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97 The empire of scrounge is littered with the residues of change. A homeowner’s decision to remodel a kitchen pushes appliances and plumbing Wxtures to the curb; a developer’s retroWtting of an old building Wlls a big rollaway with copper wire and aged lumber. As a couple falls apart, the man’s suits and shoes end up in a curbside trash pile—and, more than once, Wnd a subsequent home in my closet. Moving out of an apartment, belongings that don’t make it into the pickup truck or the moving van wind up in the apartment-house Dumpster, or stacked next to it. And of course, among a certain class of people, the unveiling of this year’s fashions forces last year’s out of the closet and into a garbage bag bound for the charity shop, or for the curb. In this sense, the lost and discarded objects that make up the empire of scrounge exist as moments in an ongoing process; their solid materiality is matched, or maybe undermined, by the emphemerality of their status. In fact, this sense of a material world in transition Wrst struck me not during my months in the empire, but many Salvage Operations c e ce c e c e c e 4 years ago, shopping and studying charity shops and secondhand thrift stores. Trying to understand how it was that a $25 sweater in a high-end resale shop could be had for twenty-Wve cents at the Goodwill Store across town, how it was that last year’s $40 pair of jeans could sell six months later in the thrift store for $1.40, I began to realize something: price tags aside, these sweaters and jeans carried no inherent value. Their value was a shifting process, as much a matter of their context as their content—and even more interesting, the process didn’t move in a straight line. The object that was originally of great monetary and emotional worth might later be discarded or given away as “worthless,” only to reappear in a charity store with a small fraction of its worth restored—and, discovered there, might well Wnd all its lost grandeur restored, and more, if now reimagined by someone as a “collectible” or “antique.” Sweaters, tea sets, toasters—they seem solid enough, but their meaning remains malleable.1 As does the legal status of those selling them, by the way. During my time as an urban scrounger, a little Methodist church in my neighborhood started a “mission” in a small portable building next to the church. Operated by Enid Randolph and Nadine Nichols, two elderly churchwomen, the mission—“Jenna’s Hope of Grace: A Mission Shop”—opened for four hours each Friday and Saturday to sell donated, secondhand clothes and toys to neighborhood residents whom one sympathetic observer described as “90 percent . . . Mexican immigrants . . . [who] live in overcrowded housing [and] work as servants for minimum wage.”2 Stumbling upon the mission while “out looking for illegal yard signs,” a City of Fort Worth code enforcement oYcer, though, saw the little building not as a mission but as an “illegal secondhand retail store,” and had it closed. As a result, “Enid and I [don’t] know what to do with ourselves on Fridays anymore,” said Nadine Nichols. “It’s a shame. We gave the people little pamphlets and invited them to our Easter egg hunt or to the Spanish worship [service]. We got to know so many nice people. It was good for the community.”3 But that was only the Wrst legal shift for Enid, Nadine, and their secondhand items. A month later, with the help of the neighborhood’s city councilperson, the city and the church had reached an agreement. The church would remove the word “shop” from the little sign out front; Enid and Nadine and the other volunteers would remove the price tags from the clothes and toys, and instead rely on a sign reading “We Accept Contributions”; and the mission would reopen. And so the status of all those clothes and toys changed once again. Clothes and toys that had started their careers as new acquisitions, that had morphed into donations and discards, then into secondhand sale items, and then into evidence of illegality, now changed back into legally charitable oVerings. And yet this latest transmogriWcation was not without its own ambiguities. As one church 98 Salvage Operations [3.139.72.78] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 07:50 GMT...

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