The Unwinding

by George Packer

  She had never once thought about who was really responsible. Or that she could hold their feet to the fire. She really was getting angry. So he had her. He was offering her a different way to help people. He talked about Chicago and told her stories of the campaigns there, with people who were serious about building power and pushing for change, connecting some of it to the civil rights movement. She thought it all sounded exciting.

  They sat together for a long time, and while she was talking about herself Noden watched her and saw something that he would describe to her later, something that she herself couldn’t quite see: a kind of raw power. It came from her passion about the east side and how it had been forgotten. He saw it as the pilot light that would get her up day in and day out for a job that would not be easy. She was taking a brave leap to remake herself, and she might come and go quickly, but she would be likelier to stick it out than someone coming to Youngstown from Columbus or out of state. She knew the story of the black community here because it was her story. He invited her to a formal interview, and she agreed.

  It took place at the Unitarian Church on Elm Street, near Youngstown State. Tammy had never heard of that kind of church. Since the divorce she had been steeped in her church in Akron. She asked the cousin who had brought her there about the Unitarians.

  “They accept all religions and all beliefs,” her cousin said.

  “But what does that mean?”

  “That means you could be a Satanist and still be welcomed into the Unitarian Church.”

  “No way.”

  “Just be careful,” her cousin said. “I’m going to be praying for you.”

  On the day of the interview, Noden met her at the church door and told her to have a seat in the sanctuary until they were ready for her. Back then Tammy had her hair in long dreads, and she had put on weight in the past few years, and she couldn’t help thinking how black she would seem to whoever was going to interview her. She sat down and glanced around. There were no crosses anywhere. In alarm she thought, “I ain’t never been in no church without a cross.” To calm herself down—on top of everything else, this was her first job interview in twenty years, and the last one was for an auto parts assembly line—she picked up a hymnbook and leafed through its pages. Her eyes fell on a song about the summer solstice. She was in a devil-worship church!

  As she was stashing away the hymnal, Noden came back and led her to the office where two women and a man were waiting. Tammy was so shaken up that an instinct to pull herself together made her take over the room, going from one person to the next, introducing herself, “How are you doing? I’m great!” When Kirk asked for an example of a time that she stood up to authority because of an injustice, she told them the story of the girl at Packard who had been down on the floor scrubbing oil, and she could tell they were moved. She sailed through the interview, she wowed them. But part of her was thinking that if she did get the job, her new colleagues would wonder why the doorknobs were always greasy since Tammy started working, because she would be anointing them every day.

  She became one of the first hires. She could stay in school and still hold down an exciting job making reasonable money with benefits. She thought, “I knew God was going to open up these doors.”

  * * *

  Noden gave his new organizers their marching orders: go out and talk to every church, neighborhood group, and potential leader they could find, recruit seventy-five people to attend a meeting, organize some kind of action, or they were fired. Noden assumed that Tammy would work on the east side since she knew it so well, but she refused, because that was just the problem—she knew too many people there, family and friends, knew what her brothers were doing, and it would be a conflict of interest. Instead, she began organizing on the north side, most of which no longer resembled the place where Granny had gone to work in white people’s homes—it was starting to look like the rest of Youngstown.

  One day, Tammy was canvassing a neighborhood on the north side on foot, carrying a yellow notepad on a clipboard and going door-to-door, introducing herself to anyone she could find, trying to keep it under five minutes. “How is your neighborhood? How long has that house over there been empty? Why do you think it hasn’t been torn down? I just talked to someone down the street who feels the same way you do. There are a lot of homes in the city that are abandoned and need to be torn down and I’m going to tell you, there are some things that really need to change. Would you come to a meeting? Because it doesn’t do a whole lot of good for just one person to call the city, but if we all get on the same page … Yes, I’m from Youngstown, born and raised, and I have watched how this city has changed, and know what? I’m at a point where I’m like, no more, it’s time for it to stop. If you come to this meeting with about fifty or sixty of your neighbors then we’ll discuss it. Can I get your number?” The goal was to recruit local people and train them as leaders, so that they would bring others along, and slowly the disempowered would gain a sense of agency and the voiceless would begin to speak.

  She turned down a street and heard two women talking and laughing on a front porch. The porch was covered with Pittsburgh Steelers banners and paraphernalia, and the front lawn had so many doodads scattered around that it looked like a yard sale was going on. The women were having what Tammy called a pity party—one of them complaining that she couldn’t afford her health insurance. Tammy took this as her cue to approach. “What are you saying about health care?” She introduced herself and gave her pitch. The woman with the health insurance problem was the owner of the house and Steeler fan, Hattie Wilkins. She was in her late fifties, short and heavyset, with long dreads colored gold, a big husky voice, and a boisterous manner. Hattie turned out to be a distant relative of Tammy’s stepfather. As far as Hattie was concerned, Tammy had just popped up out of a crack in the sidewalk.

  Tammy asked Miss Hattie if she would be willing to have a one-on-one with her and then be trained by MVOC as a leader.

  “I’m already a leader,” Hattie said. “I don’t need no training.” For twenty years she had been the head of her union local in a pillow factory on the west side. Then the company paid her to quit because she caused so much trouble—that was why she had to cover part of her health insurance. The three houses to her left were vacant—she kept the grass cut next door—and then there were two empty lots where the houses had been torn down. Hattie had turned one of the lots into a cut-down-flower garden—she called it that in memory of her granddaughter, Marissa, shot in the heart at sixteen while leaving a party. Hattie scavenged the tulip and daffodil bulbs and rosebushes from the yards of abandoned houses, and she would never cut any of the blooms because Marissa was cut down like a flower.

  Leaving her job had cost Hattie her power base, the hundreds of workers at the pillow factory. Now she was down to just four or five people in her neighborhood. Maybe she wasn’t a leader after all, maybe she needed what Tammy was offering. She agreed to a one-on-one.

  It wasn’t long before Tammy became Miss Hattie’s role model. Tammy had a talent—Noden noticed it early on—for forming deep bonds with her leaders, inspiring them with her energy and focus on the task until they were willing to throw themselves in front of a bus for her. Hattie loved the way Tammy spoke, how she could get people’s attention and keep it. Hattie was taking classes at the college in order to use proper grammar around the neighborhood kids so that they would learn to speak like the TV newscasters instead of using the slang of the hood. She told Tammy, “When I grow up I want to speak just like you.”

  The organization’s first big project was to map Youngstown—to conduct a survey, going block by block, of every house in the city, finding out which ones were occupied, which empty, which had been torn down or needed to be. The surveyors assigned a grade to each house in their area. If Tammy had surveyed the east side, she would have given the abandoned and stripped property at 1319 Charlotte an F. On the north side, not far from the park where she and Granny used to feed the swans during the ye
ar they spent in the Purnell mansion, she surveyed two blocks that had thirteen abandoned houses out of twenty-four. She talked to the mailman about which houses were occupied, and when winter came she waited for a snowfall to see if there were tire tracks on the driveways.

  Forty percent of the parcels in Youngstown turned out to be vacant. Almost a quarter of the empty houses were owned by random people in other states like California, and even foreign countries like Austria or China, house flippers caught in the real estate downdraft, Internet shoppers who hadn’t grasped the sorry state of their purchase on Craigslist or pennyforeclosure.com. The most common complaint Tammy heard in her travels was vacancy and the crime it always attracted. MVOC compiled the results of the survey in a color-coded map of the city, with green for empty lots and red for abandoned structures. On the map the east side was vast and green, with bright red spots scattered through it.

  Youngstown’s black mayor, Jay Williams, had made it a policy to speed up the demolition of abandoned buildings, but there were too many to keep up with and no one knew where they all were, for the job of city planner was also vacant. MVOC’s color-coded map became the only functional model for the physical condition of the city. In 2005, after convening fourteen hundred residents in Stambaugh Auditorium to talk about Youngstown’s future, the city had produced an ambitious document called 2010 Plan. It was the first rational effort to deal with the fact of the city’s decline—the fact that it had shrunk. That’s how Youngstown looked, like a man who’d lost a lot of weight in an illness but was still wearing his baggy old clothes—big open spaces without enough people and structures to fill them. The imbalance between scale and inhabitants made the city feel empty, except for a few lonely figures wandering the streets. The term “shrinking cities” was coming into vogue—it was often applied to Detroit—and because 2010 Plan discussed the need to reduce municipal services to a realistic level given the reduced population, Youngstown was hailed as a pioneer. There was a lot of talk about community gardens, pocket parks, beekeeping, chicken coops. In 2005, The New York Times Magazine put 2010 Plan on its annual list of the year’s best ideas. Youngstown was in danger of becoming a media darling.

  No one outside the city knew that the plan was never acted on. It was too explosive, because it meant that some people would have to move. Who would those people be? Older black homeowners on the east side who had decided not to leave and were holding on to their history. Many of them believed that industry was going to come back. Where would they be moved to? White areas like the west side. When Tammy heard about the idea, she hated it. She immediately thought of people she knew—Arlette Gatewood, a retired steelworker and union activist who was still living way out on the east side near the Pennsylvania line in an area that was turning to woodland. Or Miss Sybil, her older friend from the east side. She thought about the house her great-uncle built. Yes, the city could no longer afford garbage collection and water lines throughout the metropolitan area. She got that. “But at the same time, why would Ms. Jones want to move out of the house she’s paid for, she raised her children in, and go somewhere else?”

  Instead of 2010 Plan, Tammy was focused on the small steps that her leaders, the neighborhood people she was training, could take. She organized an event at which a slumlord named Mark King was called out for buying three hundred properties all over the city during the housing bubble and allowing 20 percent of them to become uninhabitable. It was covered in the local media, and the next day King showed up at the organization’s downtown office asking what he had to do to stop getting bad press. Tammy recruited Miss Sybil to speak at the event, telling her that the east side needed to have a voice, which was how she became vice chair of MVOC. Miss Sybil told Tammy that people on the east side were starting to organize neighborhood groups, feeling a few tremors of hope. “Anybody that comes and throws you a line,” she said, “you’re going to grab it.”

  The job let Tammy see Youngstown in a new way, as if by walking streets and knocking on doors and mapping neighborhoods she was able for the first time to get a broader view of the place where she’d lived all her life and see it whole. She had always put the blame on individuals for failing to help themselves. “One of the things that would frustrate me is when you see a person who ain’t got nothing, ain’t trying to get nothing, and don’t want nothing. An unmotivated person who doesn’t want to get better.” There was a lot of that in Youngstown, but now she saw it as the problem of a community. Generational poverty, failed schools, the loss of jobs—“A lot of it is not that they don’t want. It is because the system is designed in some instances like it feeds on people a little bit and messes up people’s minds. People get caught in it and they don’t know how to stop it.” In her own life she had stopped it, but she had never thought about politics—the city, the state, the country.

  * * *

  Tammy might have been the last black person in Youngstown to hear of Barack Obama. She was so consumed with her kids, her job, her classes, her church, that she never followed the news and wasn’t aware of a serious black contender for the presidency—who had once been a community organizer, of all things—until the start of 2008. When she had turned eighteen, Granny had told her to register to vote, to register as a Democrat, and to vote for the Democrat. So she always voted, without paying attention to the candidates. She knew more about the mayor’s races than the presidential. They talked about politics a little at Packard, and in 2004 she couldn’t understand why so many workers there—white women especially—everyday working-class people like her were voting for Bush because of their religious beliefs. Mostly, though, she thought of politics as a dirty business. Youngstown was one of the most corrupt cities in America—a judge went to jail, the sheriff went to jail, and the congressman for most of her adult life was James Traficant, a mob politician who remained popular in Youngstown even after he was expelled from Congress and went to prison for bribery and racketeering, because Youngstown was populist, anti-institutional, and Traficant made a flamboyant career of telling powerful people to kiss his ass.

  Her friend Karen from Packard was the one who got her interested in Obama. Tammy didn’t think America was ready for that—she thought Hillary Clinton would be the nominee because they’d accept a white woman before a black man. But she went with Karen to hear Obama speak at Youngstown State in February, and Tammy was so impressed that she went home and wrote up some notes on what he’d said. Over the summer she knocked on a lot of doors on the east side in MVOC’s get-out-the-vote campaign. Some people were saying, “We got a chance for a black man to be president,” and other people were saying, “They ain’t going to elect a black president,” but she had never seen such excitement about an election. Even her father volunteered for the Democratic Party, making phone calls from the local office—he had never done anything like that. He drank, ate, and slept Barack Obama. Her divorce and her new job had opened up a big rift between her and her dad, but they came back together over Obama, phoning each other to swap stories about canvassing. Once, her dad called and said, “If another person tells me they are not going to vote for Barack Obama because they think he’s going to get assassinated, I might kill myself.”

  On election night there was a pizza party at the MVOC offices. It was the first time Tammy had ever tasted Jameson’s. When Obama won, and he came out with his family to give his victory speech, Tammy couldn’t quite shake a sense of disbelief. When she was little, Granny had bought her the three-volume Ebony Success Library, about the achievements of black people throughout history, and in turn Tammy always tried hard to make her children proud of being black. During Black History Month at school, she made sure they wrote their reports on people who weren’t the usual suspects. In fifth grade her older daughter wrote about the civil rights activist Ella Baker, but the teacher, who had never heard of Baker, rejected the report.

  People could pick and choose whether someone was an important inventor or activist, but a black president—nobody could deny that. It wasn’
t just black history, it was American history. Afterward, Tammy hung a framed picture of the forty-fourth president on the wall behind her office desk. It showed Obama on election night, waving to the throng in Chicago, above words he had spoken during the campaign: “Our destiny is not written for us, but by us.”

  DEAN PRICE

  Barack Obama was the first Democrat Dean ever voted for. It was a no-brainer—if Obama had been a white man, 80 percent of the country would have gone for him. Obama, not John McCain or Sarah Palin, came to Martinsville, Virginia, in the August heat of that election year and told a crowd in the community college gym, “I will fight for you every single day. I will wake up in that White House thinking about the people of Martinsville and the people of Henry County, and how I can make your life better.” Obama understood that the old system had failed, and whether or not he knew about biodiesel, he kept talking about a new green economy. That was music to Dean’s ears.

  In 2008, the rest of the country started to catch up to the Piedmont. After the Wall Street collapse in September, millions of people lost their jobs, and January, the month when Obama took the oath of office and promised “a new era of responsibility,” was the worst month in decades. Huge companies like General Motors were on the verge of extinction. Wachovia Bank, which had once been a pillar of Winston-Salem, went under, along with other banks from Wall Street to Seattle. One establishment institution after another trembled and fell. Writers were using terms like “the Great Recession” and “the end of the suburbs.” It was the worst time since the worst time of all. Dean believed that the American people were ready for radical changes. Electing a black president was just the first of them.