Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press

POSTSCRIPT: My Hometown: From Tobacco and Textiles to an Iglesia on Main Street

MY HOMETOWN From Tobacco and Textiles to an Iglesia on Main Street It is the first anniversary of my father’s death, and I’ve come home with my brother, sister, and mother to put flowers on his grave. We spend much of the rest of the day and evening on a nostalgia tour through the gritty, blue-collar town I grew up in. It seems that every other building or house in Sanford, North Carolina , is a landmark in our personal history—the boarded-up elementary school across from the textile mill where my father worked, the Pentecostal Holiness church where my grandfather once preached, the dairy bar where we teenagers hung out every Friday night, the movie theater where I saw Go Johnny Go! and Thunder Road and where blacks had to watch from the balcony, the parking lot that used to be the pool hall where we pretended to be Minnesota Fats and Fast Eddie. “There’s the house where D. O.’s wife hung herself,” I remind my brother. Every Southern town has its gothic tales. My father’s fishing buddy found his wife in the living room after coming home from a hard day at the mill. I grew up in a town of about 15,000 or so, and nearly every family I knew was tied to either tobacco or textiles. It was a “dry” (no bars, no cold beer) town, the seat of (Robert E.) Lee County, in the dead center of North Carolina. It had a political boss, Mayor E. L. “Fish” Fields, an oldline segregationist who nevertheless later helped corner the black vote by giving away sacks of fish from his ice store. I remember my teenaged self buying illegal beer from hizzoner at that ice store. The town had a saltytalking , tough-as-nails, moneybags, skinflint newspaper publisher, too. I worked for him, covering local business as well as a half dozen other beats. “No union stories,” he told me soon after I was hired. I don’t recall ever writing one, don’t even recall if a union existed in the area, so I guess I made him happy. Postscript 222 223 Postscript: My Hometown The more I see the more I realize that Thomas Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again. If you try, you could find yourself more lost than Ralph Stanley’s rank stranger. Southerners wrestle with this. The Sanford we are seeing from our rented car is like the setting for a “film noir,” or maybe a Barry Hannah story—a town of fine, Victorian homes gone to seed, motorcycle gangs parked on the front lawns, eyeing passing motorists, a town that’s “wet” now but with little lonely bars where everyone stops and watches when a stranger walks in. Most noticeable are the Latinos. Official statistics say they’re 19 percent of the population, but they’re everywhere. I see them tending the giant vegetable garden across the street from my old high school, working at construction sites, operating the corner store where I used to buy candy and ice cream. There’s an iglesia on main street, and a Mexican restaurant practically every block or two. Sanford made national headlines back in 1997 when immigration agents broke up a ring that had smuggled in deaf and mute adults and children from Mexico to peddle trinkets on the streets. Just forty miles to the north is the high-tech, Ph.D.-laden Research Triangle, a yuppie heaven where Southern accents are getting harder and harder to find. Sanford is way off the edge of that North Carolina. No shiny, high-rise think-tanks here, no Milton Friedman–spouting intellectuals or technocrats who worry about stock values. But don’t kid yourself. This is part of a “New South” of sorts, a New South that’s beyond the horizons of Wall Street investors or sun-seeking snowbirds, a New South where the grandchildren of sharecroppers and tenant farmers are trying to adjust to new, dark-skinned neighbors from an even deeper South, where the old values of hard-gained goods square off against the high-rolling lure of lotteries and casinos, where the temptation to slip into an old, familiar malaise is ever-present and still to be resisted, that dark piece of the Old South that’s still there and may never go away. This page intentionally left blank ...