Redcap porters were the men who carried luggage for passengers on the platforms and in the terminal. The name came from the red caps they wore as a uniform identifier. The work was tipped work — the porters earned their income primarily through gratuities rather than through a fixed wage — and it required the specific skills of physical labor combined with the social skills of service: managing passengers who were often in a hurry, often burdened with more luggage than they could manage, and often uncertain about platforms and connections.
The redcap job was one of the respectable and stable positions available to Black men in Albany in the early 1910s. It was not, by any economic standard, well-paid. It was physically demanding. It depended on the volume of passenger traffic, which fluctuated with the seasons and with broader economic conditions. But it was steady work for a man who was willing to do it, in a city where the alternatives were more limited.
Johnson knew Albany’s Union Station the way that the men who work in a building know it differently from the people who pass through: its rhythms, its patterns, its specific character at different hours and in different weather. He knew the platforms and the trains and the kind of passengers who came through. When he returned from France in February 1919, he could not go back to that work. His foot would not let him.
The gap between the job he had held and the job he could not return to is the specific gap that the Army’s discharge papers left unbridged.