Monday, August 3, 1981. Around two-thirty in the afternoon the eggs land wide of us along the highway. 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. “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. We are the only two black people in the group, but this isn’t why we stand out. 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.

“I take it you’re not in this for the sport!” he shouts. And when he throws his hands up and cries, “What, and leave show business?” he brandishes his placard like a spear.

“Figure it out,” he tells me when he mistakes the look on my face for confusion. Of everyone here, I’m the one who has the least trouble deciphering his private meanings. 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. The jokes themselves are vestigial. He no longer needs them, confident his enemies will notice the deft lacerations of his wit in some later moment of quiet reflection. Uncharacteristically reckless now, he heaves them with neither accuracy nor discrimination at the passing traffic.

Highway grit settles across my brow and our picket line warps in the heat. 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. Or worse. Nothing, though, causes me to question the righteousness of our mission. In this, at least, I hold my father infallible.

He glistens. Vaguely overweight, his beard and Afro round out his chubby face. Sun catches in the penumbra of his hair when he turns to face me, and I squint until I fit into his shadow. The stretch marks beneath his sweat-stained shirtsleeve scribble a polygraph on the trunk of his bicep. How long had they been preparing for this? It’s been the center of concern in our house for weeks. When I woke up this morning my mother confirmed that the word was out: strike! Seven thousand flights across the U.S. were immediately cancelled.

We tramp the gravel, level the asters, and sedge grass on the roadside. There is garbage; there are wildflowers. Convection blurs our view of the terminals in the distance. Newark. 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. McCormick published an op-ed in the L.A. Times. Writing with the patronizing tone of a high-school disciplinarian, he listed several occupations that are better paid than controllers. “I’m not suggesting that these [other] jobs don’t have value,” he assured readers. “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.

This is the first day we’ve actually formed a picket line, and already I’m impatient for this to be over. I can smell my father’s uncertainty, too, something smoldering I want to douse by distracting him with an innocent question, maybe. I can’t ask him the real question, because he doesn’t know: When can he go back to work? When, that is, can we go back to our once triumphant lives?

Air-traffic controllers on strike in Ronkonkoma, New York, in August, 1981. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID HANDSCHUH PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID HANDSCHUH

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. 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. Our picket line hoped to “demonstrate” that we were there at the workplace, without deceit, simply refusing to work. The point was to be seen withholding labor; otherwise we could have been somewhere riding go-karts and eating soft ice cream. 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. There was no public to engage with pamphlets and handshakes and signatures on petitions. We were on the side of a highway, for Christ’s sake. Not that we had petitions anyway.

Earlier that day, Monday, August 3, 1981, President Ronald Reagan had issued his ultimatum, appearing at a press conference in the Rose Garden at the White House, wearing a gray suit and a red-and-blue candy-striped tie, his hair pomped back like some superannuated R. & B. singer. Each controller had taken an oath, he remarked, swearing not to participate in any strike against the government, and so, pursuant to an oft-flouted statute in Title 5 of the United States Code banning federal employees from striking, air-traffic controllers were “in violation of the law.” Then, with that preternatural calm of his, which looked so much like simple good will, he laid it out: “If they do not report for work within forty-eight hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.”

It had been the biggest joke in the days leading up to the strike. Whenever anyone in the union hall voiced a concern or fear about the outcome of the strike, the reply, met with laughter, was the same: “What are they going to do, fire us all?” The joke was based on more than mere arrogance. Less than a year earlier, in return for a carefully worded letter from a politician on the campaign trail, PATCO, headed by Bob Poli, had endorsed Reagan’s bid to oust the incumbent President Jimmy Carter.