The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (6 page)

He was a twenty-seven-year-old assistant vice president making more than a hundred
grand, and yet he went home in the evenings thinking this was not what he wanted to
do with his life. By the end of 1986 it was clear that Biden would run for president.
Connaughton had never forgotten him. He pulled a string with an E. F. Hutton lobbyist
who had connections to the campaign. It worked.

“Biden was like a cult figure to me,” Connaughton said much later. “He was the guy
I was going to follow because he was my horse. I was going to ride that horse into
the White House. That was going to be my next stop in life. I had done Wall Street,
and I was going to do the White House next.”

1984

On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t
be like
1984
.
…
BANK SECURITIES UNITS MAY UNDERWRITE BONDS
 … It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our
country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where
we were less than four short years ago?…
I had a job, I had a girl / I had something going mister in this world / I got laid
off down at the lumberyard / Our love went bad, times got hard
 …
TAMPA SEES GAINS FOR ITS HARD WORK
“But those kinds of things can’t do for us, long-term, what a Super Bowl can do. This
is a real opportunity for us to show people what a great place this is, that they
can come here and not expect to get taken advantage of.”
 …
MISS AMERICA IS ORDERED TO QUIT FOR POSING NUDE
 …
You’re judged by performance. Why drive a car that lives by a lesser code?
…
At Bank of New England, Vice President David E. Hersee, Jr., went apartment hunting
for the daughter of a California customer who was moving to Boston. Of course, apartment
hunting is reserved for the very best clients.
…
LINDA GRAY’S SECRET LOVE
Just Like “Dallas” Role—She Falls for Younger Man
 … In the four years before we took office, country after country fell under the Soviet
yoke. Since January 20, 1981, not one inch of soil has fallen to the Communists.…
U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
…
BEEPERS SAID TO LINK LEGIONS OF AREA’S WORKAHOLICS
Devices Now Perceived As Lifelines; No Longer a High-Tech Oddity
 …
The housing finance industry needs a national mortgage exchange that does for mortgages
and mortgage-backed securities trading “what the New York Stock Exchange does for
corporate stock trading,” Fannie Mae Chairman David O. Maxwell told
 …
NEW U.S. REPORT NAMES VIRUS THAT MAY CAUSE AIDS
 … There are times in everyone’s life when something constructive is born out of adversity.
There are times when things seem so bad that you’ve got to grab your fate by the shoulders
and shake it. I’m convinced it was that morning at the warehouse that pushed me to
take on the presidency of Chrysler.…
REAGAN WINS RE-ELECTION IN LANDSLIDE
Victory Shows Broad Appeal of President
 …
And I feel like I’m a rider on a downbound train.

TAMMY THOMAS

Tammy Thomas grew up on the east side of Youngstown, Ohio. Years after she left when
things got bad there and moved down to the south side, and after she left the south
side when things got bad there and moved up to the north side, in certain moods she
would drive her metal-gray 2002 Pontiac Sunfire over the expressway, which broke up
the city when it came through in the late sixties, and return to look around her old
neighborhood.

When Tammy was coming up in the sixties and seventies, the east side was still a mixed
area. Next door to her house on Charlotte Avenue there had been an Italian family.
Hungarians lived across the street, the blue house was Puerto Rican, and there were
a few black homeowners, too. The wide-open field at the corner of Charlotte and Bruce
had once been her elementary school. Down Bruce Street there had been a church that
was later hit by a storm and torn down. A few streets away on Shehy, where three wooden
crosses now rose from the earth and the sidewalk was spray-painted
BLOOD
and
FROM PHILLY TO YOUNGSTOWN NIGGA
, there had been a neighborhood store, next to the house where Tammy’s mother lived
before it was firebombed. A depression that cut through the grass of two lots had
been an alley lined with peach and apple trees. Back then, everyone raised flowers
and vegetables in their yard—around her house on Charlotte there had been rose of
Sharon, forsythia, tulips, hyacinth. As a girl she used to sit on her front porch
and look down the street and see the tops of the smokestacks, and if the wind blew
right she could smell the sulfur. The men on the east side had good jobs, most of
them in the mills. Families kept up their property and were proud to own three-story
houses with gable roofs and front porches and yards, all of them big compared to a
working-class home in the Northeast (the first time Tammy saw row houses in Philly
she thought, “Where are their yards, where are their driveways?”). Back then the mob
kept things in order, so there weren’t a whole lot of shenanigans going on.

Tammy had a friend, Sybil West, whom she called Miss Sybil because she was Tammy’s
mother’s age. Miss Sybil once wrote down in a little spiral memo book all the things
that she could remember from when she was coming up on the east side in the fifties
and sixties.

pool halls

confectionery w/music for teens

Isaly dairy

first mall

buses that hook up to live wires

Lincoln Park w/pool

knife sharpeners w/monkeys to entertain kids

farmers selling fruits
+
vegetables in neighborhood trucks

City at that time was so safe people slept w/doors unlocked. People very neighborly
+
much interaction occurred in schools as well as neighborhoods.

As Tammy drove over the crumbling asphalt of the streets, she was still amazed by
the gaps and silence where there had once been so much life. It was as if she still
expected to see the old families, and the east side had just disappeared. Where had
it all gone? The things that had made it a community—stores, schools, churches, playgrounds,
fruit trees—were gone, along with half the houses and two-thirds of the people, and
if you didn’t know the history, you wouldn’t know what was missing. The east side
had never been the best part of Youngstown, but it had the most black homeowners,
and to Tammy it had always been the greenest, the least dense, the most beautiful—you
could pick peaches around Lincoln Park—and now parts of it were almost returning to
nature, with deer wandering across overgrown lots where people came to dump their
garbage.

It made her damn mad to see how McGuffey Plaza was abandoned—a model shopping mall
that was built in the fifties by the Cafaro family, with a bowling alley, an A&P,
a bunch of other stores, and a huge parking lot in front—now just a concrete desert,
with nothing but one black hair-care shop left open. It frustrated her that everyone
had forgotten about the east side. Not sad, not sentimental, she was frustrated, because
she hadn’t given up and wouldn’t slip into the resignation that had settled over Youngstown,
because this city was where she had lived her whole life, and her past was still real
to her, and there was still something to be done.

It frustrated her to see the house on Charlotte, with the gable off to the right side
and the brick chimney in back, where she had lived for twenty years. The house had
been vacant since the mid-2000s, and the yellow paint on the clapboards was weathering
bare. It would have been easy to push open her old front door or climb in through
a hollow window and walk upstairs to the second-floor front bedroom that had been
hers when she was little, but she sat idling the Pontiac and stared through the windshield.
“Oh my God,” she muttered. She was afraid she would feel a little emotional if she
went in. She knew the wiring and woodwork had been stripped, and her granny had worked
so hard for that house.

Granny was Tammy’s great-grandmother, her mother’s father’s mother. It was Granny
who had raised Tammy from a girl. There was a lot Tammy didn’t know for certain about
Granny. She had two birth dates, one in 1904 (according to Social Security) and one
in 1900 (according to herself). Granny’s mother, Big Mama, might have been born near
Raleigh, North Carolina, and sold off by her family to a white man in Richmond, Virginia,
where Granny was born (unless she was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina), and
Granny very well could have been a mulatto—she was very fair, with long straight hair.
Granny’s name was Virginia Miller, but when she had a son he was given the last name
Thomas because by then Big Mama had married Henry Thomas, Granny’s stepfather, and
Papa Thomas and Big Mama raised the boy.

Tammy tried to research the family history at the Freedom Center in Cincinnati, but
a lot of it had vanished. Granny didn’t appear in the 1920 census, and in 1930 she
was listed as a “niece” in the Thomas household, age seventeen, with a son, age five—so
the census had her age wrong, and also her place in the family. The farther Tammy
went, the more mysteries she ran into. There were other names in the 1930 census,
great-aunts and great-uncles listed as Big Mama’s children who were not hers, which
was normal in black families. “You took care of the kids,” Tammy said later, “and
the kids would be raised alongside cousins and brothers and sisters. But it creates
a lot of confusion because you really don’t know whose is whose, and they didn’t talk
about it.” Granny never talked about these things, either, and now she was gone.

One thing Tammy knew almost for sure was that Granny had had to drop out of school
near Winston-Salem in the eighth grade and go to work in the tobacco fields. In the
twenties she left the South and came up to Ohio, where she found day work cleaning
houses, and later a job in the arc engraving department of the Youngstown
Vindicator
. During the Depression the rest of the Thomas household—Papa Thomas, Big Mama, various
great-aunts and great-uncles, and Granny’s son—followed her north and settled in Struthers,
across the Mahoning River on the southeastern edge of Youngstown, where there was
a coking plant with a smokestack that shot out blue flames. Some of Tammy’s relatives
got jobs in the steel mills, and the family owned several houses in Struthers. Papa
Thomas brought his farming skills north and cultivated the yards. They had plum trees,
an apple tree, a peach tree, a chestnut tree, and five cherry trees. Two of the neighbor
women made jelly and swapped it with Tammy’s great-aunt for plum wine. When Tammy
was a girl, she and Granny would visit their Struthers family on weekends. “To me
this was living in the country,” she said, “and as I grew older I realized our family
who lived up here kind of had it going on.”

Tammy’s line of the family did not have it going on. Her grandfather came back from
World War II with a heroin addiction. His wife became an alcoholic. In 1966, their
daughter Vickie, a pretty, fine-boned seventeen-year-old, gave birth to a girl and
named her Tammy. The father was a street-smart fifteen-year-old from the projects
named Gary Sharp, nicknamed Razor. He and Vickie had no use for each other. She dropped
out of high school, and soon after becoming a mother she started using. Vickie and
Tammy went to live with Granny, who was approaching seventy and working as a maid,
cleaning, cooking, and providing companionship for a rich widow on the north side
for around fifty dollars a week. The care of the baby fell to Granny.

They lived on Lane Avenue after the I-680 expressway came through Granny’s old apartment—Tammy,
Granny, Vickie, and Tammy’s grandfather and his wife and children, while whoever else
came in and out. When Granny was off at work, pretty much everyone in the household
was using. Vickie also smoked, and sometimes she fell asleep with a cigarette still
burning. As a little girl Tammy would try to stay awake until after her mother went
to sleep, then take the cigarette out of her hand. From the age of three she was taking
care of her mother.

She loved sleeping in her granny’s bed, but sometimes—less often—she would climb in
with her mother, and maybe because she never got enough of that when she was little,
she kept doing it as an adult, especially when she wasn’t feeling good and needed
comfort, just crawled into her mom’s bed, even at the hospital with the nurses telling
her to get out.

It was Granny who took Tammy to church on Sunday with the Thomas relatives in Struthers,
and shopping in Youngstown on Saturday. They would put on their gloves and hats, and
Tammy would wear her little lace tops and patent leather shoes, and they would ride
the bus downtown to West Federal Street, stop by the shoe store where Granny’s sister
Jesse worked, then have lunch at Woolworth’s, shop for household things at McCrory’s
Five and Dime and meat at Huges’s, look at clothes at Strouss’s without spending,
and buy a dress at Higbee’s. Granny kept her money at Home Savings and Loan, but she
didn’t have a checking account, so they would also go downtown to pay the bills, stopping
by the electric company, the gas company, the water company, the phone company.

At home in the kitchen Tammy would be under Granny’s feet watching her cook collard
greens fresh from the Thomas garden in Struthers. She loved being around older women
and doing them little favors and listening to them. She realized from early on that
they had wisdom to pass on to her. She wanted to grow up to be a nurse and take care
of people.

Granny performed day work in a lot of white homes in Youngstown, but the family she
was with longest was the Purnells, and by the end she was spending weeknights there.
Sometimes Tammy went with Granny to work and cleaned the glass doorknobs with something
Granny put on a rag, or squirted the clean laundry in a basket under Granny’s ironing
board. Once, when Vickie disappeared for a few days, Tammy stayed with Granny in the
Purnell house, in her quarters up on the third floor. She watched Mrs. Purnell feed
the squirrels out of her hand from the back porch, and Mrs. Purnell gave her a Mickey
Mouse phone, and later a bedroom set.