in their strike, but they lost. We opposed the sales tax for the convention center, which we won, but they’re building it anyway. You can have my TV for fifty bucks.”
Then he was gone. All I knew was what I learned in Dallas: how to organize an ACORN neighborhood group. Actually, that was a pretty wonderful thing to know. You knock on a thousand doors in a month to identify local concerns and potential leaders, ask folks to join, and pay $10-per-year dues. You hold house meetings to develop good leaders and issues, then you go into the big neighborhood meeting. As the organizer, you sit on the side at that meeting, with the leaders you found up front running the meeting, proposing action plans, and running for office. Next, you go to work on local, winnable issues.
Issues are tools that allow organizers to build powerful organizations. But I hadn’t yet found any good issues in Pine Bluff. That was why I was so excited when I pulled up to Walker’s small gas station on Ohio Street and noticed a large, hand-written sign posted out front. In big, bold, colorful letters, it declared “This Ain’t HUD’s Mud!”
I laughed out loud, delighted. I didn’t understand it, but I loved the in-your-face-ness of it.
I got out of my clunkety Dodge Dart and walked over to meet the medium height, fortyish, dark-skinned man wearing grease-stained jeans and cleaning a customer’s windshield.
“You the ACORN lady?” the man asked, looking me right in the eye. I already knew that Black folks in Pine Bluff did not look white folks in the eye, not at first anyway. They seemed to be mostly from an era before Black Power: nice, indirect, their gaze cast sort of downward. After all, they were raised to take care of white people, or else. Here was a Black man who probably took care of some people, but I had a feeling white folks weren’t among them. He wiped his hands on a rag at his waist and stuck out his hand. “Walker, Walker’s my name. You like my sign?” He burst into a big loud laugh.
That laugh. It held the anger, the intelligence, the confidence of the man in front of me. I joined in, delighted at the possibilities that the sign and the man implied. “Yeah, I’m Madeline,” I responded. “I like it a lot.”
To Be Continued:
This piece is the third of 15 short chapters and will be continued in the next organizing story.