This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Where Will The Next Big Folk Wave Come From- The Music Of Kate Campbell
A "YouTube" film clip of Kate Campbell performing "Jesus and Tomatoes." Hey, don't shoot the messenger.
CD Review
Visions of Plenty, Kate Campbell, Compass Records, 1998
I have used the first paragraph of this CD review in other reviews of contemporary folk musicians and it fits here as well:
“Frankly, I do not spend much time reviewing some of the more contemporary folk artists on that scene today, although I am vitally interested in where that music is going, and who will keep the folk flame burning. Part of the reason for my neglect is, to paraphrase a somewhat famous folkie from the 1960s folk revival; it is “hard to get worked up about lyrics complaining that the family Volvo is not available or the foibles of a trip to the Swiss Alps.” No question that much of the current scene when not just plain jailing lyrics into some “politically correct” form in order to offend no one or nothing tends to those trivialities.”
That said, I still, in the nature of things get information, or get told information that leads me to listen to some more current performers who may have broken out of that box described above. That is the case with the artist under review, Kate Campbell. This one is kind of a long story but it entails someone I know going to a folk music summer camp (for adults, if you can believe that) where Ms. Campbell was running a songwriting workshop. This friend came away a devotee not only of Ms. Campbell's music but of the her lyrical skills. So, naturally, I had to give a listen. Although I can’t say I am a devotee I can see where Ms. Campbell’s lyrics come from the depths of her Southern soul and reflect a very different way of coming to terms with the Southern experience of the past half century or so.
To get an idea of what I mean listen to the title track, “Visions Of Plenty” (with great vocals), “Perfect World”, and “Bus 109”. For a zany side (the side that reflects what I meant in the first paragraph) listen to “Jesus and Tomatoes”. I rest my case.
Kate Campbell Visions Of Plenty written by Kate Campbell Tricia Walker
Kate Campbell vocals/acoustic guitar Emmylou Harris harmony vocal Johnny Pierce acoustic guitar/vocals Don Johnson bass Bo Ramsey guitar Howard Laravea keyboards Wayne Killius drums Dave Hoffner keyboards Kristen Wilkinson viola
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~ac490/kate.html
A I live south of Memphis in downtown Hollywood
And these fields are all I've ever known
Season after season I have worked to find a way
To buy a piece of land to call my own D A Sometimes when that Delta sun comes beating down E A Well I swear those rows of cotton shine like gold D Visions of plenty A Roll across my mind E Still my hands are empty A And the system's going dry D I keep thinking bout my children A What's left down here for them E Just a cotton field of dreams D E And everybody's dreaming everybody's dreaming A Dreaming just like me A A sign went up for Harrah's on highway 61
Promising we'd all be winners soon
So every Friday evening I go and spin the wheel
Sometimes I win most times I lose D A These lights are so much brighter than I thought they'd be E And they make me think A I'll see my dreams come true D Visions of plenty A Roll across my mind E Still my hands are empty A And the system's going dry D I keep thinking bout my children A What's left down here for them E Just a cotton field of dreams D E And everybody's dreaming everybody's dreaming A Dreaming just like me D I keep thinking bout my children A What's left down here for them E Just a cotton field of dreams D E And everybody's dreaming everybody's dreaming A Dreaming just like me
From Kate Campbell "Visions Of Plenty" Compass Records 1998
Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check
By Bart Webber
I had been, strangely enough, in La Jolla out in California attending yet another writers’ conference which seems to be the makings of my days these days when I heard Tom Wolfe (not Thomas Wolfe of Look Homeward, Angels, etc.) the writer of tons of interesting stuff from acid trips in the 1960s to space flights in the 1970 to Wall Street in the reckless 1980 and back had cashed his check. The strange part of the “strangely enough” was that on Monday May 14th 2018, the day he died, I was walking along La Jolla Cove and commenting to my companion that Tom Wolfe had made the La Jolla surfing scene in the early 1960s come alive with his tale of the Pump House Gang and related stories without knowing he had passed.
I don’t know how he did at the end as a writer, or toward the end although I note he did an interesting take on the cultural life at the Army base at Fort Bragg down in North Carolina but pound for pound in his prime he could write the sociology of the land with simple flair and kept this guy flipping the pages in the wee hours of the morning. RIP, Tom Wolfe, RIP.
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the classic Marlon Brando film, The Wild One.
DVD Review
The Wild One, Marlon Brando, Lee Marvin, produced by Stanley Kramer,1954
Okay here is the book of genesis, the motorcycle book of genesis, or at least my motorcycle book of genesis. But, before I get to that let me make about seventy–six disclaimers. First, the whys and wherefores of the motorcycle culture, except on those occasions when they become subject to governmental investigation or impact some cultural phenomena, is outside the purview of the leftist politics that dominate the commentary in this space. There is no Marxoid political line, as a rule, on such activity, nor should there be. Those exceptions include when motorcyclists, usually under the rubric of “bad actor” motorcycle clubs, like the famous (or infamous) Oakland, California-based Hell’s Angels are generally harassed by the cops and we have to defend their right to be left alone (you know, those "helmet laws", and the never-failing pull-over for "driving while biker") or, like when the Angels were used by the Rolling Stones at Altamont and that ill-advised decision represented a watershed in the 1960s counter-cultural movement. Or, more ominously, from another angle when such lumpen formations form the core hell-raisers of anti-immigrant, anti-communist, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-black liberation fascistic demonstrations and we are compelled, and rightly so, to go toe to toe with them. Scary yes, necessary yes, bikes or no bikes.
Second, in the interest of full disclosure I own no stock, or have any other interest, in Harley-Davidson, or any other motorcycle company. Third, I do not now, or have I ever belonged to a motorcycle club or owned a motorcycle, although I have driven them, or, more often, on back of them on occasion. Fourth, I do not now, knowingly or unknowingly, although I grew up in working class neighborhoods where bikes and bikers were plentiful, hang with such types. Fifth, the damn things and their riders are too noisy, despite the glamour and “freedom” of the road associated with them. Sixth, and here is the “kicker”, I have been, endlessly, fascinated by bikes and bike culture as least since early high school, if not before, and had several friends who “rode”. Well that is not seventy-six but that is enough for disclaimers.
Okay, as to genesis, motorcycle genesis. Let’s connect the dots. A couple of years ago, and maybe more, as part of a trip down memory lane, the details of which do not need detain us here, I did a series of articles on various world-shaking, earth-shattering subjects like high school romances, high school hi-jinks, high school dances, high school Saturday nights, and most importantly of all, high school how to impress the girls( or boys, for girls, or whatever sexual combinations fit these days, but you can speak for yourselves, I am standing on this ground). In short, high school sub-culture, American-style, early 1960s branch, although the emphasis there, as it will be here, is on that social phenomena as filtered through the lenses of a working class town, a seen better days town at that, my growing up wild-like-the-weeds town.
One of the subjects worked over in that series was the search, the eternal search I might add, for the great working class love song. Not the Teen Angel, Earth Angel, Johnny Angel generic mush that could play in Levittown, Shaker Heights or La Jolla as well as Youngstown or Moline. No, a song that, without blushing, one could call our own, our working class own, one that the middle and upper classes might like but would not put on their dance cards. As my offering to this high-brow debate I offered a song by written by Englishman Richard Thompson (who folkies, and folk rockers, might know from his Fairport Convention days, very good days, by the way), Vincent Black Lightning, 1952. (See lyrics below.) Without belaboring the point the gist of this song is the biker romance, British version, between outlaw biker James and black-leathered, red-headed Molly. Needless to say such a tenuous lumpen existence as James leads to keep himself “biked" cuts short any long term “little white house with picket fence” ending for the pair. And we do not need such a boring finish. For James, after losing the inevitable running battle with the police, on his death bed bequeaths his bike, his precious “Vincent Black Lightning”, to said Molly. His bike, man. His bike. Is there any greater love story, working class love story, around? No, this makes West Side Story lyrics and a whole bunch of other such songs seem like so much cornball nonsense. His bike, man. Wow! Kudos, Brother Thompson.
Needless to say that exploration was not the end, but rather the beginning of thinking through the great American night bike experience. And, of course, for this writer that means going to the books, the films and the memory bank to find every seemingly relevant “biker” experience. Thus, readers of this space were treated to reviews of such classic motorcycle sagas as “gonzo” journalist, Doctor Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels and other, later Rolling Stone magazine printed “biker” stories and Tom Wolfe’ Hell Angel’s-sketched Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and other articles about California subset youth culture that drove Wolfe’s work in the old days). And to the hellish Rolling Stones (band) Hell’s Angels “policed” Altamont concert in 1969. And, as fate would have it, with the passing of actor/director Dennis Hooper, the 1960s classic biker/freedom/ seeking the great American night film, Easy Rider. And from Easy Rider to the “max daddy” of them all, tight-jeaned, thick leather-belted, tee-shirted, engineer-booted, leather-jacketed, taxi-driver-capped (hey, that’s what it reminds me of), side-burned, chain-linked wielding, hard-living, alienated, but in the end really just misunderstood, Johnny, aka, Marlon Brando, in The Wild One.
Okay, we will cut to the chase on the plot. Old Johnny and his fellow “outlaw” motorcycle club members are out for some weekend “kicks” after a hard week’s non-work (as far as we can figure out, work was marginal for many reasons, as Hunter Thompson in Hell’s Angels noted, to biker existence, the pursue of jack-rolling, armed robbery or grand theft auto careers probably running a little ahead) out in the sunny California small town hinterlands.(They are still heading out there today, the last time I noticed, in the Southern California high desert, places like Twenty-Nine Palms and Joshua Tree.)
And naturally, when the boys (and they are all boys here, except for couple of “mamas”, one spurned by Johnny, in a break-away club led by jack-in-the-box jokester, Lee Marvin as Chino) hit one small town they, naturally, after sizing up the local law, head for the local café (and bar). And once one mentions cafes in small towns in California (or Larry McMurtry’s West Texas, for that matter), then hard-working, trying to make it through the shift, got to get out of this small town and see the world, dreamy-eyed, naïve (yes, naive) sheriff-daughtered young waitress, Kathy, (yes, and hard-working, its tough dealing them off the arm in these kind of joints, or elsewhere) Johnny trap comes into play. Okay, now you know, even alienated, misunderstood, misanthropic, cop-hating (an additional obstacle given said waitress’s kinships) boy Johnny needs, needs cinematically at least, to meet a girl who understands him.
The development of that young hope, although hopeless, boy meets girl romance relationship, hither and yon, drives the plot. Natch. Oh, and along the way the boys, after a few thousand beers, as boys, especially girl-starved biker boys, will, at the drop of a hat start to systematically tear down the town, off-handedly, for fun. Needless to say, staid local burghers (aka “squares”) seeing what amount to them is their worst 1950s “communist” invasion nightmare, complete with murder, mayhem and rapine, (although that “C” word was not used in the film, nor should it have been) are determined to “take back” their little town. A few fights, forages, casualities, fatalities, and forgivenesses later though, still smitten but unquenched and chaste Johnny (and his rowdy crowd) and said waitress part, wistfully. The lesson here, for the kids in the theater audience, is that biker love outside bikerdom is doomed. For the adults, the real audience, the lesson: nip the “terrorists” in the bud (call in the state cops, the national guard, the militia, the 82nd Airborne, The Strategic Air Command, NATO, hell, even the weren't we buddies in the war Red Army , but nip it, fast when they come roaming through Amityville, Archer City, or your small town).
After that summary you can see what we are up against. This is pure fantasy Hollywood cautionary tale on a very real 1950s phenomena, “outlaw” biker clubs, mainly in California, but elsewhere as well. Hunter Thompson did yeoman’s work in his Hell’s Angels to “discover” who these guys were and what drove them, beyond drugs, sex, rock and roll (and, ya, murder and mayhem, the California prison system was a “home away from home”). In a sense the “bikers” were the obverse of the boys (again, mainly) whom Tom Wolfe, in many of his early essays, was writing about and who were (a) forming the core of the surfers on the beaches from Malibu to La Jolla and, (b) driving the custom car/hot rod/drive-in centered (later mall-centered) cool, teenage girl–impressing, car craze night in the immediate post-World War II great American Western sunny skies and pleasant dream drift (physically and culturally). Except those Wolfe guys were the “winners”. The “bikers” were Nelson Algren’s “losers”, the dead-enders who didn’t hit the gold rush, the Dove Linkhorns (aka the Arkies and Okies who in the 1930s populated John Steinbeck’s Joad saga, The Grapes Of Wrath). Not cool, iconic Marlin-Johnny but hellbend then-Hell Angels leader, Sonny Barger.
And that is why in the end, as beautifully sullen and misunderstood the alienated Johnny was, and as wholesomely rowdy as his gang was before demon rum took over, this was not the real “biker: scene, West or East. Now I lived, as a teenager in a working class, really marginally working poor, neighborhood that I have previously mentioned was the leavings of those who were moving up in post-war society. That neighborhood was no more than a mile from the central headquarters of Boston's local Hell’s Angels (although they were not called that, I think it was Deathheads, or something like that). I got to see these guys up close as they rallied at various spots on our local beach or “ran” through our neighborhood on their way to some crazed action. The leader had all of the charisma of Marlon Brando’s thick leather belt. His face, as did most of the faces, spoke of small-minded cruelties (and old prison pallors) not of misunderstood youth. And their collective prison records (as Hunter Thompson also noted about the Angels) spoke of “high” lumpenism. And that takes us back to the beginning about who, and what, forms one of the core cohorts for a fascist movement in this country, the sons of Sonny Barger. Then we will need to rely on our Marxist politics, and other such weapons.
*************
ARTIST: Richard Thompson
TITLE: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
Lyrics and Chords
Said Red Molly to James that's a fine motorbike A girl could feel special on any such like Said James to Red Molly, well my hat's off to you It's a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952 And I've seen you at the corners and cafes it seems Red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme And he pulled her on behind And down to Box Hill they did ride
/ A - - - D - / - - - - A - / : / E - D A / / E - D A - / Bm - D - / - - - - A - - - /
Said James to Red Molly, here's a ring for your right hand But I'll tell you in earnest I'm a dangerous man I've fought with the law since I was seventeen I robbed many a man to get my Vincent machine Now I'm 21 years, I might make 22 And I don't mind dying, but for the love of you And if fate should break my stride Then I'll give you my Vincent to ride
Come down, come down, Red Molly, called Sergeant McRae For they've taken young James Adie for armed robbery Shotgun blast hit his chest, left nothing inside Oh, come down, Red Molly to his dying bedside When she came to the hospital, there wasn't much left He was running out of road, he was running out of breath But he smiled to see her cry And said I'll give you my Vincent to ride
Says James, in my opinion, there's nothing in this world Beats a 52 Vincent and a red headed girl Now Nortons and Indians and Greeveses won't do They don't have a soul like a Vincent 52 He reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys He said I've got no further use for these I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome Swooping down from heaven to carry me home And he gave her one last kiss and died And he gave her his Vincent to ride
The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of
’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-A
Good Old Boy Tries To Keep It Together- With Prescott Breslin Wherever He Is
In Mind
A YouTube film
clip of Hank Williams performing minute back in the You Win Again to set
the mood for this piece.
Introduction by Allan
Jackson
[We never fucking,
excuse my English but I am suddenly hot under the collar thinking about it now
after having damned it up for a while, not fifty years like a lot of things
mentioned in this series, talked about what the hell our parents did, or did
not, do to us in the privacy of our family life. Sure some of it was the old
time religion, acting like a religious tenet anyway, of not airing one’s dirty
linen in public a staple of Irish Catholic tradition a couple of generations
back (and still around, still around damn it from what some of the younger
crowd has conveyed to me. But mainly it was about not talking about what hurt
us so deeply that we could not utter anything even to close brothers until
death corner boys. The late Peter Paul Markin who was more screwed in his
family life, his living hell family life, mainly through his mother, his father
too beaten down to raise his voice except under extremity set the parameters.
And if a guy like the Scribe was closed-mouthed about his family affairs none of
us lesser mortals were going to weep in public about our plights. Scribe’s
“solution” was to be the running kind like in the Merle Haggard song, and sneak
out the back door, or front if he could, in the middle of the night and take
the all-night subway to Harvard Square and hang around Hayes-Bickford, or some such
place where kindred spirits dwelled. Surprising that got him through a lot of
things when he and that mother were in almost daily combat about what a bad son
he was. Most of the stuff about Scribe’s home life came out later in dribs and
drabs after he had passed away way too young by guys like Seth Garth and Sam
Lowell. But I wonder how much what happened to Scribe beside Vietnam was
hell-bent on that family blood tribute altar.
Over the last several
years a bunch of us have gotten together either through our work here or
joining each other someplace and talk about the old days which is really what
this rock and roll series is about as filtered through North Adamsville’s Acre
neighborhood. What we seldom talk about although it probably weighs on each of
us is that private family part of our young existences. And that after all we
went through in Summer of Love new consciousness, radical politics, social
wisdom accumulated through age and the like. What would be good to know though,
and Josh Breslin’s remembrances of his father here is part of that knowledge,
is how extensive this closed family circle was. By Josh’s lights it extended to
the working class neighborhood of Olde Saco up in Maine. I wonder where else.
Allan Jackson ]
***********
Josh Breslin had been since he retired
a couple of years ago as a journalist writing for half the alternative and
special interest newspapers and journals in the country, make that half the unread,
mostly, newspapers and journals in those categories sitting on some glassy
coffee table showing that the residents therein had been a part of that vaunted
minute in the 1960s when they had collectively tried to turn the world upside
down, in something of a reflective mood. Not every day, certainly not on golf
days with his golfing associates over at Dunegrass, when reflection over some
missed chip or putt on the previous hole spelled the kiss of death for the
round. Much better to keep an empty mind on those days and just hope enough
muscle memory kicks in to survive the round. But enough of golf, enough of
unread journals, hell, enough of retirement except as the cushion that Josh’s
thoughts fell on one day when passing through hisold home town of Olde Saco, a town farther
north in Maine than the one where he now lived, on some family business.
While in Olde Saco he passed by his old
growing up house, as was almost always the case since it was located near a
main town road which he would have to cross to get on to the main highway and
not always in some fit of nostalgia.Or
rather he passed the plot of land where the old home was situated, an old house
that had been little better than a shack, a cabin maybe then, maybe especially
when his three sisters came of age and hogged the single bathroom and stuff
like that. A place which left little room for a single growing boy to attend to
his own toilet, his own sense of space, to any sense at all. The house may have
been a shack, no, he thought better say a cabin but it had been located on
about two acres of land and in the intervening years, years well after his
parents had passed on and his sisters like him had left the dust of Olde Saco
behind the land had become valuable and now had been developed into an
eight-unit condominium complex. Not that his parents, not that his father
Prescott Breslin derived any real financial benefit from that development since
the house had been sold when he needed to go into a nursing home after Josh’s
mother, Delores, passed away. Had been sold well before there was a resurgence
in the Olde Saco economy which had taken a beating when the MacAdams Textile
Mills shut down and moved south to North Carolina in the early 1950s and had
only recovered with some “high tech” start-ups using the old factory space well
after Prescott passed on. The sale of that old house had broken his father’s
heart despite its shanty condition at the end. The damn sale of the cabin in
any case had not brought enough money. Not enough to cover all Prescott’s
increasing medical expenses which Josh and his sisters wound up subsiding.
So the passing of that lot got Josh to
thinking about how Prescott Breslin never drew a blessed break in his
hard-scrabble life. Never drew a break although he was a hard-working man of
the old school-“a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages”-when he had work. Got
Josh to thinking about the early 1950s when he was coming of age, when he
started even if unconsciously, or maybe semi-consciously, to feel that some new
breeze was coming, some new breeze that was going to break through and unfreeze
that red scare Cold War time. And while Josh’s horizons in those days centered
on the emerging rock and roll, coming from some “new” Memphis hillbilly
sources, some black as night rhythm and blues sources, some down and out urban
blues sources, again black as night, that was leading the jail-break out then
his father’s fate was being sealed in another way. See Prescott Breslin was an
employee, a machine tender and mechanic at the MacAdams Textile factory that
was heading south and he had no other resources to fall back on. That last
thought was pure Josh though, pure Josh remembering back to those hard days.
Prescott Breslin, as he would be the first to say, and had probably said it a thousand
times, with a wife and four children had no time to worry about whether he had
resources to fall back or not. Josh chuckled to himself over that one, yeah,
that was pure Dad.
As Josh travelled further along Main
Street (really Route One but everybody called it Main Street since they had no
real such street in the town) he passed by what in the old days was Millie’s
Diner, now re-opened as Mildred’s, the one right across the street from the old
textile plant where guys would go before their shift and grab a coffee and
crullers, maybe grab a quick dinner if they were single, or maybe meet some
sweetheart and talk before going off to work. He did not know this from
personal experience but his father had once told him that right after World War
II the plant was working three shifts and guys, and gals, were catching as much
overtime as they wanted.
Millie’s did not long survived the
shutdown of the mill and had been abandoned for a number of years (like a lot
of other businesses in that section of the town that were dependent on the
mill-workers) but had re-opened about a decade ago with the same “feel” as
Millie’s including a jukebox which played current stuff but also stuff from
back then, stuff that hard-working guys and gals would put their nickels, dimes
and quarters in to listen to whatever was “hot” in those days. Josh knew all of
this because a couple of years before he had been contacted by an old high
school classmate, Melinda, Melinda Dubois (the place, Olde Saco, was crawling
with French-Canadians including his mother, nee LeBlanc), who had read some old
article of his and got in touch to invite his up for a class reunion. During
that previous time in town Melinda had taken him around town and showed him
what had changed and told him the story of Millie’s resurrection as
Mildred’s.
Something that day, probably the sight
of the old homestead, maybe just the thought of Millie’s where sometimes when
his father had been making good money he would take the family for an out of
house dinner and where Josh on occasion had stopped in to play the jukebox and
have a Coke while looking furtively around for any stray girls, prompted him to
stop and go into Mildred’s for a coffee and maybe a piece of pie (that pie an
iffy thing what with him and his new weight problem but he thought why go into
a diner if you are not going to have something that is “bad “ for you). As a
single he sat at the Formica-top counter complete with red vinyl-cushioned
swivel stool to sit on and a paper placemat and utensils in front of him
waiting for the smiling waitress to take his order (a career waitress as is
usual in diners, middle-aged, her white uniform a little tight trying to look
younger, pencil in her hair for ease of taking orders, chewing gum but friendly
until you placed your order and then either still smiling or a frown if you
only ordered coffee and, not the young college girls and guys you find in
better restaurants marking time with a job to help defray college expenses or
for “walking around” money). He placed his frowning order, coffee, black, and a
piece of apple crumb pie with, yes, with ice cream (bad, indeed).
While Josh waited for his order he
thumbed through the panels on the jukebox machine that was placed between him
and the next placemat. And as if by some strange osmosis Josh came upon Hank
Williams’ You Win Again, his father’s
favorite song when he was young back in Kentucky, back in rugged cross
heartbreak legendary Hazard. (His father had been in a pick-up band for a while
working a circuit and along the Ohio River.) Joshput his quarter in to play that one selection
(yeah, times have changed even in jukebox land, no more three for a quarter )
and as Hank moan’s his lovesick blues that triggered Josh to start thinking
about his father and where he had come from, where he would have picked up
those country tunes in his DNA. And then Josh thought of that hard time when
his father was so discouraged about his prospects when the mill had closed down
temporarily and then when the final word had come that it would be closing for
good and would play that song repeatedly as if to try and ward off some evil
spirits. He could remember his father’s voice like it was yesterday as he sat
beside him in Millie’s:
“Jesus, it’s been three months since the mill
closed on the first day of our lord, January 1954, as the huge black and red
sign in front of the dead-ass silent mill keeps screaming at us. And also
telling us not to trespass under penalty of arrest, Christ, after all the sweat
we have given the damn MacAdams family. I still haven’t been able to get steady
work, steady work anywhere, what with every other guy looking for work too, and
I don’t even have a high school diploma, not even close since I only went to
eight grade and then to the mines, to do anything but some logging work up
North when they need extra crews,”
That is what Prescott Breslin, Josh
sitting silently beside him, had half-muttered to Jack Amber, a fellow
out-of-worker sitting on the counter-stool next to his from the same MacAdams
Mill that had been in Olde Saco since, well, since forever. This conversation
and ones like it in previous weeks between the two, and by many previous
parties on those self-same stools, took place, of course, right at Millie’s
Diner right across the street from the closed, dead-ass mill the place where
every guy (and an occasion wife, or girlfriend waiting to pick up her guy) who
worked there went for his coffee and, and whatever else got him through another
mill week.
Just then Prescott, hey, no Pres, or
PB, or any such thing, not if you didn’twant an argument on one of his few vanities, fell silent, a silence that
had been recurring more frequently lately as he thought of the reality of
dead-end Maine prospects and rekindled a thought that came creeping through his
brain when Jack MacAdams, the owner’s son, first told him the plant was
shutting down for good and moving south to North Carolina not far, not far at
all, from his eastern Kentucky roots. Then it was just a second of self-doubt
but now the thoughts started ringing incessantly in his brain.
Why the hell had he fallen for, and
married, a Northern mill-town girl (the sweet, reliable Delores, met at the
Starlight Ballroom over in Old Orchard Beach when he had been Marine Corps
short-time stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base down in New Hampshire just
before heading back to the Pacific Japan death battles), stayed up North after
the war when he knew the mills were only a shade bit better that the mines that
he had worked in his youth, faced every kind of insult for being southern from
the insular Mainiacs (they actually call themselves that with pride, the hicks,
and it wasn’t really because he was from the south although that made him an
easy target but because he was not born in Maine and could never be a Mainiac
even if he lived there one hundred years), and had had three growing,
incredibly fast growing, girls and one boy with Delores. Then he was able to
shrug it off but not now.
The only thing that could break the
cursed thoughts was some old home music that Millie, good mother Millie, the
diner’s owner (and a third generation Millie and Mainiac) made sure the jukebox
man inserted for “her” country boys while they had their coffee and. He
reached, suddenly, into his pocket, found a stray nickel, put it in the
counter-side jukebox, and played Will The Circle Be Unbroken, a song
that his late, long-gone mother sang to him on her knee when he was just a
tow-headed young boy. That got him to thinking about home, the Hazard hell home
of worked-out mines, of labor struggles that were just this side of fighting
the Japanese in their intensity and possibilities of getting killed, or worst
grievously injured and a burden on some woe-begotten family, of barren land
eroded by the deforested hills and hollows that looked, in places, like the
face of the moon on a bad night. And of not enough to eat when eight kids, a
mostly absence father and a fading, fading mother needed vast quantities of
food that were not on the table and turnips and watery broth had to do, of not
enough heat when cruel winter ran down the ravines and struck at your very
bones, and of not enough dough, never enough dough to have anything but
hand-me-downs, and then again hand-me-downs clothes, sometimes sister girl’s
stuff just to keep from being bare-assed.
Then Prescott thought about the
Saturday night barn dances where he cut quite a figure with the girls when he
was in his teens and had gleefully graduated to only having to wear
hand-me-downs. He was particularly lively (and amorous) after swilling (there
is no other way to put it) some of Uncle Eddie’s just-brewed “white lightning.”
And he heard, just like now on the jukebox, the long, lonesome fiddle playing
behind some fresh-faced country girl in her best dress swaying through Will
The Circle Be Unbroken that closed most Saturday barn dances.
As Millie asked him for the third time,
“More coffee” he came out of his trance. After saying no to Millie, he said no
to himself with that same kind of December resolve. A peep-break Saturday night
dance didn’t mean squat against that other stuff. And once again he let out his
breathe and said to himself one more time- “Yes, times are tough, times will
still be tough, Jesus, but Delores, the four kids, and he would eke it out
somehow. There was no going back, no way.”
And as if to put paid to that resolve,
as Josh made a funny face in recognition, Prescott had put a coin into the
jukebox and played You Will Again,
which he always said brought him good tidings, or at least made him feel
better. A few minute after the song was completed and he and his father were
ready to leave after saying good-bye to Jack Johnny Dubois came through the
door and yelled, “Hey, Prescott, Jack, the Great Northern Lumber Company just
called and they want to know if you want two months’ work clearing some land up
North for them. I’m going, that’s for sure.” And, hell, he was going too.”
“By rectifying long-standing power imbalances, Worker-driven Social Responsibility drills into the foundation of the problem…”
“No gender-based violence programs have achieved the same amount of leverage in fostering change…”
Earlier this week, Civil Eats published an excellent, feature-length piece based on interviews conducted during the Freedom Fast in New York City that lends critical insight into the endemic, generations-old problem of gender-based violence in the agricultural industry – and the promise that the Worker-driven Social Responsibility model, fulfilled in the Fair Food Program, holds for eradicating such violence in low-wage workplaces around the globe.
Today, we are pasting key excerpts from the article, beginning with an exposition of the problem:
… An estimated 500,000 women labor in U.S. fields. On many of the farms where Raquel’s parents worked up and down the East Coast, farmworkers describe coercion, catcalls, groping, and assault from crew leaders, supervisors, and even fellow workers as their “daily bread” in the fields. A study found that four out of five female farmworkers experience sexual violence at work. Women are often dependent on male supervisors for employment, housing, and transportation. Claims against harassers are largely processed by male managers, police officers, and judges, and retaliation for complaints is the norm.
Isolating physically and socially, the informal work environment of commercial agriculture on many farms creates a “hustle culture” that threatens workers’ immediate safety and long-term health. In crop work, for example, portable toilets are often placed far from the fields, a tactic that keeps them from taking breaks, said Nely Rodriguez, a CIW leader. Workers must obtain permission to use the bathroom, which creates uncomfortable situations as women find themselves alone with crew leaders. “It’s easy for unwanted things to happen between the rows. You’re in their territory, so it’s easy for them to find and entrap you. I saw this in my own case,” Rodriguez says, who felt corralled because her former boss carried a pistol.
The advent of CIW’s Fair Food Program has changed that culture significantly; alongside the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, the Fair Food Program is sparking change for workers and women in many industries…
