MALADJUSTED TO EMPIRE.
9. WILDCRAFTING AND COUNTRY STEAK.
AS THE DAYS AT JACKIE"S Pa.s.sED, and the cold earth softened, buds and tendrils began finding their shape, and I increasingly thought about heroes. My heroes are mostly people you never hear about. They quietly go about creating a durable vision of what it means to be an American and a global citizen. These are the people whose spirits nourished me as I hoed the rows at Jackie"s place, people like Stan Crawford, Bradley, and Jackie herself. As the world flattens, they give hope. They are what I call and the cold earth softened, buds and tendrils began finding their shape, and I increasingly thought about heroes. My heroes are mostly people you never hear about. They quietly go about creating a durable vision of what it means to be an American and a global citizen. These are the people whose spirits nourished me as I hoed the rows at Jackie"s place, people like Stan Crawford, Bradley, and Jackie herself. As the world flattens, they give hope. They are what I call wildcrafters wildcrafters, people shaping their inner and outer worlds to the flow of nature, rather than trying to mold the natural world into a shape that is usable in the industrial world. Wildcrafters leave a small ecological footprint. They don"t conform to any outward program, manifesto, or organized group, but conform only to what Gandhi called the "still, small voice" within. I consider much of the dispersed "antiglobalization," pro-sustainability movement to be connected to wildcrafting. Wildcrafters inhabit the rebel territory beyond the Flat.
But one morning at the 12 12, as a particularly strong stench of the chicken factory blew in, I asked myself how people like Stan, Jackie, and Bradley find the inner strength to resist ecocide. As if in answer to this question, I discovered a copy of Gandhi"s autobiography on Jackie"s bookshelf and began reading it each night in her great-grandmother"s rocker. I knew Gandhi"s famous quote - "Be the change you want to see in the world" - but the question still remained: How? How? In his autobiography he talked about how he was convinced that absolutely anyone can achieve what he did; he was simply an average person who decided to transform himself. In his autobiography he talked about how he was convinced that absolutely anyone can achieve what he did; he was simply an average person who decided to transform himself.
This transformation happened gradually when, as a young lawyer in South Africa, he decided there shouldn"t be a gap between his convictions and his actions. Each time he identified something in his outer life that contradicted his inner beliefs, he decided to make a change. For example, believing it wasn"t correct to eat meat, he immediately cut meat out of his diet. When he realized that buying British clothing supported the colonial system that oppressed his people, he began wearing a dhoti, spinning the cloth himself. And so he continued, one quick relinquishment after the next, until his outward actions gradually came into harmony with his beliefs. This not only built his character but inspired the confidence of others, turning him into the great, humble leader who would free hundreds of millions from the colonial yoke. In his own words, Gandhi was incredibly clear: changing yourself is the key; no external achievements, however n.o.ble, can replace that.
From the rocking chair, I regarded the 12 12"s floor, a white slab of bare cement. So stark. An unadorned slab of rock surrounded by two full acres of breathing earth. Jackie later told me that she had mirrored Gandhi"s transformation, relinquishing one hypocrisy at a time, a gradual, deliberate evolution. She didn"t want to support war taxes, so she reduced her salary to eleven thousand dollars. She wished to have the carbon footprint of a Bangladeshi, so she went off the grid.
Bradley, using his skills and interests, was doing something similar. He didn"t like the suburban sprawl he saw rolling into Adams County, so he began buying up large tracts of land and turning them into environmental eco-housing. Seeing that our educational system was perpetuating ecocide, he established innovative sustainable agriculture programs at the local community college. It was remarkable to feel the ripple effect of the courses he taught there, from horticulture to eco-design, from beekeeping to turning native plants into tinctures, medicines, and foods. Bradley shaped Jackie"s skill set, and she in turn inspired Bradley with her ideas. And they are part of a larger constellation of wildcrafters. My direct neighbor, Jose, made traditional Mexican furniture by hand. The Thompsons had left the city to produce organic chicken and pork. Lisa, up the road, was a social worker who"d bought ten acres and was slowly transforming herself into a small farmer. And a fascinating father-son team, Paul Sr. and Jr. - whom I was eager to meet - had purchased thirty acres outside a nearby town and had followed Jackie"s lead and built several 12 12s.
Like Gandhi, these wildcrafters made one small change after another in their lives and watched their inner and outer lives slide into harmony. They were beginning to inhabit a place I"d later come to see as the creative edge.
This idea first came to me in the 12 12, but only after leaving Jackie"s did I fully grasp the extent to which these folks are shaping their inner lives first, then moving on to shape their outer environment through living beyond paradigms - including paradigms of environmentalism. Wildcrafters, those who work with nature"s flow rather than against it, do this in a place that is, in the end, simultaneously internal and external: the creative edge, a dynamic geography.
Wildcrafters on the creative edge have social and political impacts beyond their numbers. For example, the several hundred wildcrafters in Stan Crawford"s Dixon were only a few of the tens of thousands in New Mexico creating healthy, near-carbon-neutral communities. They voted on and pa.s.sed innovative policies like the mandatory "media literacy" courses in schools, and they have grown the state"s Green Party into a force in state politics. Nationally, the Green Party has around two hundred elected officials, including members of city councils in Boston, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Madison, and New Haven, and numerous mayorships. In Europe, Green Party inroads are stronger still; in Germany, the world"s third-largest economy, the Greens have controlled the powerful foreign minister position and other cabinet posts.
This growing political and economic resistance, sadly, comes not from our elected and corporate leaders, but rather from gusanos gusanos (worms) that gradually eat away at the apple from within; when it collapses, it decomposes and becomes soil so something new can grow. I have several friends, for instance, who are (worms) that gradually eat away at the apple from within; when it collapses, it decomposes and becomes soil so something new can grow. I have several friends, for instance, who are gusanos gusanos within the California system, working on the creative edge of health care, education, business, and conservation, laboring to turn their state into something approximating their vision of America, in the hope that it will inspire the rest of the country as a model. within the California system, working on the creative edge of health care, education, business, and conservation, laboring to turn their state into something approximating their vision of America, in the hope that it will inspire the rest of the country as a model.
What is particularly fascinating about the gusanos gusanos in North Carolina, my 12 12 neighbors, is that they did not choose to wildcraft in progressive Europe or in funky California, Vermont, or New Mexico. They"re in the conservative rural South. The late Jesse Helms used to have a lock on this area of North Carolina. The Thompsons, when they escaped to experiment on their new ten acres, were in a sense in rehab. The trailer park, the weapons and crack, neighbors in prison, the constant drone of commercial TV - all of this gone, cold turkey. They now opened their front door to a profusion of birds, a pond, a dark stretch of forest - to No Name Creek. in North Carolina, my 12 12 neighbors, is that they did not choose to wildcraft in progressive Europe or in funky California, Vermont, or New Mexico. They"re in the conservative rural South. The late Jesse Helms used to have a lock on this area of North Carolina. The Thompsons, when they escaped to experiment on their new ten acres, were in a sense in rehab. The trailer park, the weapons and crack, neighbors in prison, the constant drone of commercial TV - all of this gone, cold turkey. They now opened their front door to a profusion of birds, a pond, a dark stretch of forest - to No Name Creek.
While musing over all of this, one morning I noticed a coc.o.o.n attached to the deer fence. Was it from last year, or from a caterpillar that had already gorged itself on spring leaves and gone into an early coc.o.o.n? Around the 12 12, dozens of different-sized, -shaped, and -colored caterpillars and inchworms dangled from silk strings and attached to budding leaves. I came to marvel over the miracle of that coc.o.o.n and the transformation of one organism into a completely different one.
Really, we"ve got the story wrong. We imagine that the caterpillar, knowing that it is time, goes to sleep in its womblike coc.o.o.n and wakes up a smiley, happy b.u.t.terfly. That"s not what happens. As biologist Elisabet Sahtouris explains, the caterpillar devotes its life to hyper-consumption, greedily eating up nature"s bounty. Then it attaches itself to a twig, like the one on the deer fence, and encases itself in chrysalis. Once inside, crisis strikes: its body partially liquefies into broth.
Yet, perhaps guided by an inner wisdom, what Sahtouris calls "organizer cells" go around rounding up their fellow cells to form "imaginal buds." These multicellular buds begin to bloom into an entirely new organism but not without resistance. The caterpillar"s immune system still functions and thinks that the imaginal buds are a virus and attacks them.
But the imaginal buds resist - and ultimately prevail - because they link together, cooperatively, to become a beautiful b.u.t.terfly, which lives lightly, regenerates life through pollinating flowers, and migrates over vast distances, exploring life in ways that would have been incomprehensible to the caterpillar.
Jackie, Bradley, the Thompsons, and the other people I was meeting were undergoing this transformation, not alone but in a network of hundreds of thousands of other "imaginal buds" throughout Pine Bridge, the United States, and the world. By allowing themselves the s.p.a.ce to change, instead of clinging out of fear to what they knew, they were embarking on this transformative journey.
BUOYED BY THIS EVOLVING REALIZATION of wildcrafting, the creative edge, and the possibility of transforming from caterpillars into b.u.t.terflies, I found my spirit lighter than ever at the 12 12. One day I biked to Smithsville, rolling along South Main Street (the town was so small that there was no North Main Street), whistling and exchanging NC waves with the good folks in pa.s.sing cars, until I arrived at Rufus" Restaurant. My stomach growling, I decided to go in for lunch. of wildcrafting, the creative edge, and the possibility of transforming from caterpillars into b.u.t.terflies, I found my spirit lighter than ever at the 12 12. One day I biked to Smithsville, rolling along South Main Street (the town was so small that there was no North Main Street), whistling and exchanging NC waves with the good folks in pa.s.sing cars, until I arrived at Rufus" Restaurant. My stomach growling, I decided to go in for lunch.
The place was a quarter full, and I peered under the empty tables looking for an outlet to plug in my laptop. As I stooped, a waitress came over and cleared her throat: ""Scuse me," she said. "But may I help help you with something?" you with something?"
"I"m going to eat here," I a.s.sured her.
"Under one of the tables?"
Chuckling from the other waitresses. Some of the conversations stopped. I reached up to pat down my hair, cowlicked as it was from my bike helmet; I probably looked crazy.
"I"d like a table where I can plug in my laptop."
A completely blank stare.
"My notebook computer. It hardly uses any electricity."
"See that clock?" she said.
I looked across the room at an electric, unplugged DRINK PEPSI COLA ICE COLD DRINK PEPSI COLA ICE COLD clock stuck at 2:04 and 13 seconds. I sat down under it and plugged my laptop into the empty socket. One of the waitresses had been trying to hold in a big old laugh; when our eyes met, our mutual smile was the pinp.r.i.c.k that caused her to burst. She was still chuckling and shaking her head when she came up to me and asked in a friendly Southern tw.a.n.g, "What can I get ya?" clock stuck at 2:04 and 13 seconds. I sat down under it and plugged my laptop into the empty socket. One of the waitresses had been trying to hold in a big old laugh; when our eyes met, our mutual smile was the pinp.r.i.c.k that caused her to burst. She was still chuckling and shaking her head when she came up to me and asked in a friendly Southern tw.a.n.g, "What can I get ya?"
"What d"ya got?"
"Well, we"ve got country steak. It"s not on the menu, and it comes with slaw, pintos, taters, fries, creamed potato, any two."
"What is country steak?"
"Cubed steak."
"What"s that? Hamburger steak?"
"Oh no, it"s meat that"s been cubed."
"So, cubes of meat. In sauce?"
"Gravy, yes. But it"s been cubed and put back together. How do I explain this? Mary!"
Mary groaned, as if to say, "How many times times have I explained this?" I glanced around the restaurant interior; the decorations had been hanging on the walls for decades, mostly soda pop posters with long-dead ad campaigns like "Drink Dr. Pepper. Good for Life" and "Mountain Dew, it"ll tickle yore innards." Another slogan, the text inside a three-foot-wide bottle cap on the wall, read obscurely, "Thirsty? Just whistle." have I explained this?" I glanced around the restaurant interior; the decorations had been hanging on the walls for decades, mostly soda pop posters with long-dead ad campaigns like "Drink Dr. Pepper. Good for Life" and "Mountain Dew, it"ll tickle yore innards." Another slogan, the text inside a three-foot-wide bottle cap on the wall, read obscurely, "Thirsty? Just whistle." Whistle for what? Whistle for what? I thought, the brand it was meant to elicit unknown to me. I thought, the brand it was meant to elicit unknown to me.
"It"s fried" came an impatient Southern tw.a.n.g from the other room.
"Fried," repeated my waitress.
"Fried," I said.
"And it"s good!"
"Okay, I"ll take your word for it."
"With what?"
"Creamed potatoes. And slaw."
"Yeah, I think it"s cubed cow, because I"ve seen it in the cow section at the grocery store."
"Hold on," I said, "so we"re not completely sure what animal we"re talking about?"
She sighed and said, "I know it ain"t chicken."
There was good humor in our banter, but only later would I realize the ironies and complexities. For instance, I unconsciously judged Rufus" for "backwardness" for not understanding the twenty-first-century lexicon 101: the laptop plug-in. Yet wasn"t my very presence there a Flat World advertis.e.m.e.nt, sidling up and whipping out my portable computer? That community still had what Bradley was trying to foster up the road in Siler City: life centered around people, not machines.
Then there was a more insidious undercurrent: racism. During three visits to Rufus" I never saw an African American person. By virtue of my white skin, I was basically a member of the club, hence the easy repartee with the white staff. Similarly, at Bobby Lu"s Diner in Siler City, I didn"t see any Latinos - despite the fact that Siler City is half Latino. Other restaurants in Siler City were purely Latino.
There"s a grocery outpost a few blocks from Rufus". Once, when the restaurant was closed, I went in and asked the clerk, a hirsute, heavily tattooed man in his forties, if they served food. He sighed and said, "Nope." Behind his head hung chewing tobacco packets, raw sausage links, and packets of beef jerky. The remainder of the store was filled with possibly the world"s widest selection of 40-ounce beers and malt liquors.
The only plausible lunch food was a Hot Pocket. I held it up, frozen stiff in its colorful little package, and asked if I could microwave it. "Sure," he said. He was a man of few words, but not the guy who burst in next. This man"s voice boomed through the outpost for the next several minutes, as my Pocket got hot. He was already in midsentence as the front door flung open, a heavyset African American man with long braids tied into a ponytail, trailed by his wife. "... Oh do I see it. I see it! No, not the milk." - his wife was pulling a gallon out of the refrigerator - "It"s this!" He hoisted a cold Colt 45 over his head like an Oscar.
"I"ve been dreaming about it all day, since I woke up at five A.M. This is it, this baby..."
Even as the man paraded up and down the aisles with his enormous malt beverage hoisted high, his wife lugging milk, bread, and TV dinners, two others were already lined up to buy 40-ounce bottles, including the quiet guy with a bushy, uneven mustache. He"d already opened his Colt 45. He took a long swig and then stared at the black man with intense, squinted eyes.
The overweight black man had by now twisted open his 40-ounce and proceeded to kiss the label, work his tongue up the neck and into the opening. His wife, burdened with groceries, said, "Save some of that action for me." Without the slightest hint of a smile, the clerk accepted food stamps for the groceries and cash for the beer. Before following his wife out, the man stopped tonguing the bottle long enough to say to the deadpan clerk, "Thank you, boss, for saving my life." He then took a giant swig and disappeared on tiptoes after a perfectly executed curtsy.
I felt ambivalent about this little drama on South Main Street. The two whites, the mustached man and the clerk, eyed the black man with obvious contempt. Was it purely about race or also about social cla.s.s? Can you truly unbundle the two when racism is so deeply imbedded? The black man, though humorous on the surface, was also tragic: grossly overweight, on food stamps, already dreaming of his first 40-ounce during five A.M. insomnia. Was he resisting and transforming the racism around him or conceding defeat?
"THE AMERICANS, THEY DON"T LIKE US," my Honduran neighbor, Graciela, said to me in Spanish. " my Honduran neighbor, Graciela, said to me in Spanish. "Sahes que son los "red-necks," "red-necks," verdad verdad?" - "You know what rednecks are, right?"
She was hosing down her lawn very unevenly, soaking one spot to flooding and then breezing over the patch beside it. Her husband was late again. For both Graciela and her husband, this was a second marriage; they each had teenage children from previous marriages. He worked three jobs; two involved landscaping on the side, with his main job "processing" thousands of chickens an hour in the Gold Kist factory. That morning, I saw him tear down our gravel road in his black mini-pickup, late for work. The first time I went over to introduce myself to them, he was guarded, evidently wondering why I spoke Spanish, why I"d chosen to stay in a shack with no electricity - sizing me up to see if I posed a threat. Like the vast majority of Siler City-area Latinos, he was illegal.
"We"re like slaves," Graciela said, staring at the water gushing out of her hose. "We work all the time, and it"s never enough to pay the bills." Though she was only forty-three, the lines etched in her face made her look a decade older. She had a barrel-shaped midsection, large chest, and solid arms from her day job housecleaning and evening work at McDonald"s.
As we spoke, a wave of empathy washed over me. Hearing the Spanish, I felt as if I was back in Latin America, where I"d lived for five years, and where, on so many occasions, I had seen giant multinational companies underpaying people in sweatshops, on industrial soy plantations, and in fast-food restaurants. Was this any different? She was barely earning enough to get by. Yet Graciela was one of the lucky ones. Of Siler City"s thousands of Latinos, she was one of the few who owned a house, thanks to the nonprofit group Habitat for Humanity. She praised Habitat on several occasions, saying that her mortgage was only four hundred dollars a month, including taxes, which was considerably less than she had been paying for rent. My mother, while visiting me at Jackie"s, remarked: "You can tell Graciela"s family loves their house." There was the tidy lawn, newly planted flowers - even a little doghouse with a lightbulb that glowed at night.
One day, arriving home in her greasy McDonald"s uniform, Graciela said to me: "Life seems good here if you"re American. But only if you"re American."
Jose, in his identical Habitat home across from Graciela, was less open. Though he was incredibly friendly, and he would invite me over to dinner and into his woodshop to see a newly crafted piece of furniture, he always seemed guarded. When we"d talk about certain topics, he"d clamp down or change the subject. I wondered if he was undoc.u.mented, even though he"d been in the United States for two decades.
At one point I said to Jose, "I never see your son playing with the Thompson kids." It seemed odd, since Mike"s eldest son, Zach, was the same age as Hector.
"Oh, he doesn"t like to play so much," Jose said.
"He likes to be alone?"
"No, he plays with Graciela"s kids all the time, just not with the Americans."
It always threw me off a bit when my Latino neighbors referred to "the Americans" as if they were a separate ethnic group, and perhaps one not to be melted into. I noticed a struggle in Jose"s face, as if figuring out just how to say something. Always diplomatic, he never wanted to stir anything up. "My son says that - what"s his name, Mike?"
"Yes, Mike Thompson," I said, surprised that after a year living here he wasn"t sure of his white neighbor"s name.
Jose continued: "He says Mike looks at him in a certain way. Maybe..." - he hesitated, then shrugged - "maybe a racist kind of way."
10. WHITE.
THERE"S A POWERFUL DOc.u.mENTARY called called Dare Not Walk Alone Dare Not Walk Alone about St. Augustine, Florida, a city that Martin Luther King Jr. targeted in the 1960s as a place to challenge racist segregation laws. Weekly protests and vigils were held, but violence eventually erupted, including a white hotel owner pouring acid on black children who had jumped into his pool. Images of that incident and others shot around the world, and these events contributed to the pa.s.sing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Afterward, the white elites of the town retaliated against blacks by cutting them off economically and wiping out evidence of the civil rights struggle. Even the old slave market had no sign of ever having been a slave market - not one historical plaque existed in the town. The film ends with two black sisters visiting the church where they were once brutally cast out for being of the wrong race. Members of the white congregation receive the sisters in a powerful act of reconciliation, hugging and weeping, letting decades of pent-up shame spill over. The white congregation needed forgiveness more than the sisters - who had gone on with their lives - needed to forgive. about St. Augustine, Florida, a city that Martin Luther King Jr. targeted in the 1960s as a place to challenge racist segregation laws. Weekly protests and vigils were held, but violence eventually erupted, including a white hotel owner pouring acid on black children who had jumped into his pool. Images of that incident and others shot around the world, and these events contributed to the pa.s.sing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Afterward, the white elites of the town retaliated against blacks by cutting them off economically and wiping out evidence of the civil rights struggle. Even the old slave market had no sign of ever having been a slave market - not one historical plaque existed in the town. The film ends with two black sisters visiting the church where they were once brutally cast out for being of the wrong race. Members of the white congregation receive the sisters in a powerful act of reconciliation, hugging and weeping, letting decades of pent-up shame spill over. The white congregation needed forgiveness more than the sisters - who had gone on with their lives - needed to forgive.
We need more of such healing. There"s a parallel between how we deal with race and how we deal with ecocide. In both cases, we look away. This denial weighs heavily on our individual and collective consciousness. Just being aware reduces the burden. Jackie helped me face my own unconscious racism when she said to me, during one of my visits, "I admire you for throwing it all away."
I shifted from one foot to the other. We were standing in Zone 2 of her farm, beside the beehive. I asked her what she meant.
"Since you"re white, and a man, you have everything open to you: power, privilege. And yet you"re working in places like Liberia and interested in a 12 12. You"ve sacrificed your birthright."
Jackie helped me see that part of understanding racism is understanding white privilege. Challenging this requires a deep personal commitment to constantly reflect on and root out the ways we"ve been conditioned by false constructs of race. I find that listening allows me to overcome some of my subconscious a.s.sumptions. During my stay in the 12 12, I listened to Spike Lee"s explanation of how racism works in the film industry; listened to Jose and Graciela talk about how they experience racism in twenty-first-century America. The more I listened, the more complex it all seemed. Jackie"s comment about my "birthright" includes nationality and gender along with race. As I was seeing firsthand in the relationships between my neighbors and in town, racism is often a complex stew of status, income level, culture, and history. While there has been progress - most notably the election of the first African American president - structural racism remains deeply embedded in our society. Just consider the fact that there are nearly as many black people under some form of correctional supervision (in jail or prison, on probation, or on parole) today as there were slaves during the peak of slavery in 1860.
During one of my walks, along Pine Bridge Church Road, I came to an overlook. Below, a lone farmhouse sat in a freshly tractored field. The wide, two-story house had collapsed into itself, sad in its little nook between two hills, as desolate as a scene from Faulkner"s The Unvanquished The Unvanquished. As I looked at that house, a relic from plantation times, I thought of the slaves who once toiled there, and the reality of slavery suddenly became physically real. Black people had been treated like property on this very soil, in that old house. I wondered: Has our society ever come to terms with the extent to which our wealth was built on the backs of people who were considered less than human?
"MY FRIEND JULIANA LIVES IN THE CHICKEN COOP," Jose said. Jose said.
I was about to bite into a taco over at Jose"s, when I froze and frowned. Leah was at the 12 12 for her second visit, and Jose had invited us over to his place for a meal. I looked at Leah, dumbfounded. I finally said to Jose, "Una persona quien vive en un "chicken coop"?" "chicken coop"?"
Yes, he said. He then talked about how lucky he was to have his Habitat for Humanity home, since he also didn"t have to live in the "chicken coop."
"Jose," I said, "what do you mean?"
The "chicken coop," we discovered, was a housing project of doublewides just outside Siler City where the Mexicans and Central Americans who worked the Gold Kist factories resided. Leah, her journalist radar homing in on a story, wanted to visit immediately. She spent the night at the 12 12 - I gave her the loft and created a bed for myself below out of a sleeping bag atop two blankets - and we drove into Siler City early the next morning, pa.s.sed the town"s bustling box stores and boarded-up downtown, and crossed the train tracks. Before us appeared a sprawling trailer park, cien porciento Latino cien porciento Latino: the infamous "chicken coop." Rows of white single-and doublewides, each one equipped with hula hoop-sized satellite TV dishes. Hundreds of them.
"It"s a kind of US Soweto," I said. "A township." We turned the bend to see hundreds more on the opposite side of the road, and beyond, the forest had been felled for more to come. "So this is where we put the cheap labor."
"The Gold Kist chicken factory workers," said Leah, "plus the seasonal farmhands, the gardeners, the maids, and Wal-Mart stackers..." Leah"s voice drifted off as we pulled in and drove among the hundreds of identical trailers. Leah"s forehead wrinkled. "This is how our Gastarbeiter Gastarbeiter get screwed," she said, using the German word for "guest worker." "Greedy landlords build places like this and then gouge these folks with outrageous rent. They"re undoc.u.mented, so they can"t protest." get screwed," she said, using the German word for "guest worker." "Greedy landlords build places like this and then gouge these folks with outrageous rent. They"re undoc.u.mented, so they can"t protest."
I"d seen this all over the world; the global capitalist system zeros in on the cheapest labor. On a work trip to Delhi, India, I witnessed thousands of identical shanties just up the road from a sweatshop where thousands of people produced clothing for wealthy European designers for pennies an hour. In Bolivia"s El Alto slums, jewelry and clothing companies have set up similar factory production rows, thousands of Aymara and Quechua people - globalization"s refugees. Though the situation is of course complicated, one result is a deluge of inexpensive, industrial-chemical potatoes and corn that has eroded the sustainable rural livelihoods of Bolivia"s indigenous majority. It angered me to see people I knew, who had been growing crops in harmony with Pachamama for millennia, now with few options except to sew for terrible wages. In North Carolina, not ten miles from the 12 12, the same dynamic was only barely hidden beyond the train tracks.
But as we drove through that Sat.u.r.day afternoon, Leah and I began to notice something unexpected. This wasn"t Eminem"s 8-Mile 8-Mile trailer park, with pistols and ridin" dirty. We noticed trailer park, with pistols and ridin" dirty. We noticed alegria alegria and community, as people gathered around barbecue grills or on porches; we saw laughter and large gatherings. We pa.s.sed a birthday party with a child, maybe five or six, swinging wildly at - and missing - a dragon pinata. Leah slowed down further. and community, as people gathered around barbecue grills or on porches; we saw laughter and large gatherings. We pa.s.sed a birthday party with a child, maybe five or six, swinging wildly at - and missing - a dragon pinata. Leah slowed down further. Wham! Wham! The boy hit the soft spot under the dragon"s neck and dozens of kids broke into a joint scream as they stooped for treats. The boy hit the soft spot under the dragon"s neck and dozens of kids broke into a joint scream as they stooped for treats.
And these folks had water, electricity, telephones, roads, and a solid shelter. "It might not be so terrible here," I said.
Leah agreed. "Definitely not. A lot of the Latinos I"ve met in America, they have a kind of lightness, because they are here for one basic reason: money. And they have this don"t-care kind of att.i.tude because they know if all else fails - deportation, it just doesn"t work out - they can go back to Mexico. Back home home. They have a country, a home. I couldn"t spin this as a story on "Apartheid in Siler City." "
As we crossed the tracks again out of the "chicken coop," we saw the white folks" stately colonials with their dormer windows, gabled roofs, wraparound porches, and sculpted gardens - but not a soul around. No more Latino alegria alegria. Who was better off ? There were two races, two cla.s.ses. But there were also folks like Jose and Graciela, who owned their own houses. And the Latinos here have an emotional and cultural escape route - homelands in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, places with more limited financial opportunities, but homelands nevertheless. We"d found in Siler City something of Soweto, but along with it something else, more puzzling.
FOR TWO STRAIGHT DAYS, THE RAINS FELL. The two fifty-five-gallon rainwater tanks beside the 12 12 overflowed; No Name Creek swelled in her banks. The world was liquid. Plants sweated, Jackie"s bees beaded up with water, their hind legs thick with honey. Sometimes the sky would momentarily clear, and I"d head out along the tracks or the creek for a walk, but on one of those occasions the skies suddenly turned from gray-blue to charcoal and began dumping rain. I ducked into an abandoned house, under the one part of it that still had a rusty tin roof, and crouched there for an hour, just watching the rain, listening to it, feeling it bead on my skin. I looked up; I wasn"t alone. A hawk was in there, too, seeking shelter on a rafter above, the same enormous one that had dropped a feather out of the sky into my hand. Our eyes met, and we both froze. After a while, though, we forgot about each other. I listened to the rain - on tin, on leaves, m.u.f.fled by the wet earth. When the rain slackened and I continued along No Name Creek, the hawk remained behind.
During those walks the landscape held something back. I"d break away from the creek"s banks at random places, heading off through farmers" fields and tracts of wood, along old dirt roads, wherever my instincts took me, sometimes coming to a high point where a hilly panorama would stretch out around me. Everything looked stalky, reedy, as if wanting to burst into a full Southern spring but not being able to. The landscape was thick with history, with inertia, sluggish and melancholy, as if it just couldn"t motivate to once again change seasons.
Leah and I began spending weekends together as we developed what the Irish call anam cara anam cara, or a soul friendship. Without doubt, a romantic attraction was growing between us, but though it was unspoken, we both hesitated to act on that attraction and become lovers. It seemed we were exploring so many feelings and issues that went beyond "us."
We"d usually stay in the 12 12, but we once went to her place in Durham. The first time I climbed the outside stairs to her apartment - actually the converted attic of a hundred-year-old home - I was struck most forcefully by the white glare of the entire place. A clamsh.e.l.l-white kitchen, a white sitting-room nook, and a large white bedroom with twin sloping ceilings. She"d taken down the photo of her ex-boyfriend, and many of her old paintings; she had created a fresh blank canvas on which to repaint her life.
The three colorful photos she had up only accented the white further, like parrots flying across a sky of billowing clouds. Indeed, in her apartment I felt a bit as if I was floating in a cloud, buoyed by scents of jasmine soap, incense, spices, and the fresh fruit gathered in a wooden bowl in the kitchen.
We set up a little room for me in her reading nook. Later, we lay side by side atop a comforter on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. The whole place, though by no means ostentatious, felt luxurious compared to the 12 12. We talked for an hour, enjoying what novelist Anne Lamott calls "p.r.o.ne yoga," where you get horizontal and let thoughts flow from mind to mouth. We talked about "decolonizing ourselves," how to rewrite our scripts, throwing out the ones that posit consumption as end and not means, that consider the natural environment as a bunch of stuff put there for us to use; the scripts that oppress races, cla.s.ses, and nature felt hardwired into us. After a while we shifted gears and talked about where our own lives were headed. Leah said into the pure white ceiling: "I"m confused."
"If you"re not confused, you"re fused."
She got up and pulled me from the bed, saying, "I want to show you something." We went for a walk in Durham. The city has a gritty, hardscrabble feel to it. It"s three-quarters African American, one-quarter white. We walked past scores of old tobacco warehouses, many of them being renovated as restaurant and gallery s.p.a.ce - the slaves that worked in them and their history covered over with hardly a trace. We walked past the YMCA where Leah worked out, past her office, and into an old neighborhood, circa 1940s, where she was thinking of buying a house.
I looked into her blue eyes, and then down the street. She said, "I"m twenty-eight, and I want a home."
"Will buying a house give you that?"
She looked down the street. "You"d go crazy in a place like this, wouldn"t you?" she said.
I followed her eyes down the street, the chestnut trees, old middle-cla.s.s homes, and shrugged. Much was changing in me, and in that moment, I didn"t know.