Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  —

  “VACATIONLAND,” THE LICENSE PLATE SAYS. Blueberries are one of Maine’s largest crops, covering sixty thousand acres, and they’re a symbol every bit as important as the lobster to the image of Maine as a happy, vital place. Maine is the largest producer of wild blueberries in the world. The woody plants occur naturally in the sandy gravel understory of Maine’s coastal forests, where little else bothers even trying to grow. The plants thrive here because they have no real competition, and because of mycorrhiza, the symbiotic relationship between the blueberry plants and a fungus that regularly clings to their roots. It’s a beneficial fungus, allowing the plants to extract nutrients from the otherwise lousy soil. In winter, the deep Maine snow acts as a blanket insulating the dormant plants. In spring, the melting snow provides all the water that greening perennials need. In summer, the large rocks tangled in the soil hold the heat that allows the berries to ripen. In fall, storms produce lightning that touches the earth, igniting whole fields, a perfect pruning. Wild blueberries have been surviving here for centuries like this, a vigorous conspiracy of nature.

  As blueberries go, the wild variety (“lowbush”) are the rock stars. The cultivated kind (“highbush”) can be planted anywhere, and grow in huge fields in places like New Jersey and Michigan. You’re as likely to find either topping your cereal. Sometimes you’ve got these big, fat berries bobbing in your milk, and other times you’ll have tiny bold nuggets on your spoon. Do a taste test someday. The cultivated ones are watery and mealy compared with the tiny wild ones—intense bursts of candy-like fruit. Once you notice the difference, you will never buy the fat ones again.

  The workers at the camp at the end of Blueberry Circle where Consuelo cooked, and Humberto pitched his tent, and Urbano and his sons slept, raked for Cherryfield Foods, the largest blueberry producer in the state and widely regarded as fair and accommodating. This was a world apart from the citrus groves of Florida or the vegetable fields of Georgia and the Carolinas, where working conditions have made shocking headlines since the late 1990s. Farmers in southern states have been prosecuted for modern-day slavery: holding migrant workers in debt and chaining them inside box trucks.

  Maine, at least in recent years, has earned the opposite reputation. Farmers are known as honorable, and any migrant worth his callused hands finds a way to get here for blueberry season. The money is excellent and the locals don’t treat you like shit. Something about Maine—poor, tucked up north out of the way, with that ragged, rocky coast of dramatic mood swings—something about this place is easier on misfits.

  The question of legal status lingered in the sticky August air during my time in the camp, always present, like mosquitoes that kept biting no matter how many times you slapped your legs. All of the migrants who worked for Cherryfield Foods were legal in that they had passed E-Verify, the federally mandated screening test that runs your Social Security number and is supposed to tell whether or not it’s legit. Companies face enormous fines if they hire workers who don’t pass, and so it is nothing to take lightly.

  And yet, at other camps around the state, migrants who spoke on the condition of (absurdly redundant) anonymity proudly let me see the Social Security cards they bought on the streets of Boston for $100 a pop. Fake green cards and driver’s licenses, and a few showed me their “insurance”—paperwork for multiple identifications, just in case the first ones didn’t work.

  “And these pass E-Verify?” I asked.

  “E-Verify is a joke,” they said. “Everyone pretends.”

  False papers might be easy to come by, but the workers I spoke to said that getting into the United States was more difficult than ever. In 2010, President Obama signed a $600 million border-security bill into law, which included a thousand new Border Patrol agents, more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, updated communications equipment, and unmanned surveillance drones.

  I heard dramatic tales of hiking for weeks across the Sonoran Desert with skinny donkeys hauling bags of rehydration solution, and people paying thousands of dollars to “coyotes” to sneak them over the border. Crossing had become so difficult, in fact, that you couldn’t go back and forth to see your family like you used to. Once in, you stayed, for years, not months, because you knew returning to the United States would be treacherous or impossible. Five years, six, maybe seven. You wired the money home until there was enough for a house or whatever you needed, and only then could you return to your family. To the people I talked to, a tighter border control was mostly a matter of a prolonged homesickness.

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  PEREZ-FEBLES WAS RAISED to salute the American flag and never look back. He grew up in Cuba, was sent by his parents to the home of friends in Pittsburgh when he was sixteen, and went on to embody an American mythology that is beginning to sound quaint if not downright Disney: a proud national narrative of a country of immigrants who come here and lift themselves up with hard work.

  Having put himself through both college and graduate school, Perez-Febles was teaching high school Spanish when he learned of a job in Maine to work with the immigrant community he understood so well. This was back in the mid-nineties, on the heels of the state’s infamous DeCoster Egg Farms scandal: the largest producer of brown eggs in the U.S. was deemed an agricultural sweatshop, the poster child of migrant-worker abuses. An OSHA investigation had revealed videos of workers cleaning manure with their hands and raw sewage bubbling from bathtubs and sinks.

  Back then, Maine was known as one of the worst places in America for migrant-labor conditions, and as the new state monitor advocate, Perez-Febles was charged with reforming it. He documented violations all over the state, spent three years investigating a broccoli farm where he videotaped himself standing in an open pit of human waste. His work helped enact legislation to curb labor violations, and he became a regular in the blueberry barrens and camps. He set up the Rakers’ Center next to the Columbia town hall during raking season, a gathering place with free services: donated canned goods and clothes, an education office, legal advice, and a migrant-health program that dispatches mobile units to the barrens. His efforts were hailed among labor advocates, who now hold up Maine as an example of a state that does the right thing.

  As for the migrants themselves, the workers I spoke to rarely mentioned the services, or if they did, it was not their reason for coming to Maine. The reason was money.

  Blueberries have always fetched the highest pay of any crop on the eastern stream. They’re like the bonus round at the end of a pinball game: all of a sudden the points really start adding up. A good raker with a strong rhythm averages one hundred boxes a day. At $2.25 a box, it’s not uncommon to see a weekly check for $1,350. Compare that with just $375 a week picking Georgia peaches, or $400 down in the orange groves of Florida.

  Washington County, occupying the far eastern tip of the state, is where the majority of the blueberry barrens are located, and it has 12.2 percent unemployment, the highest in the state. And yet the money does not draw the local unemployed into the fields—an inexplicable dimension to the new American dream repeated nationwide. Raking is hard, backbreaking, and the sun is hot.

  Just a generation ago, the harvest was a community effort. A ritual that brought all the locals out to the barrens. The blueberries were ripe! They had to be picked! There was so little time! You could make decent cash, help your farmer friends, have a good time gossiping with your neighbors, and shame the teenagers caught kissing behind the birch trees. Afterward you’d celebrate a successful harvest in town at the blueberry festival, compete for best jam, pie, candle, or soap.

  The locals no longer do the raking, but the blueberry festivals still happen all over Maine, and the townspeople still celebrate, and the tourists still come.

  The migrant workers I spoke to were well aware of the disconnect: they labored to support a culture they had virtually no part in, for people who had no part in theirs.

>   “Now, you see everyone here is brown,” said Noel, Consuelo’s brother-in-law, one morning in the barrens. He was a pretty man with a wide brow and long locks of wavy black hair, and he was cracking open a beer under a blazing sunrise. “When I first came here in 1998, there were white people raking blueberries. None now. White people got lazy and let the Spanish take over.” There was still a chill in the air, but his shirt was off and he was sweating, having already combed ten boxes of blueberries from the endless green and purple brush. “White people are lazy. White people won’t travel an hour or two away to work. Spanish will travel. Spanish didn’t fight to take over. White people dropped their rakes and Spanish picked them up.”

  —

  OUT IN THE FIELDS north of Pea Ridge Road, a tall truckload of fresh empties crept out of the horizon, and the workers sprinted like urgent bargain shoppers toward it. Yellow, green, blue, white plastic boxes identical in size, and so they stacked, Lego-style, ten, fifteen at a time. Lift the stack on your shoulder and run. You wanted as many empties as you could carry so you could be sure to have enough to fill as you raked. Your kids, those who were at least twelve, raked alongside you, pouring what they got into your boxes. Your kids, those under twelve, hid in the car, scratching their mosquito bites, waiting until nobody from the company was around, before they started raking. The company has zero tolerance about letting underage kids work, because there are laws in America. But your kids wanted to rake, and your family needed the money, so what was the problem?

  Consuelo’s husband, Naud, had claimed the far western edge of the barren, all of the family spread out in consecutive rows that had been marked off with twine by Pat, the crew chief, and the only white person here. You wanted the rows that lay flat and were free of rocks, not the valleys or hillsides or the gnarly, weedy spots. One of the ways to claim a spot in the barren was to park your truck and open all the windows and crank the stereo. Most of the music was Latin pop or traditional Mexican folk, the bass held tight and full by the moist air that smelled aggressively sweet.

  A blueberry rake is a rectangular bucket of tines, a giant upturned fork, with a handle that can be short, long, or longer. Everyone had his own rake, many handmade to fit the body God gave you to rake with. A swipe with a rake is roughly the same motion as shoveling snow, but you do it faster, your arms swinging, the rake swooshing as it captures dozens of berries at a time. It takes about ten minutes of raking to fill a box; then you carry it to the road, put a piece of masking tape with your name on it, and start on the next empty. No one messes with another man’s boxes, his rake, or even his masking tape: that was the code. Treated fairly, you didn’t have to push and shove or cheat. This wasn’t like Florida or Georgia, where half the time you pissed in your pants because they didn’t allow bathroom breaks. This was fair: Rake as much as your body could take, stop when you needed to.

  Cristo, a nine-year-old-boy, sat in the dirt alone in the barrens, watching the grown-ups compete for empties. His mom was here somewhere, and so was his dad. “We drove in the truck twelve hours from Florida, where we work lettuce,” he said. “Me and my parents and my sister and my four brothers.” He was a round boy dressed in a sweatshirt decorated with a Christmas wreath and a teddy bear, his head shaved bald on account of the heat. He said he had many responsibilities, but mostly his job was to take care of Dina, his seven-month-old baby sister. “She’s back at the camp with my little brother now,” he said. “We take turns.” Cristo was in charge of rocking Dina at night if she cried, and if she got too loud, sometimes he would take her outside in the moonlight and climb with her into the hammock his father had strung between two white pines. There was not a lot to do back at camp. Sometimes he and his brothers played freeze tag or had water-pistol wars with some boys from Peru. “I would rather come to the barrens each day,” he said. “My dad said I can rake, but if I get caught he will pretend he doesn’t know me.” One week Cristo made $120. He gave $100 of it to his mom, and the rest he took with him on a beer run with his dad to Milbridge, where he bought “memories” to take to his cousins in Florida: a deck of cards that said “Maine,” a key chain with a lobster on it, and a little pillow that smelled of balsam. “When I grow up, I plan to become an engineer,” he said. “Or a scientist, or a truck driver through the lettuce fields—but I will be frightened because sometimes you have to go through water.”

  Pat was ordering the grown-ups to go here and there with the empties, and Cristo had nothing to do but wait for the coast to be clear, so he rocked on his heels and held his rake like a guitar and pretended to be a Latin pop star, singing along with Romeo Santos crooning into the fog.

  The sugary blueberry smell came out with a rhythmic punch as the brush was continually jostled, and the shush, shush, shush of the rakes was roughly in time with the thumping beat coming from the trucks. You could see necklaces swinging as the workers raked, glints of silver and gold catching the sun. The rocky fields fell into dips and deeper hollows, stretching into the horizon that moved past blood red and on to yellows and blues.

  No one this morning talked about where Urbano and his boys were; it was likely no one even knew their names or noticed that they were gone. Except Humberto, the skinny man who cleaned the kitchen, who told the crew chief about the boy who’d shown up with the messed-up eyes. Otherwise it was business as usual: empties, rakes, masking tape, shush, shush, shush. There was no talk, for that matter, of life outside the barrens, of Cristo’s school in Florida starting next week, of getting home to sign up for soccer or band. There was no talk of making it home in time for anything, no talk of the next crop, the next job, the next day, or even the tropical storm barreling up the East Coast, headed right here. Time in the barrens had no measure beyond the movement of the sun that warmed your back, then scorched it, then mercifully began letting go.

  Noel needed a Monster Energy drink and so did Naud, and Consuelo wasn’t here yet with the lunch truck. Cristo’s mom, a wide woman with a high ponytail, came charging up to yell at him for wandering off, and then she bitched to no one in particular about her swollen ankles. “Are you talking to these men?” she said to Cristo, about Naud and Noel, who in truth presented no threat. “No, Mama, I’m not.” She had found Cristo making new friends in the camp the night before, talking to guys who spoke ugly Spanish, a Spanish from some other part of the world, and she told him if any of them touched him she’d get a knife from the kitchen and stab them dead.

  “No. Mama, no one touched me.”

  —

  HUMBERTO WAS TAKING A BREAK, sitting on an upturned box, wearing a thin green T-shirt and jeans caked in purple. His way was to rake a few boxes, break, rake a few boxes. He simply didn’t have the strength of the younger men and women. “Me, I’m slow,” he said. His face was weathered as a fisherman’s and he was unshaven. “Twenty, thirty, forty boxes a day. I never got to fifty, not once. That’s what I wonder: how they get to a hundred. You’re supposed to make so many boxes per hour, but I never do. But they keep letting me work. I don’t know why. That’s what I wonder too. The company is very nice to me.”

  He turned his rake upside down, began picking out weeds that had become entangled in the tines. He felt as welcome here as he did anywhere. Home for Humberto was not a place so much as a season. He knew nothing of the rhythms of a man who stayed somewhere after a harvest. He didn’t have an address or a car or a telephone.

  “That’s my friend over there,” he said, gesturing toward a group clearing a ravine. “The big one. And the other one. They look alike. I forget their names. I met them here. The lady in the kitchen is my friend too. She saves me my tent every year. That’s how I have it every year: she brings it back for me. I bring my sleeping bag. My pillow. My toothbrush. The mattress I get from one of the cabins. I put my laundry on the trees. There’s a basin. I have a new pair of boots. I have a shaving kit. I have some more things in Portland, where I have a locker. I have a radio. It goes off at fo
ur o’clock and it wakes me. If it’s raining and we can’t rake, I sit in my tent and listen to it.”

  Everything Humberto needed to know, he learned more than a half century ago from his father and his mother, whom he harvested alongside in the tomato fields in Mexico and then cabbage and spinach in Texas. When he got older, he found himself on the eastern stream. A friend of a friend. One day you’re here and the next you are there. “I don’t care if I stay in one place,” he said. “I find some work. If I have the work, it’s good. I keep busy. I don’t stop.”

  His rake was clear and so he stood up, his body so thin it might have made a crackling sound. He felt his age. He couldn’t haul stacks of empties on his shoulder like he used to. He carried his rake respectfully (not dragging it like the kids did) to the next row, which he then scanned and considered before entering. His boots were purple. Like a lot of people, he said he liked harvesting blueberries better than any crop. “Some camps you go to are better and some are worse,” he said. “Georgia peaches are hard work, bad people. In New Jersey, there’s a nursery I like. I go to Pennsylvania to work in the mushrooms. I come to Maine every year I can get a ride.

  “I don’t care if I stay in one place. I find some work. If I have the work, it’s good. I keep busy. I don’t stop. In Milbridge I catch the bus. Ellsworth. To Bangor. From there to Southbend. West Perry. I don’t know if they’re going to hire me or not in Geneva. That’s what I wonder. I’ll go to New York and look. Cabbage, onions, they have everything in New York.

  “I was sick last year, so I skipped blueberries. The pain is coming in my chest; I was having heartburn and everything. Got to keep going. Keep going. Never stop! That’s what I told myself. In Portland they give free medicine, injections, they have a clinic. I get all the medicine I need for a long time there.”