State by State

by Matt Weiland

  Why is Wilmington the way it is?” The Bookseller is an amiable guy with sandy hair and a touch of a drawl. He grew up in Wilmington, just outside the city, still on the tramline, though the trams had wheels by then. He has run the shop with his wife for thirty-one years. “Why is Delaware the way it is? You’ve got to go back to 1968, to the Martin Luther King assassination riots here. Some areas were burned.

  “I was at my brother’s gas station at the time. There was a curfew. Everybody got in their houses. We were right across the street from the fire-house so we were staying open to feed the fire trucks that were using Route 40 to go into the city. They were letting things burn pretty much, but just in case, we were prepared. All of a sudden here come the National Guard trucks coming toward the city from our little airbase where they were headquartered. Here they are coming up Maryland Avenue and I’m seeing these guys in the back of some deuce and a half trucks, the old military trucks with the hoops on top, and I know some of them. They’ve got guns in their hands. I’m thinking, Oh my God, we’re in trouble now.

  “The problem was we had a governor from below the canal who had no idea what the city was like. Those Guards should have been pulled back and pulled out within weeks. It went on for over a year. He left them in. He was afraid to make that move. He had no understanding of the city. To him this was the wild jungles of Watts, LA, and he had these National Guard troops stationed on the corners for a year. What’s business going to do? It just ruined Wilmington. That was probably the seminal moment for Wilmington itself as a city. It has never recovered from it.”

  At around five in the afternoon, the Tenth Street bus shelter in Caesar Rodney Square in Wilmington is placid and full of tired faces and wilted shopping bags. There are pinpoint cracks in each of the shelter’s windows. The Two Mothers are sitting in the King Street shelter, wrestling their strollers down, cracking open juice containers, jiggling sleeping children. An iPod headphone dangles from one’s collar, sending out tinny beats. There are no buses in sight.

  “So as not to be the thing, is what I’m saying, you know what I’m saying? New York is the thing. We’re not the thing,” says one of the Mothers.

  “To be close to the things but not to be, like, the thing itself,” says the other.

  Across the road light is falling on the Bank of America building. These are the few blocks of power, hemming in Caesar Rodney Square.

  “No one’s like, Delaware, oh that’s the thing.“

  “But we can squirt into New York, into Philly. Everything is either twenty minutes or two hours away from Delaware.”

  “There’s nothing in between.”

  A bus arrives. Passengers grab their plastic shopping bags and sway toward the exit. Outside, a couple of men are throwing empty beer cans at the trash.

  “All these streets round here clear out at five o’clock. It’s like, the white people head toward those parking lots. Black people come down to take the bus.”

  “It takes them twenty minutes to get home.”

  “Yeah, it takes us two hours.”

  The Lawyer in Wilmington says he only gives deep background. It is Delaware after all: Everyone knows everyone. “The thing with Delaware is that we’re receptive. We’re receptive to change the law to accommodate business trends. For example, when the LLC, the limited liability corporation, came into being, many corporations said we like the LLC better. We want to move toward that. Delaware was at the cutting edge of adjusting laws so that INC could move to an LLC, an LLC to an INC, partnership to an LLC, an LLP—limited liability partnership—to an LLLP, a limited liability limited partnership. In other words, we’re very in tune with the modern problems a corporate identity must deal with and we are willing to change the laws to accommodate the practical problems that corporations face.

  “We have a court of chancery, which is a court of equity, which is guided by the law but, more so, it’s guided by hundreds of years of precedence. What do corporations want? They want stability. They want to know that they’re not going to get a rogue judge. There’s no jury. In some very very minor cases, there can be a jury, but 99.99999 percent of the time there’s no jury. They want to know they have a business judge, a business expert, an arbitrator, if you will, who is an expert on business practices and can quickly find out what’s going on and get to the bottom of it. And also corporations know when they make a contract, 200 years of history are standing behind it. The stability is what can’t be replicated.

  “We are like the maitre d’. We’re welcoming to business. You want this? I’ll take care of you. You want the best seat? I’ll take care of you.”

  A row of four Sports Fans sit at the bar in Newark, upstate Delaware, the college town. They’re wearing check shirts and black belts. Their cell phones are holstered. The baseball players on the television look like angry horses swatting away pests. Flies are visible in the close-ups of their faces, swirling about in the evening air. The New York Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez keeps fouling balls off and then strikes out with a runner in scoring position.

  “Look at those flies,” the Yankee Fan says. He’s scratching his arm. “It’s like The Birds out there. My skin is crawling.” No one wears a hat from a Delaware team. Everyone in Delaware has elsewhere allegiance. There are a few Red Sox hats, a little love for the Yankees, a lot for Philly.

  “No allegiance means any allegiance,” says the Sports Fan who has just untucked his dress shirt, disappeared the tie, and is now sprinkling flavored seasoning on the melted cheese of the crispy fries. “What’s happening to baseball players? They all seem to be named, like, Bronson Sardinha,” he says. “They all seem to be named Coco Crisp.”

  “Fuck the Yankees,” someone says.

  “Fuck Cleveland,” someone says.

  “Fuck baseball,” says a female voice. She’s blond and perched over a glass of red wine with a thin disc of liquid at the bottom.

  Later in the evening Sports Fans troop to the bathroom, one at a time. “At least there’s the Delaware Smash,” says a guy at the urinal. “It’s our only pro team. They’re a tennis team. They’re going to do real well. It’s all we’ve got.” He dries his hands under tacked-up copies of the News Journal with a story on bodies from Iraq being flown back to Dover. “But come on, you know … a tennis team?”

  They say Delaware’s boring because they don’t have enough stuff here,” says the Entrepreneur. She’s sitting in her church in downtown Wilmington. She was saved when she was sixteen. She’s now twenty-four. The sign outside the church reads EXTREME FAITH!!! EXTREME POWER!!! EXTREME PRAISE!!! EXTREME PRESENCE!!!

  “It’s enough stuff for me. There’s a lot of banks here. It’s good for entrepreneurs like me. I want to start a program, a nonprofit organization, and start up a shelter and things like that. I want to start a coffee shop, that’s what I want to start. I’m not a real coffee drinker, so maybe I can add something the other shops don’t have besides just hot chocolate and tea. Christians, you know, they need someplace where they can just fellowship together. There’s Brew-haha and Starbucks but I don’t really feel them, you know what I mean?

  “So what else is there to do here? I see people fishing on the Brandy-wine and I say, What’re you going to do with those fish? They’re fishing and crabbing. I don’t know if you can catch anything in there but if you can I wouldn’t suggest you eat it. This is the Chemical State. Always. You hear about the du Ponts?!”

  Route 9 crosses the canal and curves east toward the Delaware River and then off down the coast. The commercial traffic is sparse. On the weekend holiday bikers streak past on shiny Harleys. Outside Delaware City, the Two Fishermen sit in the reeds next to the road behind the metal barrier with empty Corona bottles littered around their feet. White string leads out into the water. They’ve tied chicken to the string to catch the crabs. There are already more than twenty clacking in the battered red-and-white cooler.

  “Mucho caliente, mucho sol and we catch more crabs,” says Fisherman Uno. He works at the
Champion factory in Wilmington but his boss lives south of the canal and tells him where to lay his line.

  “We don’t worry,” says Fisherman Dos.

  “All the fish is good,” says Fisherman Uno. “All the crabs is good. Healthy, good. When we get the sun it’s even better.”

  Across the highway, across the rough water of the Delaware, the towers of the Hope Creek Nuclear Generating Station rise up.

  The State Senator and her partner are sharing dinner with the Bookseller and the Bookseller’s Wife. There is a prepared mushroom salad, pizza with fig and homemade cornmeal crust. The Bookseller rode his bicycle from the shop in Wilmington to this ring of suburbs. “Did you notice our solar panels?” he says. “We’re on the grid.”

  “In Delaware,” the Bookseller’s Wife says, after the food has been passed. “We are very, very friendly to banks.”

  “Oh boy. Here we go.”

  “That’s Governor Pete du Pont’s contribution to the state’s economy,” she says. “We’re basically the onshore version of the Cayman Islands. Legitimized usury is what we’ve got.”

  “Do we have any usury laws at all?” the Bookseller asks.

  The State Senator finishes a bite. “There used to be a cap on the interest banks and lending institutions could charge,” the State Senator says. “When Pete du Pont did the banking bill to attract banks to come here they repealed the cap.”

  “And that was debated for what, an hour at most?” The Bookseller answers his own questions. “Pretty much. It was just thrown out there.”

  “Now Sears can charge 25 percent interest.”

  “And then their gross profits are taxed at unbelievably low percentages,” says the Bookseller’s Wife. “We as a business in Delaware pay 8.7 percent gross tax. But banks—it’s a graduated thing—the bulk of their profits are taxed at 1.7 percent.”

  “Each industry has a different rate,” says the State Senator. “When I asked why the rates were different the answer was: We don’t know. Grocery stores, which have one of the lowest profit margins at something like 1.2 percent profit, have one of the highest percentages. You look at banks and some of the real high-end profits …”

  “Most banks are taxed at 1.7 percent,” says the Bookseller’s Wife.

  The State Senator continues: “It really does have to do with who the lobbyists are as to what rate you’re going to pay. If you have an effective lobby, then the law gets amended to lower the taxes in that particular industry.”

  “It’s called corporate extortion,” says the Bookseller’s Wife.

  “Don’t get her started,” says the Bookseller.

  “When the banking bill passed there seemed to be this culture of get rid of dirty industry,” says the State Senator. “We want clean banks. They brought all of these clean banks in who paid minimum wage to the vast majority of their employees and paid no health care benefits. So they’re nice and clean but in the meantime all these good manufacturing jobs, Electric Hose and Rubber and all those places, folded up their tents and left. GM and Chrysler were the last of the really good manufacturing jobs.”

  The Bookseller’s Wife nods. “Now they’re going after the bio-tech sector because that’s another clean, white-collar industry. We gave AstraZeneca how much money?”

  “Four-point-something million,” says the Bookseller.

  “Corporate welfare,” adds the State Senator.

  The Bookseller goes on: “We gave Wal-Mart $1.4 million to bring their distribution center into Smyrna. Here are the richest people in the world. We gave 1.4 million to them.”

  “Look what we gave to Bank of America,” says the State Senator. “Was it $17 million? I was the only person who voted against it. I said why are we giving Bank of America $17 million? They took over MBNA.”

  “Oh, they had sweetheart deals,” says the Bookseller’s Wife. “One after another.”

  “Don’t get her started,” says the Bookseller.

  “The city gave them a $4.5-million piece of property for nothing,” says the State Senator.

  “No property taxes,” says the Bookseller’s Wife.

  “It’s jobs,” says the Bookseller.

  “When MBNA sold out to Bank of America they started making noises saying, ‘We’ve already got a headquarters down in Texas. We might just move our operations down there,’” the State Senator continues. “So Delaware started to grovel. One of the ways we grovelled was to say, ‘Here’s a $17 million tax cut if you’ll stay.’ They never promised anything in return for that. In fact, they’ve cut how many thousand jobs? So they’ve stuck it to us even with their $ 17 million welfare check.”

  “They all do it,” says the Bookseller’s Wife. What’s left of the corn-crust pizza has cooled.

  “No politician wants to be against jobs,” says the Bookseller. “No one wants to go out on lost jobs.”

  In the storefront church in Wilmington, the Evangelist’s cell phone vibrates against a table. Someone on the other end is buying a car and the Evangelist asks, “Is God showing you a two-door or a four-door? Don’t settle for something little.”

  She has recently moved to Delaware from rural New York. Her revelations, she says, have been awesome. They have far outweighed the struggles with divorce and car repossession in her own life. “I came here from a community in the country,” she says. “A country mouse to a city mouse, mostly all white people to all black people. Not that it’s a problem—I love black people but I think they still hold that yoke of bondage of hatred toward white people. My heart breaks for them for what we did to them. I can relate to them because I moved into an almost all black area with the church. I can relate to how they must feel being a minority. I think I feel like Rosa Parks going OK, now I know what it feels like trying to get accepted because of my skin color. I’ve actually had two people look at me because of my skin color when they shook my hand. It made me feel uncomfortable but I just felt like, OK God, you’re showing me something and this is how they feel. I didn’t reject them. I was pleasant to them.

  “I grew up in a high school where there were no black people, in a grade school where there were none, so it’s totally different for me. But I don’t look at blacks any different than I look at Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese. I don’t look at anyone as if they were different. It’s the world we live in.

  “When I moved to Wilmington I didn’t think they’d accept me. I said ‘God, they’re black.’ He said, ‘I know. I made ‘em.’ I thought, wow, I just got rebuked from the Lord. My girlfriends were like, ‘Are you sure you heard from God?’ He spoke to me for two weeks through dreams and through impressions. He spoke to me to come to Delaware. He kept giving me Deuteronomy 11, which is ‘Cross over the river Jordan and if you obey and heed my voice then all these blessings will come upon you.’ So I chose to come.”

  The Former Governor is now ninety-one but his mind is sharp. He sits near the window of his house in a suburb of Wilmington looking at the expanse of trees in the backyard. He was the fair-haired boy early in his career as a chemist at DuPont but the relationship soured. He says DuPont brought in the company psychiatrist to comment on his stability after he challenged their hiring policy toward blacks. His favorite political cartoons hang in the hall. On one he rides an elephant, defending the coastline from a frowning barrel of oil.

  “We have a Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, which hooks the Delaware to Chesapeake Bay,” he says. “The modern bridge is quite fancy but the old one is a big arch, a narrow bridge with traffic each way. If you go up there and look south, you see wide open spaces and great marshland. There are places that have become national refuges. I’d always go visit those places and look over toward New Jersey and out toward Spain. There’s a lot of bird life in that area.

  “My nine-year-old got me interested in birds. He’d go out in the woods in the morning before the sun came up to see what birds sang first. One morning I went with him to see what the hell he was doing and he got me interested. His older brother got interested so I’
d take those two boys and we’d go up and down the Delaware coast. We’d move down along the Delaware River, going in and out from the river, into the forest along the way and down to southern Delaware. We’d have dinner down in Maryland at night, get up early in the morning, and come back a different route. I got to know that coast. I walked over nearly all of it.

  “Just before I became governor in 1969 it became apparent the major battle that was developing was that coast. Thirteen international oil companies and major transportation companies, including one owned by George H.W. Bush, wanted to develop. Shell had detailed plans to build a large refinery on the five thousand acres they owned in the choice places along the Delaware Bay. People organized to fight them. The argument went all the way up through our state supreme court. The state supreme court gave permission to Shell to go ahead and build the plant. That’s when I became governor. I felt teed off. One of the key things I was going to do was stop this plan to industrialize the area. It wasn’t important just to Delaware.

  “Up north of here is refinery after refinery. There are all kinds of petrochemical complexes. We have one of them in Delaware City. That was done long before I was governor. We used to use it as an example: You want that Delaware City thing to march on down the coast? That’s exactly what would have happened. It was an outstanding place for oil companies. Deep water, the oil coming in direct from overseas, absolutely open land. The outlets for the oil were there since we’re close to the East Coast markets. But I said to the state we had to have a big debate. We have two opportunities for our coast zone. We can leave it as it is for fishing and hunting and boating and swimming and just lying out in the sun. Or we can participate in the world’s most rapid and largest industrializations. We can’t do both. They’re incompatible. I favor the former but let’s have a big debate. All the business community, including the DuPont company, didn’t say very much. Then I declared a moratorium—no more building in these areas until we decide what we’re going to do. That’s when all hell broke loose. I got called down to Washington by the Secretary of Commerce, Maurice Stans, who later got in trouble over the Watergate problem. He said to me in his huge office, ‘These twenty-five men sitting here with us have been working for ten years on this project to develop this Delaware coast. This is so fundamentally important to our country.’ He got up, walked over to me, pointed his finger, and said, ‘Governor, you’re being disloyal to your country.’ I jumped up and said, ‘Hell no, I’m being loyal to future generations.’