Twelve by Twelve (14 page)

But the imaginal buds resist — and ultimately prevail — because they link together, cooperatively, to become a beautiful butterfly, which lives lightly, regenerates life through pollinating flowers, and migrates over vast distances, exploring life in ways that would have been incomprehensible to the caterpillar.

Jackie, Bradley, the Thompsons, and the other people I was meeting were undergoing this transformation, not alone but in a network of hundreds of thousands of other “imaginal buds” throughout Pine Bridge, the United States, and the world. By allowing themselves the space to change, instead of clinging out of fear to what they knew, they were embarking on this transformative journey.

BUOYED BY THIS EVOLVING REALIZATION
of wildcrafting, the creative edge, and the possibility of transforming from caterpillars into
butterflies, I found my spirit lighter than ever at the 12 × 12. One day I biked to Smithsville, rolling along South Main Street (the town was so small that there was no North Main Street), whistling and exchanging NC waves with the good folks in passing cars, until I arrived at Rufus’ Restaurant. My stomach growling, I decided to go in for lunch.

The place was a quarter full, and I peered under the empty tables looking for an outlet to plug in my laptop. As I stooped, a waitress came over and cleared her throat: “’Scuse me,” she said. “But may I
help
you with something?”

“I’m going to eat here,” I assured her.

“Under one of the tables?”

Chuckling from the other waitresses. Some of the conversations stopped. I reached up to pat down my hair, cowlicked as it was from my bike helmet; I probably looked crazy.

“I’d like a table where I can plug in my laptop.”

A completely blank stare.

“My notebook computer. It hardly uses any electricity.”

“See that clock?” she said.

I looked across the room at an electric, unplugged
DRINK PEPSI COLA ICE COLD
clock stuck at 2:04 and 13 seconds. I sat down under it and plugged my laptop into the empty socket. One of the waitresses had been trying to hold in a big old laugh; when our eyes met, our mutual smile was the pinprick that caused her to burst. She was still chuckling and shaking her head when she came up to me and asked in a friendly Southern twang, “What can I get ya?”

“What d’ya got?”

“Well, we’ve got country steak. It’s not on the menu, and it comes with slaw, pintos, taters, fries, creamed potato, any two.”

“What is country steak?”

“Cubed steak.”

“What’s that? Hamburger steak?”

“Oh no, it’s meat that’s been cubed.”

“So, cubes of meat. In sauce?”

“Gravy, yes. But it’s been cubed and put back together. How do I explain this? Mary!”

Mary groaned, as if to say, “How many
times
have I explained this?” I glanced around the restaurant interior; the decorations had been hanging on the walls for decades, mostly soda pop posters with long-dead ad campaigns like “Drink Dr. Pepper. Good for Life” and “Mountain Dew, it’ll tickle yore innards.” Another slogan, the text inside a three-foot-wide bottle cap on the wall, read obscurely, “Thirsty? Just whistle.”
Whistle for what?
I thought, the brand it was meant to elicit unknown to me.

“It’s fried” came an impatient Southern twang from the other room.

“Fried,” repeated my waitress.

“Fried,” I said.

“And it’s good!”

“Okay, I’ll take your word for it.”

“With what?”

“Creamed potatoes. And slaw.”

“Yeah, I think it’s cubed cow, because I’ve seen it in the cow section at the grocery store.”

“Hold on,” I said, “so we’re not completely sure what animal we’re talking about?”

She sighed and said, “I know it ain’t chicken.”

There was good humor in our banter, but only later would I realize the ironies and complexities. For instance, I unconsciously judged Rufus’ for “backwardness” for not understanding the twenty-first-century lexicon 101: the laptop plug-in. Yet wasn’t my very presence there a Flat World advertisement, sidling up and whipping out my portable computer? That community still had what Bradley was trying to foster up the road in Siler City: life centered around people, not machines.

Then there was a more insidious undercurrent: racism. During three visits to Rufus’ I never saw an African American person. By virtue of my white skin, I was basically a member of the club, hence the easy repartee with the white staff. Similarly, at Bobby Lu’s Diner in Siler City, I didn’t see any Latinos — despite the fact that Siler City is half Latino. Other restaurants in Siler City were purely Latino.

There’s a grocery outpost a few blocks from Rufus’. Once, when the restaurant was closed, I went in and asked the clerk, a hirsute, heavily tattooed man in his forties, if they served food. He sighed and said, “Nope.” Behind his head hung chewing tobacco packets, raw sausage links, and packets of beef jerky. The remainder of the store was filled with possibly the world’s widest selection of 40-ounce beers and malt liquors.

The only plausible lunch food was a Hot Pocket. I held it up, frozen stiff in its colorful little package, and asked if I could microwave it. “Sure,” he said. He was a man of few words, but not the guy who burst in next. This man’s voice boomed through the outpost for the next several minutes, as my Pocket got hot. He was already in midsentence as the front door flung open, a heavyset African American man with long braids tied into a ponytail, trailed by his wife. “… Oh do I see it. I see it! No, not the milk.” — his wife was pulling a gallon out of the refrigerator — “It’s this!” He hoisted a cold Colt 45 over his head like an Oscar.

“I’ve been dreaming about it all day, since I woke up at five A.M. This is it, this baby…”

Even as the man paraded up and down the aisles with his enormous malt beverage hoisted high, his wife lugging milk, bread, and TV dinners, two others were already lined up to buy 40-ounce bottles, including the quiet guy with a bushy, uneven mustache. He’d already opened his Colt 45. He took a long swig and then stared at the black man with intense, squinted eyes.

The overweight black man had by now twisted open his
40-ounce and proceeded to kiss the label, work his tongue up the neck and into the opening. His wife, burdened with groceries, said, “Save some of that action for me.” Without the slightest hint of a smile, the clerk accepted food stamps for the groceries and cash for the beer. Before following his wife out, the man stopped tonguing the bottle long enough to say to the deadpan clerk, “Thank you, boss, for saving my life.” He then took a giant swig and disappeared on tiptoes after a perfectly executed curtsy.

I felt ambivalent about this little drama on South Main Street. The two whites, the mustached man and the clerk, eyed the black man with obvious contempt. Was it purely about race or also about social class? Can you truly unbundle the two when racism is so deeply imbedded? The black man, though humorous on the surface, was also tragic: grossly overweight, on food stamps, already dreaming of his first 40-ounce during five A.M. insomnia. Was he resisting and transforming the racism around him or conceding defeat?

“THE AMERICANS, THEY DON’T LIKE US,”
my Honduran neighbor, Graciela, said to me in Spanish. “
Sahes que son los
‘red-necks,’
verdad
?” — “You know what rednecks are, right?”

She was hosing down her lawn very unevenly, soaking one spot to flooding and then breezing over the patch beside it. Her husband was late again. For both Graciela and her husband, this was a second marriage; they each had teenage children from previous marriages. He worked three jobs; two involved landscaping on the side, with his main job “processing” thousands of chickens an hour in the Gold Kist factory. That morning, I saw him tear down our gravel road in his black mini-pickup, late for work. The first time I went over to introduce myself to them, he was guarded, evidently wondering why I spoke Spanish, why I’d chosen to stay in a shack with no electricity — sizing me up to see if I posed a threat. Like the vast majority of Siler City—area Latinos, he was illegal.

“We’re like slaves,” Graciela said, staring at the water gushing out of her hose. “We work all the time, and it’s never enough to pay the bills.” Though she was only forty-three, the lines etched in her face made her look a decade older. She had a barrel-shaped midsection, large chest, and solid arms from her day job housecleaning and evening work at McDonald’s.

As we spoke, a wave of empathy washed over me. Hearing the Spanish, I felt as if I was back in Latin America, where I’d lived for five years, and where, on so many occasions, I had seen giant multinational companies underpaying people in sweatshops, on industrial soy plantations, and in fast-food restaurants. Was this any different? She was barely earning enough to get by. Yet Graciela was one of the lucky ones. Of Siler City’s thousands of Latinos, she was one of the few who owned a house, thanks to the nonprofit group Habitat for Humanity. She praised Habitat on several occasions, saying that her mortgage was only four hundred dollars a month, including taxes, which was considerably less than she had been paying for rent. My mother, while visiting me at Jackie’s, remarked: “You can tell Graciela’s family loves their house.” There was the tidy lawn, newly planted flowers — even a little doghouse with a lightbulb that glowed at night.

One day, arriving home in her greasy McDonald’s uniform, Graciela said to me: “Life seems good here if you’re American. But only if you’re American.”

José, in his identical Habitat home across from Graciela, was less open. Though he was incredibly friendly, and he would invite me over to dinner and into his woodshop to see a newly crafted piece of furniture, he always seemed guarded. When we’d talk about certain topics, he’d clamp down or change the subject. I wondered if he was undocumented, even though he’d been in the United States for two decades.

At one point I said to José, “I never see your son playing with the
Thompson kids.” It seemed odd, since Mike’s eldest son, Zach, was the same age as Hector.

“Oh, he doesn’t like to play so much,” José said.

“He likes to be alone?”

“No, he plays with Graciela’s kids all the time, just not with the Americans.”

It always threw me off a bit when my Latino neighbors referred to “the Americans” as if they were a separate ethnic group, and perhaps one not to be melted into. I noticed a struggle in José’s face, as if figuring out just how to say something. Always diplomatic, he never wanted to stir anything up. “My son says that — what’s his name, Mike?”

“Yes, Mike Thompson,” I said, surprised that after a year living here he wasn’t sure of his white neighbor’s name.

José continued: “He says Mike looks at him in a certain way. Maybe…” — he hesitated, then shrugged — “maybe a racist kind of way.”

THERE’S A POWERFUL DOCUMENTARY
called
Dare Not Walk Alone
about St. Augustine, Florida, a city that Martin Luther King Jr. targeted in the 1960s as a place to challenge racist segregation laws. Weekly protests and vigils were held, but violence eventually erupted, including a white hotel owner pouring acid on black children who had jumped into his pool. Images of that incident and others shot around the world, and these events contributed to the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Afterward, the white elites of the town retaliated against blacks by cutting them off economically and wiping out evidence of the civil rights struggle. Even the old slave market had no sign of ever having been a slave market — not one historical plaque existed in the town. The film ends with two black sisters visiting the church where they were once brutally cast out for being of the wrong race. Members of the white congregation receive the sisters in a powerful act of reconciliation, hugging and weeping, letting decades of pent-up shame spill over. The white congregation needed forgiveness more than the sisters — who had gone on with their lives — needed to forgive.

We need more of such healing. There’s a parallel between how we deal with race and how we deal with ecocide. In both cases, we look away. This denial weighs heavily on our individual and collective consciousness. Just being aware reduces the burden. Jackie helped me face my own unconscious racism when she said to me, during one of my visits, “I admire you for throwing it all away.”

I shifted from one foot to the other. We were standing in Zone 2 of her farm, beside the beehive. I asked her what she meant.

“Since you’re white, and a man, you have everything open to you: power, privilege. And yet you’re working in places like Liberia and interested in a 12 × 12. You’ve sacrificed your birthright.”

Jackie helped me see that part of understanding racism is understanding white privilege. Challenging this requires a deep personal commitment to constantly reflect on and root out the ways we’ve been conditioned by false constructs of race. I find that listening allows me to overcome some of my subconscious assumptions. During my stay in the 12 × 12, I listened to Spike Lee’s explanation of how racism works in the film industry; listened to José and Graciela talk about how they experience racism in twenty-first-century America. The more I listened, the more complex it all seemed. Jackie’s comment about my “birthright” includes nationality and gender along with race. As I was seeing firsthand in the relationships between my neighbors and in town, racism is often a complex stew of status, income level, culture, and history. While there has been progress — most notably the election of the first African American president — structural racism remains deeply embedded in our society. Just consider the fact that there are nearly as many black people under some form of correctional supervision (in jail or prison, on probation, or on parole) today as there were slaves during the peak of slavery in 1860.

During one of my walks, along Pine Bridge Church Road, I came to an overlook. Below, a lone farmhouse sat in a freshly tractored
field. The wide, two-story house had collapsed into itself, sad in its little nook between two hills, as desolate as a scene from Faulkner’s
The Unvanquished
. As I looked at that house, a relic from plantation times, I thought of the slaves who once toiled there, and the reality of slavery suddenly became physically real. Black people had been treated like property on this very soil, in that old house. I wondered: Has our society ever come to terms with the extent to which our wealth was built on the backs of people who were considered less than human?