The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (36 page)

Noden began looking for organizers to hire ahead of the formal launch in the spring
of 2008. Joel Ratner, the president of Wean, told Noden about a woman he had met through
her work at the Salvation Army, where she was leading workshops for single mothers
in an internship funded by the foundation while pursuing her bachelor’s degree in
sociology at Youngstown State. “You ought to meet her,” Ratner said. “She might be
a gold mine.”

Noden got in touch, and he and Tammy arranged to meet one April afternoon at the Bob
Evans restaurant near her house.

The first thing Tammy noticed as Noden drank his coffee was that this fresh-faced
white guy looked like a thirteen-year-old (he was in his thirties). When he mentioned
the possibility of a job at a new organization, she was skeptical. She still had a
year to go for her degree, she was struggling in her classes, and to be honest, she
was already a little disillusioned with the world of social services. There was so
much infighting—they seemed to be about maintaining their existence instead of serving
folks.

Noden explained what it would mean to be a community organizer: she would teach other
people to hold those in power accountable. It was something Tammy had never imagined
doing. “What do you mean?” she said. “This is the kind of place where the congressman
goes to jail, the sheriff goes to jail. You’re going to hold them accountable?” And
then she thought about it and added, “Somebody does need to do it.”

Noden asked about her childhood, the neighborhood she grew up in, did she remember
the mills, what was it like to work in the factory while raising three kids. She wasn’t
used to talking about herself this way but she did her best to answer his questions,
saying how her neighborhood had been safe when she was coming up because of the mob,
how that changed with the street gangs and crack—though she assumed he knew some of
the answers already.

And what made her angry?

Well, people liked to say the east side looked like Beirut, and she would think—without
saying—“What do you mean? This is where I’m from.” And she told him, “I’m pissed that
I have to raise my kids, get them educated, and get them out because there’s no opportunity
here.” Her older daughter was living in Orlando, her son was thinking of moving to
North Carolina, and the younger daughter wanted to go live with her sister. After
the Delphi buyout the girls tried to get their mother to move to Florida. “I am going
to have to get on a plane to go see my kids. It shouldn’t be like that. They should
be able to grow up and buy a home in this community. My grandmother worked too hard
for my neighborhood to look the way it does. She cooked and cleaned in a lot of houses
and now they’re going downhill. I remember when I was little my grandmother would
take me downtown to go shopping.”

She had never once thought about who was really responsible. Or that she could hold
their feet to the fire. She really was getting angry. So he had her. He was offering
her a different way to help people. He talked about Chicago and told her stories of
the campaigns there, with people who were serious about building power and pushing
for change, connecting some of it to the civil rights movement. She thought it all
sounded exciting.

They sat together for a long time, and while she was talking about herself Noden watched
her and saw something that he would describe to her later, something that she herself
couldn’t quite see: a kind of raw power. It came from her passion about the east side
and how it had been forgotten. He saw it as the pilot light that would get her up
day in and day out for a job that would not be easy. She was taking a brave leap to
remake herself, and she might come and go quickly, but she would be likelier to stick
it out than someone coming to Youngstown from Columbus or out of state. She knew the
story of the black community here because it was her story. He invited her to a formal
interview, and she agreed.

It took place at the Unitarian Church on Elm Street, near Youngstown State. Tammy
had never heard of that kind of church. Since the divorce she had been steeped in
her church in Akron. She asked the cousin who had brought her there about the Unitarians.

“They accept all religions and all beliefs,” her cousin said.

“But what does that mean?”

“That means you could be a Satanist and still be welcomed into the Unitarian Church.”

“No way.”

“Just be careful,” her cousin said. “I’m going to be praying for you.”

On the day of the interview, Noden met her at the church door and told her to have
a seat in the sanctuary until they were ready for her. Back then Tammy had her hair
in long dreads, and she had put on weight in the past few years, and she couldn’t
help thinking how black she would seem to whoever was going to interview her. She
sat down and glanced around. There were no crosses anywhere. In alarm she thought,
“I ain’t never been in no church without a cross.” To calm herself down—on top of
everything else, this was her first job interview in twenty years, and the last one
was for an auto parts assembly line—she picked up a hymnbook and leafed through its
pages. Her eyes fell on a song about the summer solstice. She was in a devil-worship
church!

As she was stashing away the hymnal, Noden came back and led her to the office where
two women and a man were waiting. Tammy was so shaken up that an instinct to pull
herself together made her take over the room, going from one person to the next, introducing
herself, “How are you doing? I’m great!” When Kirk asked for an example of a time
that she stood up to authority because of an injustice, she told them the story of
the girl at Packard who had been down on the floor scrubbing oil, and she could tell
they were moved. She sailed through the interview, she wowed them. But part of her
was thinking that if she did get the job, her new colleagues would wonder why the
doorknobs were always greasy since Tammy started working, because she would be anointing
them every day.

She became one of the first hires. She could stay in school and still hold down an
exciting job making reasonable money with benefits. She thought, “I knew God was going
to open up these doors.”

*   *   *

Noden gave his new organizers their marching orders: go out and talk to every church,
neighborhood group, and potential leader they could find, recruit seventy-five people
to attend a meeting, organize some kind of action, or they were fired. Noden assumed
that Tammy would work on the east side since she knew it so well, but she refused,
because that was just the problem—she knew too many people there, family and friends,
knew what her brothers were doing, and it would be a conflict of interest. Instead,
she began organizing on the north side, most of which no longer resembled the place
where Granny had gone to work in white people’s homes—it was starting to look like
the rest of Youngstown.

One day, Tammy was canvassing a neighborhood on the north side on foot, carrying a
yellow notepad on a clipboard and going door-to-door, introducing herself to anyone
she could find, trying to keep it under five minutes. “How is your neighborhood? How
long has that house over there been empty? Why do you think it hasn’t been torn down?
I just talked to someone down the street who feels the same way you do. There are
a lot of homes in the city that are abandoned and need to be torn down and I’m going
to tell you, there are some things that really need to change. Would you come to a
meeting? Because it doesn’t do a whole lot of good for just one person to call the
city, but if we all get on the same page … Yes, I’m from Youngstown, born and raised,
and I have watched how this city has changed, and know what? I’m at a point where
I’m like, no more, it’s time for it to stop. If you come to this meeting with about
fifty or sixty of your neighbors then we’ll discuss it. Can I get your number?” The
goal was to recruit local people and train them as leaders, so that they would bring
others along, and slowly the disempowered would gain a sense of agency and the voiceless
would begin to speak.

She turned down a street and heard two women talking and laughing on a front porch.
The porch was covered with Pittsburgh Steelers banners and paraphernalia, and the
front lawn had so many doodads scattered around that it looked like a yard sale was
going on. The women were having what Tammy called a pity party—one of them complaining
that she couldn’t afford her health insurance. Tammy took this as her cue to approach.
“What are you saying about health care?” She introduced herself and gave her pitch.
The woman with the health insurance problem was the owner of the house and Steeler
fan, Hattie Wilkins. She was in her late fifties, short and heavyset, with long dreads
colored gold, a big husky voice, and a boisterous manner. Hattie turned out to be
a distant relative of Tammy’s stepfather. As far as Hattie was concerned, Tammy had
just popped up out of a crack in the sidewalk.

Tammy asked Miss Hattie if she would be willing to have a one-on-one with her and
then be trained by MVOC as a leader.

“I’m already a leader,” Hattie said. “I don’t need no training.” For twenty years
she had been the head of her union local in a pillow factory on the west side. Then
the company paid her to quit because she caused so much trouble—that was why she had
to cover part of her health insurance. The three houses to her left were vacant—she
kept the grass cut next door—and then there were two empty lots where the houses had
been torn down. Hattie had turned one of the lots into a cut-down-flower garden—she
called it that in memory of her granddaughter, Marissa, shot in the heart at sixteen
while leaving a party. Hattie scavenged the tulip and daffodil bulbs and rosebushes
from the yards of abandoned houses, and she would never cut any of the blooms because
Marissa was cut down like a flower.

Leaving her job had cost Hattie her power base, the hundreds of workers at the pillow
factory. Now she was down to just four or five people in her neighborhood. Maybe she
wasn’t a leader after all, maybe she needed what Tammy was offering. She agreed to
a one-on-one.

It wasn’t long before Tammy became Miss Hattie’s role model. Tammy had a talent—Noden
noticed it early on—for forming deep bonds with her leaders, inspiring them with her
energy and focus on the task until they were willing to throw themselves in front
of a bus for her. Hattie loved the way Tammy spoke, how she could get people’s attention
and keep it. Hattie was taking classes at the college in order to use proper grammar
around the neighborhood kids so that they would learn to speak like the TV newscasters
instead of using the slang of the hood. She told Tammy, “When I grow up I want to
speak just like you.”

The organization’s first big project was to map Youngstown—to conduct a survey, going
block by block, of every house in the city, finding out which ones were occupied,
which empty, which had been torn down or needed to be. The surveyors assigned a grade
to each house in their area. If Tammy had surveyed the east side, she would have given
the abandoned and stripped property at 1319 Charlotte an F. On the north side, not
far from the park where she and Granny used to feed the swans during the year they
spent in the Purnell mansion, she surveyed two blocks that had thirteen abandoned
houses out of twenty-four. She talked to the mailman about which houses were occupied,
and when winter came she waited for a snowfall to see if there were tire tracks on
the driveways.

Forty percent of the parcels in Youngstown turned out to be vacant. Almost a quarter
of the empty houses were owned by random people in other states like California, and
even foreign countries like Austria or China, house flippers caught in the real estate
downdraft, Internet shoppers who hadn’t grasped the sorry state of their purchase
on Craigslist or
pennyforeclosure.com
. The most common complaint Tammy heard in her travels was vacancy and the crime it
always attracted. MVOC compiled the results of the survey in a color-coded map of
the city, with green for empty lots and red for abandoned structures. On the map the
east side was vast and green, with bright red spots scattered through it.

Youngstown’s black mayor, Jay Williams, had made it a policy to speed up the demolition
of abandoned buildings, but there were too many to keep up with and no one knew where
they all were, for the job of city planner was also vacant. MVOC’s color-coded map
became the only functional model for the physical condition of the city. In 2005,
after convening fourteen hundred residents in Stambaugh Auditorium to talk about Youngstown’s
future, the city had produced an ambitious document called 2010 Plan. It was the first
rational effort to deal with the fact of the city’s decline—the fact that it had
shrunk
. That’s how Youngstown looked, like a man who’d lost a lot of weight in an illness
but was still wearing his baggy old clothes—big open spaces without enough people
and structures to fill them. The imbalance between scale and inhabitants made the
city feel empty, except for a few lonely figures wandering the streets. The term “shrinking
cities” was coming into vogue—it was often applied to Detroit—and because 2010 Plan
discussed the need to reduce municipal services to a realistic level given the reduced
population, Youngstown was hailed as a pioneer. There was a lot of talk about community
gardens, pocket parks, beekeeping, chicken coops. In 2005,
The New York Times Magazine
put 2010 Plan on its annual list of the year’s best ideas. Youngstown was in danger
of becoming a media darling.

No one outside the city knew that the plan was never acted on. It was too explosive,
because it meant that some people would have to move. Who would those people be? Older
black homeowners on the east side who had decided not to leave and were holding on
to their history. Many of them believed that industry was going to come back. Where
would they be moved to? White areas like the west side. When Tammy heard about the
idea, she hated it. She immediately thought of people she knew—Arlette Gatewood, a
retired steelworker and union activist who was still living way out on the east side
near the Pennsylvania line in an area that was turning to woodland. Or Miss Sybil,
her older friend from the east side. She thought about the house her great-uncle built.
Yes, the city could no longer afford garbage collection and water lines throughout
the metropolitan area. She got that. “But at the same time, why would Ms. Jones want
to move out of the house she’s paid for, she raised her children in, and go somewhere
else?”