by Bryant Simon
Just days after the fire, Chief Fuller met with reporters and told a different story. He scoffed at the notion that he had signed off on a locked door. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Can you imagine us sorting through a big bunch of keys every time there’s a fire? We’re trained in forcible entry, and we carry bolt cutters on the trucks. We don’t need to fool with keys.” Still, Fuller’s denials did not fully put an end to the rumors, not in 1991 or years later, that he had okayed the locking of the back door to stop the theft of chickens and that he or someone in his department had had a key to that exit.83
A couple of months after the fire, L. Bradford Barringer also talked about exit doors, the character of Imperial workers, and theft. The owner of a Stanly County construction company and a member of the state OSHA advisory board, Barringer told Raleigh News and Observer reporter C.E. Yandle, “I imagine they stole chickens as fast as they could go. If there had been more honest employees the doors probably wouldn’t have been locked.” “Employers,” he reasoned, “get frustrated.”84
Even if Chief Fuller didn’t justify, like Bradford Barringer did, the locking of the doors because of stealing (and the compromised integrity of Imperial employees), and even if he didn’t have keys to the doors, he never practiced anything that could be mistaken for vigilant oversight to protect the lives of the men and women in the town’s factories. The eight people in his department didn’t regularly inspect Hamlet’s industrial sites. Despite three fires at the Imperial plant in the 1980s, and chatter around the small town about the dangers inside the building, Fuller never knocked on the door with a pad and paper in hand ready to take notes and make recommendations. Some remember him in the factory, but none can recall him looking closely at the fryer, faulty wiring, or exit routes. And his department never drew up a firefighting plan for the building like the Rockingham Fire Department did with most industrial sites in its jurisdiction.85
On the day of the fire, Rockingham firefighter Frankie Moree arrived on the scene around 8:30 a.m. with the very first wave of firefighters and met with his Hamlet counterparts. To this day, he remains surprised, stunned even, that they didn’t have a map of the plant to share with him and that they didn’t know the location of the nearest water source. The Hamlet men were decent firefighters, Moree observed that day and on previous occasions working with them, but they weren’t prepared for the fire. “We burned a couple of houses every week” for practice, he recalled. Northside, East Rockingham, and Cordova would send over their crews to join in the drills and talk about the best ways to suppress the fires. But, he said, “I never saw anyone from Hamlet come over.”86
Even when the law instructed Fuller to conduct inspections, a loophole and budget matters kept him away from the town’s industrial sites. During the 1991 legislative session, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a measure requiring all of the state’s municipal and county governing units to appoint a fire inspector by July 1 of that year. The inspectors were expected to use the state’s new uniform and comprehensive fire code to check every commercial building in their jurisdiction. But the state, operating on the cheap, didn’t fund the program. By the summer deadline for compliance, only 257 of the state’s 613 governmental units had named a fire inspector. Hamlet was one of those places that hadn’t designated anyone for the job. “We can’t afford it . . . I don’t have the people to do it,” maintained Chief Fuller. The city and the fire department insisted that they lacked the money to pay for inspections, so they didn’t automatically inspect the commercial buildings and factories in their community. Local officials talked about having the Rockingham Fire Department conduct the inspections because it had the personnel, but the details never got worked out. In the end, no one ever walked through the Imperial plant long enough to notice the bolted door by the dumpster or the locked exit in the breakroom. No government official, except for the USDA men, ever made note in public or in writing that the Bridges Street factory lacked working sprinklers or that dangerous fluids sometimes leaked from connections perilously close to jets of gas flames. Again, no one said anything, perhaps because, as one local firefighter remarked, “You have two fires in this plant. Two. But no one gave a damn. No one.”87
Yet the silence of local, state, and federal firefighters and inspectors wasn’t enough for Emmett Roe. He kept on making more silence. In some ways, that was really what he and his son produced on Bridges Street. They processed silence as diligently and as aggressively as they processed chickens.
“I didn’t know anybody who worked there,” Hamlet’s Ruth Land, the daughter of a railroad engineer and wife of a tractor-trailer dealer, told a reporter in 1991. “Just people you didn’t know worked down there.” Hiding the poor didn’t just happen in Hamlet, or in places on the margins; it was, as the journalist Jonathan Kozol lamented, a national phenomenon in the years after 1980 as trade unionism and workplace activism waned against a backdrop of rising unemployment, swelling labor markets, and increased government efforts to attract new jobs.88 If laborers and their representatives didn’t speak up and their voices couldn’t be heard, the government didn’t have to spend money to listen to them, help them, or protect them. These were exactly the kinds of people Roe and his counterparts relocating to the American South and the Global South were looking for as employees—people easily replaced, easily silenced, and easily tucked away and out of sight.
Rockingham firefighter Moree, whose father had worked inside the Buttercup plant when only white people did, described the labor situation even more bluntly. “At that time,” he said, some of the people in power in Hamlet “considered those workers just a bunch a damn niggers there [at Imperial], and no one cared.”89
Over the years, the Roes relied on the clerks at the government-run employment services offices in Hamlet, Rockingham, and other nearby towns to funnel the kind of workers no one cared about to their doorstep. The agency sent them single women with children, often from the projects in South Hamlet near Bridges Street or from one of the shotgun shacks in the North Yard on the other side of town. They sent high school dropouts. They sent those discarded by the textile mills and by Clark Equipment after it left the county in the late 1980s. After cycling through the local reserve army of the underemployed and undereducated, the Roes cast a wider net. They employed women and men from Bennettsville, South Carolina, and Gibson, North Carolina, whistle-stop towns even more economically depleted than Hamlet was, who were willing to drive twenty and thirty minutes each way by car for a low-paying job in a dank chicken plant. These, too, were people invisible to Ruth Land and local officials.90
Hamlet resident O’Neal Patrick lived close enough to the Imperial plant to hear the screams of the women and men trapped inside on the morning of the fire. A few days later, he told a reporter from National Public Radio that “jobs are so hard to come by in Hamlet that even if the workers didn’t like the conditions at the plant, they were afraid to quit. There’s no place you can get a job around here. And the poultry plant is about . . . the only . . . place you can get a job and they treat you like dirt when you’re there. They care more about their chicken than they do a human.”91
“You couldn’t complain, you couldn’t say anything,” Imperial line worker Loretta Goodwin remembered. If you did, “you were out of there.” But the problem was that, as Annette Zimmerman explained twenty years after the fire while thinking about the local labor market, “there was nothing . . . to do, and this,” she remarked, pointing in the direction of the Imperial site, “was just about it.”
The lack of employment options reinforced workers’ silence. Maggie Brown said that although she and her co-workers talked on breaks and on their way home from work about the lack of fire drills, slippery floors, exposed electrical wires, and locked doors, she knew of no one who complained to the Roes or the supervisors. “We weren’t allowed to speak to Emmett Roe,” recalled Lorrie Boyle. “They were afraid that if they did” say anything, added onetime packing room worker Mary Ann Primus-Darien,
“they would get fired.”92
“The managers didn’t talk to anyone like they was human,” Mary Pouncey said about Imperial. “But we managed. When you got three or four children, and that is all you have, you can put aside what he says.” So she stayed quiet about the popping sounds she heard coming from the fryer and about the plant’s unmarked exits. “They never had a drill, at least while I was working there,” Pouncey told a documentary film crew in 1992. “There was no sprinkler system. There was a lot that you knew that wasn’t right, but if you complained about it, you got fired.”93
Line workers sometimes fashioned their own silences. Ada Blanchard grew up outside of Rockingham on a sandy patch of land her father worked as a sharecropper. In her teens, she ran off to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and then to Philadelphia. A failed marriage brought her back to North Carolina in the mid-1980s. Years after the fire, she said that she had learned to speak up for herself up North. She called herself a “loud mouth.” When she first started working at Imperial, she complained all the time about the lack of fire drills and the flash fires breaking out near the gigantic fryer. She wanted to say something to the bosses, but her co-workers stopped her. Every time she was about to point out some shortcoming, they reminded her of the realities of both her life and the local political economy. They told her what she already knew: there weren’t many jobs in Richmond County that paid above minimum wage, especially if you were a black woman with kids like Blanchard and 70 to 75 percent of her co-workers in the trim room, packing room, and processing room were. You just had to keep quiet and keep your thoughts to yourself and your friends. Working in a small town in North Carolina and holding on to a job meant keeping your mouth shut and keeping the secrets of the plant secret.94
Emmett Roe was never going to be the first to talk. Even after the fire, he maintained a terse, sometimes belligerent silence. Based then in an Atlanta suburb, he arrived in Hamlet within twenty-four hours of the fire breaking out. When a radio reporter asked him about the locked doors, he shrugged and said he didn’t know anything about them. When two reporters from the Charlotte Observer tried to slip into Imperial’s office across the road from the charred plant, Roe told them to leave and slammed the door in their faces. Asked to confirm that he was, in fact, Emmett Roe, he shot back, “Never mind who I am. It’s not important.” When one of the reporters persisted, Roe gave him the finger.95
Roe took a softer approach a few days later. Several people who saw him after the fire said he was crushed. Mayor Covington remembers him weeping on the phone. Another associate saw him with his chin buried in his chest.96 In a letter to “All Employees,” typed out in all capital letters, he wrote, “THERE IS NO QUESTION BUT THAT THIS HAS BEEN A TRAGEDY FOR THE FAMILY MEMBERS OF ALL IMPERIAL EMPLOYEES, PARTICULARLY OF THOSE WHO LOST THEIR LIVES OR WERE INJURED.” Concluding his five-sentence note, he got as emotional as he would get in public, yet he did not take any responsibility for the tragedy, saying, “OUR HEARTS, OUR THOUGHTS, AND OUR PRAYERS ARE WITH ALL THOSE IN THE COMMUNITY WHO ARE SUFFERING A LOSS AS A RESULT OF THE ACCIDENT.”97
After that, Emmett Roe went quiet again, never explaining what he meant when he called the fire an accident. He never spoke at length with city officials. He never sent the families of the dead or injured get-well notes or sympathy cards. Even as “Wanted for Murder” posters with his picture on them started to pop up in union halls and churches across the United States, he said nothing.98
3
CHICKEN
It was more sticky than hot on Labor Day in 1991 along North Carolina’s roadways. Not even having the air-conditioning cranked up all the way in a car could blunt the humidity or cool down the black vinyl seats. Some families were, no doubt, looking to break up the ride. Get something cold to drink, a burger, perhaps some chicken strips, and an ice cream cone to finish the meal. When they reached the top of a ramp leading off just about any highway in the Tar Heel state, there was a McDonald’s, and a Hardees a little farther down the road, and maybe a Bojangles or a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Shoney’s sometimes sat across the median from the McDonald’s. Getting something to eat at the casual, medium-priced restaurant chain would take a few minutes longer than at the fast food places, but it would be cooler in there, and it wouldn’t hurt, some parents surely thought, to sit for a while and relax before getting started back on the road and getting sweaty all over again.
Once Shoney’s customers had settled into their booth, a server would come over and fill up tall plastic glasses with sweet tea and water. She would pass the adults laminated tablets that unfolded like an accordion into sixteen pages of burgers, Salisbury steaks, and marinated chicken and rice dishes. The kids’ menus made out of paper featured games of Tic Tac Toe next to cartoon pictures of the smiling Berenstain Bears family. This time of year the menus doubled as book covers. On one side of the menu, there were instructions for how to turn it into a protective shield for the history or science textbooks that teachers would hand out on the first day of school a few days later. Along the sides, the menu offered educational advice. “Writing,” it coached, “teaches us to think more clearly and make our ideas known to others.” And history “is the story of what we did and where we went!”
Food choices filled the other side of the menu. Everything for the kids was cheap. Shoney’s charged just 99 cents for spaghetti. The “Junior All-American” with two burgers and fries cost $2.47. Shoney’s sold a “Kid’s Chicken Dinner” with “fried chicken fillets,” french fries, and a “slice of dinner bread” for $1.99.
Of course, the Shoney’s menu didn’t say where the fillets came from, though if that highway ran through North Carolina, the chicken products probably came from the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet. But it didn’t say that, nor did it say anything about the powerful forces that allowed Imperial to supply those chicken products so cheaply. Still, some families at Shoney’s that weekend probably commented on what a good deal they got when they ordered the chicken dinner from the kids’ menu or even from the adult one. Maybe one of them even noted how chicken prices in general seemed to going down while just about everything else seemed to cost more.1
A watershed moment in the history of American eating took place in 1992.2 That was the year that per capita chicken consumption surpassed per capita beef consumption in the United States, turning the nation, in the words of one cook, from a “beef country to a chicken country.”3 The defeat of steak and hamburger stemmed from nothing more complicated than “simple economics,” the pop economist Daniel Gross contended years later. By that, he meant price.4 While the cost of beef steadily rose during the postwar years even as warnings about the health risks associated with red meat aired on television and flashed across newspapers headlines, chicken got cheaper and cheaper. In fact, in 1987, chicken cost the same in real dollars as it had in 1923.5
But there was nothing simple about the making of cheap chicken. Each bird, each leg and thigh part, each skinless, boneless breast, and each nugget and golden fried fillet served at Shoney’s was a product of what might best be called poultry capitalism, a tightly wound economic system that generated relentless competition among producers and manufacturers; the ceaseless exploitation of farmers and slaughterhouse and processing plant workers; the industrialization of animals themselves; the constant innovation of biologists, marketers, and flavor specialists; and, in the end, lower consumer prices hiding a host of unseen and unaccounted-for external costs.6
Imperial Food Products was a small, even marginal, player in the system of poultry capitalism that emerged in postwar America. Each week in 1991, the company bought somewhere in the neighborhood of 144,000 skinless, boneless chicken breasts from, among other places, Georgia-based Cagle’s, a company bigger than Imperial but a fraction of the size of the big multi-state and multi-national players, Perdue, Tyson, and Holly Farms. They were the kings of growing, slaughtering, and processing chicken and making it the cheapest source of meat-based protein in the United States in the last decade of th
e twentieth century.
During the early part of the century, the poultry industry in the United States operated on a relatively small scale. Rural women, with the help of their children, raised from a handful to a few dozen chickens for eggs and the occasional holiday supper. The animals roamed around the farmhouse, pecking at seeds and leftovers thrown in their direction. Living off discarded scraps, the birds remained thin and gaunt. Some families, like the Cagles, started to purchase a few extra bags of feed or some leftover corn and began to experiment with more intensive chicken growing, raising scores of chicks in low-slung wood coops, selling live hens to local grocers to earn some extra cash, and trading eggs for bacon and help with a broken tractor. Even this slightly larger, but still small-scale, cultivation made good economic and biological sense given the well-known fact that chickens easily passed along viruses and other illnesses. Because of this, it didn’t pay to raise too many of the animals at once in the same place, but this also limited output and kept poultry prices relatively high.7
But George L. Cagle, like others in the changing world of chicken, had bigger ambitions than a chicken coop or two in the countryside. In 1940, he used $8,000 from his savings to open a poultry retail shop in Atlanta’s bustling Five Points section. Some of the chickens in the store came from his farm, but most came from other growers scattered around northern Georgia. Cagle’s business took off, and the family started to sell thousands of pounds of meat each week. With the outbreak of World War II, the government rationed beef, so families could only buy a few pounds of steak or hamburger each month for their dinners and Sunday suppers after church.8 Demand for chicken soared as poultry suddenly had to fill the void for many American families who couldn’t imagine a proper meal without a meat-based protein dish on the center of the plate. War workers on their way home from production jobs and housekeepers doing the shopping for their families would stop by the Cagle store to pick up a whole chicken. They would point to the bird they wanted and wait while Cagle or his teenaged son, Douglas, plucked the feathers and cut off the head. The neck and feet were still on when the customer walked out the door. Soon, restaurants, hotels, and hospitals called on Cagle for chickens. They, too, faced beef cutbacks because of rationing. While the company grew, it remained dependent on a slew of small and medium-size chicken growers for its main product. But this supply chain would have to change if Cagle wanted to expand his business and make more money.