Tales of Two Americas Read online

  Moreover, it’s important to remember that many Trump supporters who feel this way have jobs. Some have lost high-paying jobs and had to take others that not only pay less but are not nearly as meaningful. Others may still have their original high-paying jobs, but many of them are angry too, often on behalf of friends and relatives who haven’t been so fortunate. Suddenly these guys feel like they’re on the wrong side of history, and maybe they are. Unlike the rising tide of the working class that Dickens recognized and tapped into, today’s working class too often feel like they’re circling the drain. Even those who have jobs that provide a decent living—electricians, plumbers, carpenters, mechanics—are all too aware that people who work with their hands are often looked down upon. Over time, probably since the GI Bill, the notion that in America you’re nobody without a college education has taken deep root. It was certainly drilled into me, and I come from decent, honest people who did good, honest work. Nor was their insistence that I go to college rooted in self-loathing. They simply understood that in America education correlates with income. They wanted me to prosper.

  Okay, but somehow we’ve taken that correlation between education and prosperity to mean that there’s something demeaning about unclogging drains and pounding nails, somehow less essential to our national life than, say, writing computer code. Trump supporters don’t just remember when guys like themselves had good jobs; they remember a time when the work they did was valued and respected. My own working class heroes, even when they’re standing hip-deep in muck, take a certain stubborn pride in doing jobs that are necessary, no matter how disgusting or dangerous. And though I’ve educated myself out of the necessity for doing such work for a living, I still share the pride of those who are less fortunate. And nothing makes me angrier than that one-sentence Amazon review of a novel of mine (and you have no idea how many of them there are) that says, “Why should I care about these losers?” Really? Working people are losers? It seems unlikely to me that we’re going to be one America again until such casual contempt is admitted and addressed.

  Here’s the bottom line, I think. Before anybody can be admired, they must first be seen. Dickens saw Sam Weller, saw in a shoeshine boy character traits—honesty, hard work, goodwill—that were worth something to the nation. Isn’t it worth asking how often Trump supporters see themselves reflected on TV or in movies or novels? How many contemporary Mr. Pickwicks give them the time of day? Those of us with voices—writers and publishers, actors and producers, musicians and record companies, among others—bear some responsibility here. I’ve been surprised by just how often I’ve been called upon repeatedly for insight into “Trump’s America” in the aftermath of the election. It didn’t take much imagination to conjure up the conversations that were probably taking place in newsrooms all over America the morning after the election. “If the politicos got it all wrong, whom do we talk to? How about some novelists? Who out there writes about American working people with sympathy? Who’s tackled the disappearance of high-paying jobs and the destructive impact of such losses on places where there are large concentrations of Trump voters?” In truth, there aren’t that many of us. Since Steinbeck and the great proletarian novelists, have there ever been? And what about the geographical bias that’s long been a feature of New York–based publishing? It’s not that writers like Kent Haruf and Ivan Doig and Howard Frank Mosher are not widely admired and well reviewed; it’s that they would have been even more widely read and admired had they been writing about more “important” people (read: urban, affluent, beautiful, educated) and places (read: coastal). The New York Review of Books was once parodied as The New York Review of Us for a reason. Be honest. Isn’t much of the disdain that Trump voters feel for elites warranted? Haven’t the elites of both political parties been blind to the travails of working people?

  Okay, granted, there’s a lot of willful blindness out there, more than enough to go around, and failures of imagination abound as well. One can be sympathetic to Trump voters without giving them a free pass. Feeling angry, undervalued, and ignored, they don’t seem to grasp that these are not new feelings. They’re just new to them. American blacks and Latinos and LGBT folks have been feeling the same way for a long time. And I want to be clear about the man himself. Donald Trump is a despicable human being—a full-blown narcissist, a pathological liar, a vulgarian, a groper of women and girls. He’s completely unfit to be president of the United States. As regards the working class, however, he did what Dickens did. He held a mirror up to a whole class of people who were too often ignored. Because Dickens was both a good man and a great artist, what people saw in that mirror was their best selves. And because Trump is neither good nor great, his distorted mirror reflects little but his supporters’ bigotry and anger. But give the man this much credit. To his supporters he was saying, I see you. I see your value. Which is more than can be said for the elites of either party.

  FIELDWORK

  Manuel Muñoz

  MY MOTHER TOLD ME the story only once, when I was a teenager and didn’t know any better about asking personal questions, about holding in pain, that, yes, it was true there had been a baby, the first one before the others came, but I had to understand that this was never something to ask a woman about, ever. It is none of a man’s business.

  I think I was fourteen when I asked her that question, just like she was when she had the baby, and I was thinking about why my oldest siblings had been born in Texas and the rest of us in the Valley. I was young enough to believe that something bigger—fate, destiny, God’s will—was responsible for my being born in a place like Dinuba, one of the many dusty towns dotting the fields around Fresno. It could have been Yettem, my mother had told me. Or Seville, even smaller places on the map, but she was long done with towns that didn’t have hospitals. This is how she told me the story about having her first baby at fourteen and how she was still fourteen when the baby developed a fever. They had driven to another town that had a hospital, the baby wrapped in a blanket. She didn’t have the English to explain what was wrong with the baby and no one at the hospital spoke Spanish. This was in Texas and it was 1960. They took the baby from her and she tried to follow them into another room, but they wouldn’t let her. She could see through the glass in the door, though, and she watched them lift the baby from the blanket, strip it of its diaper, and place it in a tub of water. She heard the baby wail from the shock of the water and then the crying softened, as if the fever had broken, and then the baby made no more noise.

  The baby had pneumonia? I remember asking, because back then I thought there should always be an answer to everything.

  My mother said only that she hadn’t known English. It was her way of saying that she had always wondered, but that she had no way of asking, that it was something she had not been allowed to understand.

  I had it in my mind back then that any place but our hometown—any place but the Valley—would have been a better place to be. I spoke of her Texas as if I knew it, as if it were a place that had been a mistake for her to leave and deprive me of, all because the Valley offered nothing. When I was younger, I dreamed aloud about leaving and my mother’s question was always, To do what? She had come to the Valley in the 1960s because of the work; her older sister had gone ahead of her because of the work (though my mother later told me that my tía was all talk, that she never worked a day in her life). Her brothers—my tíos—hunched everywhere in the fields, no matter the season. The Valley was all about work if you wanted to do it, and Fresno was a city big enough for anyone. My best friend from the Valley told me that his family, like mine, had come to the Fresno area because of the fieldwork, too. His father and his mother drove a truck from town to town, looking for crops to pick, and they had lived like that for a while before the truck broke down on Highway 99 outside of Selma. They had had no money to fix the truck, so they had settled there.

  My best friend doesn’t know if this story is entirely true or not, but I can eas
ily picture his father, cigarette in hand, standing at the side of the highway and wasting no time with a decision. His father, like mine, is pragmatic, with little patience for fruitless dreaming.

  That’s how it was for my family and their arrival in the Valley, as well as people like us: the poorest from Texas and from Mexico, looking for work hard enough to never disappear. My father had come to the Valley from Mexico, just as many other Mexican fathers had done before him; I asked him this question not as a teenager but as a much older adult, caring for him in the fluorescent dullness of a county rehab center while he recovered from a stroke, the words not coming to him. I wanted to get him talking, so I asked him what I thought was a simple question, so the simple words could arrive. To pick crops, he told me, in Spanish and with great hesitation, as if he had to think about it to be sure. Just like all the men who had gone up north to the Valley before him, and wired back money from picking oranges and grapes and peaches, mostly. But cotton and tomatoes, too, he recalled. And almonds, my father added, and figs and nectarines, there was so much work. Apricots, plums, corn, pistachios, the lemon groves over on the eastern slope of the Valley into the Sierras. Walnuts and cauliflower. Cherries and pears. He kept remembering things. Strawberries hiding in the dirt. Pecans. Persimmons. Avocado trees in the prettiest green rows you’ve ever seen. Olives and wheat. Hay bundled up for the horses and the cows. Apples, since the Americanos liked their pie.

  You picked all of those things? I asked him.

  He hesitated or he couldn’t say, I don’t know. But then he nodded his head yes.

  The way people talked about the Valley, my father said, you could get rich.

  Then, after a moment, he recalled, unbidden, the first place he had ever lived in the Valley, a trailer parked illegally near a highway overpass. The owner would move it every few nights, in case the county sheriff came by.

  I didn’t ask him if he was angry that he had lived this way, or why he was remembering this fact. I simply wanted to hear him say anything. In the first few nights of my father’s rehab, I had a terrible feeling that he was not going to make it. We had been alternating overnights at the center, my mother and I, sleeping in my father’s room and then switching off after the morning meal. None of it was completely necessary, I thought, but my mother had a fear that there would be no one to translate for him in the middle of the night if the nurse was English-only. I didn’t tell my mother that he had been awakened in the middle of the night by a nurse for medications and a blood withdrawal, and his disorientation grew so strong that it translated into what could only be pain. He struggled to rise from the bed, as if he sensed that he was being kept in the room against his will, and the English-speaking nurse had no words to calm him. Tranquilo, tranquilo, I kept saying to him, but my voice was nothing he recognized. He seized against both of us for a good long while before the nurse tapped the call button and another nurse came in to assist, drawing the curtain around the bed, and leaving me to listen to him whimper quietly back into sleep.

  After that came other episodes with the same pitch of uncertainty but I grew to realize that it was my father not knowing where he was, what day of the week, what year, his full name, his date of birth. His confusion and his stunted tongue would cause the moaning, as if he were trying to fill the room with some kind of noise to kill the confusing silence brought on by those simple questions.

  We all die, he told me one night, as if he had known what I was thinking. A todos nos toca ese camino. We’re all on that road.

  The other hospital bed was mercifully empty of another patient and the night nurse had encouraged me to sleep there instead of in the uncomfortable armchair. I kept one foot on the ground and stared up at the ceiling, wondered if my father could discern where he was, that his road could end here, in a county rehab center in the Valley, thousands of miles from where he was born.

  And so I decided to ask him about what I didn’t know. I didn’t care that it was nearly four in the morning and that he should be sleeping.

  It’s true, my father said, that he came to the Valley only because others had talked about it. If enough people had said go to Texas instead, he would’ve gone. Or if enough people had reported that good things could happen in Los Angeles, he would’ve gone. As long as word came back. As long as word reached him.

  It was his bad luck that he had never known anyone who could have told him about Denver or Chicago. Or New York City. New York City, he marveled. Imagínate . . .

  Look at your mother, he said. Look at your tía, with eleven kids to feed and not enough work in Texas. Work that other people were too proud to do, even if their kids were hungry.

  But you came here with no mouths to feed, I told him.

  He had his mother in Mexico and plenty of cousins, he told me, young ones who couldn’t do for themselves. Everyone is a hungry child in the end.

  Did I know, he asked, the story of the man who had knocked on my mother’s back door one Sunday morning because he had nowhere to go and he had wound up in our little town of Dinuba on a bright hot summer day while the whole neighborhood was at church and so no one answered his knocking? He was lost and he was hungry and he had nowhere to go and my mother (who wasn’t a churchgoer) gave him two tacos wrapped in tinfoil and a drink from the garden hose, and she had to tell him to let it run a bit so the hot rubbery taste could pass and the colder water could come through.

  My father was quiet after he finished telling that story, as if the effort of thinking and remembering had tired him. I thought he had drifted off to sleep. I could hear nothing in the hallways, nothing from the nurses’ station, and thought about the story: I knew it and had heard it, but did not know why my father was telling it. I looked up at the ceiling, back to my thoughts of my father ending his days in the Valley, when he asked me what I was thinking.

  I couldn’t bring myself to say anything about him dying, so I asked my father why he had remembered that story.

  Because that man was afraid and now he was afraid.

  I had never known my father to be afraid, to be a fearful man, and I told him so.

  Just one time, he said. Just once, many years ago, when he had been deported for the first time. He had been trucked somewhere in Arizona, or maybe it was El Paso, it was so long ago, but it was the desert and he knew the border was close by. He waited to be driven across and he was thinking of a river, because to cross over meant to cross a river. Instead, they were marched over to a wide expanse of cement that he realized was an airfield, and a transport plane, military green, waited with its engines running and a little ramp for them to climb aboard. All of them were young men and none of them had ever been on a plane before. They sat on thin benches that stretched along the sides and the two men in the cockpit told them that they should hang on if they knew what was good for them.

  You’ve never been to jail, my father told me. You were too much of a good boy for that, but your brothers would know. Your brothers would know the inside of the walls, what people carved in there because they wanted someone to remember them. That was the inside of that plane, just the benches and the metal walls. I read those terrible things and I thought they were going to throw us out of that plane.

  But they didn’t, I said.

  Pues claro, he said.

  After a pause, he asked me if I was a fearful person and I told him that I didn’t think so.

  You’re like your mother, he said. He was quiet again for a long time before I realized he had fallen asleep.

  In the morning, I helped my father to the dining room and waited for my mother. A quiet man sat at the table, staring off at the door, disconsolate as his breakfast ran cold, his wife yet to appear. He didn’t want any of the nurses to help him, his eyes fixed on the door. Another man ate unassisted, his hands spry with the plastic utensils. Both of these men were my father’s age. The nurses liked my father because his improvement in speaking and understanding and
responding was an encouragement to these two men in their recoveries. They talked like the old Mexican men who gathered at our town bakery at six in the morning.

  My mother came in just as my father’s tray was being served to him, but my father was busy beginning his conversation.

  He wants to know, my father said—meaning me—why you—meaning the old man with the spry hands—came to the Valley.

  I didn’t have to say to my mother that I had never asked such a question. She knew how my father would take his hazy recall of the previous evening’s conversation and use it to start some chatter at breakfast, no matter who was at the table or what the subject might be.

  Don’t worry, one nurse had assured my mother in Spanish, we know that half the things they say aren’t true anyway.

  The old man with the spry hands finished his breakfast and pushed his tray forward. He was thin, more on the gaunt side, and yet he cleaned his plate at every meal. He had come from Mexico as well, in the 1970s, and he had found work at a dairy farm, feeding and caring for the cows, the single job he had had for more than forty years. An older brother, who had gone up north before him, had told him to look for work in the dairies and he found the job easily, the first and only dairy he had ever approached.

  In those days, my father said, you could find work everywhere. People these days don’t want to work anymore. Turning to me, he said, You see?

  My mother looked at me as if to ask what had gotten my father so interested in work, but then the quiet man’s wife came in, rushed and panicked. Because there were no nurses around, she eyed my mother when she saw the full breakfast tray. My mother said buenos días to her anyway.

  And you? my father asked, as the quiet man waited for his wife to cut up his pancakes.

  Let him eat his breakfast in peace, my mother said.

  Oranges, said the old man with the spry hands. Isn’t that right, señora? Isn’t that what your husband did for a living?