The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (64 page)

The only rich person Danny respected was Bill Gates, because he made his money honestly
and then spent it saving third world countries. Sam Walton had seemed like a pretty
decent man, but after he passed on, his kids got greedy. Ronale wanted to shake the
hand of Warren Buffett, and also Oprah, and Michelle Obama because of how sincere
she was, jumping rope with kids and getting them to eat healthy. Ronale liked watching
Secret Millionaire
because every week a rich person had to live just like poor people, and at the end
of the show he had a change of heart and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to
a charity. But she also had a disturbing vision of the greed that lay behind everything
else: “In the background there is this horrible nightmare that stands behind the good,
getting bigger and bigger, and it’s like a black cloud and it’s consuming everything
and actually taking life away from people.”

All the same, Ronale bought everything at Wal-Mart, because you couldn’t beat their
prices. Except for meat, because Danny and Dennis told her how they left food racks
outside the cooler for hours. But everything else. You just had to give in. Danny
was beginning to think that Wal-Mart and big oil ran the whole world, and when the
family went shopping he stayed in the car.

Then, one morning not long before the convention, he told some co-workers on break
how much he hated his job, and the word got back to his manager, and the manager confronted
Danny right in the produce section and humiliated him in front of customers. The next
day Danny woke up with the manager’s words burning in his ears and he couldn’t take
it, his impotent pride raged, and he didn’t go in to work. So they were back where
they started.

On the last day of the convention, Danny, Ronale, Dennis, Brent, and Danielle sat
in their living room. HGTV was on. Brent’s hair was cut short—he was in ninth grade
and had joined Junior ROTC. Danielle was at the computer doing her classwork. The
Hartzells had been unable to get her into a decent middle school, so she was enrolled
in the Hillsborough Virtual School for sixth grade (which worked okay until they could
no longer pay for Internet and lost their service). Danny was sipping a Diet Pepsi
and helping Danielle with her work. He already regretted the hotheadedness that had
cost him his job.

Ronale was still seething about the speech of the Nominee’s wife. “She was pouring
the sugar out and everything, and I don’t get how they would not notice the fake.
‘I had breast cancer, I had MS’—but they want to take Planned Parenthood away. It’s
assistance for women that could not afford mammograms, pap smears, preventive cancer.
If a woman’s diagnosed with breast cancer, what’s she going to do if she ain’t got
the money?”

Danny said, “My view on everything—if you want to change this country, you have to
put a person in office who has never done it for a day. Put a regular old guy like
me, someone who’s lived it and never done nothing else but live it.” He sipped his
Diet Pepsi. “We’re struggling, but we’re not starving. There’s no life, but there’s
a roof over your head.”

“It’s the price of freedom,” Dennis said. “I can come home, I have a bed to sleep
on, I have food, a soda to drink, or tea—I’m fine. I wish I could have more, like
everybody, but it’s never going to be perfect as long as the world runs the way it
runs and people make the decisions they make.”

It was the second-to-last day of August. While the Republicans concluded their $123
million convention fifteen minutes away, the Hartzells, having paid all their bills,
had five dollars left till the first of September.

TAMMY THOMAS

One day in the spring of 2012, Tammy left her purse in the Pontiac and walked up to
the broad front door of the brick house on Tod Lane. She couldn’t find a street address,
and she wondered what had happened to the rose garden under the front windows, but
this was the house—there was the curved patio off on the right side, there was the
tree she got spanked for climbing. Dogs were already barking before she could summon
the nerve to knock. The door swung open and a tiny white-haired white woman appeared.

“Yes?” The woman stood bowlegged in sweatpants and a sweatshirt that said
BODYWORKS
.

“Hi!” Tammy stayed on the circular drive that ran along the front steps. “I know you’re
probably wondering why is this lady standing in my driveway.”

The woman withdrew to put the barking dogs away, then returned to the door.

Tammy said, “Can I come up and shake your hand?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Tammy approached, and the woman accepted her hand warily. “My name is Tammy Thomas,
and I want to tell you that the lady that used to live in this house—”

“Purnell?”

“Miss Purnell. My great-grandmother used to work for her, and when Miss Purnell—I
remember her very vaguely—when she passed, we actually stayed here for a little while.”

“Yeah. Mm-hmm.”

“And I have so many vivid memories of this house,” Tammy’s voice was getting thick,
“and I’ve been wondering if they are all of them just memories, or is it for real.”
She mentioned the rose garden and the curved patio, the ballroom upstairs, the grand
staircase, and Miss Lena’s long bathroom, with the gold-colored tiles and the stand-up
shower. “I started kindergarten here,” Tammy said, “and I don’t even know what else
to say.”

The woman confirmed that all the memories were real, but it was the emotion in Tammy’s
eyes and voice that made her say, “You can come in and look at it. I’m in the process
of redoing it.”

Tammy stepped inside. The grand staircase was straight ahead—just a flight of stairs
with a threadbare runner. The foyer and living room, where she had learned to ride
a bike, looked much smaller than she remembered. The hardwood of the floors had the
same pattern, but the shine was worn off and they were all scratched up. The buzzer
was gone from the dining room floor.

The woman’s name was Mrs. Tupper. The house had cost two hundred thousand dollars
in 1976 but now it was worth less than that. Her husband had been an executive at
Packard Electric, but he was long dead, her children moved out, and she talked on,
explaining the shabby state of things, in the way of someone living alone and completely
absorbed in a task. “Like I said, I’m not going to be around much longer, and the
original carpet—I haven’t changed the carpet because of the dogs. All carpet today
has a rough backing and it would destroy the floors. It would destroy everything.
You have to have a soft backing. Even if you have padding down it still doesn’t help.”

Mrs. Tupper had just come from her ballet lesson. She still did ballet at her age
but your knees started going as you got older and she no longer did tap. Tammy followed
her from room to room, gazing at walls and ceilings, losing herself in a memory (was
that chandelier original?), then coming back to the present and this woman, finding
her where she was—in a house that she was slowly and painfully renovating herself,
with the thought of selling it before she died—instinctively knowing how to make a
connection with an old woman.

When they were out on the curved patio facing the garden, Mrs. Tupper suddenly looked
at Tammy as if for the first time. “I do know what it feels like to go back and see
things.”

She and her sister had been born in Ohio, taken to Washington by their rich parents,
and then abandoned, put in a children’s home, and she had recently gone back to Washington
to see it. “I grew up back when we had reform school. Mothers, if you don’t take care
of your child, your child goes to a reform school if he’s bad, and if you don’t want
to take care of him, you put him in a children’s home. Not a thing wrong. Perfect.
I was given more than I could ever give my children.”

Mrs. Tupper’s backyard looked across the street at the empty fields where Rayen High
School had once stood. Rayen was where Barry, Tammy’s ex-husband, her first child’s
father, had gone, and also Geneva, her best friend, who had been thrown to the street
and shot in the head. Built in 1922, torn down after it closed in 2007. Mrs. Tupper
was glad to see it gone. The house between hers and the school had been a drug house,
and the Crips and Bloods used to fight there. Once, two boys with guns were chasing
and shooting at a third, who broke down her fence and ran right up onto her porch
into her house. Mrs. Tupper made him sit down and asked him a bunch of questions,
but all he would say was that he was with the gang, he was a Crip and they were Bloods,
and they were after him and he was saving his life. A few days later he went back
to the drug house with a gun, because he’d had enough. From the third floor Mrs. Tupper
heard a boy cry out for his mother just before the gun went off. One boy walked to
the schoolyard and died there, the other lay on the driveway until the ambulance Mrs.
Tupper called came, but he was already dead.

“This was in the late eighties, early nineties?” Tammy asked.

“Something like that.”

“Do you remember their names?”

“No. It never showed up in the newspaper. The only things they could have been after
him for—he wouldn’t say—was either drugs or a woman.”

“It was probably drugs,” Tammy said.

“Right. I didn’t realize it because he looked so young. It was really sad.”

“Sure, yeah.”

“When they’re thirteen or fourteen years, I believe in putting them in the reform
school, and when I say reform, what does reform mean? They can reform you to want
to be a good citizen, and then from there you go into the service. Mom and Dad don’t
care about you anyway, so the reform school can take you. You understand? And it’s
going to give you something to hold on to in life. Make sure you have a good education,
and you’ll have fun in there, you’ll go to the circus. I did all of these things.
It’s getting cold.”

“My eyes are watering,” Tammy said.

She stayed for over an hour. It felt like she could have stayed all day because once
Mrs. Tupper started talking she wouldn’t stop, but Tammy had to get back to work.
Before leaving, Tammy asked if she could come back and have tea, or bring lunch.

“I’d love to have you,” Mrs. Tupper said.

Tammy got in her Pontiac and drove away, past Crandall Park, where she had once fed
the swans. The house was a lot smaller than she remembered, and less glamorous. It
hadn’t been kept up well, and a bad neighborhood was closing in. But as Tammy stood
in the foyer, her mother was hurrying down the stairs, saying she didn’t like staying
there because the house was haunted, and as Tammy stood in the kitchen, her granny
was calling for her to come help with the laundry, and in those moments she felt close
to them again.

*   *   *

The Front Porch Café was on the ground floor of a brick building with a burned-out
second floor, next to the interstate near downtown Akron. Inside, fifty people were
sitting at tables, a few black and white women and a lot of black men, many of them
former convicts. Miss Hattie was there, with a big picture of Obama on her T-shirt.
Tammy was standing in front of a screen, wearing jeans and a long loose synthetic
shirt with purple and white swirls. Her hair was cut short and hennaed on top.

A couple of days before, she had been at a community center in Cleveland, talking
about Social Security and Medicare to a room full of old people, the women listening,
the men playing dominoes. She’d had one of her leaders with her in Cleveland, Miss
Gloria, who was seventy-one, and Miss Gloria was supposed to talk about living on
retirement benefits and how they were under threat, but they couldn’t hear Miss Gloria
very well so Tammy had to do most of the talking while she set up the projector she
was lugging around in order to show them a video about the Koch brothers, Charles
and David, who were shown in a cartoon as two heads growing out of an octopus, and
after the video, one of the women, Linda, had asked, “Where did these two Koch brothers
come from? Why haven’t we heard of them before?” and another woman, Mabel, had said,
“Koch brothers going to make the Negroes pay the bill.” After Cleveland, Tammy had
a Food Policy Council meeting in Youngstown, then she had to prepare a presentation
for a minority health conference. In the middle of it all she was getting ready for
her wedding on the beach near Tampa to a roofer named Mark, a guy she’d known when
they were at East High School, and suddenly Mark’s uncle from East Cleveland had shown
up with financial problems, and so the uncle was now living with them in her house
in Liberty.

She was tired.

“I grew up in a place where you could sit on my front porch and you could smell the
sulfur in the air,” Tammy was telling the group at the Front Porch Café. “And everybody
in that community was working. We were at a hundred fifty thousand people at that
time. And guess what? One day, the jobs left. September of ’77, the mills stopped
working. We lost over fifty thousand jobs within a ten-year time frame. I was fortunate
enough as an adult that I was able to get a job at Packard. Eleven thousand jobs in
its heyday, down to three thousand jobs, and when we all left it had less than six
hundred jobs. I just want to let you know, that story of Youngstown is the epitome
of any older industrial city across the United States.”

MVOC’s survey map of Youngstown was projected onto the screen, with the east side
a sea of green. “The house that my grandmother worked very hard, cleaning people’s
floors, washing their clothes, cooking their food, so that we could have a home—that
home now sits on a street with four houses on it. Two of them are vacant, and one
of them is ours. The majority of our community lives like that.”

Tammy was going on notes that she’d written up the day before—turning her life story
into a speech, in order to teach the people in the group how to tell their own stories
and tie them to a campaign during the presidential election for better jobs in Ohio.