There was a twenty-four-hour fishing closure in early July; the fisherman pulled their nets and hurried their holds to the cannery and all the crews worked at triple speed to make the most of the holiday. No one had plans to sleep. The day was sunny, and at meal breaks everyone ate quickly and lay outside on the sun-warmed deck and on the driftwood benches. The boys took off their shirts and the girls rolled up their sleeves and tucked their hems up into their bras.
Everyone was elated, passing out cigarettes and Skittles and running down to the boats with folded bills for the fisherman and returning with plastic bottles of Black Velvet tucked inside their waterproof coveralls. The hillsides were steaming in the heat. Nusky appeared with a bowl of wild berries and offered them out. A group of fishermen walked down the dock and Nusky jumped on his bicycle to run them off. Fishermen weren’t allowed in the cannery because of the reputation they had. They were allowed in the shower room, and then sent packing. The boys at the cannery eyed them with suspicion; the girls watched them walk away—slowly, sea-legged.
The last fish were packed in the early evening, leaving the entire night and next day free. There were plans for a bonfire. Betty took a shower and teased her hair up into a bouffant, applied her eyeliner, applied her lipstick, and stood in front of the mirror of the bathroom puffing her lips, turning and looking at herself over one shoulder with heavy-lidded eyes. Maryanne came into the bathroom and whistled, sarcastic.
“What do you think you’re doing with all that? Where do you think you are right now?”
Betty clicked her nails against the counter by the sink, a motion that seemed aloof, weary.
“You’re not Marilyn Monroe.” Maryanne was wearing Carhartt overalls. “You’re not in Hollywood. This isn’t 1950.” Betty had brought her tape deck into the bathroom with her. “Blue Moon” was playing. She turned toward the mirror and looked at the reflection of Maryanne.
“What are you rebelling against, Johnny? What do you got?”
“What?” Maryanne asked.
“What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” Betty repeated. Hannah walked in, holding her towel. She smiled.
“What do you got?” Hannah said brightly.
Betty had watched The Wild One with her boyfriend, and liked to quote it. She had quoted it to Hannah during one of the first shifts, and now it had become a byword, a call and response that helped Betty when she was angry and Hannah when she was scared. When Betty was choking on imagined rage at four in the morning, Hannah would ask her:
“What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” and Betty would scream, echoing against the sorting bins and the freezer doors:
“What do you got!”
Betty had let everyone at the cannery know that she had a boyfriend. She let Nusky know, she let the fishermen know, she let the Child brothers know. It didn’t matter, as it turned out. Nusky still brought her chocolates and the Child brothers still offered her Sudafed when she was nodding. She talked to her boyfriend on the phone every Tuesday. She told him that she was staying true, which sounded mournful and sexy. When a fisherman off the Kendra H told her that she was wearing some mean jeans, she turned and told him, “I have a boyfriend back home, and I’m staying true to him.” He said that her jeans were still mean, and winked. She looked down in a way that she thought was demure.
Hannah was demure. Hannah, without thinking, wrung her hands. Betty told her that she should wear gloves, or pearls, or both. It was a surprise then, when Hannah started sleeping with J. Child—J. Child who had run away with the carnival and had a junky’s sharp good looks and wet eyes and ate Sudafed by the box and mixed cocoa powder into his coffee like a real degenerate. They left the July opening bonfire together, J. Child leading Hannah by her hand and Hannah trailing behind, demure.
After the initial surprise, though, Betty decided that it made perfect sense. Hannah was a good girl who studied primary education and basically went to church. J. Child had a delinquent’s pronounced, slutty lower lip and probably rode a motorcycle back home. Hannah was blond and J. Child was dark. J. Child was wounded, his carpal tunnel growing more severe by the day, and Hannah sat by him at coffee breaks and massaged his wrist. Hannah, who never talked back, defended J. Child heatedly when Maryanne said his veins were turning black because he had shot up.
“You don’t know the first thing about him!” Hannah snapped. Betty started calling J. Child her “man.”
“You stick up for your man, Hannah,” Betty told her. “Nobody knows him like you do.”
By mid-July the sun was setting completely and there was real nighttime. The pink salmon run had started, and the cannery was running around the clock. A forklift driver fell asleep on the job and ran into the side of the stockroom. Jozef the machine had fallen asleep after thirty hours at work and woke up with a high fever. He was flown out of the cannery and back into town, and the rumor was that he was going to be returned to Poland or the Ukraine. For all his hard work, he was now considered a broken taco. Zack, J. Child’s brother, slept with Ilsa, and fell asleep in the women’s bunkhouse and was facing disciplinary action. A girl named Melanie had sliced her hand with a gutting knife and was now working in the laundry room, and the cannery medic was watching the veins in her arm for signs of blood poisoning. She cried a lot. Maryanne speculated that she would also become a broken taco. J. Child was the next in line. His hand had cramped into a fist, and he had to stack fish one-armed, which slowed down his crew. Nusky would come into the fresh-frozen room and dismiss J. Child after just a few hours’ work. He wouldn’t even speak to J. Child; he’d just jerk his thumb toward the exit. There was no mention of assigning J. Child to an easier job. Hannah would watch J. Child walk out the cannery doors and lower her head over the sorting belt, her tears spilling onto the fish.
“What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” Betty would ask.
“What do you got?”
J. Child got down to working six hours a day, and then three, and then Nusky told him, in a dangerously polite voice, that he didn’t need to come in to work and could take a day to rest. It was implied that there were no more hours left for him. He sat in his bunkroom; he napped. The rest of the employees watched him suspiciously as his drawn face fleshed out with sleep. They rolled their eyes as he walked from the mess hall back to the bunkhouse as they all returned to work. Nusky looked contented. They were angry.
“They’re just jealous!” said Hannah, her eyes wild. The shift was in its eighteenth hour.
“Don’t—” started Betty, but it was too late.
“You’re just jealous! You’re just tired and jealous,” Hannah said, loudly, to no one in particular. Maryanne looked at Hannah and Betty levelly. Nusky looked, too. Betty was aware that she hadn’t had time to shower in the last three days, and the pomade was heavy on her scalp. Hannah’s mascara had smeared down her cheeks, and little black seeds of it clung in the corner of her eyes. Hannah startled, turning after something scurrying out of her field of vision. Her teeth were gritted, squeaking. She turned again, trying to catch sight of whatever it was.
J. Child quit three days later. In a fit of charity, Nusky released Zack from probation. Hannah cried, staring at the shadows detaching from the walls. Nusky watched her stumble to the coffee cart and sent her off to sleep. He gave her twelve hours off and she slept for most of them, returning mute and guarded. Maryanne started a tally of broken tacos on the corkboard in the women’s bunkhouse. Betty overheard her say that she figured that Hannah was next.
The next few days were clear, but instead of sunning themselves on the deck everyone went into the bunkhouses to nap during meal breaks. People were having a hard time getting to sleep—the bunkhouses were full of the sounds of groans and slaps as they swatted at black flies or shapes they assumed were black flies. When they did sleep, they overslept. They blamed the season. They blamed the machinery. They blamed the Poles or Ukrainians. Betty and Hannah agreed that it was Nusky’s fault, and Maryanne’s as well. Maryanne was in line for a prom
otion, and would probably get a bicycle next season. Betty maintained that if everyone had a bicycle, they could all get from the bunkhouse to the cannery faster, and average at least a couple more hours of sleep a week. They talked and talked, quickly, so they wouldn’t become sleepy. They made plans to change the cannery system, plans to get revenge on Nusky, plans to expose the corruption they imagined ran rampant in the fishing industry. They started talking about piracy; they talked about arson. When Betty saw Hannah’s face start to expand, and then contract, she lay down, closing her eyes against the nausea. She woke up to Nusky shaking her by the shoulders, telling her gently that it was time to go to work.
They sat apart from the others at coffee breaks. Betty was aware of a sour bedding smell coming off of Hannah. Hannah’s hair hung lankly at the sides of her face.
“I think I’m a broken taco, Betty.”
“What are you rebelling against, Johnny?”
“I think I really am.” Hannah spoke dully.
“Listen, let’s bust out of here at lunch. They won’t miss us, and if they do, they won’t be able to do anything. We’ll go to the Chinese barracks.”
“What are the Chinese barracks?”
“Abandoned. A group of kids went there last year and said it was fun. We need some fun. We need to cut loose.”
The Chinese barracks were a group of buildings clustered behind the cannery. Legend had it that the cannery had employed a hundred Chinese back when they first opened, and the Chinese, mid-season, exhausted and homesick, had all committed suicide rather than work another day.
“The kings of broken tacos!” Betty said.
They all hanged themselves, legend had it, all in the same morning. The cannery had had to shut down for the remainder of the season. The Chinese had left a long suicide note that spoke for all of them: they wanted their bodies to be returned to China, and they wanted their wages to be sent to their families. But the misers who ran the cannery, who had worked the Chinese to death, and whose profits were now suffering because of the mass suicide, pocketed the Chinese workers’ wages and incinerated their bodies rather than spend the money to ship them home.
The exterior walls of the barracks were warped and splintering. Betty pointed to an exposed beam in the second story.
“So they all hung themselves from that beam up there, I guess. And the cannery was screwed! They’re said”—and Betty raised her voice into a falsetto—“to haunt these barracks to this very day! Although that’s stupid,” she said, watching Hannah’s face for discomfort. But Hannah’s expression was placid.
“Let’s go inside,” Hannah said.
“I don’t know that we should,” Betty said. “It’s really scary in there, I guess. There’s a room with no sunlight, and noises.”
“I want to go inside,” Hannah said.
The inside of the Chinese barracks was painted the same industrial pale green as the rest of the cannery. There were beer cans on the floors, and a scuttling sound that Betty soon realized was the sound of the water lapping against the pylons below the floor. The floor was open in several spots, and through the holes they could see the water glinting. Hannah moved delicately about, holding her hands out to the sides to steady herself.
“Here’s that room!” she called back to Betty, her voice merry. Inside the open doorway was a room without any light whatsoever. There was no window or airshaft, it was one of the few rooms whose walls had stayed intact. Betty couldn’t see to the back, she could only see the dim outline of a metal bed frame. A ceramic saucer lay in the doorway.
“Boo,” said Hannah.
They didn’t sleep before the next shift, they sat and plotted Nusky’s downfall. They would poison his chocolates with a syringe, right through the wrapping. They’d fix the brakes on his bicycle. They would—they even drew diagrams—construct a trapdoor above the sorting bins, and he would fall in and drown, or be suffocated, under tons of writhing salmon. In the event that they got caught, Betty figured that Hannah could tell the press how Nusky had mistreated her man, and their hearts would melt.
They were both broken tacos before the week was over. Betty threw her rubber gloves down on the deck and told Nusky, “I’ve had it with this place! I’m through!” Nusky told her to sleep on it, but she refused. Hannah simply went to sleep and didn’t get up for twenty-six hours, and arrived at Nusky’s office with her bag packed and told him that she wanted to go home.
Betty went home to her boyfriend, slept late into the day, and when the money from the cannery ran out, she got a job cleaning rooms at the Red Lion. Hannah went home to her parents’ house. Through the end of that summer, they would call each other and talk about what Betty found in the drawers of the extended stay rooms, but mostly they talked about the cannery. In the autumn Hannah went back to school and got a part-time job teaching at a kindergarten, and Betty enrolled in beauty school. They talked on the phone every month. It was around Christmas when Hannah asked Betty what the foreman’s name had been. She remembered it as sounding Polish, or maybe Ukrainian, but she had forgotten. The name had reminded her of a pet’s name.
RACHEL KAADZI GHANSAH
If He Hollers Let Him Go
FROM The Believer
ALTHOUGH THE CITY OF DAYTON is small and has been hit hard by the decline of industry, in Xenia and Yellow Springs the land is green, fecund, and alive, even in the relentless heat of summer. Xenia is three miles from where the first private black college, Wilberforce, opened, in 1856, to meet the educational needs of the growing population of freed blacks that crossed the Ohio River. Yellow Springs, a stop on the Underground Railroad, was initially established as a utopian community in 1825. In 1852, Horace Mann founded Antioch College and served as its president. During the ’50s and ’60s, Antioch and Yellow Springs were hamlets of anti-McCarthyism and antiwar and civil rights activism. Today there are a lot of hippies and there’s even more tie-dye. Between the villages, you can drive over rolling hills and pastures and not see another car for miles, and only far off on the horizon will you be able to spot a farmhouse.
I spent a week in this part of Ohio, and during my stay I was invited to do all sorts of things with people of all kinds—rich and poor, white and black. I was invited to go flying, dig for worms at midnight, and plant raspberry bushes. My request to drive a tractor was turned down, not because I don’t know how to drive but because the tractor had been put away. In Ohio, there is space for people to do what they want. There is a lot of land, plenty of it. This is where enslaved people ran to, certain that they had finally evaded capture. This is where America’s first prominent black poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, wrote “We Wear the Mask.” And somewhere in the midst of it all is Dave Chappelle’s home.
From above, everything seems smaller and less complicated—or at the very least things are put into perspective. From a plane at thirty-five thousand feet it was much easier for me to understand why Dave Chappelle quit his hit TV show, Chappelle’s Show, and said goodbye to all that, and didn’t stop until he got home to Yellow Springs, Ohio. When news of his decision to cease filming the third season of the show first made headlines, there were many spectacular rumors. He had quit the show without any warning. He had unceremoniously ditched its cocreator, his good friend Neal Brennan, leaving him stranded. Chappelle was now addicted to crack. He had lost his mind. The most insane speculation I saw was posted on a friend’s Facebook page at 3 a.m. A website had alleged that a powerful cabal of black leaders—Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, and others—were so offended by Chappelle’s use of the n-word that they had him intimidated and banned. The controversial “Niggar Family” sketch, where viewers were introduced to an Ozzie and Harriet-like 1950s suburban, white, upper-class family named “the Niggars,” was said to have set them off. The weirdest thing was that people actually went for such stories. Chappelle’s brief moment in television had been that incendiary. It didn’t matter that Chappelle himself had told Oprah on national television that he had quit wholly of his own accord.
You know you must be doing something right if old people like you.
—Dave Chappelle
Dave Chappelle was in his teens when he first appeared on the comedy club circuit. He was twenty-three when he and his friend Neal Brennan wrote Half Baked, a now-classic stoner flick about four hapless friends who try to enter the drug-dealing game so they can get bail money for their friend Kenny, who has landed in jail after inadvertently killing a cop’s horse. They were young and had no expectations except to have fun and be funny. They certainly had no idea Chappelle’s Show, another collaboration, would become the most talked-about show on television. But early into the show’s first season, critics at the New York Times would take notice of Chappelle’s “kind of laid-back indignation” and his “refusal to believe that ignoring racial differences will make anyone’s life better.” What Brennan and Chappelle were doing every week was so unusual that the Times declared that “it almost looks like a renaissance for African-American humor on television.”
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 Page 24
