Ray wanted to write a novel. But a man who was trying to wash six loads of clothes in a Laundromat while his wife was serving food somewhere and the kids were waiting for him to come pick them up somewhere else and it was getting late and the woman ahead of him kept putting more dimes in her dryer—that man could never write a novel. To do that, he would need to be living in a world that made sense, a world that stayed fixed in one place so that he could describe it accurately. That wasn’t Ray’s world.
In Ray’s world the rules changed every day, and he couldn’t see past the first of next month, when he would have to find money for rent and school clothes. The most important fact of his life was that he had two children, and he would never get out from under the baleful responsibility of having them. Hard work, good intentions, doing the right things—these would not be enough, things would not get better. He and Maryann would never get their reward. That was the other thing he understood in the Laundromat. And somewhere along the way, his dreams started to go bust.
Without the heart to write anything long, which might have brought in real money, and with the deep frustration of seeing no way out, Ray could write only poems, and very short stories. Then he rewrote them, again and again, sometimes over many years.
The stories were about people who did not succeed. That had been Ray’s experience, and those were his people. His characters were unemployed salesmen, waitresses, mill hands. They lived nowhere in particular, in bedrooms and living rooms and front yards where they couldn’t get away from one another or themselves and everyone was alone and adrift. Their names weren’t fancy—Earl, Arlene, L.D., Rae—and they seldom had more than one, if that. Nothing like religion or politics or community surrounded them, except the Safeway and the bingo hall. Nothing was happening anywhere in the world, there was only a boy fighting a fish, a wife selling a used car, two couples talking themselves into paralysis. Ray left almost everything out.
In one story, a wife learns that her husband, just back from a fishing trip with his buddies, left the brutalized corpse of a girl lying in the river for three days before reporting it.
My husband eats with good appetite but he seems tired, edgy. He chews slowly, arms on the table, and stares at something across the room. He looks at me and looks away again. He wipes his mouth on the napkin. He shrugs and goes on eating. Something has come between us though he would like me to believe otherwise.
“What are you staring at me for?” he asks. “What is it?” he says and puts his fork down.
“Was I staring?” I say and shake my head stupidly, stupidly.
His characters spoke a language that sounded ordinary, except that every word echoed with the strange, and in the silences between words a kind of panic rose. These lives were trembling over a void.
“Most of my characters would like their actions to count for something,” Ray once said. “But at the same time they’ve reached the point—as many people do—that they know it isn’t so. It doesn’t add up any longer. The things you once thought important or even worth dying for aren’t worth a nickel now. It’s their lives they’ve become uncomfortable with, lives they see breaking down. They’d like to set things right, but they can’t.”
Ray was doing things the long, hard way, going against every trend of the period. In those years, the short story was a minor literary form. Realism seemed played out. The writer Ray brought most quickly to mind, Hemingway, was at the start of a posthumous eclipse. In the sixties and seventies, the most discussed writers—Mailer, Bellow, Roth, Updike, Barth, Wolfe, Pynchon—reached for overstatement, not restraint, writing sprawling novels of intellectual, linguistic, or erotic excess, and high-octane journalism. There was a kind of competition to swallow American life whole—to mirror and distort in prose the social facts of a country that had a limitless capacity for flux and shock.
Ray, whose hero was Chekhov, moved in the opposite direction from literary trends and kept faith with a quieter task, following Ezra Pound’s maxim that “fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing.” By paying close attention to the lives of marginal, lost people, people who scarcely figured and were rarely taken seriously in contemporary American fiction (if they appeared anywhere, it was in the paintings of Edward Hopper), Ray had his fingers on the pulse of a deeper loneliness. He seemed to know, in the unintentional way of a fiction writer, that the country’s future would be most unnerving in its very ordinariness, in the late-night trip to the supermarket, the yard sale at the end of the line. He sensed that beneath the surface of life there was nothing to stand on.
In the early seventies, Maryann got her degree and began to teach high school English. That freed Ray to put his effort into writing and finding a college teaching job. He began publishing stories in big East Coast magazines. The Carvers bought their first house, in the future Silicon Valley. There was a nonstop party scene with other working-class writers and their wives in the area. Things were looking up for the Carvers. That was when everything went to pieces.
The children became teenagers, and Ray felt that they now held the reins. Ray and Maryann each had an affair. They went into bankruptcy twice. He was convicted of lying to the state of California on his unemployment claim and almost sent to prison. Instead, he went in and out of detox. His drinking turned poisonous, with long blackouts. Maryann tried to keep up in order not to lose him. Ray was a quiet, spooked-looking man, but with the scotch he grew menacing, and one night, after Maryann flirted with a friend, Ray hit her with a wine bottle. She lost 60 percent of her blood from the severed artery by her ear and was taken to the emergency room while Ray hid in the kitchen.
A few months later, in 1976, his first book of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?—written over nearly two decades—was published in New York. The dedication page said: THIS BOOK IS FOR MARYANN.
Ray was a drinker and a writer. The two had always gone along separate tracks. What the first self fled or wrecked or rued or resented, the second stared into high art. But now his writing dwindled to nothing.
“The time came and went when everything my wife and I held sacred or considered worthy of respect, every spiritual value, crumbled away,” he later wrote. “Something terrible had happened to us.” He never intended to become an alcoholic, a bankrupt, a cheat, a thief, and a liar. But he was all those. It was the 1970s, and a lot of people were having a good time, but Ray knew ahead of the years that the life of partying and drinking poor was a road into darkness.
In the middle of 1977 he went to live by himself on the remote California coast near Oregon. It was fear for his writing, not for his own life or the life of his family, that made him take his last drink there. Sober, he began to write again. In 1978 he and Maryann split.
That was the end of Bad Ray and the beginning of Good Raymond. He had ten more years before a lifetime of smoking finally caught up with him and he died at fifty, in 1988. During that decade he found happiness with a poet. He wrote some of his best stories and escaped the trap of self-parody that had begun to be called minimalism, turning to more fullness of expression in the service of a more generous vision. He became famous and entered the middle class. He received prestigious appointments and won major prizes, a literary hero redeemed from hell. He walked with the happy carefulness of someone pardoned on the verge of execution.
The turn to flash and glitz in the eighties worked in his favor. During the Reagan years he was named the chronicler of blue-collar despair. The less articulate his characters, the more his many new readers loved the creator. If the sinking working class fascinated and frightened them, they could imagine that they knew its spirit through his stories, and so they fetishized him. The New York literary scene, hot and flush again, took him to its heart. He became a Vintage Contemporary alongside writers in their twenties who had learned to mimic the austere prose without having first forged it in personal fires. He posed for jacket portraits with some of the old menace, like a man who had wandered into a book party from the scary part
of town.
“They sold his stories of inadequate, failed, embarrassed and embarrassing men, many of them drunkards, all of them losers, to yuppies,” one of his old friends said. “His people confirmed the yuppies in their sense of superiority.”
But every morning, Good Raymond got up, made coffee, sat at his desk, and did exactly what Bad Ray had always done. After all, they were the same craftsman. The distractions were different now, but he was still trying to set down what he saw and felt with utmost accuracy, and in the American din, that small thing was everything.
DEAN PRICE
Dean spent seven years in Pennsylvania. He married a girl who also worked for Johnson & Johnson, and they lived in Harrisburg and had two boys—Chase in 1993, Ryan in 1995. After leaving the company, Dean went to work as an independent contractor selling Johnson & Johnson orthopedic knees and hips. He made good money, but within a few years the marriage fell apart, and Dean turned to drinking. It got harder and harder to walk out the front door in the morning, and eventually he stopped making his sales quotas. He quit before the company could terminate his contract.
He decided to return to Rockingham County. He couldn’t live in the North, couldn’t stand the winters, the unfriendliness, the fact that drivers didn’t lift their fingers from the wheel and wave when they passed you on the road. He was afraid that his boys would grow up not knowing the land or farming or fishing, not knowing their kin who all lived within ten miles of one another. The court gave primary custody to the boys’ mother, with Dean getting them the first ten days of every month until they started school, then every other weekend. Dean felt that if he went back home, he would eventually be able to lure them and their mother down there. Until then, he would drive north to pick up and return his sons as often as necessary, even six times a month, even crying at the wheel.
Dean always said, “I’m a great father, a pretty good businessman, and a shitty husband.”
When he moved back to Stokesdale in 1997, he was thirty-four. He vowed that the divorce would not make him bitter. He resolved to change his life and become a better father, a more honest human being. He loved the fact that so much about his part of the country was old. The backbone of America was right here, the self-sufficiency and loyalty. Jefferson had written, “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.” It was still true. If the United States was invaded, how many people in California or New York would pick up a pistol and fight? “The thing about the farmers is it’s in their blood to be entrepreneurs,” Dean said. “That’s why they came here two hundred years ago. They didn’t want to have to punch the clock, they didn’t want to have to work for the Man. They could have a hundred fifty acres of land and be their own boss. If you had a Petri dish and you were trying to grow an entrepreneur, the environment in this country is perfect, because there is reward with the risk.”
He joined the Sardis Primitive Baptist Church, a simple redbrick building under a giant old oak that had been around since 1801, next to the little graveyard where his grandparents Birch and Ollie Neal lay buried. By the time Dean joined, the congregation at Sardis had dwindled to no more than eight or nine people, most of them twice his age. He loved the smell of old wood in the church, the a cappella singing of old hymns. The Primitive Baptists put a lot of store in dreams, and the preacher, Elder Mintor, often spoke of them from the pulpit. How else would God talk to you if not through your dreams, your imagination? The theology was called sacred hope. Dean was no longer a Christian in the way of his parents. He hoped to goodness he was saved, but he didn’t know anything for sure—didn’t know if he would make it home at the end of the day. You did the best you could. He was baptized in the Dan River, his third time—the first two hadn’t taken—and came out of the water rejoicing, feeling that he could have a fresh start.
* * *
The plateau of hardwood hills and red clay fields between the Appalachian range and the Atlantic coastal plain is called the Piedmont. Along the border between Virginia and North Carolina, from Danville and Martinsville down to Greensboro and Winston-Salem, the mainstays of Piedmont life in the twentieth century were tobacco, textiles, and furniture. In the last years of the century they all started to die, more or less simultaneously, as if a mysterious and highly communicable plague swept through the region. Dean Price returned home just as the first bad signs were showing up across the landscape.
Most of the tobacco grown in the area was bought, warehoused, aged, processed, blended, rolled, and cut into cigarettes by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in Winston-Salem. Dean liked to drive up the Jeb Stuart Highway across the Virginia line and visit the Reynolds homestead, within view of No Business Mountain, which got its name from moonshining. He admired Richard Joshua Reynolds—born in 1850, rode into Winston on a horse in 1874, started manufacturing tobacco there the next year, and became the richest man in North Carolina by inventing the packaged cigarette. That was a good time to be an entrepreneur, Dean thought—virgin territory in business, with the best ideas rising to the top. Reynolds was an innovator, a modern industrialist at a time when the South was still rural and dirt poor. There was a stone marker at the homestead with a quotation from his grandson saying how Reynolds had given a decent life to thousands of people “who otherwise would have been doomed to the backwardness of a region that had no future and was burdened with a past that had failed.” R.J. Reynolds Tobacco made the city of Winston-Salem, took care of its workers with (segregated) company housing and free day care, gave them Class A stock that paid a handsome yearly dividend, and built a local bank, called Wachovia, to house its stock and deposits.
By the early 1980s, the company had slipped out of Reynolds family control and was coming under heavy pressure from competitors. Reynolds sales peaked in 1983 and fell every year after that. In the same period, the federal government applied a different kind of pressure—banning cigarette advertisements and doubling the excise tax on cigarettes in 1983, while antismoking crusaders carried out a huge public awareness campaign. To stay on top, Reynolds merged with Nabisco Foods in 1985, and the headquarters was moved to Atlanta, which made a lot of people in Winston-Salem unhappy. In 1988, RJR Nabisco became the target of the biggest leveraged buyout in history until that point, acquired for twenty-five billion dollars by the Wall Street firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. The factory workers had little understanding of the deal, but almost immediately Reynolds started cutting its workforce in Winston-Salem to pay off the pile of debt in New York. The writing was on the wall for tobacco.
In 1990 a tobacco farmer Dean Price knew, James Lee Albert, was interviewed and photographed by the Greensboro News & Record. When he was twenty-five, in 1964, Albert had bought a hundred-seventy-five-acre farm in Rockingham County for a hundred dollars an acre, when top tobacco brought forty-seven cents a pound. As he raised his family and added on to his house, the price went up ten or fifteen cents a year after that, almost every year, until it hit its peak at $2.25 around 1990. That was when Albert told the paper that the government was going to put the tobacco farmers who had built this country out of business.
In the years that followed, congressional hearings and litigation against the companies drove the price of tobacco steadily downward as demand declined. In 1998, to end the lawsuits, Big Tobacco agreed to pay the states more than two hundred billion dollars to cover the health costs incurred by smoking. In 2004 the federal government ended the tobacco subsidy. Under the buyout, tobacco company money would pay farmers around seven dollars for every pound of tobacco they didn’t grow for the next decade.
Most of the farmers in Dean’s area took the buyout. James Lee Albert received his and almost immediately underwent open-heart surgery at age sixty-seven, and that was the end of his working life. One of his sons started boarding horses on the land. Dean’s cousin Terry Neal, who had two hundred prime a
cres right across Route 220 from Dean’s house, quit farming in 2005 and used most of his buyout money to pay off his taxes and debts. It was too expensive for most tobacco farmers to convert to strawberries or soy, so they just grew hay or let the land sit fallow, and the strange sight of denuded fields at the height of the growing season was seen in Rockingham County.
The fall of textiles had different causes. The mills came to the Piedmont in the late nineteenth century, mostly dispersed in small towns. Dan River opened in Danville in 1882; the Cone brothers brought Proximity to Greensboro in 1895. The social code in the mill towns was paternalistic and insular—the company took care of its employees and fiercely opposed any union drives. In a place like Martinsville there was never a real middle class, just managers and workers, and when the collapse began in the 1990s, the mill towns had nothing to fall back on. Some workers and local officials blamed it on NAFTA, which took effect on the first day of 1994, ushered into being by Democrats and Republicans alike. Others said it was the selfishness and greed of the owners, who had prevented other industries from getting a foothold, then sold out to conglomerates and Wall Street firms that had no loyalty to Danville or Greensboro. Pro-business locals blamed high labor costs. Analysts in Washington and New York said that it was all inevitable—technology and globalization. After years of cutbacks and other warning signs, the end came with breathtaking speed, as companies that had been the most important institutional pillars of their communities for over a century and looked set to continue forever disappeared in rapid order: Tultex of Martinsville filed for bankruptcy in 1999, Proximity of Greensboro in 2003, Dan River of Danville in 2005; Hanes of Winston-Salem started closing plants in 2006, and by 2010 only one skeletal factory was left. Hundreds of smaller businesses went away with them. A single rural county in North Carolina—Surry, population seventy-three thousand—lost ten thousand jobs in one decade.
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