She and her husband never lingered in the parking lot at shift change. That is when the anger of a long day comes seeping out. Cars get kicked and faces slapped over parking spots or fender benders. The traffic is a serpent. Cars jockey for a spot in line to make the quarter-mile crawl along the plant’s one-lane exit road to the highway. Usually no one will let you in. A lot of the scuffling is between black and Mexican.
Black and Bleak
The meat was backing up on the conveyor and spilling onto the floor. The supervisor climbed down off the scaffolding and chewed out a group of black women. Something about skin being left on the meat. There was a new skinner on the job, and the cutting line was expected to take up his slack. The whole line groaned. First looks flew, then people began hurling slurs at one another in Spanish and English, words they could hardly hear over the factory’s roar. The black women started waving their knives at the Mexicans. The Mexicans waved theirs back. The blades got close. One Mexican spit at the blacks and was fired.
After watching the knife scene, Wade Baker went home and sagged in his recliner. CNN played. Good news on Wall Street, the television said. Wages remained stable. ”Since when is the fact that a man doesn’t get paid good news?” he asked the TV. The TV told him that money was everywhere — everywhere but here.
Still lean at 51, Mr. Baker has seen life improve since his youth in the Jim Crow South. You can say things. You can ride in a car with a white woman. You can stay in the motels, eat in the restaurants. The black man got off the white man’s field.
”Socially, things are much better,” Mr. Baker said wearily over the droning television. ”But we’re going backwards as black people economically. For every one of us doing better, there’s two of us doing worse.”
His town, Chad Bourne, is a dreary strip of peeling paint and warped porches and houses as run-down as rotting teeth. Young men drift from the cinder-block pool hall to the empty streets and back. In the center of town is a bank, a gas station, a chicken shack and a motel. As you drive out, the lights get dimmer and the homes older until eventually you’re in a flat void of tobacco fields.
Mr. Baker was standing on the main street with his grandson Monte watching the Christmas parade march by when a scruffy man approached. It was Mr. Baker’s cousin, and he smelled of kerosene and had dust in his hair as if he lived in a vacant building and warmed himself with a portable heater. He asked for $2.
”It’s ironic isn’t it?” Mr. Baker said as his cousin walked away only eight bits richer. ”He was asking me the same thing 10 years ago.”
A group of Mexicans stood across the street hanging around the gas station watching them.
”People around here always want to blame the system,” he said. ”And it is true that the system is antiblack and antipoor. It’s true that things are run by the whites. But being angry only means you failed in life. Instead of complaining, you got to work twice as hard and make do.”
He stood quietly with his hands in his pockets watching the parade go by. He watched the Mexicans across the street, laughing in their new clothes. Then he said, almost as an afterthought, ”There’s a day coming soon where the Mexicans are going to catch hell from the blacks, the way the blacks caught it from the whites.”
Wade Baker used to work in the post office, until he lost his job over drugs. When he came out of his haze a few years ago, there wasn’t much else for him but the plant. He took the job, he said, ”because I don’t have a 401K.” He took it because he had learned from his mother that you don’t stand around with your head down and your hand out waiting for another man to drop you a dime.
Evelyn Baker, bent and gray now, grew up a sharecropper, the granddaughter of slaves. She was raised up in a tar-paper shack, picked cotton and hoed tobacco for a white family. She supported her three boys alone by cleaning white people’s homes.
In the late 60’s something good started happening. There was a labor shortage, just as there is now. The managers at the textile plants started giving machine jobs to black people.
Mrs. Baker was 40 then. ”I started at a dollar and 60 cents an hour, and honey, that was a lot of money then,” she said.
The work was plentiful through the 70’s and 80’s, and she was able to save money and add on to her home. By the early 90’s the textile factories started moving away, to Mexico. Robeson County has lost about a quarter of its jobs since that time.
Unemployment in Robeson hovers around 8 percent, twice the national average. In neighboring Columbus County it is 10.8 percent. In Bladen County it is 5 percent, and Bladen has the pork factory.
Still, Mr. Baker believes that people who want to work can find work. As far as he’s concerned, there are too many shiftless young men who ought to be working, even if it’s in the pork plant. His son-in-law once worked there, quit and now hangs around the gas station where other young men sell dope.
The son-in-law came over one day last fall and threatened to cause trouble if the Bakers didn’t let him borrow the car. This could have turned messy; the 71-year-old Mrs. Baker keeps a .38 tucked in her bosom.
When Wade Baker got home from the plant and heard from his mother what had happened, he took up his pistol and went down to the corner, looking for his son-in-law. He chased a couple of the young men around the dark dusty lot, waving the gun. ”Hold still so I can shoot one of you!” he recalled having bellowed. ”That would make the world a better place!”
He scattered the men without firing. Later, sitting in his car with his pistol on the seat and his hands between his knees, he said, staring into the night: ”There’s got to be more than this. White people drive by and look at this and laugh.”
Living It, Hating It
Billy Harwood had been working at the plant 10 days when he was released from the Robeson County Correctional Facility. He stood at the prison gates in his work clothes with his belongings in a plastic bag, waiting. A friend dropped him at the Salvation Army shelter, but he decided it was too much like prison. Full of black people. No leaving after 10 p.m. No smoking indoors. ”What you doing here, white boy?” they asked him.
He fumbled with a cigarette outside the shelter. He wanted to quit the plant. The work stinks, he said, ”but at least I ain’t a nigger. I’ll find other work soon. I’m a white man.” He had hopes of landing a roofing job through a friend. The way he saw it, white society looks out for itself.
On the cut line he worked slowly and allowed Mercedes Fernandez and the others to pick up his slack. He would cut only the left shoulders; it was easier on his hands. Sometimes it would be three minutes before a left shoulder came down the line. When he did cut, he didn’t clean the bone; he left chunks of meat on it.
Mrs. Fernandez was disappointed by her first experience with a white person. After a week she tried to avoid standing by Billy Harwood. She decided it wasn’t just the blacks who were lazy, she said.
Even so, the supervisor came by one morning, took a look at one of Mr. Harwood’s badly cut shoulders and threw it at Mrs. Fernandez, blaming her. He said obscene things about her family. She didn’t understand exactly what he said, but it scared her. She couldn’t wipe the tears from her eyes because her gloves were covered with greasy shreds of swine. The other cutters kept their heads down, embarrassed.
Her life was falling apart. She and her husband both worked the cut floor. They never saw their daughter. They were 26 but rarely made love anymore. All they wanted was to save enough money to put plumbing in their house in Mexico and start a business there. They come from the town of Tehuacan, in a rural area about 150 miles southeast of Mexico City. His mother owns a bar there and a home but gives nothing to them. Mother must look out for her old age.
”We came here to work so we have a chance to grow old in Mexico,” Mrs. Fernandez said one evening while cooking pork and potatoes. Now they were into a smuggler for thousands. Her hands swelled into claws in the evenings and stung while she worked. She felt trapped. But she kept at it for the money, for the $9.60 an hour. The smuggler still had to be paid.
They explained their story this way: The coyote drove her and her family from Barstow a year ago and left them in Robeson. They knew no one. They did not even know they were in the state of North Carolina. They found shelter in a trailer park that had once been exclusively black but was rapidly filling with Mexicans. There was a lot of drug dealing there and a lot of tension. One evening, Mr. Fernandez said, he asked a black neighbor to move his business inside and the man pulled a pistol on him.
”I hate the blacks,” Mr. Fernandez said in Spanish, sitting in the break room not 10 feet from Mr. Baker and his black friends. Mr. Harwood was sitting two tables away with the whites and Indians.
After the gun incident, Mr. Fernandez packed up his family and moved out into the country, to a prefabricated number sitting on a brick foundation off in the woods alone. Their only contact with people is through the satellite dish. Except for the coyote. The coyote knows where they live and comes for his money every other month.
Their 5-year-old daughter has no playmates in the back country and few at school. That is the way her parents want it. ”We don’t want her to be American,” her mother said.
‘We Need a Union’
The steel bars holding a row of hogs gave way as a woman stood below them. Hog after hog fell around her with a sickening thud, knocking her senseless, the connecting bars barely missing her face. As co-workers rushed to help the woman, the supervisor spun his hands in the air, a signal to keep working. Wade Baker saw this and shook his head in disgust. Nothing stops the disassembly lines.
”We need a union,” he said later in the break room. It was payday and he stared at his check: $288. He spoke softly to the black workers sitting near him. Everyone is convinced that talk of a union will get you fired. After two years at the factory, Mr. Baker makes slightly more than $9 an hour toting meat away from the cut line, slightly less than $20,000 a year, 45 cents an hour less than Mrs. Fernandez.
”I don’t want to get racial about the Mexicans,” he whispered to the black workers. ”But they’re dragging down the pay. It’s pure economics. They say Americans don’t want to do the job. That ain’t exactly true. We don’t want to do it for $8. Pay $15 and we’ll do it.”
These men knew that in the late 70’s, when the meatpacking industry was centered in northern cities like Chicago and Omaha, people had a union getting them $18 an hour. But by the mid-80’s, to cut costs, many of the packing houses had moved to small towns where they could pay a lower, nonunion wage.
The black men sitting around the table also felt sure that the Mexicans pay almost nothing in income tax, claiming 8, 9, even 10 exemptions. The men believed that the illegal workers should be rooted out of the factory. ”It’s all about money,” Mr. Baker said.
His co-workers shook their heads. ”A plantation with a roof on it,” one said.
For their part, many of the Mexicans in Tar Heel fear that a union would place their illegal status under scrutiny and force them out. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union last tried organizing the plant in 1997, but the idea was voted down nearly two to one.
One reason Americans refused to vote for the union was because it refuses to take a stand on illegal laborers. Another reason was the intimidation. When workers arrived at the plant the morning of the vote, they were met by Bladen County deputy sheriffs in riot gear. ”Nigger Lover” had been scrawled on the union trailer.
Five years ago the work force at the plant was 50 percent black, 20 percent white and Indian, and 30 percent Latino, according to union statistics. Company officials say those numbers are about the same today. But from inside the plant, the breakdown appears to be more like 60 percent Latino, 30 percent black, 10 percent white and red.
Sherri Buffkin, a white woman and the former director of purchasing who testified before the National Labor Relations Board in an unfair-labor-practice suit brought by the union in 1998, said in an interview that the company assigns workers by race. She also said that management had kept lists of union sympathizers during the ’97 election, firing blacks and replacing them with Latinos. ”I know because I fired at least 15 of them myself,” she said.
The company denies those accusations. Michael H. Cole, a lawyer for Smithfield who would respond to questions about the company’s labor practices only in writing, said that jobs at the Tar Heel plant were awarded through a bidding process and not assigned by race. The company also denies ever having kept lists of union sympathizers or singled out blacks to be fired.
The hog business is important to North Carolina. It is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry in the state, with nearly two pigs for every one of its 7.5 million people. And Smithfield Foods, a publicly traded company based in Smithfield, Va., has become the No. 1 producer and processor of pork in the world. It slaughters more than 20 percent of the nation’s swine, more than 19 million animals a year.
The company, which has acquired a network of factory farms and slaughterhouses, worries federal agriculture officials and legislators, who see it siphoning business from smaller farmers. And environmentalists contend that Smithfield’s operations contaminate local water supplies. (The Environmental Protection Agency fined the company $12.6 million in 1996 after its processing plants in Virginia discharged pollutants into the Pagan River.) The chairman and chief executive, Joseph W. Luter III, declined to be interviewed.
Smithfield’s employment practices have not been so closely scrutinized. And so every year, more Mexicans get hired. ”An illegal alien isn’t going to complain all that much,” said Ed Tomlinson, acting supervisor of the Immigration and Naturalization Service bureau in Charlotte.
But the company says it does not knowingly hire illegal aliens. Smithfield’s lawyer, Mr. Cole, said all new employees must present papers showing that they can legally work in the United States. ”If any employee’s documentation appears to be genuine and to belong to the person presenting it,” he said in his written response, ”Smithfield is required by law to take it at face value.”
The naturalization service — which has only 18 agents in North Carolina — has not investigated Smithfield because no one has filed a complaint, Mr. Tomlinson said. ”There are more jobs than people,” he said, ”and a lot of Americans will do the dirty work for a while and then return to their couches and eat bonbons and watch Oprah.”
Not Fit for a Convict
When Billy Harwood was in solitary confinement, he liked a book to get him through. A guard would come around with a cartful. But when the prisoner asked for a new book, the guard, before handing it to him, liked to tear out the last 50 pages. The guard was a real funny guy.
”I got good at making up my own endings,” Billy Harwood said during a break. ”And my book don’t end standing here. I ought to be on that roof any day now.”
But a few days later, he found out that the white contractor he was counting on already had a full roofing crew. They were Mexicans who were working for less than he was making at the plant.
During his third week cutting hogs, he got a new supervisor — a black woman. Right away she didn’t like his work ethic. He went too slow. He cut out to the bathroom too much.
”Got a bladder infection?” she asked, standing in his spot when he returned. She forbade him to use the toilet.
He boiled. Mercedes Fernandez kept her head down. She was certain of it, she said: he was the laziest man she had ever met. She stood next to a black man now, a prisoner from the north. They called him K. T. and he was nice to her. He tried Spanish, and he worked hard.
When the paychecks were brought around at lunch time on Friday, Billy Harwood got paid for five hours less than everyone else, even though everyone punched out on the same clock. The supervisor had docked him.
The prisoners mocked him. ”You might be white,” K. T. said, ”but you came in wearing prison greens and that makes you good as a nigger.”
The ending wasn’t turning out the way Billy Harwood had written it: no place to live and a job not fit for a donkey. He quit and took the Greyhound back to his parents’ trailer in the hills.
When Mrs. Fernandez came to work the next day, a Mexican guy going by the name of Alfredo was standing in Billy Harwood’s spot.
About the Series
Two generations after the end of legal discrimination, race still ignites political debates. But the wider public discussion of race relations seems muted. Race relations are being defined less by political action than by daily experience, in schools, in sports arenas, in pop culture and at worship, and especially in the workplace. These encounters — race relations in the most literal, everyday sense — make up this series of reports, the outcome of a yearlong examination by Times reporters.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )