The Higgins 5th Army

Levi walked through the chilly Coventry air, pulling his shirt a bit more tightly around his neck. Making his way down the high street, he turned down a tight small road, recognizing on a sign about halfway down the name of the mechanics shop he’d been told. He wasn’t sure how this one would go. Two or three beforehand hadn’t landed anything long-term and while he had a little bit of cushion and a safe place to stay, he didn’t want to go too much longer without a good full-time job.

Getting one to even talk to a Black man was an effort onto itself. Then once there, navigating comments about his accent and whether they could understand him to interview, much less do the work, was another; not that they made much effort. After all, it was England, 1959. Black folks, regardless of where in the Caribbean they were from, were supposed to be just happy to have the opportunity to be there – never mind that the only reason they were there was that Britain was a shell of itself after World War II ended in 1945. The Brits had no intention that these people would stay.

“I’m looking for George,” Levi carefully spoke, in his clearest English.

The young man to whom he was speaking, maybe in his early 20s and a little greasy, looked up and blew a puff of air out of the side of his mouth. He sized Levi up in a glance and then, without saying a word, tilted his head to the right in the direction of an older man standing in the middle of the automobile bay. Levi did the slightest of nods in acknowledgement that the young man had exerted his energy to summon a nod, and started walking into the shop. There were maybe eight men inside, working on a variety of cars, some were standing underneath vehicles that were hoisted high in the air, others were on their backs underneath the cars. Good thing the large vertical doors were hoisted to the very top, because if not, it wouldn’t have been a pleasant smell.

Levi walked up to George. “Morning,” he started, “I’m Levi Higgins and I was told to come see you about a mechanic job.”

A slight accent leaked out as he said “mawning” instead of “morning.” George looked up from the clipboard he was scanning and, without moving his head, scanned Levi in much the same way he had the papers in his hands. Levi could tell from the way both had surveyed him that they weren’t used to working with Black men. It registered in his mind that no others were in the shop.

“Yeah,” George replied in his central English accent. “They told me at the pub that you’re supposed to be good. We only take top men here.”

Just then, there was a noticeable increase in the noises in the shop as the men swung into full gear, the early morning haze dissipating from both the external air and their sleepy minds, and the fullness of the day hitting all.

George started walking towards a wall of offices in the back left corner and said, “Follow me.”

Levi walked, noticing, as he did so, the tools in the shop and the kinds of cars on which the men were working. Yeah, this was a good shop. As they entered the small office with windows all around the top of it so George could look out onto the shop floor, George plopped into the cracked leather cushion on the squeaky chair behind the desk. He motioned with his hand for Levi to sit down on the hard wood one on the other side. Levi soundlessly sat.

“Tell me about your work,” George said, squinting his eyes a bit as he leaned back and continued to size up the tall Black man in front of him.

“Well, I was the best mechanic in my part of Jamaica, which was pretty large,” Levi began.

He started detailing the types of cars on which he’d worked, the varying transmissions and engines on which he was an expert, and the varying tools and machinery on which he’d honed his craft.

After giving a comprehensive view of his expertise, he concluded with, “I got here to England about three months ago and have done a few small jobs here and there and I’m ready to settle into a steady job now.”

George listened, not giving indication of what he’d actually heard of the man in front of him. “Cocky” was the word he’d heard multiple times. “Doesn’t know his place,” was another. From his nook in the corner of the pub, an ale in his hand most nights, he’d heard that a couple auto shop owners had brought him in on a couple small jobs to test out whether, as Black men around town said, he was the best. His work was exceptional, alright, but none could get around the air of arrogance he seemed to carry. Apparently, he was a man of few words and didn’t actually say much, but the times he had spoken up, they didn’t much like what he had to say. That didn’t deter George, though. The other words he consistently heard were “master mechanic.”

Levi sat silently, waiting. The silence made George realize it was his turn to speak as, apparently, by the way Levi was looking at him, it may have been silent for a while.

“What pay are you asking?”

George threw the words in Levi’s direction like a poker player throwing cards on the table after an opponent had uttered the words, “Call.”

This is where George, through his many years running the shop, had learned just how good at his craft a man really was or wasn’t. A man who said he was good at what he did but didn’t ask for that kind of salary was just bluffing.

Levi smiled slightly at the question, a line or two creasing at the side of his eyes as his mouth turned momentarily upward then returned to its normal state. George was looking directly at him, almost expectantly.

“I’ll work for the week,” Levi said, “and at the end of the week, you pay me. If I think it’s a fair amount, I’ll come back.”

George almost laughed out loud. What kind of an answer was that? But he could tell by the look on the face of the man sitting across from him that he was serious. So, he simply leaned back in his chair a bit and nodded.

“Alright,” George said. Can you start now?”

Levi had a toolbox in his hand when he walked in the shop and was wearing overalls, so the answer felt obvious to George as well as him, but Levi nodded a yes. They both got up and George showed him around the shop.

It was a Monday and the week went by quickly and without incident. True to the rumors, Levi was one of the best George had seen. Like clockwork, he showed up at 6am and went right to work. No matter the car or tool, he was easily more advanced than all but one or two of the men in the shop. Good men. Unlike some of the other shops, George ran a tight ship. Men were there to work and not start trouble, so everything went well and, though he never gave a word of encouragement or note, George was pleased.

Then came Friday. Payday. The men lined up one by one outside the office and came into the office to get their envelope of cash. George, looking through the glass of the office, could see as he handed the envelope to one of the men, that Levi was a couple men behind and would be entering the office soon. George had thought long and hard about what to pay him, with Levi’s curious but seemingly innocuous pay solution ultimately creating quite a quandary. The work had been topnotch. George knew it, Levi knew it, and every man on the shop floor knew it. One or two of the shop managers had even directly asked George how much he was paying this man, after seeing the level of work.

George had brushed it off, but knew the message was clear that this Black man had better not be paid more than them. George had laughed at the notion, which reassured them that wouldn’t be the case. The fact was that George had no intention of paying a Jamaican, literally fresh off the boat, what he paid the white men who had worked for him for years, regardless of how good he was.

At the same time, George wasn’t going to take the risk of paying him near the bottom. The work was that good. If a couple of the less experienced white men found out that Levi was earning more than them and left, that was a risk George was willing to take.

Levi walked into the office and nodded slightly at George. George raised his hand, handed him the envelope and Levi turned and left, neither man saying a word.

George glanced out his office windows into the shop as he handed the next man his envelope. Levi never broke stride or opened the envelope as he walked out into the Friday afternoon air. George, finished with the distribution of envelopes, closed the lockbox, grabbed his coat and hat, and locked the office while a couple men pulled down the doors of the shop. Everything secure, they laughed as they ambled down the road to the pub.

Monday came. The weekend had been the usual for George – time with his mates Friday night, family time on Saturday, church on Sunday followed by a good meal.

He opened the office at 5:30am as he usually did during the week, pouring hot coffee from his thermos into a tin mug while a couple of the managers pushed up the shop doors and set out tools. One by one or sometimes in small groups, the mechanics started trickling in. Some finished a cigarette before making their way through the doors, some said a couple words about what they did over the weekend and, for the most part, it was just like any other Monday morning.

“Guvnor,” one of the men nodded as he punched his time card.

George nodded back and raised his mug.

“Mornin,” another nodded as he walked by.

George acknowledged each but his attention was divided. From the corner of his eye, he periodically glanced at the clock on the office wall.

6:05. 6:10. 6:15.

—--------------------------------------- —------------------------------------

Levi opened the fridge and took out a small pot. It was mid-morning but he yawned as he began to fully wake up. Cornmeal porridge. It would have to do today. He’d waited until he’d gotten home on Friday to open the envelope. It was what he’d expected.

There was a time just a few months ago when he would have been overjoyed to get a check of that size. In fact, he actually was. That’s what led to his first altercation with a white British man. A friend had told Levi about an auto shop needing someone for a day or two while a man was out sick. Having only been in the country a couple weeks, he jumped at the chance.

After two days of what he knew was excellent work, when the week ended on Friday, the garage owner gave him an envelope with his pay. Stepping into a corner of the garage bay, he pulled up one side of the flap of the envelope and a smile came over his face. Wait until he told his brothers and dad what he’d earned from just a couple days' work.

Folding the envelope and putting it into his back pocket, he made a step or two towards the large garage doors.

“Hey, Jamaica,” one of the men he’d been working with over the last couple days said. “What you so happy ‘bout?”

Levi shrugged his shoulders with a sheepish smile and the man laughed.

“Pay day, eh?”

As the man put on his coat and continued toward the door at the same pace with Levi, he asked, “So, what they give you for a couple days work?”

Feeling like it was no big deal, and a little proud of what he’d been able to earn in those couple days – more than his brothers or father would likely earn in a week or maybe two – he told the man.

The man laughed, so hard that he stopped to hold his belly.

“Jamaica,” he said, "I earned that much while I was peeing in the bathroom in the last hour.”

Levi couldn’t tell if the man was just trying to get under his skin, so he kept walking.

“Hey, Tom,” the man shouted to another of the mechanics making his way toward the door, “Jamaica thinks he made big money!” Both men laughed as the first man started to add some additional words for color.

Within a couple of moments, Levi snapped. He lunged and had gotten both his hands on the shirt collar before the second man stepped in and separated them.

“You know how much I make, Jamaica?” the first man sneered, straightening his collar.

He said the number, and Levi understood why he laughed.

“You’re a good mechanic, Jamaica,” the man threw over his shoulder as he and a couple more men started walking out the door. “But you know what you’ll never be?”

He paused for emphasis as he walked out the door.

“White.”

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From that day, two things happened. Fewer auto shops were willing to give Levi a chance, regardless of his skills, and Levi made it his business to find out what white mechanics earned.

Sometimes, he’d stand around outside pubs or pool halls he knew were popular with them – the ones he could safely go – and he’d casually smoke a cigarette or two outside as he listened to men talk. More often, he tried to get information from the Black men he thought might know, other Jamaicans or Caribbeans or Africans who worked in the trade. Often, they didn’t have the benefit of a strong sense either, but they’d pass along what they knew.

The result was that, after a couple months, he confirmed what should have been obvious, but what felt really hard to accept: what he made from a couple side jobs here and there was indeed more than almost all the Black men made, but not what the white men made, most of whom weren’t skilled mechanics the way he was. It was a hard pill to swallow.

Levi had been the fourth one in the family to leave Jamaica and he’d done it reluctantly. He wasn’t rich there but he was comfortable. The weather was beautiful and when it got too hot, after work he could jump in the Rio Grande. Everyone knew he was the best mechanic in the region, so his work was secure, people respected him, and he made enough to go out on weekends, enjoy life and do the things he wanted to do.

But his sister Mildred went to England in 1951 to study nursing and the Higgins immigration to the UK began. To be clear, members of the family had traveled abroad before. Grandpa Zhang, his mother’s father, was a shipbuilder who often went to Cuba and other parts of the Caribbean. And Uncle Joseph, an Anglican Canon, did a pulpit exchange in the UK for a year at a diocese there. Even Levi had been abroad. Throughout the 1950s, he and some of his brothers had spent months at a time in Florida in the United States, picking oranges and doing other farm work. None, however, ever left with the intention to stay.

That changed when Mildred went to England and sent word there was opportunity there. Though they’d been triumphant, Britain’s economy was weak when World War II ended in 1945. They needed workers to help rebuild and to fill the labor shortage, and colonies across the British Empire were a natural answer. The British Nationality Act of 1948 gave all British subjects, including those born in British colonies, the right to settle in the UK. Britain opened its borders, even if not its soul. To the Brits, who had first tried recruiting white Europeans from other countries that had been negatively impacted by the war, the recruitment of Black Caribbeans was a short-term necessity. In their minds, after the work was done, all would return from whence they came.

When Mildred arrived in England in 1951, nursing was a natural choice, as it would be for her younger sisters, Beverly and Hope, who arrived in the years after. While there was a need for women in other sectors, there were many opportunities in healthcare. The BBC even produced a pamphlet used by Caribbean would-be nurses and other travelers, called, “Going To Britain?” By the early 1970s, there were more than 10,000 Black nurses in the UK and the Higgins girls were among them. While their training led to less prestigious options than their white counterparts, they saw the opportunity and took it.

For the men in the Higgins family, the professional path felt less clear – but there was a path. The UK needed physical rebuilding as well as economic rebuilding, so construction, manufacturing and public transportation were sectors in which jobs were readily available.

Dad was the first man to go, leaving for England in 1952, a year after Mildred. After Beverly in ‘54, brothers Sydney, Levi, Basil and Herbert as well as sister Hope all immigrated between 1958 and 1964. They joined others creating a new life in “the Mother Country.” More Caribbeans immigrated to England in the 1950s than Indians, Pakistanis and Africans. In fact, between 1948 and 1970, almost half a million Caribbeans arrived in Britain.

Despite every indication that a mechanic as skilled as he was could build a life in England, Levi was reluctant. It was his mother, Eloise, who helped push him past those hesitations.

“What are you waiting for?” she asked one night as they were eating outside, not far from the carefully-arranged stones on which they cooked their food. The night was beautiful and clear and Eloise spoke in the clearest of English.

Living in what most developed countries would consider poverty, Eloise was still one of the most highly educated women, if not the most educated, in the Rio Grande Valley. Born in 1905, she’d accomplished the unusual feat of completing high school and her older sister, Lena, born at the turn of the century, had gone on to teacher’s college and become a teacher. Educated to the extent that she was, Eloise didn’t speak patois, or Jamaican Creole as it came to be called by linguists.

“What are you waiting for?” she repeated softly but firmly, since Levi’s only response had been a shrug. He was a grown man of twenty-one and she rarely questioned him. But in this case, she pressed on.

“Levi, we have a saying,” she continued, as if he didn’t already know every saying she was likely to voice. He listened anyway.

“He who has raw meat must seek fire.”

And with that, she got up and walked into the wood house.

He thought about that all night, but in the patois he spoke: If yu have raw meat yu haffi seek fire.

He’d heard this one many times. It was most often hurled at a child who was being lazy or at someone waiting for another to do for them something that they, with a little ambition, could do for themselves.

Francis Bacon’s 1625 phrase, “If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain,” was somewhat similar. However, the Jamaican version carried a bit more urgency, as Jamaican words often did. You have raw meat. You need fire. Find it.

His mother was telling him to go and seek a bigger life, a better life.

And he listened.

—--------------------------------------- —------------------------------------

Armed with knowledge of what white mechanics in England earned, Levi set out with a unique job search and salary negotiation strategy. He only wanted to give his valuable skills to a shop that, in turn, valued him. Whether for small jobs or large ones, he’d let the shop owner or manager set the wage.

He would tell them up front for how long he would work and he’d let them know that, at the end of that time period, after seeing his work, they could pay him whatever they felt fair. If he, on seeing the amount, thought the amount was fair, then he’d return. If not, he wouldn’t.

For months, Levi went through shop after shop in West Midlands county. Almost everyone wanted him back and he developed a reputation that was pristine; no one could argue with his work. However, no one wanted to take a chance on upsetting the white mechanics by paying a Black man more. It might take a week, or two or three but eventually it would get out and then any shop with that situation would have a problem on their hands. After all, the majority of mechanics were white and all the customers were white. It wasn’t worth the risk, no matter how good the mechanic.

In the Spring, Levi was finishing a week on a potential job. The shop manager, Richard, knew he needed someone with Levi’s experience. The shop was on the verge of turning away customers because they didn’t have enough skilled mechanics. Richard had known of Levi’s reputation before agreeing to see him, but he only momentarily weighed the pros and cons before agreeing to Levi’s typical work arrangement.

At the end of the week, as the mechanics climbed the staircase from the shop floor to Richard’s office to get their pay envelope, Richard told Levi to come upstairs last. As the last of the other men walked out the office, Levi’s shadow crossed the doorway.

“Here,” Richard said, thrusting the envelope in Levi’s direction. True to form, Levi’s work had been exceptional. In equally true form, Richard didn’t want to take the risk of upsetting the white workers.

“I know from the grapevine that you’ve turned down this amount from other shops before,” Richard said, eyeing Levi from his seat behind the desk. Levi said nothing as he reached for the envelope.

“This is fair for a Black man,” Richard began to argue, though the argument was only against himself, as Levi had not said a word. “This has to be more than any of your friends or family make,” Richard continued.

Levi took the envelope and headed for the office door, turning on the landing to walk down the steps. Richard got up from his desk, yelling slightly at Levi’s back, “So, you’re not gonna come back?” The volume of his voice betrayed how much he actually cared about the answer.

Levi never paused and continued walking down the stairs. “You think you’re gonna find anything better? For someone like you?” Now, Richard actually was shouting.

Levi never paused. He reached the last step and walked onto the shop floor. The shop was almost empty and the few men still around feigned packing up, curiously peering at the situation from the corners of their eyes.

“You think you’re better than everyone else? You think you’re better than us?” George yelled down from the landing outside his office door.

Levi’s long strides silently took him across the shop floor as he headed toward the door in the far corner.

“What exactly are you looking for?” George flung the words across the cavernous shop in exasperation.

Levi neared the door, his footsteps the only other sound as his answer echoed back across the shop floor.

“Fire.”