189 Book Review
Woody, Cisco and Me: Seamen Three in the Merchant Marine
by Jim Longhi (Urbana; University of Illinois Press) Pp 275
Bill Barry, Dundalk (MD) Community College
Woody, Cisco and Me is a terrific book in many ways: work, war, music, race, politics, sex, love, friendship and, of course, unionism of the most political and dedicated sort, all show up in this “road” book. The road consisted of three trans-Atlantic round trips in the Merchant Marine in 1943-44 made by Jim Longhi and his two extraordinary road buddies—or should I pun “fellow travelers”?-- Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston.
Longhi (rhymes with “shorty”) is the son of Italian immigrants in New York City who mockingly portrays himself as a radical guy (“Wasn’t I raised on anti-fascism? Did Pop ever allow me to drink a glass of wine without toasting ‘Morte’ – death to Mussolini and his blackshirts? Was I ever allowed to pass any man dressed in black without touching my balls and muttering “Fongul al fascismo?”) with a case of the fears in 1943. “You cowardly bastard,” he said to himself in the NMU hiring hall, “You should have shipped out or joined the Army the day war was declared. Instead, it’s eighteen months later, and you’re still here. You’ve got overcooked spaghetti for a backbone and tomato sauce instead of blood in your veins.
As we first meet him in the NMU hall spring, 1943, Longhi has been recruited by the two figures of talent and courage. Woody’s autobiography, Bound For Glory, is a success. Both of them could have been exempted from military services, Woody for his families and Cisco for his bad eyes but both of them show up at the hall complete with instruments, those Machines Which Kill Fascists, ready to ship out as messmen in the Merchant Marine. Not only do they drag Longhi along but they buy him a guitar, make him part of their trio, elect him union chairman on his last voyage, and join him in a marvelous series of adventures.
For the next 16 months, the three buddies ship out together, back and forth across the Atlantic, with side trips to Sicily, Africa, Scotland, and northern Ireland. Longhi has a novelist’s skill, blending together all of the wild episodes into an exciting narrative. A good deal of time is given to the simple descriptions of work on a ship, proving that work can be fascinating topic. Longhi first shipped out as a messman and then, after enrolling in a baker’s school to extend his honeymoon by a month, as a Second Baker. You get the descriptions of preparing and serving meals, the fear of falling as a Baker (an outraged crew often punished an incompetent cook or baker by pissing on him as he slept!), living in cramped quarters, dealing with fear and tedium of the long convoys, constantly attacked by U-boats.
Throughout the book, Woody is the central figure, not just Woody the singer but Woody the tireless and imaginative organizer. Assigned to the gun-crew mess, instead of dutifully setting the tables, Woody designed brilliant flowered blackboards, announcing some dumpy stew as “Aunt Jenny’s Prize-winning Saturday-night Special,” and so thrilling the crew that they then set their own tables. Face with morale problems on their first ship, Woody created an AntiCyclone and Ship-Speeder-Upper out of the wood scraps to make the cumbersome freighter go faster. In a wonderful episode on their third convoy, Woody integrated an enormous troop ship headed for the D-Day invasion by singing with black crew members in a segregated bathroom, and then refusing to sing in front of a white audience unless the blacks could sing with him.
The book creates a lot of tension, so give credit once again to Longhi’s skills. We know that all three of them survived the war, but he describes each day as thrilling and perilous, as if it would be their last. Pursued by U-boats, two of their three ships were hit, and were menaced by waves as tall as a 10-story building, in boats built by the lowest bidder. So read this book twice, once make sure the three really do make it through alive, and once to savor all of the extraordinary characters and episodes that are wound together. Enjoy the sublime—the union meetings, the endless political discussions, the trip inland at Sicily to find the mother of Longhi’s friend from New York City and enjoy the ridiculous—a vindictive farting war between Woody and Cisco that lasted for days, with both combatants piling in cans of beans to stoke up their productivity.
And enjoy Woody and Cisco as the conflicting political currents of the 1940s are tossing them around. After Woody wrote an article for the Sunday Worker, the FBI took away his seaman’s papers but Cisco was sent out on tour by the State Department and eventually, This Land is Your Land became almost a second national anthem. It is a rare book which can capture the qualities of true friendship, and Longhi embraces Cisco, “my beautiful Cisco,” and Woody, showing them in all of their humor and vitality, even as the shadows are drawing upon them: Cisco was dead at age 42 in his beloved California while Woody deteriorated for years with Huntington’s Chorea. Longhi is then left alone to tell the tale, even if it took him more than 50 years to get it to us. In this short review, it is difficult to describe the energy and affection of the characters, or the wild episodes that they stumble through. Read it for yourself—you will love it.
Finally, this book is a wholesome antidote to all of the vomit-inducing myths about World War II. As I was reading the book, our local rag ran an op-ed article by Stephen Ambrose, who celebrated soldiers “who were successful because of what they learned in the war: the value of teamwork, initiative, self-discipline and national unity.” Woody, Cisco and Me is the worker’s answer to John Wayne, history truly from the bottom up, a memoir of disunity and solidarity, racism, class hatred, and most importantly, of workers and their union struggles, their fears, their prejudices and conniving, and their greatness.