Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  “He’s window-shopping again. He told me he’s shopping again.”

  “Sooner or later, you gotta trust somebody.”

  They talked about killing coyotes. You make a cry like a wounded animal and you can call them in, shoot ’em dead.

  They talked about Freddie Mercury wearing assless chaps.

  They talked about why Smitty uses a spoon to eat grapes.

  They talked about it being Billy’s turn to relieve Pap on the bolter so Pap has a chance to eat.

  Billy stood, ready for duty. “Okay, give me something to think about,” he said, before heading out. He was a man who needed to keep his mind occupied while running equipment, to keep himself from going mad.

  They thought about what to offer up to Billy’s mind.

  “Okay, I got one,” Hook said. “If everyone is going to Wang Chung tonight, and everyone is going to have fun tonight, what is everyone doing?”

  No one felt they could top that one.

  Scotty came over, sat next to me. He told me his wife had had a baby boy. He told me how happy he was, holding his son. “It was just like looking at a little me,” he said. He named him King.

  At about midnight, Foot drove me out in our own private mantrip, him slouched down as he steered, me leaning on my side, trying to find the one spot of my hip best able to cushion the bumpy ride. We went rattling through the darkness, and I guess he could see me shivering. The drive out was always cold because you were moving into the wind, into all the fresh air whooshing through the mine. Foot grabbed somebody’s jacket lying behind him, offered it to me. I cuddled under that sooty thing and thanked him. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “I don’t know why you never listened to me and brought a damn jacket in.” He said he was glad our time was up so he could get back to his normal life, just dealing with the state inspectors he had to drag through the mine four and five days a week. I flipped my light on for one last look at the coal seam all frosted white, moving the light around with my head, drawing with that light on the walls.

  Oftentimes, but only on the drive out of the mine, Foot got to philosophizing. This time he mused on how it was a man became a good man. Not that he was calling himself a good man, but he felt more and more that he’d been leaning in the direction.

  “You’re away from your kids,” he said. “You work all kinds of crazy hours. Now, what happens when you work those kinda hours?”

  I wasn’t sure where he was going, so I didn’t answer.

  “What happens is you come home and your kids say they love you. Now, they’re not saying that because they know you. They’re saying that because of what their mom instilled in them kids. She’s instilled in them kids that this is a good man.”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Because my kids didn’t know me. You know what I mean? I wasn’t there. So, why do my kids think so much of their dad? It’s because of what their mom has instilled in them. Now, my portion of that is that everything she says about me, I have to make it more or less be true. That’s my portion of the equation.

  “Do you see? Do you know what I mean? If I’m a good man, it’s because of the people I got around me expecting good out of me.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said, considering the theory.

  “Down here, this kind of shit kicks in,” he said.

  HECHO EN AMÉRICA

  Migrant Labor Camp

  Cherryfield, Maine

  Pedro awoke suddenly in the middle of the night, his eyes on fire. Out of nowhere, sharp, blazing pain. He sat up, rubbed his face, kept trying to unglue his eyes. He reached for his dad or his brother, fumbling frantically in the darkness of the damp tent. “Daddy! Juan! Daddy!”

  Juan is Pedro’s twin. They are exact replicas: slim, brown, shy, equally oblivious to the powers of their teen-idol good looks—the kind of twins who can survive by bamboozling people, taking tests for each other, talking to girls for each other. Juan felt Pedro’s panic as if it were his own. He grabbed a flashlight. “Daddy!” he hollered, waking his father, who reached into the light and pried open one of Pedro’s eyes. It was yellow, the eyeball hidden beneath a thick curtain of pus. “I can’t see!” Pedro screamed. “Daddy, I can’t see.”

  There are systems in place, of course: family doctors, pharmacies, and twenty-four-hour urgent-care centers in strip malls across America. But a lot of those amenities are not immediately within reach if you’re a migrant worker living out of your car. You’re in a camp, beside some ready rows of broccoli or some bulging sweet potatoes under the stars, nothing but you and the full-throttle crickets—and maybe you should have put a plan in place for your kid suddenly waking up blind, but you didn’t. You just didn’t.

  Up here, in Maine, the blueberry scent lay like a fog over carpets of balsam, and the mosquitoes were fat and in charge. Sixty-some people lived in the camp, at the end of a dirt road called Blueberry Circle, a deceptively quaint name for a place like this: a ramshackle settlement under a canopy of firs, laundry hanging from the trees, overturned buckets for chairs. Everyone said it wasn’t half bad. First of all, it was free: if growers want the good rakers, they have to provide housing. There were two outdoor showers, two flush toilets, and electricity for lights, radios, TVs, anything you wanted. The cabins were plywood, weather-beaten and bowed, painted in cheerful, fading hues of red, green, gray, and brown, and fitted with bunk beds. If you got here too late to claim a bunk, you pitched a tent. The season would start whenever the blueberries decided, usually at the end of July, and last about four weeks.

  Pedro and his father and his brother sat in the tent wondering what to do. It was nearly 4:00 a.m. and Consuelo, on the other side of camp, would be up soon to start the biscuits and the soup. Urbano, a compact, worn-out version of his sons, told his boys to stay in the tent, to be quiet and wait. They shouldn’t disturb anyone’s sleep. That was how he taught his boys. Keep a low profile. Don’t ever make a scene. Not even if someone robs your tent; just hide your money better next time. If the family in the cabin next door is drunk and dancing and fighting and you can’t sleep, put earplugs in. If the rain comes and soaks your bedroll, get up and sleep in the car.

  Surely someone in Consuelo’s huge clan—thirteen people crammed into two cabins—would know what to do for Pedro. So Urbano hushed his son, wrapped his arms around him, and rocked him even though, at fourteen, Pedro was way too old for something like that. “Shshshsh,” Urbano said, swaying back and forth, his mind soon rolling with the thoughts that can rattle like loose cargo in the back of his head. He was a man who had awakened to a thousand mornings of bad news, but these, he knew, had only made him stronger. He had acquired wisdom. He had made peace with a sky filled with untold storms. And he understood how the world was divided: kings over here, peasants over there. Kings live in palaces and want berries on their cornflakes; peasants need the money so they work the fields. And you? You were born king or you were born peasant, and that got decided long before you fell out of your mama’s womb, so don’t bother worrying about it. Say your prayers, be thankful for what you’ve got, and hang a crucifix from your rearview mirror so Jesus will protect your family from the chupacabras, the goat suckers, and other spirits lurking in the woods.

  —

  WASH THE APPLE BEFORE you bite into it, because that’s the way you were raised. Germs, pesticides, dirt, worm-related matter, gunk, it doesn’t matter: Just wash it. The fingerprints, too, go down the drain with the rest of the apple’s history. The fingerprints are one of those aspects of American life that escape everyday thought: the fact that there are people, actual people, who pick our food. Sometimes, maybe, we are reminded of the seasons and the sun and the way of the apple tree, and if we multiply that by millions of apple trees, times millions of tomato plants, times all the other fruits and vegetables, we realize, holy potato chips, that’s a lot of picking. Without one million people on the ground,
on ladders, in bushes—armies of pickers swooping in like bees—all the tilling, planting, and fertilizing of America’s $144 billion horticultural production is for naught. The fruit falls to the ground and rots.

  There are machines, of course. Machines harvest corn, wheat, soy, barley, and plenty of crops that lie like luxurious carpets under a reliable sun. But machines can’t climb trees, or tiptoe through forests, or reach delicately into caves; machines can’t decide which orange is ready, which pepper is green enough, which peach has the proper fuzz, which mushroom has the wow factor. So much of the fresh produce in our supermarkets, as well as the fruits and vegetables floating in our canned goods and sitting stiff in bags in our freezers, so much of it is the result of judgment, reason, and other human gifts, to say nothing of muscle and sweat.

  Most of the people who pick our food have brown skin. They come from Mexico and Central American nations and they lead nomadic lives, following the ripening crops northward in one of three streams. The western stream begins in Southern California and hugs the coast to Washington state, with a branch heading northeast from central California to North Dakota. The midwestern stream begins in southern Texas and divides off through every midwestern state. The eastern stream originates around Fort Pierce, Florida, where workers pick oranges and strawberries in January, then move on to peaches and pecans and lettuce in Georgia, tobacco in Tennessee, New Jersey tomatoes and cucumbers, before arriving in Maine in late July for the blueberry harvest. After Maine, many from the eastern stream move on to New York and Pennsylvania for the apple harvests. Then it’s a long trip down 1-95 to Florida for sugarcane, squash, and snap beans, and the cycle repeats.

  These migrant workers blanket the entire country—not just the southern border states we tend to associate them with—and yet to most of us they are strangers so removed from our lives we hardly know they’re here, people hunched over baskets in the flat distance as we drive down vacation highways. We don’t run into them at the mall or the corner café. Rarely do we strike up a conversation at a bar with a person who introduces him- or herself as a person who harvests anything. We don’t pal around with them on our college campuses and they are not invited to be pundits on TV.

  Civilizations have for centuries worked hard to shield citizens from the world’s unsightly infrastructure—the sewers and slaughterhouses and boiler rooms—and so it’s easy to forget that there is anything going on behind the curtain at all. What we don’t know can’t hurt us.

  More than 50 percent of the migrant farmworker population is in the U.S. illegally—the one piece of the story Americans hear quite a lot about, and are increasingly bothered by, or are urged to be. On TV and talk radio and especially during election years, we’re told we must work together to stop this national crisis. These people are robbing our homes and trafficking drugs and raping our children right there in our JCPenney dressing rooms. The bad guys make headlines, as bad guys will, and the rest, we’re told, are a more insidious blight: taking American jobs, giving birth to bastard “anchor babies” in what Pat Buchanan once called “the greatest invasion in human history.” These people are here illegally, the reasoning goes, and are therefore lawbreakers; lawbreakers should be rounded up and jailed. (And surely America can pick its own stupid fruit.) Whether we buy into the heated rhetoric or not, one thing has been made clear: Immigration is a problem reaching a breaking point, and something must be done.

  Except there really is no invasion, no growing national crisis. In fact, current statistics show that immigration from Mexico has actually gone down—and steeply so—over the past decade. (An estimated 80,000 unauthorized migrants crossed the Mexican border into the United States in 2010, down from 500,000 in 2000.) More to the point: There is nothing new about this story. Importing foreign labor has always been the American way, beginning with 4 million slaves from Africa. Later came the Jews and Poles, the Hungarians, Italians, and Irish, to work the mills and mines and factories—everything you learned in sixth-grade social studies about the great American melting pot. And with each group came a new wave of anti-immigrant, pro-Anglo rage—sometimes followed by outright expulsion. China was the first to fill the agricultural labor hole in California in the mid-1850s. Nearly 200,000 Chinese immigrants were legally contracted to cultivate fields there—until the Chinese Exclusion Act was created in 1882, thanks to the efforts of California’s “Supreme Order of Caucasians.” The “yellow peril” was shipped home. Japanese workers replaced the Chinese for a time, until the Immigration Act of 1924, which banned immigration from East Asia entirely. Meantime, the railroad between Mexico and the U.S. opened in the late 1880s, and the floodgates of a new labor force were opened. The U.S. Border Patrol was created in 1924 to control the flow, and the term “illegal alien” was born.

  Our current debate over how to control the southern border is really just a rehashed version of a very old one cycling over the reach of history. It’s a lively conversation about fairness and purity, about who belongs and who does not, and as a result, the people who pick our food are shamed into the shadows, nameless, mostly afraid, and certainly inconvenient to the experience of the satisfying first crunch and explosion of sugar that happens when we discover that, oh yes, this apple is awesome.

  —

  HUMBERTO WAS AWAKE even before Consuelo at the camp at the end of Blueberry Circle. He cleaned the kitchen in exchange for food. It was a special arrangement. (Meals usually went for about $6, depending on Consuelo’s mood.) At sixty-three, Humberto was the oldest raker at the camp. He was a gentle man, unfailingly kind, and people whispered about him. He slept in an orange pup tent away from the rest, under a birch tree with branches perfect for hanging socks. He appeared sickly, wrinkled, his thin frame bent like scrap metal. People whispered he must be a homosexual, and he must have AIDS, and he must be contagious. This is a transient life where nobody really knows anybody unless they’re family, so fear is always running things.

  Humberto was finished sweeping when Consuelo breezed in, all hustle and purpose, firing up the oven and the grill. The kitchen was a plywood cabin slightly larger than the others, thick with unmoving heat on the outer edge of camp. It was for everyone at the camp to use, but few felt like cooking, and Consuelo had learned to capitalize on that fact years ago, back when she and her husband first started coming up here to rake.

  It was about 4:30 a.m. when Urbano came into the kitchen with Juan and a stumbling Pedro, who could not see.

  “Help,” Urbano said, his face and neck wet with sweat.

  “He needs a hospital!” Humberto shouted when he saw the boy’s swollen eyes. He himself had no idea where the hospital was; he was, after all, a hitchhiking man.

  “Where is the hospital?” Urbano pleaded to Consuelo, who had become engrossed as if in a complicated text on the folds of dough beneath her fists. She was a round woman who wore the constant smile of someone intent on avoiding all conflict, opinion, and consequence. Three of her four kids had come with her into the kitchen, and the baby was crying, while the nine-year-old was trying to give him his bottle, and the ten-year-old was cracking eggs, and the sun wasn’t due up for two hours.

  “Call that man,” Consuelo offered, pointing to a business card taped to the wall. Soon her husband, Naud, wandered in, and his brother, Noel, still drunk from the night before. More kids, and Noel’s woman, Tammy, with the bored, faraway look, and Tammy’s daughter with the tattoos, and the daughter’s boyfriend with the long dreads pulled up high in a ponytail. Coffee. Was the coffee ready? In a half hour the rakers would start lining their cars up to convoy out to the fields, and nobody had time for these two punk teenagers and their dad standing in the kitchen—what did they want?

  Urbano gave up. He took the card off the wall and left. In truth, he was afraid of that whole gigantic Consuelo clan; he thought of them like the Mafia of the camp. You had to play by their rules, put up with their blaring music and with Mimi, their creepy Ch
ihuahua, and with that nameless freak of a pit bull. That kitchen was supposed to be for everyone to use. A lot of the people in the camp appreciated Consuelo’s sweet breads, her tamales, and especially her chicken mole, but Urbano and his boys knew how to cook for themselves, and they would have appreciated some use of the kitchen. They didn’t come all the way up to Maine to spend money.

  “Maybe this man knows where a hospital is,” Urbano said to his sons, studying the business card.

  The contact information was for Juan Perez-Febles, a beefy guy with a jet-black goatee who often came around handing out his card and telling people to call him if they had any trouble. Most people tossed the card as soon as he turned away. Could be some slimy lawyer drumming up business or a spy from Immigration. One thing you learn quick in this line of work is to trust no one.

  Juan took the phone from his dad, as a fourteen-year-old will do, and dialed the number, while the three got into their car to go find a hospital. The phone rang into voice mail. “Can you help us?” Juan asked. “My brother is blind.”

  At the top of Blueberry Circle there’s another camp, a better one, where the cabins have indoor plumbing and the workers stay on past the harvest. It’s for the higher class of laborers, “the company Hispanics,” those who have better skills—tractor experience, pesticide knowhow—or better luck and work an hourly wage instead of by the piece. One of the guys saw the car lights coming up the hill. He stepped out of his cabin to see who was leaving so unusually early. Urbano pulled over, and the man, who introduced himself as Luis, leaned into the car to see what was up. “Holy shit!” he said when he saw Pedro’s oozing eyes, which really was the only humane response. “Wait here.” He ran back to his cabin, where he grabbed his wallet and shoes, and jumped in the car, then took the terrified family to the hospital in Machias, twenty-five miles away.

  Meantime, Perez-Febles was holding his phone, wondering who the caller was. The ring had awakened him, but he hadn’t reached it in time, and the child who left the voice mail offered no name, the caller ID UNKNOWN. So a boy in one of the camps needed help? Was blind? Forty-five blueberry companies. Thousands of workers to oversee and protect. Perez-Febles dressed quickly, set out on his rounds, and felt a flash of the hopelessness that had a way of following him like a ghost.