Voices from the Rust Belt

by Anne Trubek

  That was one of the things that set them off.

  You’ve never had ham? You think you’re too good for it, don’t you.

  I had two best friends when I was a little boy, James M. and Freddie C. They were cool with me, but their brothers called me Hambone, in honor of the dietary habits of the Jews. Freddie was a couple years older than me. He and I would debate who was better, the Beatles or the Dave Clark Five. He loved the Beach Boys, and we both thought “Help Me, Rhonda” might be the best song ever. James was a good football player, touch or tackle. We followed the Bills closely. Jack Kemp or Daryle Lamonica? Against the Boston Patriots, should they give the ball to Cookie Gilchrist on every play?

  The other sport that mattered was baseball. James and his family liked the San Francisco Giants. My family and I liked the L.A. Dodgers. My father was from Brooklyn. My sister was born there. And I liked Sandy Koufax because he was the best pitcher in baseball and wouldn’t play that World Series game on Yom Kippur. I had his baseball card. So James’s older brother John is standing next to the stoop and asks if he can see my Sandy Koufax card. I hand it down to him. He takes it and rubs the face of it, hard, on the iron railing, up and down, several times. Here, he says, handing it back to me. Koufax’s picture is still there, but it’s got black streaks all over it.

  The food especially seemed to get to them. The older C. and M. brothers simply could not get over their impression that keeping kosher meant Jews thought Catholic meat was inferior and couldn’t be eaten. One day when my mother wasn’t home, the M. brothers asked if they could come inside and get a snack out of the kitchen. I let them in and they descended on the fridge and cabinets like locusts, devouring all the Wise potato chips and Ritz crackers and Hershey bars they could find. But their real motivation was simply to see what the kitchen of Jews looked like.

  “Not so different,” one of them said. “Where’s the kosher stuff?”

  I don’t want this to sound like a bitter catalog of slights from the musty scrapbook of my childhood. That’s not my point. It’s just that we’ve gotten into the habit of extolling the tight-knit ethnic enclaves of long ago, conveniently omitting one of their distinguishing characteristics—they could be snake pits of hatred. It didn’t matter who the majority was, and it didn’t matter who the Other was. The majority actively hated the Other. That’s the way it was in most neighborhoods, in most cities. Yet, despite that, those neighborhoods could be wonderful. North Park—the old North Park, not the one now, which I like, but I’m talking about the old one—that North Park was a great place to be a kid.

  But there was this one thing. It kept coming up.

  Once I went over to Freddie’s house down the block, the C. house. His two or three older brothers seemed surprised to see me.

  Hambone, what are you doing here?

  They stood around in the living room, ostentatiously discussing politics. Hitler, he was bad. But he had some good ideas. A look at me to gauge my reaction. These were fifteen-, seventeen-, and twenty-year-olds talking in front of a nine-year-old. I think one of their parents told them to stop, but I might be making that part up. I do recall unmistakably their banter, their laughter, and how it went on long enough to make me uncomfortable. I knew full well what Hitler had done. It had happened only twenty years earlier.

  My mother could sense the anti-Semitism in the air of our neighborhood, and she hated it. She’d grown up in Toronto when Toronto was the polar opposite of what it is today. When she was a girl, there’d been a riot, Gentiles versus Jews, at the Christie Pits playing fields over the display of a swastika flag. At the beaches on the other side of town, some swim clubs flew swastikas to keep the Jews out. NO JEWS NEED APPLY signs at job sites were common. All that institutionalized anti-Semitism when she was growing up, and then the Nuremberg Laws and World War II and the camps. She had reason to suspect Jew-hatred everywhere she looked, but I scoffed—I thought what she experienced had gotten to her and made her obsessive. Many years later, we were watching TV together, and we saw a universally respected statesman disembark from a plane for a peacekeeping mission at some international trouble spot.

  “Look at that anti-Semite,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” I said dismissively. “That’s the secretary general of the UN.”

  It was Kurt Waldheim. Later we learned he’d been an SS officer during the war. My mother was right; the old world was full of them.

  She’d claim that things in our neighborhood got worse around Easter. I never noticed, but I do remember the only time in my childhood that I heard the phrase “You killed Christ.” It came from one of James’s older brothers on a spring day. I didn’t understand. What?

  You killed Christ. Well, not you, but your people.

  I was completely baffled. I didn’t know the story. I asked my mother.

  “This is what they teach them in their churches,” she said. She named the church down the block. “They teach this every Easter, and people like the C.’s and the M.’s come out and act worse than they usually do.”

  I asked my father, too, but he just shrugged it off. He’d grown up in a place where all the ethnicities blended without incident, and he simply didn’t care. He was an architect and an FDR Democrat through and through, and he never had a bad word to say about any group. (The last job he did was to convert an old East Side church building into a mosque, and that was after 9/11. He was friendly with the imam. I thought the whole thing was pretty remarkable. I wanted to write an article about it for a Buffalo magazine, and after much hemming and hawing the magazine editor got back to me. “Well, it’s like this,” the guy said. “A lot of people we talked to don’t think what your father did is necessarily a good thing.” Jerk.)

  If you weren’t around in the 1960s, you may not truly understand how pervasive this stuff was. People then didn’t veil their prejudices—they were all out in the open, and nothing to be particularly embarrassed about. This was a time of ubiquitous Polack jokes, or, as sanitized on TV by famous comedians, “Polish jokes.” No Asian immigration was allowed, so there simply were no Asians around, but there was plenty of talk about the Japs in World War II. And the N-word wasn’t something you heard on TV, but it was pretty common in casual conversation. One of the older M. brothers spoke of a kid he knew who was a great football player. “He’s a n—, but I tell you, I respect him,” he said.

  We grunted gravely in agreement, acknowledging how sincere and important an assertion this was. I tried saying the word a couple of times, but even back then it sounded foul; now I can’t even type it, and you’d be mortified to see it in print. I can’t remember the kid’s name, but he came over once and played football with us. He was the only black kid who set foot in our neighborhood in the thirteen years I lived there.

  One day when I was eleven or twelve, I went out our front door and heard a tremendous amount of yelling from the C. house. It seemed to be directed across the street, where a family of Hasidic Jews, although I didn’t know the term at the time, were moving in. They looked exotic. We and all the other Jews we knew were totally secular and assimilated—no yarmulkes, no outward sign of Jewishness. But these guys in their black suits and black hats, they stood out. Still, I couldn’t figure out what was going on.

  I walked over to the C.’s porch. The older C. and M. brothers were there, huddling behind the railings, yelling, “Get out! Get out!” They’d spring up and throw small stones at the Hasids hauling chairs and couches into their new house, then duck down again behind the cover of the railing. I can’t remember if James or Freddie was there. Maybe I don’t want to. But I do remember, quite vividly, asking, “What are you doing? Why are you doing this?” One of the older brothers answered.

  Look at them. We don’t want them living here.

  He seemed to forget that I was one of them, too. He sprang up and threw another stone, and so did a couple of others. They yelled across the street, “Get out, you Jews!”

  For many years I blamed myself for n
ot saying anything at that moment, but now I understand that I responded within the boundaries of the behavior that had always worked for me: I simply left the porch and walked away. They kept screaming at the Hasids, who kept moving their furniture in without responding to the taunts or the stones, and they were still screaming as I stepped through my front door. But something in me had changed. I never talked to the C.’s or the M.’s again. Not even James or Freddie, even though I thought then, and still think now, that they never shared the hatred that their older brothers spewed.

  The Hasidic family moved away just a month or two later, and after another year, so did we, to Eggertsville. Officially we could be counted as part of the white flight fleeing Buffalo, like all the whites leaving cities for the suburbs across late-sixties America. But in our case, that’d be misleading. We weren’t fleeing black people, or poverty, or crime, or declining city services. We were fleeing the M.’s and the C.’s, to the northern suburbs, where the other Jews lived.

  So the first week I’m at my new suburban junior high school, and a kid comes up to me and asks, “Are you Jewish?” Uh-oh, here we go, I think to myself.

  “I am—does that affect anything?” I answer, challengingly. I think at this point I’m finally ready to fight.

  But the kid is totally normal. “Oh no,” he says. “I was just curious.”

  And that was it. From the moment we moved to Eggertsville, I never heard an anti-Jewish slur again. And in the five decades since, living in Manhattan and L.A., and now, just off Allen Street in Buffalo, nothing. I’ve heard Jews say bad things about other people, but never the other way around.

  It seems like everything turned way back there, in the 1960s, thanks to Vatican II, which changed church theology to stop blaming the Jews for the crucifixion of Christ; and thanks, too, to the civil rights movement, the feminists, new immigration laws that permitted Asians and Africans to come to the United States, Stonewall and the gay rights movement, and, all in all, to the very slowly dawning recognition that everyone deserves dignity and respect.

  I recognize that what I experienced in my childhood was not all that difficult, and certainly nothing compared to what most black people can tell you about their experiences—or First Nations people, or Latinos, or Asians, or those in the LGBTQ community. And as I write this, a guy running for president wants to ban Muslims from entering the country. I recognize that we’re definitely a long way from utopia.

  But now, when I walk down Hertel Avenue, I feel all right. My old neighborhood may look the same, but it has definitely changed. No slurs, no hate, no threats. The only sounds are the music streaming from the bars, the happy shouts of the soccer fans, and the rustling leaves in the boughs arched high overhead, the great green cathedral that shelters everyone.

  DAVID FAULK

  Moundsville

  THERE IS A STORY THAT has circulated my hometown like an intractable conspiracy theory for as long as I can remember. In the nineteenth century, so the story goes, the town elders were given a choice between hosting West Virginia’s state penitentiary or a soon-to-be-announced land grant university. These practical men, given the choice between free prison labor and a standing army of fuzzy-minded professors, leapt at the former. One is tempted to throw in “and the rest is history” here, but such historical determinism has its faults. There have since been too many possibilities at redemption for that choice to have dictated a destiny. And besides, the narrative is awfully clean cut, suspiciously so, even for that historical cliché. No, what makes the story so compelling is not its explanatory simplicity, or even whether it passes the smell test of truth, but rather that choosing a prison over a university is just the sort of thing that people where I come from would do.

  Moundsville, West Virginia, lies on the east bank of the Ohio River, just a short barge and tugboat ride downstream from Pittsburgh. We drink the Steel City’s wastewater and brownfield runoff, in fact. This forgotten outpost of boarded-up smelters and steel mills lies just beyond the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area per “the Feds,” as we liked to call them while playing Cowboys and Indians. (Even at a tender age, we usually identified with the Indians.) It does not matter much to us where we technically belong. Reality prevails here. Of the variety of industrial manufacturers that once lined the river before the economic apocalypse of the early 1980s, all that remain are the anus end of some coal mines, paint plants, and a few chemical manufacturers, which yield products similar to those which caused a disaster in Bhopal, India.

  To be working-class in Moundsville was to be truly on the bottom of the slag heap of society. Shunned by Pittsburghers and Clevelanders for its southerness, and by the rest of West Virginia for its sundry north-of-the-Mason-Dixon Catholicisms (mostly Italians and Eastern Europeans, with an occasional Greek thrown in), the northern panhandle of West Virginia can even shun itself. This was most recently witnessed when country music star and favorite son of Glen Dale (just north of Moundsville) Brad Paisley went on Jay Leno to defend his song “Accidental Racist,” which is about how it has become unacceptable to wear a Confederate flag T-shirt. For the record, West Virginia entered the Union as a free state in 1863 and fought on the blue side. But most locals don’t know that. Whenever this neurotic northern sliver of West Virginia is missing from CNN’s crude election-night maps, moral outrage follows. Residents are flummoxed by assertions that this place does not in fact exist.

  My ancestors were Asturian Spanish, stocky little human espresso machines who came to West Virginia from the silver-mining regions of the old country during the 1920s. Their expertise in mining and smelting was in great demand. They lived in Spanish Row’s squat matchbox-like houses, in a little bastion of papism and domestic violence located down the street from the constant clink-hum of the Pepsi bottling plant. The matchbox simile is not imprecise. Inside these matchbox houses were little hotheaded match people who threatened to explode with self-destructive violence if rubbed the wrong way.

  Pepsi was the official non-alcoholic drink of Spanish Row, the bottling plant having been owned by one of its enterprising residents. The Asturians in my family shrub were too proud to sign anti-anarchist and communist statements at Ellis Island, and subsequently redirected to Cuba to mellow out a bit. They made it through Ellis Island in a more amenable state of mind a few babies later. Lured by posters offering mining work in West Virginia, they wound their way through the Alleghenies and northern Appalachians, carrying their stubborn, erect postures into the heart of darkness. Photos show them in tight, cruel shoes and starched collars, staring uncomfortably into the flash of the camera. They were known to abuse cats.

  The Asturianos, too proud to refer to themselves as Spaniards, did not take well to the local customs, I am told, or rather the locals did not take well to them. Holed up at the windowless Peso Club down the street from Spanish Row, the Asturianos organized labor after being fired as prison guards for agitation. It was at the Peso that I had my first Pepsi out of a frosty mug pulled from a horizontal deep freezer by a thin guy attired in an impeccable white undershirt. The Peso was cold, winter cold, like the frosty mug, the coldest place I had ever been during the summer. The Asturianos back in Spain, the stay-at-home Monteses and Zapicos, became legendary anti-fascist fighters in the 1930s. Some lived on in exile in Paris as late as the 1990s. I tell their story knowing I am attempting to make identity lemonade out of identity lemons.

  From the employment of my grandfather to my junior high school education, the penal colony on Jefferson Avenue, the State Pen, played a greater role in my life than anyone will ever know. My junior high school was overrun by the progeny of inmates from all over the state seeking proximity to Dad’s weekend visitation. These violent miscreants, challenged in basic hygiene, were promptly labeled “dirt balls” and considered genetically predisposed to all sorts of degenerate acts in the restrooms and locker rooms. They played a central role in our needy psyche: they were people we could look down on.

  * * *

  When I
first heard the term “Rust Belt” during my last year of junior high, the rust had barely formed on Moundsville. I immediately assumed this rust belt was a reference to the local repurposing of a fashion accessory as a disciplinary device, a tactic that increased in response to the stresses of rapid deindustrialization. Childhood infractions small and large were reacted to all the same: the belt was released by grimy mill hands, swung with cracking precision, and re-sheathed between frayed belt loops, all in a matter of seconds. The Ohio Valley in the early 1980s was marked by patterns: for every mill closure, bankers closed in on the houses, women dried their eyes with pink Kleenexes, and the belts came off. Then families moved away or fell apart.

  I have always wondered whether Moundsville suffers under a curse. The mammoth stone-walled penitentiary we called the “butt hut” was ruled unfit for even prisoner habitation. It was repurposed as a federally funded SWAT team training facility, until it was discovered that the mock explosions were releasing unsafe levels of asbestos. The corrections facility moved to the outskirts of town, in the foothills off a road called Fork Ridge.

  Across the street from the abandoned butt hut, the city’s namesake, sixty-nine-foot-tall Grave Creek Mound stands like a big green earthen tit. The Adena mound-building civilization populated this region between 1000 and 200 B.C., or “before the curse,” as we said in school. Our mound is thought to have been built near the end of this period. Early Moundsvillean, amateur archaeologist, and tomb raider Delf Norona dug exploratory shafts into the mound in 1838 and exhumed bodies. Thus we speculate a curse not unlike that of Chief Cornstalk’s curse in downstream Point Pleasant, West Virginia, which local lore claims as the backstory behind The Mothman Prophecies.

  There is a distinct possibility that I have personally contributed to Moundsville’s curse. Of many nights spent drinking cheap regional beer on the peak of this venerable structure, one evening stands out in particular.