Love’s Labors: The Killing Floor Illuminates the Dream of an Interracial Workers’ Movement

The story is based on court transcripts found by the film’s executive producer, Elsa Rassbach, who was struck by the testimony of two Black workers on opposite sides of the union fight. Frank and Heavy (Moses Gunn), who may be acting on his own initiative or for the bosses, are at odds over more than collective bargaining. Throughout the film, people who love each other, hate each other, or have no strong feelings at all find themselves in disagreement over the best way to survive white supremacy. There are those like Frank, who sees a way forward in a multiracial workers’ movement. Then there are those like Heavy, who refuses to join the union and agitates against them. The script wisely makes Heavy more of an obstacle than a villain. In his eyes, they are all compelled to work for white men, but that doesn’t mean they should work with them. He is a pawn, but he submits to being one because of a visceral knowledge of racism. For him, it is better to be defeated than deluded.

In Lonely Crusade, another Chester Himes novel, a Black organizer reflects upon the paradox of the Black worker. Himes writes, “It had taken him some time to realize the scope of the Negro worker’s attitude toward unionism. At once it was a curious mixture of logical antipathy and great expectation.” The Killing Floor rides the tension produced by these polarities until it explodes. The pressure of these forces, and the palpable anger that arises from it, ought to sap these characters of their vitality. But the work is elevated by its attention to the love that sustains them. For much of the film, Frank is cut off from his family, and all his communications with them are passed through others. At first it is the middleman who sets newcomers up with jobs. When Frank says that he is trying to work his way up to being a butcher, the man warns him, “You might be up north, but you still got to stay in your place. Don’t be pushing too hard now.” Frank finds someone else to write for him—Miss Lila (Mary Alice), a woman who charges fifty cents a letter at a time when it is five dollars to join the union and seventy-five cents a month to stay in. When he asks her to write to his wife, Mattie, that he is on his way to becoming a butcher, she encourages him and says, “We don’t have to settle for crumbs when there’s plenty of bread out there.” But crumbs are mostly what’s on offer. During the holidays, company executives give every worker a package of sausage as a present. There are many indignities in the film, most of them more violent than this, but returning the product of labor back to the laborers and calling it magnanimity is a prominent one.    

In such an isolating and callous world, it is hard for Frank to find the tenderness of friends and lovers. When Christmas comes, a Polish worker gives Frank a wafer and an apple. Though apparently touched by the gesture, Frank in turn tries to give the gift to Miss Lila. She refuses but, seeing it means something to him, agrees to take it and in return gives him a coat that belonged to her late husband. In the exchange he reaches out and takes hold of her hand. The close-up affords the slight touch all the weight a pounding heart would give it. Her blouse is pink with cherries on it. His left hand cups three of her fingers, delicately, as though he were touching aged paper in a well-loved book. “Miss Lila,” he starts with a faltering voice. She cups his hand and interrupts, “Frank, you’re just a little lonely, that’s all. It’s Christmastime.” He withdraws. A less elegant vision would have reduced this moment to a lonesome man in a big city trying for a holiday tryst. There is some of that elsewhere, but the handling here complicates that characterization, making a light, fleeting touch feel perilous. She has been the mouthpiece of all his intimacies. When he says, “my dear Mattie,” she writes, “my dearest.” For some time, the entirety of his marriage is conducted through her. She seems to understand the situation better than he does. The act passes in an instant. It is the kind that is really nothing at all but sits in the memory, stinging sweetly at first and guiltily later on.

When Mattie (Alfre Woodard) finally arrives, she and Frank embrace in bed, thrilling in the nearness of each other. The moonlight traces the contours of their muscles, and as they turn their faces pass in and out of darkness. He kisses her shoulder, she kisses his hand, and they are interrupted by a burst of laughter next door. Mattie is startled, unaccustomed to having to ignore the city’s intrusions in intimate moments. She stops and asks if he has been faithful. He assures her he has. It’s the truth, but the pink lace running down Mattie’s white nightgown like the sash and cherries on Miss Lila at Christmas makes it feel like it’s not the whole of it. It’s not deception, just the faint echo of a different life. He gives her a gift. She gives him a kiss. A newsreel bursts forth: the war is over.

The 1919 Chicago race riot ends the union’s hopes. In real life, it began with a Black teenager being murdered for swimming in the white section of a beach, and erupted into the most violent of that summer’s nationwide spasms of terror. Until federal troops arrived, the Black neighborhoods were cut off from the rest of the city by marauding rioters. In the film, the bosses seize the moment to rehire the now destitute Black workers as scabs. It is an old trick: starve people, give them crumbs, and call it progress. Heavy is placed in charge of the distribution of food and takes pleasure in humiliating Frank, who has been saved by the company and the government, not his union. Frank is unyielding. “I didn’t ride that boxcar all the way up here to be the same as I left,” he shouts at Heavy and everyone. “I was nothing when I come up here, but I ain’t gonna stay nothing.”

Bill Duke’s debut is a rarity. It is an American film financed by unions and public money that tells the story of a group of people who failed. Their dream—an interracial workers’ movement as willing to fight racism as miscalculations of overtime—is in many ways still just that. Whether it remains so because of defeat, deferral, or betrayal probably depends less on the facts of what has happened than on what one thinks should happen next. Before his turn to the right, John Dos Passos wrote: “what are the needs of man. At least a man needs to be notjailed notafraid nothungry notcold not without love, not a worker for a power he has never seen . . .” Living in a wrong world for so long makes it easier to name the right one through a process of negation. But Duke takes seriously that labor’s fight is as much about love as it is about fear, hunger, and cold. If it weren’t for love, and the desire to experience it unencumbered by all the rest, it might be impossible to imagine a better world at all. Films like this one craft a picture of those who envisioned that world until such time as they are needed again.

The Killing Floor is playing on the Criterion Channel now through January 31, 2023.