The Unwinding

by George Packer

  The only rich person Danny respected was Bill Gates, because he made his money honestly and then spent it saving third world countries. Sam Walton had seemed like a pretty decent man, but after he passed on, his kids got greedy. Ronale wanted to shake the hand of Warren Buffett, and also Oprah, and Michelle Obama because of how sincere she was, jumping rope with kids and getting them to eat healthy. Ronale liked watching Secret Millionaire because every week a rich person had to live just like poor people, and at the end of the show he had a change of heart and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to a charity. But she also had a disturbing vision of the greed that lay behind everything else: “In the background there is this horrible nightmare that stands behind the good, getting bigger and bigger, and it’s like a black cloud and it’s consuming everything and actually taking life away from people.”

  All the same, Ronale bought everything at Wal-Mart, because you couldn’t beat their prices. Except for meat, because Danny and Dennis told her how they left food racks outside the cooler for hours. But everything else. You just had to give in. Danny was beginning to think that Wal-Mart and big oil ran the whole world, and when the family went shopping he stayed in the car.

  Then, one morning not long before the convention, he told some co-workers on break how much he hated his job, and the word got back to his manager, and the manager confronted Danny right in the produce section and humiliated him in front of customers. The next day Danny woke up with the manager’s words burning in his ears and he couldn’t take it, his impotent pride raged, and he didn’t go in to work. So they were back where they started.

  On the last day of the convention, Danny, Ronale, Dennis, Brent, and Danielle sat in their living room. HGTV was on. Brent’s hair was cut short—he was in ninth grade and had joined Junior ROTC. Danielle was at the computer doing her classwork. The Hartzells had been unable to get her into a decent middle school, so she was enrolled in the Hillsborough Virtual School for sixth grade (which worked okay until they could no longer pay for Internet and lost their service). Danny was sipping a Diet Pepsi and helping Danielle with her work. He already regretted the hotheadedness that had cost him his job.

  Ronale was still seething about the speech of the Nominee’s wife. “She was pouring the sugar out and everything, and I don’t get how they would not notice the fake. ‘I had breast cancer, I had MS’—but they want to take Planned Parenthood away. It’s assistance for women that could not afford mammograms, pap smears, preventive cancer. If a woman’s diagnosed with breast cancer, what’s she going to do if she ain’t got the money?”

  Danny said, “My view on everything—if you want to change this country, you have to put a person in office who has never done it for a day. Put a regular old guy like me, someone who’s lived it and never done nothing else but live it.” He sipped his Diet Pepsi. “We’re struggling, but we’re not starving. There’s no life, but there’s a roof over your head.”

  “It’s the price of freedom,” Dennis said. “I can come home, I have a bed to sleep on, I have food, a soda to drink, or tea—I’m fine. I wish I could have more, like everybody, but it’s never going to be perfect as long as the world runs the way it runs and people make the decisions they make.”

  It was the second-to-last day of August. While the Republicans concluded their $123 million convention fifteen minutes away, the Hartzells, having paid all their bills, had five dollars left till the first of September.

  TAMMY THOMAS

  One day in the spring of 2012, Tammy left her purse in the Pontiac and walked up to the broad front door of the brick house on Tod Lane. She couldn’t find a street address, and she wondered what had happened to the rose garden under the front windows, but this was the house—there was the curved patio off on the right side, there was the tree she got spanked for climbing. Dogs were already barking before she could summon the nerve to knock. The door swung open and a tiny white-haired white woman appeared.

  “Yes?” The woman stood bowlegged in sweatpants and a sweatshirt that said BODYWORKS.

  “Hi!” Tammy stayed on the circular drive that ran along the front steps. “I know you’re probably wondering why is this lady standing in my driveway.”

  The woman withdrew to put the barking dogs away, then returned to the door.

  Tammy said, “Can I come up and shake your hand?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  Tammy approached, and the woman accepted her hand warily. “My name is Tammy Thomas, and I want to tell you that the lady that used to live in this house—”

  “Purnell?”

  “Miss Purnell. My great-grandmother used to work for her, and when Miss Purnell—I remember her very vaguely—when she passed, we actually stayed here for a little while.”

  “Yeah. Mm-hmm.”

  “And I have so many vivid memories of this house,” Tammy’s voice was getting thick, “and I’ve been wondering if they are all of them just memories, or is it for real.” She mentioned the rose garden and the curved patio, the ballroom upstairs, the grand staircase, and Miss Lena’s long bathroom, with the gold-colored tiles and the stand-up shower. “I started kindergarten here,” Tammy said, “and I don’t even know what else to say.”

  The woman confirmed that all the memories were real, but it was the emotion in Tammy’s eyes and voice that made her say, “You can come in and look at it. I’m in the process of redoing it.”

  Tammy stepped inside. The grand staircase was straight ahead—just a flight of stairs with a threadbare runner. The foyer and living room, where she had learned to ride a bike, looked much smaller than she remembered. The hardwood of the floors had the same pattern, but the shine was worn off and they were all scratched up. The buzzer was gone from the dining room floor.

  The woman’s name was Mrs. Tupper. The house had cost two hundred thousand dollars in 1976 but now it was worth less than that. Her husband had been an executive at Packard Electric, but he was long dead, her children moved out, and she talked on, explaining the shabby state of things, in the way of someone living alone and completely absorbed in a task. “Like I said, I’m not going to be around much longer, and the original carpet—I haven’t changed the carpet because of the dogs. All carpet today has a rough backing and it would destroy the floors. It would destroy everything. You have to have a soft backing. Even if you have padding down it still doesn’t help.”

  Mrs. Tupper had just come from her ballet lesson. She still did ballet at her age but your knees started going as you got older and she no longer did tap. Tammy followed her from room to room, gazing at walls and ceilings, losing herself in a memory (was that chandelier original?), then coming back to the present and this woman, finding her where she was—in a house that she was slowly and painfully renovating herself, with the thought of selling it before she died—instinctively knowing how to make a connection with an old woman.

  When they were out on the curved patio facing the garden, Mrs. Tupper suddenly looked at Tammy as if for the first time. “I do know what it feels like to go back and see things.”

  She and her sister had been born in Ohio, taken to Washington by their rich parents, and then abandoned, put in a children’s home, and she had recently gone back to Washington to see it. “I grew up back when we had reform school. Mothers, if you don’t take care of your child, your child goes to a reform school if he’s bad, and if you don’t want to take care of him, you put him in a children’s home. Not a thing wrong. Perfect. I was given more than I could ever give my children.”

  Mrs. Tupper’s backyard looked across the street at the empty fields where Rayen High School had once stood. Rayen was where Barry, Tammy’s ex-husband, her first child’s father, had gone, and also Geneva, her best friend, who had been thrown to the street and shot in the head. Built in 1922, torn down after it closed in 2007. Mrs. Tupper was glad to see it gone. The house between hers and the school had been a drug house, and the Crips and Bloods used to fight there. Once, two boys with guns were chasing and shooting at a third, who
broke down her fence and ran right up onto her porch into her house. Mrs. Tupper made him sit down and asked him a bunch of questions, but all he would say was that he was with the gang, he was a Crip and they were Bloods, and they were after him and he was saving his life. A few days later he went back to the drug house with a gun, because he’d had enough. From the third floor Mrs. Tupper heard a boy cry out for his mother just before the gun went off. One boy walked to the schoolyard and died there, the other lay on the driveway until the ambulance Mrs. Tupper called came, but he was already dead.

  “This was in the late eighties, early nineties?” Tammy asked.

  “Something like that.”

  “Do you remember their names?”

  “No. It never showed up in the newspaper. The only things they could have been after him for—he wouldn’t say—was either drugs or a woman.”

  “It was probably drugs,” Tammy said.

  “Right. I didn’t realize it because he looked so young. It was really sad.”

  “Sure, yeah.”

  “When they’re thirteen or fourteen years, I believe in putting them in the reform school, and when I say reform, what does reform mean? They can reform you to want to be a good citizen, and then from there you go into the service. Mom and Dad don’t care about you anyway, so the reform school can take you. You understand? And it’s going to give you something to hold on to in life. Make sure you have a good education, and you’ll have fun in there, you’ll go to the circus. I did all of these things. It’s getting cold.”

  “My eyes are watering,” Tammy said.

  She stayed for over an hour. It felt like she could have stayed all day because once Mrs. Tupper started talking she wouldn’t stop, but Tammy had to get back to work. Before leaving, Tammy asked if she could come back and have tea, or bring lunch.

  “I’d love to have you,” Mrs. Tupper said.

  Tammy got in her Pontiac and drove away, past Crandall Park, where she had once fed the swans. The house was a lot smaller than she remembered, and less glamorous. It hadn’t been kept up well, and a bad neighborhood was closing in. But as Tammy stood in the foyer, her mother was hurrying down the stairs, saying she didn’t like staying there because the house was haunted, and as Tammy stood in the kitchen, her granny was calling for her to come help with the laundry, and in those moments she felt close to them again.

  * * *

  The Front Porch Café was on the ground floor of a brick building with a burned-out second floor, next to the interstate near downtown Akron. Inside, fifty people were sitting at tables, a few black and white women and a lot of black men, many of them former convicts. Miss Hattie was there, with a big picture of Obama on her T-shirt. Tammy was standing in front of a screen, wearing jeans and a long loose synthetic shirt with purple and white swirls. Her hair was cut short and hennaed on top.

  A couple of days before, she had been at a community center in Cleveland, talking about Social Security and Medicare to a room full of old people, the women listening, the men playing dominoes. She’d had one of her leaders with her in Cleveland, Miss Gloria, who was seventy-one, and Miss Gloria was supposed to talk about living on retirement benefits and how they were under threat, but they couldn’t hear Miss Gloria very well so Tammy had to do most of the talking while she set up the projector she was lugging around in order to show them a video about the Koch brothers, Charles and David, who were shown in a cartoon as two heads growing out of an octopus, and after the video, one of the women, Linda, had asked, “Where did these two Koch brothers come from? Why haven’t we heard of them before?” and another woman, Mabel, had said, “Koch brothers going to make the Negroes pay the bill.” After Cleveland, Tammy had a Food Policy Council meeting in Youngstown, then she had to prepare a presentation for a minority health conference. In the middle of it all she was getting ready for her wedding on the beach near Tampa to a roofer named Mark, a guy she’d known when they were at East High School, and suddenly Mark’s uncle from East Cleveland had shown up with financial problems, and so the uncle was now living with them in her house in Liberty.

  She was tired.

  “I grew up in a place where you could sit on my front porch and you could smell the sulfur in the air,” Tammy was telling the group at the Front Porch Café. “And everybody in that community was working. We were at a hundred fifty thousand people at that time. And guess what? One day, the jobs left. September of ’77, the mills stopped working. We lost over fifty thousand jobs within a ten-year time frame. I was fortunate enough as an adult that I was able to get a job at Packard. Eleven thousand jobs in its heyday, down to three thousand jobs, and when we all left it had less than six hundred jobs. I just want to let you know, that story of Youngstown is the epitome of any older industrial city across the United States.”

  MVOC’s survey map of Youngstown was projected onto the screen, with the east side a sea of green. “The house that my grandmother worked very hard, cleaning people’s floors, washing their clothes, cooking their food, so that we could have a home—that home now sits on a street with four houses on it. Two of them are vacant, and one of them is ours. The majority of our community lives like that.”

  Tammy was going on notes that she’d written up the day before—turning her life story into a speech, in order to teach the people in the group how to tell their own stories and tie them to a campaign during the presidential election for better jobs in Ohio.

  “When we look at our children and the blight that has come to our communities, how can you continuously attack good-paying union jobs, like the jobs we lost at Packard Electric? No one ever could have told me I would not have retired from that job. We need jobs in Ohio. We need jobs that pay a living wage in Ohio. Jobs are the connective tissue to everything surrounding us.”

  In 2012, jobs were slowly coming back to Ohio, some of them in the area around Youngstown: jobs in natural gas exploration of the Utica shale, which ran right under the Mahoning Valley; new shifts at the GM plant northwest of town; manufacturing work in auto parts factories; even a few jobs in steel mills. So far, though, the new opportunities had hardly reached the people who needed them most, such as the poor and chronically unemployed men and women who still lived in Youngstown, especially those—like so many at the Front Porch Café—who had done time in prison. MVOC did not have an economic development strategy. Its jobs campaign simply called for private employers to hire local people first and give felons a chance, and for government to be the employer of last resort.

  “When I got pregnant, it broke my grandmother’s heart,” Tammy said, winding up her speech. “I wanted to make sure I graduated from high school because I knew that was the only way I could give my daughter a better life. I have three adult children that I raised in our community, and they all moved away. Youngstown could be a wonderful place to live again—it should be.”

  Tammy was so busy with her organizing work that she hardly had time to canvass for the election. But on November 5, she spent two hours going door-to-door with Kirk Noden around Lincoln Park on the east side, the part of the city where she had grown up. There was a rumor that a misleading piece of paper was circulating in the neighborhood, telling people that they could sign it as a substitute for voting. So Tammy asked everyone she met whether they had already voted, or intended to vote the next day, or needed a ride to the polls. To her surprise, the enthusiasm for Obama was even higher than in 2008, with none of the concerns about whether the country was ready and a black president would survive.

  And when he was reelected the next night, Tammy found herself even more emotional than the first time. She had gotten caught up in the daily mechanics of the race, the close polls in Ohio, the fear that Obama might lose. She had been thinking about the election negatively: if he lost, the people she had helped to recruit and train, people like Miss Hattie and Miss Gloria and the men at the Front Porch Café, might feel that the work was in vain, and a few years of her life might have been lost. Tammy hadn’t allowed herself to think about wha
t it would mean if he won. And when it was over, she thought: “My God, it means we’ve got a chance to do something for real.”

  DEAN PRICE

  One day in the spring of 2011, around the time he stopped going up to Red Birch, Dean was sitting in the Rockingham County economic development office, looking through the literature on display there, when he found a study by a professor at Appalachian State University, in Boone, on waste cooking oil in North Carolina. A chart showed the population of each of the state’s one hundred counties, the number of restaurants in each county, and the gallons of cooking oil that those restaurants got rid of. It turned out that in each county, even the smallest and poorest ones, the amount of oil for every man, woman, and child was about three or four gallons a year. There was a direct correlation between the amount of waste cooking oil a county created in a year and the amount of fuel a county’s school buses would use in a year.

  Dean stood up at his chair. Just like when he first read about peak oil, his knees went weak and he stumbled back. Ever since leaving Red Birch and going off on his own, he had been looking for alternatives to canola oil, which was unprofitable as long as gas stayed below five dollars a gallon. That was why Red Birch had a failed business model—Dean said it to anyone who would listen. On the other hand, waste cooking oil was cheap: some restaurants charged fifty cents a gallon to pump it out of the barrels in back and take it away, some gave it away for free, and some even paid to have it removed. Fried chicken, livers and gizzards, pulled pork, fish, corn fritters, fried okra, french fries—just about everything eaten at restaurants in North Carolina was cooked in shiny reddish-brown vegetable oil that sat bubbling in deep metal fryers. And all that oil had to be thrown out.