Twelve by Twelve

by Micahel Powers

  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 assumptions. During my stay in the 12 × 12, I listened to Spike Lee’s explanation of how racism works in the film industry; listened to José 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. 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,” José said.

  I was about to bite into a taco over at José’s, when I froze and frowned. Leah was at the 12 × 12 for her second visit, and José had invited us over to his place for a meal. I looked at Leah, dumbfounded. I finally said to José, “Una persona quien vive en un ‘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.”

  “José,” 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, passed 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: 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 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 undocumented, 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 Saturday afternoon, Leah and I began to notice something unexpected. This wasn’t Eminem’s 8-Mile trailer park, with pistols and ridin’ dirty. We noticed alegria and community, as people gathered around barbecue grills or on porches; we saw laughter and large gatherings. We passed a birthday party with a child, maybe five or six, swinging wildly at — and missing — a dragon piñata. Leah slowed down further. 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.

  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 attitude because they know if all else fails — deportation, it just doesn’t work out — they can go back to Mexico. Back 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. Who was better off ? There were two races, two classes. But there were also folks like José 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, muffled 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, 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 clamshell-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 “prone 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, classes, 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 space — 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-class homes, and shrugged. Much was changing in me, and in that moment, I didn’t know.

  BACK AT THE 12 X 12 THE NEXT DAY, I spotted the two-year-old blonde head of Allison Thompson bobbing along the dirt road toward José’s and Graciela’s houses. I’d been watching the movement of a light breeze, which passed like a wave through the trees on the Thompson farm, crossed No Name Creek, and washed through the deeper woods beyond. Seeing Allison reminded me that I had a gift for her.

  Actually, it was from Leah, a doll she’d given me to pass along; Leah said Allison reminded her of herself as a little girl. Picturing the smile on her face, I retrieved the doll from inside and strode toward the rabbit fence. I was about to undo the twist tie when I hesitated. Beyond the cute little Allison — who had now been joined by her four-year-old brother, the mohawked Brett — I noticed other people with darker hair and skin, who for a second felt vaguely threatening. Mexican and Honduran teenagers: Hector — José’s son — and two of Graciela’s kids, ranging between twelve and sixteen. I wanted to give Allison the doll, but another thought crossed my mind: Did I really want to interact with the teenagers? Have them know I’m home? What if the two older ones were into gang stuff? Later on, I’d look back at this reaction as my own internalized racism — I viewed them not as unique people in that moment but through a kind of racial profile. My fingers hesitated on the twist tie, and then I heard Mike’s voice booming from down the road: “Allison! Allison!”

  In a flash Mike reached the 12 × 12’s gate, three of his boys in tow. Even quicker, little Allison and Brett, hearing their father’s angry voice, took a shortcut between two Habitat houses and headed by a back route toward their own home.

  “Have you seen my daughter?” Mike blurted out to me, his face practically cherry red. I told him she’d hung a left back toward his house. He didn’t respond; instead he charged in the direction of the teens, his boys picking up steam behind him. I thought of Mike’s gun. I’d heard it go off during target practice the day before. Meanwhile, the Latino teens seemed oblivious to Mike charging toward them. They fake-pushed each other, fooling around. When Mike was fifty yards away, the tallest boy looked up and stopped midsentence; the others stopped as well, regarding the angry father and his three blond boys. Everybody froze.

  The silent standoff stretched out for a long moment, an incredible tension filling the space between Mike and his boys and the Latino teens. Suddenly I felt myself completely outside of the situation, as if I were a ghost in a movie revisiting his life. I experienced a kind of inner paralysis, knowing only one thing for sure: I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. Mike moved toward the teens, his sons right behind him. They narrowed the gap to thirty yards, then twenty yards; the teens didn’t move. Then all of sudden Michele’s voice rang through the trees: “I got her!”

  Mike stopped abruptly, one of his boys banging up against him. “You got her?” he called out.

  “Affirmative!” Michele hollered from about a quarter mile away.

  Mike hesitated for a few seconds, which stretched out to ten. He seemed at a loss as to how to act. Nobody moved or spoke. His boys looked up to him, waiting for his cue. Without a word, Mike did a i8o-degree about-face and marched toward his house, his boys following him, a rapid retreat.

  11. FORGIVENESS

  “I WALKED BACK WARD IN TO AMERICA,” José said. “I never finished that story. Of how I came to your country.”

  José had invited Leah and me to his cherished woodworking studio. He gave Leah the same impassioned tour he’d given me, showing her the beautiful dressers, tables, and chairs that he struggled to sell door-to-door. He told her that Habitat for Humanity made it all possible, as he touched his sliding table saw with reverence. Leah couldn’t hide her fascination with the man. He invited us in for tacos.

  They were delicious. We happily munched away, La Fea Más Bella on the TV in the background. Hector got up early to go play RuneScape on the computer, and eventually Leah followed him in there, sitting next to him. “I’m killing chickens for their bones,” I overheard him saying to her.

  The touch of mistrust I’d felt from José until that point — the way he’d tiptoe around his past or local racial politics — seemed to fall away as we got to know each other. Leah wandered back in and sat down next to me on the couch. José cleared his throat and said, in Spanish, “I lived in a village in Guerrero, Mexico, until I was one, but our family had constant gunfights with the neighboring family. A historical feud. So my grandmother decided one day that we should leave. We found another place, closer to the city, in the hillside slums, and I lived there until I was fifteen. It was a shack with old mattresses for walls and cardboard siding, with a tin roof and a single window.

  “What did I do? I went to elementary school for a few years and then dropped out
at age eight to shine shoes in town for twenty pesos a day. Later I sold ice cream on foot. When I was fifteen, my cousin said, ‘Nothing is ever going to change here.’ Then he mentioned ‘America,’ but I didn’t know what that was.”

  Leah didn’t catch all of this, so José stopped while I translated. She asked José in broken Spanish if he had never even heard of America at that point in his life.

  José said, “I had no idea what America was. Sure, I’d heard the word America, but it meant nothing to me. Absolutely nothing, like … like a grunt.”

  He muted the TV and continued, “In the end, my cousin convinced me that we could make money in America. So we got a train — but went the wrong way and ended up in Guatemala. Guatemala! A week later we were back in Guerrero, ashamed. But soon we did travel north. We crossed the border at night, through the mountains, the desert. We spent three days in the desert.