Tales of Two Americas Read online

  The quiet man’s wife helped him spoon a bit of egg and looked at us, unsure about the question or why it was being asked. She had the look of someone who had been asked a lot of questions about work—if she had it, the kind she had, how long she had had it. If she had the necessary documents, if she understood how she would be paid. And she had the look of someone who knew better than to answer.

  He picked oranges, said my father. ¿Te acuerdas? he urged the quiet man to remember.

  You’re from Ivanhoe, said the old man with the spry hands. You told us that you were from Ivanhoe. There’s nothing but oranges over in Ivanhoe.

  The whole east side, my father said. All those towns that are almost in the mountains. Orange Cove up north and Lemon Cove down south.

  Citrus, said the old man with the spry hands.

  Grapefruit, said my father. I picked those before. Some as big as your head.

  Mentiroso, my mother interrupted. You never picked grapefruit in your life, she said. And then, to me, what have you been talking to him about?

  Work, I said, but then I realized that wasn’t what we had been talking about at all: my father, the man with the spry hands who struggled to recover any use in his legs, the quiet man who remained just as quiet through his pancakes. These men who worked all their lives in the fields of the Valley, making do with whatever the state could provide now that their bodies had given out.

  You shouldn’t believe everything he tells you, my mother said.

  The quiet man’s wife kept her attention on my mother as she fed her husband some cereal. She took occasional glances at me, too, surprised that a son was present to help in feeding. This was women’s work.

  Do you have other children besides him? she asked my mother. She gestured with her head in my direction, as if I were not in the room.

  Yes, I do, my mother answered.

  How many? asked the wife.

  I thought my mother took too long to answer. But then she said, I had six.

  It was the truth, though it was not something I expected my mother to say. I had always heard her say five. I thought of myself as the youngest of five. Maybe it had to do with the way the woman was cleaning her husband’s chin, helping him hold a cup of coffee. Maybe it had to do with knowing my father, in his current state, would try to correct the smallest of facts, and it was better to keep him calm around the breakfast table, to let the quiet man eat in peace.

  The wife fed her husband some more and he ate as if in great thought. She kept her attention on my mother and then my father asked her ¿Y usted? Where was she from and why had she come to the Valley?

  I knew the answer would be Mexico and I knew the answer would be she came because of her husband. I knew the answer would be there was no other choice but to come north. I listened with the respect that my mother had taught me and I asked her no questions when she said that picking oranges was a good and steady job. It had been, she said, a good place to live. It had been hard work, but she didn’t have any complaints.

  We would have weeks of this, my mother and I, staying overnight even as my father slept quite peacefully through the late hours, his hands gaining in grip strength, his eyesight coming back from what he said were the silver clouds. We alternated our posts at the end of the daily breakfast, about eight in the morning, when my father was wheeled off to physical therapy. The quiet man never spoke a word in those weeks and the man with the spry hands continued his healing without a family member to help him.

  Imagínate, I said to my mother one morning, near exhaustion, to be so broken after all that hard work, and to end up like this.

  We all work, my mother said. All work is hard. Mira ésta, she said, so I could remember the therapist who told us she was originally from Canada, another person who had come from so far away.

  I tied vines one year, my mother said, when the money was low. I was pregnant with you, about seven months, but there I was. It must have been seven months because you were born in March and tying is January work, in the cold and the rain. You know what tying is?

  Yes, I told her. I had done it before, along with my sister.

  She remembered, yes, because it’s easy work for kids, for women, untangling the vines like it was unruly hair, pruning them back a little, and then wrapping them back tight around the wires, the rows tidy and ready for the hotter months. It was still hard work, my mother said, all that mud and cold, and you just two months away from being born.

  We watched my father as he negotiated a walker across the room, careful step by careful step. The old man with spry hands practiced stretching his upper arms and the quiet man was tasked with buttoning a shirt.

  They’ll get out soon if they do their exercises, she said, as if to remind me that this place was not the end. No place is the end if you don’t want it to be. If they work hard, they can leave and go home.

  We watched my father quietly. Seven months, my mother said, as if lost in thought. And then a moment later, Men don’t know how to suffer.

  For the Ones Who Put

  Their Names on the Wall

  & no one knew them

  For the ones taken in the rustle of thorns w/o stars

  For the ones the color of water who slowly grew peaceful

  Face down on the spikes of asphalt

  For the ones I longed to give lettuce who turned fast away

  When they noticed a truck-man hunched scribbling

  Near the fence they could have been

  Feathered round & desire-shaped w/

  Black rubber-like feet & elegant noses

  In search for a way out

  This endless container

  Lagoon of shadows

  —Juan Felipe Herrera

  TRASH FOOD

  Chris Offutt

  OVER THE YEARS I’ve known many people with nicknames, including Lucky, Big O, Haywire, Turtle Eggs, Hercules, two guys named Hollywood, and three guys called Booger. I’ve had my own nicknames as well. In college people called me “Arf” because of a dog on a T-shirt. Back home a few of my best buddies call me “Shit-for-Brains,” because I was alleged to be smart.

  Three years ago, shortly after moving to Oxford, someone introduced me to John T. Edge. My understanding was that he also went by a nickname. The word “jaunty” means convivial, affable, someone always merry and bright. The name suited him perfectly. Each time I called him Jaunty he gave me a quick sharp look of suspicion. He wondered if I was making fun of his name—and of him. The matter was resolved when I suggested he call me “Chrissie O.”

  Last spring John T. asked me to join him at an Oxford restaurant. My wife dropped me off and drove to a nearby secondhand store. Our plan was for me to meet her later and find a couple of cheap lamps. During lunch John T. asked me to give a presentation at the Southern Foodways Alliance symposium over which he presided every fall. I reminded him of my inexperience—at the time I’d published only a few humorous essays that dealt with food. I lacked the necessary qualifications. Other writers were more knowledgeable and wrote with a historical and scholarly context. All I did was write personal essays inspired by old community cookbooks I found in secondhand stores. Strictly speaking, my food writing wasn’t actually about food.

  John T. said that didn’t matter. He wanted me to explore “trash food,” because, as he put it, “you write about class.”

  I sat without speaking, my food getting cold on my plate. First, I couldn’t see the connection between social class and garbage.

  Second, I didn’t like having my thirty-year career reduced to a single subject matter. I write about my friends, family, and my experiences in the world, but never with a sociopolitical agenda. Writers who are motivated by politics often produce propaganda or agitprop. My goal was always art first, combined with self-examination.

  Third, I’d never heard of anything called “trash food.”

>   I found myself in a professional and social pickle, not unusual for a country boy who’s clawed his way out of the hills, one of the steepest social climbs in America. As a native of eastern Kentucky, I’ve never mastered the highborn art of concealing my emotions. Unfortunately my feelings are always readily apparent. I should have been an actor and spent my life getting paid to expose my emotions. Instead, I’m nothing but a writer—about class, apparently.

  Recognizing my turmoil, John T. asked if I was pissed off. I nodded and he apologized immediately. I told him I was oversensitive to matters of social class. I explained that people from the hills of Appalachia had to fight to prove they were smart, diligent, and trustworthy. It’s the same for people who grew up in the Mississippi Delta, the barrios of Los Angeles and Texas, or the ghettos of New York. His request reminded me that due to social class I’d been refused jobs, bank loans, and dates. I’ve been called hillbilly, stumpjumper, cracker, weedsucker, redneck, and white trash—mean-spirited terms designed to hurt me and make me feel bad about myself.

  As a young man, I used to laugh awkwardly at remarks about sex with my sister or the perceived novelty of my wearing shoes. As I got older I quit laughing. When strangers thought I was stupid because of where I was from or what I looked like—they were granting me the high ground. I learned to patiently wait in ambush for the chance to utterly demolish them intellectually. Later I resolved to stop wasting my energy. It was easier to simply stop talking to that person—forever. But I didn’t want to do that with a guy whose name rhymes with Jaunty. A guy who’d inadvertently triggered an old emotional response. A guy who liked my work well enough to pay me for it.

  By this time our lunch had a tension to it that draped over us both like a lead vest for an X-ray. We just looked at each other, neither of us knowing what to do. John T. suggested I think about it, then graciously offered me a lift to meet my wife. Our conversation had left me inexplicably ashamed of shopping at a thrift store. I wanted to walk in order to hide my destination, but refusing a ride could make John T. think I was angry with him. I wasn’t. I was upset, but not with him.

  My solution was a verbal compromise, a term politicians use to mean a blatant lie. I told him to drop me at a restaurant where I was meeting my wife for cocktails. He did so and I waited until his red Italian sports car sped away. Once it was out of sight I walked to the junk store. I sat out front like a man with not a care in the world, ensconced in a battered patio chair staring at clouds above the parking lot. When I was a kid my mother bought baked goods at the day-old bread store and hoped no one would see her car out front. Now I was embarrassed for shopping secondhand.

  My behavior was class based twice over: buying used goods to save a buck and feeling ashamed of it. I’d behaved in strict accordance with my social station, then evaluated myself in a negative fashion. I sat on the patio chair and became mad, first at John T., then at myself. Even the anger was classic self-oppression, a learned behavior of lower-class people. I was transforming outward shame into inner fury. Without a clear target, I aimed it at myself.

  My thoughts and feelings were completely irrational and I knew they made no sense. Most of what I owned had been used by someone else—cars, clothes, shoes, furniture, dishware, cookbooks. I liked old and battered things. They reminded me of myself, still capable and functioning despite the wear and tear. I enjoyed the idea that my belongings had a previous history before coming my way. It was satisfying to make the small repairs necessary to transform a broken lamp made of Popsicle sticks into a lovely source of illumination.

  Twenty-five years ago I’d managed a nonprofit thrift shop in New York City. Since then I’ve lived in Boston, Florida, New Mexico, Montana, California, Tennessee, Georgia, Iowa, Arizona, and now Mississippi. Before each move I got rid of stuff. At each new place, I began gathering used possessions once more. A writer’s livelihood is weak at best, and I’d become adept at operating in a secondhand economy. I was comfortable with it.

  Still, I sat in that chair getting madder and madder. After careful examination I concluded that the core of my anger was fear—in this case fear that John T. would judge me for shopping secondhand. I knew it was absurd since he is not judgmental in the least. Anyone who knows him recognizes that he’s an open-hearted guy willing to embrace anything and everyone—even me.

  Nevertheless I’d felt compelled to mislead him based on class stigma. I was ashamed—of my fifteen-year-old Mazda, my income, and my rented home. I felt ashamed of the very clothes I was wearing, the shoes on my feet. Abruptly, with the force of being struck in the face, I understood it wasn’t his judgment I feared, it was my own. I’d judged myself and found failure. I wanted a car like his. I wanted to dress like him and have a house like his. I wanted to be in a position to offer other people jobs.

  The flip side of shame is pride and all I had was the pride of refusal. I could say no to his offer. I resolved not to write about trash food and class. Later, it occurred to me that my reluctance was evidence that maybe I should. I resolved to do some research before making a firm decision.

  John T. had been a little shaky on the label of “trash food,” mentioning mullet and possum as examples. At one time this list included crawfish because Cajun people ate it, and catfish because it was favored by African Americans and poor Southern whites. As these cuisines gained popularity, the food itself became culturally upgraded. Crawfish and catfish stopped being “trash food” when the people eating it in restaurants were the same ones who felt superior to the lower classes. The elite diners had to redefine the food. Otherwise they were voluntarily lowering their own social status—something nobody wants to do.

  It should be noted that carp and gar still remain reputationally compromised. In other words—poor folks eat them and rich folks don’t. I predict that one day people will pay thirty-five dollars for a tiny portion of carp with a rich sauce—and congratulate themselves for doing so. The situation is similar to a politician who wants to demonstrate he’s a man of the people but doesn’t know how to hold a mattock. Or a writer from the hills of Kentucky wearing a sports coat in a public forum. The only person fooled is oneself. The emperor’s new clothes are not invisible, they’re made of carp and gar.

  At home I ran a multitude of various searches on library databases and the Internet in general, typing in permutations of the words “trash” and “food.” Surprisingly, every single reference was to “white trash food.” Within certain communities, it’s become popular to host “white trash parties” where people are urged to bring Cheetos, pork rinds, Vienna sausages, Jell-O with marshmallows, fried bologna, corn dogs, RC cola, Slim Jims, Fritos, Twinkies, and cottage cheese with jelly. In short—the food I ate as a kid in the hills. Having such a feast is somehow considered evidence of being very cool and hip. Implicit in the menu is a vicious ridicule of the people who eat such food on a regular basis. People who attend these “white trash parties” are cuisinally slumming, temporarily visiting a place they never want to live. They are the worst sort of tourists—they want to see the Mississippi Delta and the hills of Appalachia but are afraid to get off the bus.

  The term “white trash” is an epithet of bigotry that equates human worth with garbage. The connotation implies a dismissal of the group as stupid, violent, lazy, and untrustworthy—the same negative descriptors of racial minorities, anyone on the outside of the mainstream. A similar division between “us” and “them” appears in stories from the Old Testament that pit Jews against Romans, later co-opted to mean Christians versus Jews. Long before that, the philosopher Socrates divided Europe’s population into two groups when he said: “There are Greeks and there are slaves.” This deeply flawed way of thinking is popular because of its simplicity, its reduction of humanity to either-or, to us and them. It’s a method of thinking preferred by politicians, preachers, and bigots as a means of social control.

  History has changed very little in this regard. What has changed is the
language itself. For example, here in Mississippi, the term “Democrats” is code for “African Americans.” Throughout the United States, “family values” really means “no homosexuals.” The term “trash food” is not about food, it’s about social class. It’s about poor people and what they can afford to eat.

  In America, class lines run parallel to racial lines. At the very bottom are people of color. The Caucasian equivalent is me—an Appalachian. As a male Caucasian in America, I am supposed to have an inherent advantage in every possible way. It’s true—I can pass more easily in polite society—I have better access to education, health care, and employment. But if I insist on behaving like a poor white person—shopping at secondhand shops and eating mullet—I not only earn the epithet “trash,” I somehow deserve it.

  I am trash because I’m white and poor.

  I am trash because I’m from a specific region—the rural South.

  Polite society regards me as stupid, lazy, ignorant, violent, and untrustworthy. Use of the term “white trash” has gained prominence as a term of class disparagement due to economics.

  But human beings are not trash. We are the civilizing force on the planet. We produce great art and great technology. It’s not the opposable thumb that separates us from the beasts, it’s our facility with language. We are able to communicate with great precision. Nevertheless, history is fraught with the persistence of treating fellow humans as garbage, which means collection and transport for destruction. The most efficient management of humans as trash occurred when the Third Reich systematically murdered people by the millions. People they didn’t like. People who had little status and power—Jews, Romanis, Catholics, gays and lesbians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the disabled.

  In World War II, my father-in-law was captured by the Nazis and placed on a train car so crammed with people that everyone had to stand. Arthur hadn’t eaten in several days. He was close to starvation. A Romani gave him half a turnip, which saved his life. Arthur had been raised to look down on Romani people as stupid, lazy, violent, and untrustworthy—the ubiquitous language of discrimination. The man later died. Arthur survived the war and revised his view of Romanis.