The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (51 page)

Dean, on a very personal note, I’m very disappointed it has come to this. I really
wish it hadn’t. When we first started, you were a great partner, but when the truck
stop started to fail, you changed. Yes, you are still a nice person, but you have
avoided all responsibilities to the company, cut off all communication with any of
us, lied to us on many occasions … I could go on, but I won’t. All I can say is I
wish you well and hope you find a way to get your life back in order.

Sincerely,

Gary N. Sink

President

Dean never replied. “They kicked me when I was down,” he said, “and they ran me off.”

Meanwhile, the liquidation of his business had not resolved the problem of his debts.
One of his creditors at the truck stop had been his fuel supplier, Eden Oil, a small
company out of Rockingham County. Dean had considered the owner, a man named Reid
Teague, to be a friend, but once Eden Oil got a judgment on Dean for $325,000 in unpaid
fuel bills, Teague became his nemesis. First he cut off the fuel supply to the truck
stop, which was what had forced it into Chapter 7. But the liquidation of Red Birch
of Martinsville couldn’t protect Dean, for Teague was coming after his personal assets,
too. In February 2011 Dean learned that his house—the house his grandfather Birch
Neal had built in 1934 on land he won in a poker game, where his mother had grown
up and the Neals had raised tobacco for decades, where his father had slapped him
down the last night they lived together under the same roof, where he had returned
from Pennsylvania in 1997, the house that he had spent a year moving down the hill
from the highway and rebuilding on a new foundation, the house that he had made into
a home for Ryan when his son came to live with him, that was also his mother’s house
and that they jointly owned—his house was scheduled to be auctioned off on the Rockingham
County Courthouse steps, in Wentworth, on May 15. He didn’t tell his mother, but a
notice appeared in the local paper. A cousin once removed dropped by the Sunday before
the auction on the pretext of reminiscing, but as she was leaving she told Dean that
she was there to check out the house for its sale value.

Dean had been thinking about declaring personal bankruptcy ever since the end of 2009,
but for one reason or another—he was concentrating on biodiesel; his lawyer had stopped
returning his calls after collecting his fifteen-hundred-dollar fee; no one wanted
to face ruin—he hadn’t done it. But on Monday, May 9, six days ahead of the scheduled
auction, Dean filed under Chapter 7 as a “self-employed entrepreneur” in the U.S.
Bankruptcy Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, in Greensboro. He did
it to save his house. Twenty-six other debtors appeared in court with him that day.
Across the country, over the course of the year, there were 1,410,653 bankruptcies.

Dean’s debts totaled a million dollars. His assets—his half of the house in Stokesdale,
his quarter share of the forty-four acres that was the remnant of the Price tobacco
farm, his furniture, tractor, clothes, books, and shotguns, his vintage signs, his
1988 Ford pickup truck, and the used Jeep Wrangler that he had bought for Ryan’s sixteenth
birthday—all fell within the exemptions allowed in North Carolina, so he was able
to hang on to them. He had to undergo credit counseling and take a financial management
course.

On July 25, he went to the courthouse in Greensboro for the meeting of creditors.
It was held in a room on the first floor, and instead of creditors, who seldom attended
a hearing, Dean found himself surrounded by his fellow debtors, old people, people
sitting in wheelchairs or walking on canes, breathing through respirators, waiting
for their name to be called by the bankruptcy trustee, and they reminded him of his
father and how he had been broken by failure. He had never felt his father’s shadow
on him like that. The crease in his britches.

While he was in bankruptcy he actually thought a few times about ending it. But he
could never do that to his boys—it would be the easy way out. And, in a way, bankruptcy
was a wonderful thing because it allowed a fresh start. Thank God he didn’t live in
a country where they cut off your head if you fell into debt.

On August 30, Dean’s case was closed. He had felt the Lord’s hand on him the whole
time.

By then he already saw the right way forward. After getting thrown out by Gary and
them he came very close to quitting biodiesel, but it turned out to be one of the
best things in his life. Otherwise, he never would have come up with the new idea.
He would have stayed at Red Birch until he died trying.

There was a Henry Ford quote that he’d read somewhere: “Failure is simply the opportunity
to begin again, this time more intelligently.”

TAMMY THOMAS

Tammy loved doing actions. She loved the bigger stage, the larger movement. Public
speaking freaked her out, but in 2009, when the organization joined unions and other
groups in rallies for health care reform and other causes all over Ohio and in Washington,
Tammy would be at the front of the bus leading the songs and chants. She had a sense
of the drama, and how to keep it alive when it was fading. Once, outside a Chase Bank
in Columbus, an organizer with a bullhorn kept trying to get a chant of “Si se puede”
started, the Spanish version of Obama’s “Yes we can,” but there were hardly any Hispanics
in the crowd. Tammy finally grabbed the bullhorn and got everyone singing. Another
“Si se puede” and the action would have ground to a halt.

In Mason, Ohio, a conservative white town, they stormed the lobby of United Healthcare
singing and chanting. In Washington, Tammy and others from Youngstown—local people
she had recruited, like Miss Hattie—joined a national progressive group on K Street
and shut down a whole intersection, and from there they marched to Bank of America
to denounce Wall Street, then protested on the front lawns of bank executives. It
was pouring and Tammy got soaking wet in spite of the trash bag she had turned into
a poncho. She got sick afterward, but it was exhilarating. It made her feel, “Hey,
take that! You’ve been giving it to us and everyone else forever. Take a little bit
of it back.” She was standing up and saying—whether it was true or not—“I’m not going
to take this anymore.” She thought about all the foreclosures she knew, and the redlining
in black neighborhoods like the east side, and the payday lending abuses. “I just
get sick of when people take advantage of other people. And you take advantage of
the people who have less already? Isn’t that America? That is the nature of the beast
and it seems like we are getting so deeper into it.” She thought about being forced
to retire from Packard, and the CEO and upper-level staff getting their bonuses while
leaving all these people without jobs, decimating a community, and some of the banks
getting bailed out with her tax dollars, and she still couldn’t get a loan from them
while she had to pay her mortgage every month. “That makes me want to say, ‘What the
F?’ It’s the injustice of it.”

The actions put her leaders on a stage they had never dreamed of. Miss Sybil, just
retired from hauling cement at the Ohio Lamp factory, went to Washington and met with
Shaun Donovan, Obama’s secretary of housing and urban development. She told him that
some of the stimulus dollars to distressed cities should go for demolitions. She brought
out MVOC’s map and explained that the problem in Youngstown wasn’t gentrification,
like New York or Chicago—Youngstown didn’t need low-income housing to be built, it
needed vacant houses to be torn down. After three meetings the secretary got it, and
he also remembered her name.

Miss Hattie became a local celebrity. Tammy had her speaking all over town, about
health care, vacant houses, what the banks were doing to the neighborhood, until people
would walk up to her at the store and say, “You don’t know me but I know you, I seen
you on TV. You speak for all of us that can’t speak.” Then Tammy took her to Washington,
and Miss Hattie nearly died of nervousness getting up in front of what looked to her
like thousands of people on Capitol Hill. When she started stuttering and said some
things wrong, Tim Ryan, Youngstown’s congressman after Traficant, hugged her. “You
are a dynamic speaker,” he said, “you need to introduce me every time.” It was like
her mother patting her on the back and saying, “It’s going to be all right.” After
that she hit the ground running. Miss Hattie said later, “Tammy molded me into the
leader that I am.”

Across the street from her cut-down-flower garden, in another vacant lot Miss Hattie
started the Fairmont Girls and Vicinity Community Garden. She put up a white picket
fence, like in the suburbs, and built raised beds out of scavenged wood and chipboard,
and compost bins from factory pallets. Georgine’s restaurant loaded thirty pounds
of compost in her truck every day, and her doctor gave her horse manure from his farm.
Tammy wrote a grant application to the Wean Foundation and Miss Hattie received thirty-seven
hundred dollars to get started. She was trying to beautify the neighborhood and teach
the kids something nobody could take away from them. “You might hate it at first,
but you can cook with greens and you don’t have to eat meat all the time. You can
eat for cheap or nothing as long as you work hard. Hard work is the key to everything.
I didn’t know that when I was young, but I guess I got wisdom with age.” The garden
was a serene thing—it reminded Miss Hattie of her father’s garden. But the kids in
the neighborhood were all teenagers now, and it was hard to get them interested. It
didn’t help when the house next door to her garden had an attic fire because a seven-year-old
boy was playing with matches, and the owner immediately began stripping off the aluminum
siding to sell for scrap.

Miss Sybil started a community garden on her block of the east side as well. It was
an urban garden, black soil and green vegetable waste on top of concrete. “We all
go back to dirt,” she said, “everything goes back to dirt.” She knew nothing about
gardening, just eating, but she and her neighbors grew everything edible to man. The
policy was come at will and pick what you want, just don’t tear up the garden. Only
the groundhogs and deer didn’t abide by it.

Tammy and MVOC did a second survey of Youngstown, this time of grocery stores. Their
map showed that Youngstown was a food desert—there were hardly any decent stores in
the whole city. From certain parts of the east side it took a four-hour round-trip
on the bus to buy fresh groceries, and it made a big difference when a Bottom Dollar
opened up on the south side. A good corner store might carry a few potatoes, a few
onions, and heads of lettuce starting to turn black, but most were like the F&N Food
Market next to Vickie’s demolished house on Shehy Street, selling fast food, liquor,
and cigarettes. The organization pressured corner store owners to sign an agreement
to stock fresh, nutritious food and keep their stores from becoming hangouts for dealers.

The food campaign put Tammy in touch with a white evangelical church south of Youngstown,
where the minister, Steve Fortenberry, had started a cooperative farm on thirty-one
acres. His congregation had some older and more conservative members who were skeptical
of anything having to do with environmentalism, so he pitched the project as feeding
the hungry, which was easier to sell. Teenagers, disabled people, and ex-cons from
Youngstown worked on the church’s farm over the summer, and Tammy and Fortenberry
arranged to bring the food by truck to community centers and farmer’s markets around
Youngstown.

In her earlier life, Tammy never would have met someone like Steve Fortenberry. She
wouldn’t have met Kirk Noden. She didn’t know there were people like Noden with such
a passion for the underdog. She called him “the blackest white guy I know.” The work
was taking over her life. It stole time away from her family, she didn’t go to church
as often as before, she didn’t get around to spring cleaning. But MVOC also opened
her up to different people and experiences, even different cuisines (Kirk challenged
her to eat octopus, and she learned to love Indian food). She used to look at white
people wearing dreads and think, “Why are they trying to lock their hair like a black
person?” That didn’t faze her anymore, and neither did the peculiarities of the Unitarian
Church—a woman opening up a meeting with a chant and a gong—or any other religion.
It was all part of a cultural experience. After her divorce, when she got so deep
into the House of the Lord, she’d stopped drinking, but now she and the other organizers
held long strategy sessions over food and drinks, and they always ended up telling
war stories, comparing victories and scars. She had never been around people who were
so passionate about their work. There was so much more to life than she had known.
And nothing burned her up more than when certain people she knew said that Kirk was
trying to take advantage of black people, or that he was racist. “Are you kidding
me? Do you know what he has done for me and my family? He didn’t have to hire me.
I didn’t have any experience, I had no degree. He saw something needed to be done
here and he had a couple answers. If you want to fix it and make it better, you haven’t
in the past twenty years. What are you waiting for?”

*   *   *

When Tammy left Delphi, her buyout was worth about a hundred forty thousand dollars.
It sounded like a lot of money, until you figured that it was two and a half years
of pay with no guarantee of another job. She lost more than half of her pension, but
she ended up among the lucky ones with a good job. Her best friend, Karen, who was
ten years older, took the buyout but didn’t find another job, and she and her husband
went through hard times, like just about everyone else Tammy knew at the plant. The
company did too good a job of scaring workers into leaving, and so many took the buyout
that Delphi had to bring a few hundred back to the Warren factory as temps to get
up to six hundred fifty. Tammy knew some people who went back to work in the high-speed
press area, running three or four machines for thirteen dollars an hour—double the
work for half the pay.