Red Cloud is renowned, however, as the hometown of Willa Cather, whose lifetime (1873–1947) spanned the passage from the frontier to the modern era. No one before or since has written better about the West as it was experienced by ordinary people. In My Antonia, the final book of her Prairie Trilogy, she wrote one of the most moving passages in American literature. It comes in the voice of the novel’s narrator, Jim Burden, as he reflects on the grave of Antonia Shimerda’s father, a Czech immigrant who found only misery in his pioneer life on the Great Plains and committed suicide. Denied burial in consecrated ground, Mr. Shimerda was interred out on the prairie.
Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed surveyed section lines, Mr. Shimerda’s grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross. As grandfather had predicted, Mrs. Shimerda never saw the roads go over his head. The road from the north curved a little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a little to the south; so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray rivers flowing past it. I never came upon the place without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence—the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rumbled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.
That paragraph is highlighted and underlined in my beat-up copy of the novel. I suppose I’ve reread it a dozen times, often aloud; it’s as if I’m reciting an incantation to summon the angels who sang to Cather. No response as yet.
Red Cloud is a handsome old town, and with its streets paved in brick and its brick and sandstone buildings, most definitely red. It is definite—no accretions on its fringes, there is the country and then there is the town—and I liked that. As the model for the town of Black Hawk in My Antonia, Red Cloud had become a destination for literary-minded tourists and scholars. Willa Cather is almost a cottage industry. The Willa Cather museum is housed in a three-story brownstone on the main street; the Willa Cather home, a beige frame with picket fence and historical marker, is less than a block away; the Willa Cather Foundation has offices in the restored opera house. Five miles outside of town lies the six-hundred-acre Willa Cather Memorial Prairie, and the area all around is known as Cather Country. No surprise—commerce has claimed her name, and Leslie chuckled as she took a picture of a license plate holder advertising Cather Country Auto Sales.
The museum and the Cather home were closed for the afternoon. We drove out past the Memorial Prairie, its tall red grasses speckled with primrose and aster, as all the wide land looked before it was plowed under and fenced.
“Let’s give three cheers for Red Cloud,” I said.
“Definitely,” Leslie said. “But why in particular?”
“For giving Willa Cather the Elvis treatment.”
An hour of meandering took us through places where time seemed to have stopped, then brought us to I-80 and back into the present. Cars racing east and west, semis blasting by at eighty miles an hour, buffeting Fred and Ethel. A line from Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop seemed appropriate. Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
In Doniphan, a few miles south of Grand Island, Nebraska, we rented space at another kampground, this one nestled in a shady grove of locust and poplar wedged between a corn field and a wheat field.
* * *
A Canadian cold front invaded. Thunderheads scalloped the level horizon, loomed higher, then rumbled overhead, lightning flashing inside as from gigantic welding torches. The wind howled up to forty miles an hour, with nothing between it and the campground but a few barbed-wire fences. Streamers of dust flew from the prairie like spume from the waves of an unquiet sea. No rain fell, so I managed to barbecue pork chops bought from Ladow’s market, and we managed to eat them at a picnic table under a trembling poplar, though the gusts nearly blew the plates away. The sunset was a spectacle; the great clouds racing overhead, colored by its light, looked like billowing fires in the heavens as spears of lightning shot horizontally across the seam of land and sky.
19.
I had planned to push on from Grand Island through the Nebraska sandhills into South Dakota. A couple of chance encounters changed my mind.
To kill time while Fred was getting his oil changed and tires rotated, I walked Sage and Sky in a park across from the garage. I noticed two black men on a bench. I’d been to Sudan twice in the past, on assignments, and recognized them as Sudanese by their Nilotic features, their great height, obvious even though they were seated, and the Arabic they were speaking. It was fairly unusual to see Africans and hear Arabic in Nebraska. What could have brought those two to Grand Island?
An answer of sorts came later, when I went to the post office to pick up forwarded mail. I was standing in a long line behind a thirtyish white guy wearing a tank top, his neck and arms wallpapered in tattoos, when a man in a straw cowboy hat asked me, “Spick Spanich?”
“Un poco. Muy poco. Que quieres?”
I guess my accent discouraged him. He turned away.
“Spick Spanich,” snorted Tattoo-man. “He asked me the same thing. Too goddamn many Mexicans in this town. I remember when there was one black family and one Mexican family in Grand Island. Now we got a million of ’em, and Somalis and Sudanese comin’ in, and bringin’ bedbugs with ’em.”
“Why are they coming here?”
“To work at the Swift meatpacking plant,” he said. “It’s here in town, it’s big. You can’t miss it by the smell. They come directly here. They give ’em money, give ’em a car, give ’em a house, give ’em a job, and they get to work tax free. You wonder where our tax dollars go.”
“Who gives them all that? The company?”
“The government! Nebraska! The only state I know more screwed up than California.”
I said I’d never heard of any government buying houses and cars for immigrants, much less assuring them of work in private industry.
Tattoo-man swore it was true. The Africans, he said, “need to go home.” He didn’t say what the Mexicans should do.
I asked, “They’re causing problems?”
“Oh, yeah. That’s why half the nightclubs are shut down. They come in there, and all they want to do is fight. Fight, fight, fight.”
Back in the truck, I told Leslie about the encounter and she consulted our oracle, Magic Droid. It turned out that Tattoo-man had purveyed yet another myth. Neither the federal government nor the state of Nebraska provided the Somalis and Sudanese with houses and cars; they’d found work at the meatpacking plant because Swift had recruited them.
The Law of Unintended Consequences may not be as immutable as Newton’s First Law of Motion, but it runs a close second. A few years ago, in response to the outcry about illegal immigration, the Department of Homeland Security began raiding meatpacking plants throughout the Midwest, found hundreds of undocumented workers, and deported them. Half a dozen Swift factories from Colorado to Iowa lost almost thirteen hundred employes. To replace them, the company sent recruiters all over the farm belt and Great Plains states to hire foreign workers who were in the United States legally. Sudanese and Somalis, who had refugee status because of civil strife in their homelands, formed a natural labor pool, and that was how they arrived in Grand Island.
The unintended consequence was to turn the city of some forty-eight thousand into a melting pot where little was melting and much was on high simmer. It boiled over in 2008, when more than two hundred Somali workers
walked off the job, demanding that Swift give them special breaks to observe daily Muslim prayers. Management decided to cut the workday—and the pay—of its other employees to allow the Somalis time for evening prayers. That set off days of strikes and protests by Latino workers, and the company scrapped the plan.
I held a number of dirty, backbreaking jobs when I was young, but I never worked in a meatpacking house. The closest I came to being in one was when I was eight or nine and my father took me to the Union Stockyards, on Chicago’s South Side. I don’t remember much about the visit except the commingled reek of raw meat, blood, guts, manure, urine, and the pungent smoke from the rendering factories nearby.
I picked up that same stench on the northeast side of Grand Island and followed my nose to the JBS Swift plant. Tattoo-man, wrong about some things, had been right about the smell. Also about the size of the place. The steel and concrete structure, almost windowless, with venting stacks poking through its roof, covered several acres. JBS was devoted to the disassembly of hogs and cattle, two thousand head a day, seven days a week. They were herded off cattle cars and livestock trucks into the slaughterhouse to be killed instantly by pneumatic darts to the brain, then stripped of their hides, decapitated, dehorned, dismembered, and carved into quarters, into rib eyes, sirloins, flank steaks, and pork chops by three thousand people laboring amid mounds of bloody offal.
Looking at that huge abattoir, I pondered the commonplace that immigrants do the grueling, dangerous work Americans aren’t willing to do. The reality is that immigrants, the illegal kind in particular, are more willing to tolerate long hours, faster line speeds, and pay much lower than it was three decades ago, when meatpacking jobs were prized by people born in the United States.1 The physical stress causes injuries and chronic disabilities. It also exacts an emotional price. As we drove away, Leslie asked me to stop so she could photograph a peculiar pairing of highway billboards. The one on top, in red, white, and blue, proclaimed JBS—GREAT JOB OPPORTUNITIES. Then came a list: STARTING WAGE—$12.95 AN HOUR … EARN UP TO $18.60 AN HOUR IN PRODUCTION … Right below it was a sign showing a young, disconsolate Latino man sitting with his head in a hand. SUICIDIO, said the headline, NO ES LA SOLUCION. A panel alongside identified, in Spanish and English, the Hall County Suicide Prevention Project and gave a number to call.
* * *
Singing the song of These, my ever-united lands—my body no more inevitably united, part to part, and made out of a thousand diverse contributions one identity, any more than my hands are inevitably united and made ONE IDENTITY … Nativities, climates, the grass of the great pastoral Plains … These affording, in all their particulars, the old feuillage to me and to America … How can I but as here chanting, invite you for yourself to collect bouquets of the incomparable feuillage of these States?
—WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass
We drove into Grand Island on the Henry Fonda Highway (the actor was born in Grand Island in 1905). Mexican restaurants spiced up the Locust Street commercial strip; American eateries appeared to be in a cuisine minority. Locust led downtown, past a concert hall with the word Liederkrantz chiseled in stone above its front door. (Grand Island was founded in 1867 by mostly German immigrants.) In the Salvation Army thrift store, beside the Union Pacific tracks and a grain elevator, every tag and sign was in Spanish and English, and Latinos and whites shopped together for bargains. A few blocks away, in Mickleson’s, an old movie theater converted into a bar, restaurant, and pool hall, Anglo retirees gathered to eat lunch and shoot eight ball with custom-built sticks carried in fine leather cases. Not far from there, around East Fourth Street, was Grand Island’s old business district, and it wasn’t historic; nor was it a museum of preciously restored buildings with nobody in them. It was a little worn around the edges, a little run-down here and there, but in the way of a house that looks lived in rather than like a subject for Better Homes and Gardens. Once again, the Latino influence dominated—Mexican restaurants, bodegas, laundromats, but we spotted two places offering African food, another serving Laotian.
I’d grown up in a city that was home to people from half the world: Irish, Poles, Italians, Germans, African Americans, Chinese, Swedes, Norwegians, Mexicans, Czechs, Jews, Serbs, Croatians, and Greeks, among others, dwelled in ethnic and racial enclaves. Up through the fifties, Chicagoans identified themselves by their national origins. I recalled a conversation I’d had with Mike Royko, the great Chicago Daily News columnist, in the Billy Goat Tavern (owned by a Greek, Billy Sianis). Royko (Polish) had taken his family to visit friends in California. Royko’s kids had reported disturbing news. “Dad, they aren’t anything,” they said of the friends’ kids. “What do you mean, they’re not anything?” Royko asked. “We asked them what nationality they were, and they said they were American!”
It’s not that everyone got along. In my father’s time, neighborhood borders were as hard and fast and as zealously guarded as those in the old country. My father was around ten when he strayed out of Little Italy into an Irish precinct across Blue Island Avenue. A woman leaned out of a tenement window, and spotting the olive-complected boy with jet-black hair and a distinctly Roman nose she yelled, “Get outta here, ya dirty little Wop!” and to encourage his exit dumped a pan of hot water on his head.
The American blender did not work its homogenizing magic until after World War II, when the children and grandchildren of the immigrant generations began an exodus to the suburbs. They had to get along because now they lived next door to each other, and they made the astonishing discovery that they had more in common than not. They all wanted the same things: fresh air, a house to call their own, a car, decent schools for their kids.
When my parents moved out to Westchester, Illinois, into a new house that stood by itself on an as yet unpaved street cut through a fallow cornfield, my best friend was Bob Stloukal, half Czech, half Irish. We played sandlot ball and hunted rabbits and went skinny-dipping in Salt Creek and ran around the woods of the Cook County Forest Preserve, digging up Pottawatomie and Sauk-Fox arrowheads. We’d become leaves in Whitman’s feuillage, as American as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.
Was it possible that twenty-five years from now the sons and daughters of Grand Island’s Mexicans, Africans, and Asians would be speaking with midwestern twangs and rooting for the Cornhuskers?
Maybe.
* * *
The three men, all white, asked me not to use their names or identify them in any other way, so I’ll call them Jim, Joe, and John, and describe them as prominent opinion makers in Grand Island. Not that they said anything controversial, but the immigration question had become so sensitive that even an innocuous comment could be taken the wrong way by some folks in town.
Jim offered a few statistics to show me how recently, and how quickly, Grand Island’s complexion had changed. Minority enrollment in the city’s schools had more than doubled, from 20 percent in 1999 to 44 percent in 2010. The number of Latino students had tripled in the same period, from 1,139 to 3,357. Whites were projected to become a minority between 2020 and 2030.
But without immigration, Joe pointed out, Grand Island would have lost population in the past ten years. He praised Latinos. They were the most acculturated group in the city and were “terrific entrepreneurs. They’ve branched out into fields like construction. The guy who reroofed my house was named Lopez.”
Outlooks like Tattoo-man’s were not rare but were confined to a “vocal minority” of the white population.
“We see somebody who doesn’t look, dress, eat, or worship like we do, and we resent it,” said John. “But if today we brought over a bunch of people from the Black Forest, nobody would think twice about it.”
He found it ironic that the people from the Black Forest who settled in Grand Island had once been victims of nativist fervor. The Know-Nothing Party was formed in the 1850s by American-born citizens furious about the rising tide of Irish and German immigration.2 During World War I, as anti-German sentiment washed over the lan
d, the Ku Klux Klan raided a social center in Grand Island and burned all of its German-language books.
Now sentiment had turned against those whose skin was brown and black, and who spoke strange tongues. But racial animosity didn’t come from whites alone. The 2008 labor strife lifted the lid on a stewpot of ethnic bitterness—the dark side of diversity. Latinos were pissed off at Somalis for demanding special privileges. One Mexican described workers like himself as “humble” and Somalis as “arrogant.” The Sudanese, mostly Christian, were suspicious of the Muslim Somalis, who returned the feeling. The handful of Asians in the city, Burmese and Laotians for the most part, cast wary eyes at one another. Listening to all this, I thought the volatile mix could update a verse from the old Kingston Trio tune “The Merry Minuet”:
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans,
The Germans hate the Poles.
Italians hate Yugoslavs.
South Africans hate the Dutch,
And I don’t like anybody very much.
Was the center holding here in the center of the United States? I asked. All three were at once hopeful and skeptical.
“I think that whatever governors we used to have on what we say and how we behave are gone,” John said, weighing in on the skeptical side. “What’s happened to our manners? To our civility? Maybe it’s because of the anonymity of the Internet. It lets people feel free to say whatever they want, and it becomes legitimized because it’s on the Internet.”
Donald Anderson and Sandra Towne were sitting on a bench outside a community center, waiting for the doors to open for a meeting of Parents Without Partners. They were quite civil and reasonable. Maybe it was the influence of the Great Plains, whose level spaciousness fosters levelheadedness. Sandra harbored no ill feelings toward immigrants, so long as they were here legally. Her next-door neighbors were Mexican—“good, decent people,” she said, but lamented the lack of neighborly conversation. “They don’t speak English, and I don’t speak Spanish, and we never say a word to each other.”
The Longest Road Page 14
