The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (66 page)

Dean paid thirty-five hundred dollars at a local used car lot for a 1997 Honda Civic
with 196,000 miles and a broken air conditioner, and he began taking his idea around
the state, seeking acres of diamonds from the Appalachians to the coastal plain.

*   *   *

Dean had an apartment in his basement that he rented for $225 a month to a twenty-five-year-old
named Matt Orr. Matt had grown up in the area, done more than his share of drinking
and smoking and partying, then joined the army for the discipline and served a tour
in Iraq in 2006–2007. America looked beautiful after Tikrit—on the drive into Stokes
County from the Greensboro airport with his dad, Matt saw trees, hills, and green
grass, and he felt he was waking up from a bad dream. But he came home with a thousand-mile
stare and no prospects of gainful employment. He was hired by an auto parts store—he’d
been a mechanic with the 25th Infantry Division—but they never raised him above $7.75
an hour. He quit and worked briefly at a copper tubing factory, the same one where
Dean had a job after high school, but Matt was paid eight dollars an hour—less than
Dean had made in 1981. After quitting that, Matt got a job at the Kmart in Madison
as a “loss prevention manager,” which meant that he spent ten hours a day looking
for shoplifters and placing the ones he caught in nonviolent restraint, including
a forty-year-old jobless man who was trying to steal a tent because his mother had
kicked him out of her house. This was not what Matt had wanted to come back to—he
had hoped to make more of a difference—but he couldn’t turn down ten dollars an hour.
Then Kmart knocked him back to $8.50.

What really depressed Matt was how monetary everything had become in America, how
it was just the biggest profit at the lowest cost. It was all about me, me, me, and
no one wanted to help anyone else. The lobbyists, the politicians—they were all corrupt,
taking everything from those who had the least. His favorite thing to do when he was
alone in Dean’s basement relaxing with a beer was to watch old episodes of
The Andy Griffith Show
. It was a better America back then. If he could have grown up at any time it would
have been in the fifties, which was the last great time in America. He hated to say
it but it was true.

Dean tried to do anything he could for Matt, but after Matt went five months without
being able to pay his rent, Dean had to ask him to move out.

The Andy Griffith Show
was still popular in the region (even after Andy made an ad for Obamacare), with
reruns every afternoon, because the original for Mayberry RFD was the town of Mount
Airy, up at the Virginia border—now just another hard-hit textile town trying its
best keep up a quaint appearance on Main Street for the sake of the tourists, shop
windows displaying posters and photos and memorabilia with those goofy, reassuring,
all-white faces from the show. At the end of July, a few days after his bankruptcy
hearing in Greensboro, Dean made the hour’s drive to Mount Airy to see a woman on
the city commission. He had been trying for four months to get a county to sign on
to his proposal, driving all over the state, talking to officials in at least thirty
counties, without success. They were like lemmings, just waiting for the first one
to jump, but something held them back.

Dean hadn’t spoken to Gary in months. He didn’t want Gary to find out about this new
idea, because in Dean’s mind Gary was a pirate, a modern-day pirate. Any idea Dean
ever gave him, Gary would steal and claim as his own. It went back to what Napoleon
Hill wrote about the “Mastermind alliance”—he and Gary never had it. Gary didn’t believe
in what Dean told him about the third mind. And Gary was a Tea Party Republican. Once,
when Dean was having beers with a tobacco farmer, the subject of partnerships came
up. “Partnerships are good for two things,” the farmer said. “Dancing and fucking.”
For now, Dean was on his own.

The woman in Mount Airy was named Teresa Lewis. They met at her office in a shopping
mall outside the center of town, where Teresa ran a temp service. She was in her early
fifties, dyed blond, wearing a blue suit and pearls. There was a poster of Elvis on
the wall, and pictures of John McCain and the state’s Republican senator. Dean put
his jars of canola seed and oil on Teresa’s desk and explained his concept.

“It’s really a grassroots community effort,” he said, “where not only are the farmers
involved, but the restaurant owners, the school system, and the government.”

“Well, Dean,” Teresa said, in a breathy drawl, “what would stop somebody from doing
this? It doesn’t sound like there’s a downside.”

“There is none.”

“We’re a big agricultural community. Tobacco built every building in this city.” Teresa
smiled. “Now, you used two words, Dean—‘sustainability’ and ‘green.’ People here don’t
like those words.”

Teresa gave Dean a lesson in local politics. She was a Republican, of course, but
a Chamber of Commerce, United Fund, civic improvement Republican—not a Tea Party Republican.
In 2010 she had lost the race for mayor of Mount Airy to a very conservative woman—a
former textile worker and Glenn Beck fan—and the Tea Party had taken over the Surry
County board of commissioners. On the city commission, a proposal to institute curbside
recycling had inflamed passions on both sides, with some opponents describing it as
a liberal, green, big government effort to impose a burden on the taxpayers of Mount
Airy, and Teresa had cast the deciding vote in favor. She still seemed bruised by
the year’s battles.

“People here like ‘savings,’ they like ‘farming,’ they like ‘receiving income back,’”
Teresa said. “And they like ‘alternative sources.’ ‘Alternative’ will not get the
same reaction as ‘sustainability.’”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’re running into five very conservative county commissioners from the last election,”
she said. “I like you—I just want to warn you, these words are not popular.”

Teresa said she would help Dean get his idea to the Surry County Commission, but weeks
went by and he never heard anything definite.

*   *   *

Dean put fifty thousand miles on the used Honda. He drove the length and breadth of
the state with his jars, wearing his red Coca-Cola baseball cap that was faded to
pink. He talked to anyone who would listen. He talked to the hippies at Piedmont Biofuels,
which was a worker-owned co-op near Chapel Hill—prosperous and progressive North Carolina,
where people moved from out of state—and he talked to a school board member in Greensboro
who was so right-wing that he wasn’t sure there should even be public schools.

He talked to Eva Clayton, a retired black congresswoman from Warren County. They sat
in her office in Raleigh and Dean said, “The way I look at it, this economy is demonstrating
that it cannot provide the amount of jobs necessary for the current population. So
therefore we have to start thinking differently, and I think that this new green economy
is really a different mind-set, and I can’t see this economy starting any other way
than with an energy source,” and Eva Clayton, who was tiny and elegant and unsmiling,
said, “Mm-hmm. What is the ask?” and Dean said, “We ask the restaurant owners to be
part of this movement, where they either donate or we get the oil at a discount. Second
thing is to work with these school boards where they get these bus garage guys to
introduce this new fuel to the school buses. That’s the seed, the starting point.
From there we go to canola,” and Eva Clayton said, “We’re asking farmers to grow?”
and Dean said, “To grow canola. We’re going to build a small-scale crushing facility
to get oil from that seed,” and Eva Clayton, taking Dean’s jars and sliding them on
top of her conference table, said, “You’re going to get farmers to grow this,” and
Dean said, “Yes, ma’am. In order to get them to grow this it’s all about money,” and
Eva Clayton said, “I see a gentleman who has an idea that may help these distressed
people, but the distress is right now—‘I need food now, I need to pay bills now’—and
this idea is a year or two away.” Eva Clayton finally smiled. “But hope comes from
these ideas, with people saying we can do better.”

He talked at a green-jobs fair in a refurbished armory in Warrenton, before a crowd
of three hundred people looking for work, 80 percent of them black. He had done some
research before going to Warrenton, and he had read about Soul City, which was just
five miles outside town. Soul City was started in the seventies by a black activist
named Floyd McKissick, with help from Eva Clayton and her husband, on five thousand
acres of dirt-poor tobacco fields. It was intended to be a self-sufficient, multiracial
community, with housing planned for eighteen thousand people, and the Nixon administration
gave a federal grant under the Model Cities program after McKissick joined the Republican
Party—which infuriated Dean’s father, who hated the whole idea of Soul City—but the
population never grew beyond a couple of hundred, and no businesses were established.
Instead, Soul City died a slow death, and by 2011 there was just a vandalized health
clinic and a few two-bedroom houses on streets named Liberation and Revolution, next
to the red clay cornfields.

Dean read about all this, and it blew his mind, and he stood up at the green-jobs
fair and said, “My name is Dean Price but I want you to call me Green Dean. In my
opinion one of the greatest men ever to live was Martin Luther King.” If his father
could have heard that! When Congress was debating whether to make King’s birthday
a national holiday, his father had said, “If they killed four more you could give
’em a whole week.” Dean had always thought that King was a black leader at best, not
a leader of all men, but his views had changed in recent years, and now, before this
mainly black crowd, who couldn’t often have heard a white man with a southern country
accent say such things, he went on, “Martin Luther King once said, ‘We all came here
on different ships but we’re in the same boat now,’” and he heard a gasp from the
crowd. “There’s another man who came to Warren County forty years ago by the name
of Floyd McKissick.” Another gasp, from the older people in the crowd. “Floyd McKissick
had a dream, too, and that was to build a city for all men—white, yellow, black, brown,
green—so they could work together with equal opportunity for all. And I’m here to
tell you that dream is still alive! Floyd McKissick was a visionary. He was swimming
upstream, but the tide has turned and we’re swimming with the stream because cheap
energy is leaving here. Cheap energy allowed globalization to take place, and what
will allow the reverse of globalization will be high energy costs, and it goes back
to Gandhi. Gandhi said it was a sin to buy from your farthest neighbor at the neglect
of your nearest neighbor.” And he told them how they could make their own energy right
here in one of the poorest counties in North Carolina.

They ate it up with a spoon. Afterward, people called out to him, “Green Dean! Green
Dean!” An old black man with blue eyes told him, “If I had a million dollars I’d put
it in your idea.” Acres of diamonds in Warren County. But the board of commissioners
didn’t have the right sense of urgency, they spent months kicking the tires without
making the sale, and nothing came of Dean’s speech.

He talked to Kathy Proctor, a fifty-five-year-old white single mother of two down
near High Point, who had lost her job at the furniture factory during the bank bailouts.
With her unemployment benefits she had gone back to study biotechnology at the community
college in Winston-Salem—not just to find a new career, but to set an example for
her daughters. One day, President Obama visited the college to talk up retraining
and manufacturing, and when he came through Kathy’s lab and asked if anyone had a
story, Kathy told him hers. The next thing Kathy knew, she was Michelle Obama’s guest
at the 2011 State of the Union address (and she hadn’t even voted for Mrs. Obama’s
husband in 2008, though she might well the next time around). When the president mentioned
Kathy Proctor’s name in his speech, she was so surprised that the cameras caught a
stout woman with lank dark hair turning to the people seated beside her in the First
Lady’s box and saying, “That’s me.”

By the time Dean went down to see Kathy Proctor, and they sat together in the cramped
living room, which was furnished with dark-stained pieces made in the defunct local
factories where she had worked all her life, Kathy had been hired to do quality control
at an online twenty-four-hour vitamin distribution center. She was making thirty thousand
a year—less than at the furniture factory, not the lab job she’d hoped for with her
associate’s degree, but it was better than minimum wage, better than living on the
streets, it paid her bills.

Dean described how he had met Obama, too, and then he told her about his project.

“I didn’t know about this biofuels,” Kathy, a lively and curious woman, said.

“Let’s start a new industry,” Dean laughed.

“We might. I’m interested in this. It’s fixin’ to take off. How long you been working
on this, Dean?”

“Since 2005—and it has been a struggle.”

The White House had invited Kathy to hear Obama speak at a community college in Greensboro
the next day. “If I get a chance to talk to the president tomorrow,” she told Dean,
“I’ll mention it to him.”

Dean and Kathy exchanged a high five. But he no longer expected much from the president.
Up at Red Birch, he had thought that change would come from Obama getting elected,
or Tom Perriello helping make it happen. As polarized as the country was, Obama had
his best chance with a majority in Congress, but he couldn’t muster the support to
pass cap and trade. Obama had failed, and Perriello was gone—working for a Washington
think tank. Change wasn’t going to come from new laws. It wasn’t going to come from
Washington, or Raleigh. It might come from Stokesdale. The country was stuck and no
politician could fix that. It was going to take an entrepreneur. “It’s like a dam
that develops a crack, and the water starts seeping through, and it’s not long before
the whole dam comes down, and I think it’s that way with this economy. And that crack
is the relationship between the rendering company and the restaurant owner.”