by Bryant Simon
One day, Imperial worker Thomas Oates picked up a piece of chicken off the floor and started to carry it over to the “inedible room” when Brad Roe spotted him.
“Where are you going with that damn chicken?” Roe asked, according to what Oates told a journalist in the late fall of 1991. “I want the [expletive] chicken picked up and put in the box.”
Oates replied that he was following “the USDA man’s instructions.”
“I ain’t the USDA man,” Roe shot back, Oates recounted. “I own this place.”
Another time, Oates said, he told Brad Roe that some of the chicken in the cooler smelled so bad it would “send a buzzard running for a gas mask.” Roe, he claimed, brushed off the warning and let him know, “As long as it’s not green, go ahead and run it.”67
But the boldest and most significant way that Roe and his father tried to protect themselves against the pressures that poultry capitalism exerted on smaller players was to become a bigger player. From 1987 to 1990, they opened three new plants and moved in new business directions, all in the hopes of limiting their exposure to the fluctuations of the cheap chicken market. Yet the opposite happened. With each new plant and each new investment came new vulnerabilities, more debt, and greater pressure on the bottom line, which must have seemed to the Roes like it was always moving down in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In some ways, the Roes were a lot like the growers that Cagle’s bought its chickens from; they were at the mercy of bigger forces, stuck in an economy in which they had only a limited number of possible customers and therefore had little control over their own economic fate. In order to survive in this world, the Roes built systems based on debt and uncertainty, speed and terror, cruelty and compulsion, repressed voices and official neglect. But even this dangerous and risky combination of tactics wasn’t enough to overcome the larger system of cheap.
In 1987, with an eye toward diversifying, Emmett Roe bought a Colorado meat-processing plant that did some work with beef. The next year, Roe made his biggest and riskiest move ever. Putting down his business and personal assets as collateral, he took out a loan from Northwestern Bank in Pennsylvania for $5 million. He dumped some of the money into the Hamlet plant. He used the rest, along with some capital from his nephew Edward Woncik, to buy Haverpride Farms from Northern Pride, a British-based corporation. Located in Tarrant, Alabama, just a few miles northeast of Birmingham, Haverpride Farms specialized in making chicken nuggets and patties. Though sales had lagged at the sprawling facility, Roe thought he could turn the oversize operation around, or perhaps he thought that expanding his enterprises represented the only way for his company to survive in the cutthroat world of further-processed chicken and compete with the economies of scale and branding efforts of the biggest players in the market.
In 1989, a couple of years after the Haverpride acquisition, Emmett Roe bought another factory, acquiring the abandoned Mrs. Kinser’s facility just off Main Street in Cumming, Georgia, for $725,000.68 Before it became part of Imperial, the plant made pimento cheese spread and coleslaw packaged in plastic tubs for picnics and backyard barbeques. Around the time he opened the Cumming branch, Roe shut down the Moosic plant for good and moved with his wife into a three-thousand-square-foot townhouse in Dunwoody, Georgia, a prosperous north Atlanta suburb. That put him within a day’s drive of most of the satellites in his burgeoning, yet debt-strapped, chicken empire.69
Things fell apart in a hurry for Roe. The Colorado business never really got going. Far from Roe’s home base and outside the reach of his Rolodex of chicken contacts, the plant struggled. It mostly made products for a single buyer, but by the late 1980s that buyer had pulled out. Soon, the plant ran below capacity, opening just a couple of days a week.
Meanwhile, just as the Cumming plant started to crank out chicken nuggets and other chicken products, a fire caused by an electrical malfunction broke out there on Christmas Day 1989.70 As inspectors combed through the scorched sections of the plant, they found broken sprinklers, a faulty ventilation system, and a couple of poorly marked exits. The bill for the damages added up to $1.2 million, more than the factory cost in the first place. Roe temporarily moved equipment and production to a nearby facility. Fire or no fire, he had to pay his bank note, so he couldn’t stop making nuggets and tenders. Not long after getting the Cumming site back up and running, in December 1990 another fire broke out. This one was smaller and less intense than the previous one. Yet despite the setbacks in Georgia and Colorado, Roe’s biggest problems were in the rambling plant in Tarrant, Alabama.71
Shortly after purchasing the Haverpride facility, Roe shook hands on a multi-year deal worth as much as $20 million to supply generic nuggets to Lyle Farms, Inc. The Roswell, Georgia–based food brokerage planned to sell Roe’s further-processed microwavable chicken products to supermarket chains and other outlets under the Big Top, Shur-Fine, and Jewell labels. Almost as soon as the nuggets hit the freezer aisles and gas station warming trays, Lyle officials claimed that they started to receive complaints. “Where’s the chicken?” customers supposedly asked. Lyle accused Roe’s company of using rancid meat and of cutting costs and corners by concocting nuggets full of more than the usual amount of filler, breading, and water. Perhaps this was the only way Emmett Roe, the firm’s chief decision maker, could service his mounting debts or deal with the razor-thin margins in big food. Or perhaps Lyle was flexing its muscles and shaking down a smaller player in the pecking order of poultry capitalism.72
By March 1990, Lyle had allegedly reneged on its deal with Roe’s company. Yet it kept, according to one inside source, as much as a million dollars’ worth of unpaid-for chicken products. This was money that Roe didn’t have.73 By then, the only contract the hulking Haverpride plant still had left was to supply nuggets to an Alabama school district for lunches. This deal was set to expire when classes ended late that spring. That didn’t give Haverpride enough cash to cover its bills and keep the factory running. And there was no extra money from any of the other parts of Roe’s shaky chicken empire to bail out the Alabama branch. By this point, Roe hadn’t paid in full the finance corporation he relied on for debt relief or his chicken suppliers in months. His companies in Georgia and North Carolina owed thousands in back taxes, and the Alabama outlet fell so far behind on its electric bill that the power company turned off the lights. Even before Haverpride went dark, Roe reportedly stopped paying his share of his employees’ health care coverage, though he apparently continued to draw deductions for this expense out of their paychecks, using the funds, it seems, to cover other costs and keep the plant open and their jobs still going. Haverpride operatives only found out about the owner’s moves when they went to the doctor’s office and discovered that they had no insurance.74
When Emmett Roe closed the plant in Alabama in 1990, he didn’t tell anyone ahead of time. He left without giving workers a sixty-day notice as federal law required. More than a hundred Haverpride employees sued Roe and Imperial Food Products. The United States District Court in Birmingham awarded them more than $250,000 in severance pay. But when the fire broke out in Hamlet the next year, none of the Haverpride laborers had yet received any money, and many were still looking for work.75
Following the setbacks in Alabama, Colorado, and Georgia, Emmett Roe focused his energies on Hamlet. Workers recalled seeing him around the plant more. He and Brad ratcheted up production on Bridges Street after the Haverpride closure, steadily running a second shift and speeding up the lines. They needed the Hamlet plant to help turn the family company’s fortunes around. It was at this point, as Imperial cranked up production, that the Hamlet city manager, Ron Niland, started to notice those “cannonball”-size chunks of grease in the local water supply.76
Still, the bank notes and creditors hung over the Roes’ heads and the heads of their workers, even if they didn’t know it yet.77 When repairs needed to be made in Hamlet, Brad Roe, the person usually on the scene, ordered the mechanics to move as quickly as possible. He told them to u
se the parts they had, even if they weren’t the exact right ones. A little clamp or an extra screw could get the job done. Usually, the maintenance crew didn’t turn off the gigantic three-hundred-gallon fryer when they worked around it. It would take an hour to get it heated back up again, and that would waste money and leave workers sitting around the breakroom or outside on company time. Nothing ran at Imperial without the fryer, explained former employee Martin Quick. Roe could not have people waiting around. This same money-saving logic persuaded him to lock the breakroom and side doors at the Hamlet plant. When workers got caught sneaking out for a smoke, or when a few of them lifted a box or two of tenders, it cost the company money. More important, they locked the doors because it satisfied the USDA inspectors by keeping the flies out and the factory open. At this point, there was no way Imperial could afford to have another one of its factories shut down.78
Persevering was never about fairness or equity. It was about dealing with the risks of poultry capitalism. In 1991, every part of Emmett and Brad Roe’s business was exposed to risk, and they were trying the best they could to stabilize things and keep going. Yet eliminating risks for management meant multiplying risks for animals, for workers, and for the city of Hamlet. This persistent precariousness was woven into every corner and every venture in the risky business of cheap chickens.79
4
LABOR
Even with her three daughters standing behind her, Georgia Quick seemed alone, lost in solitude. Maybe the memories of the sinister smoke and impenetrable darkness at the Imperial Food Products factory that day in 1991 set her apart. Or perhaps it was her past that made her seem so isolated, or maybe it was the people who weren’t there that made her come off as somewhat detached.1
Georgia Ann Foster was born in Chesterfield, South Carolina, at the tail end of the baby boom, on April 4, 1960. Her father didn’t stay around long—at least not long enough for Georgia to get to know him. Unsure if she could make it on her own, Georgia’s mother took Georgia and her sister across the state line to live with a relative in Gibson, North Carolina, a speck on a highway map eleven miles south of Hamlet and a stone’s throw from the South Carolina border.
Not long after moving, her mother met and married another man. Georgia’s stepfather took one look at his new daughter’s high cheekbones, light skin, and faint freckles and said “no way.” He wasn’t having a white man’s child live in his house. Georgia never met her biological father, so she couldn’t say for sure whether she was part white or maybe part Native American or part something else. Her mother didn’t provide many details about the family tree either. Years later, Georgia looked for her dad, hoping to sit down in the same room with him and study his face and hear his stories, but she didn’t get to him before he died.
With her mom starting a new life with her new husband, an aunt raised Georgia and her sister in rural Scotland County, North Carolina. The family never owned any land. They worked as sharecroppers and day laborers, picking cotton and peaches and doing all kinds of other jobs to get by. Georgia grew up doing what farm girls do. When she wasn’t at school or in the fields, she fed chickens in the yard and did a list of chores. She cleaned pots and dusted, but no one really taught her how to cook.
Country life did, though, teach her the significance of the seasons. Early fall was for picking cotton, spring for planting and getting the fields ready, and mid-summer represented the lay-by time to take it easy and tidy up the house, mend fences, and fix the tractor. Even though she missed a day of school here and there to work in the fields, Georgia still managed to graduate from high school, earning her diploma from Scotland County High School in Laurinburg in 1979.
As Georgia got older, the seasons started to lose some of their meaning. County and state workers poured hot tar over gravel paths and made the nearby towns an easy drive away. The mills, lumberyards, railroads, government offices, and hardware stores enticed more men with promises of work not subject to the ups and downs of distant commodities markets or the whims of the weather. Some of these jobs paid enough money to buy a beat-up car and packets of hot dogs that went in new refrigerators bought on credit and paid for with cash each week. It didn’t matter so much anymore how many kids you had or how much land you owned or rented or what kind of deal you struck with the landlord and the merchant for seeds and fertilizer. What mattered in this changing rural world was a good, steady job—a job that could lift a man without a high school education and his family into the upper ranks of the working class or the bottom ranks of the middle class. A job that paid a man enough so that his wife could stay at home and cook and clean and tend to a vegetable garden and a yard full of hens and roosters, even if she did have to work outside the home every once in a while when illness, injury, or a leaky transmission pushed the family budget to the brink.
By the time she was in her late teens, Georgia wanted to get out of her aunt’s house and “be on her own.” Garry Quick seemed like the way to do that. He had a decent job at a nearby cotton gin. When farmers brought their crops in from the fields, he unloaded the bags of raw cotton and then loaded up the bales of processed fleece. He made sure the machines ran smoothly and fixed them when they jammed with rocks and sticks. The rhythms of cotton growing still mattered to him. His wallet was full between January and July, and a little lighter in between. When farmers weren’t bringing in their crops, Quick did odd jobs for his boss and others in town. For the most part, the white man who owned the cotton gin treated him well. He paid him on time and let him live in the house next to the gin rent free. Garry could afford a few Christmas presents and an occasional night on the town. That job and the somewhat steady paycheck that came with it made the slightly older Garry Quick attractive to nineteen-year-old Georgia Foster.
Georgia and Garry got married within weeks of Georgia’s high school graduation, on June 20, 1979. She packed up her stuff from her aunt’s house and moved into the home next to the cotton gin. “I had to learn to cook,” she remembers. Pretty soon, she could cut up a chicken on her own and put three meals a day on the table. A few years later, Georgia and Garry’s daughter, Alicia, was born. For a while, things went pretty smoothly for the young Quick family, but the sweeping forces of history and economic change had them in their sights.
Cotton’s kingdom crumbled in postwar North Carolina. In 1980, the state’s cotton output matched what it had been in 1840, and that amounted to just one-sixth of the total harvested in 1926.2 With overhead costs rising, global competition stiffening, and crop prices fluctuating, some farmers gambled on animal crops, a gamble that paid off only for a few. Others gave up on the land, except for tending to a garden, and joined the exodus into town for work. Others tried their luck up north or in the cities of the South. For Garry Quick, fewer cotton farmers meant less cotton to process at the gin, and this wasn’t good for him. By the mid-1980s, his somewhat steady job became even less steady. Instead of nearly year-round work, he started to get a few months here and a few months there. To make up for the shortfall, he mowed lawns and picked fruit. As money came in fits and spurts, emotions ebbed and flowed in the Quick household.3
Georgia didn’t like waiting for Garry to give her a few dollars to pay the phone company or buy groceries or cleaning supplies. She needed money, her own money, even if getting a job outside the home did run the risk of driving another wedge between her and her husband.
“I wasn’t interested in the factory,” Georgia remembered about the start of her job search in the 1980s. With this in mind, she didn’t fill out an application at White’s Poultry or Perdue, slaughterhouses in and around Rockingham, or at any of the textile mills in Richmond County, not that they were hiring anyway. She wanted what people who lived in the country called “a clean job,” one that was inside and not too hot or messy. She got one that paid minimum wage as a cashier at Roses, a Henderson-based discount department store. She left that job to work at Family Dollar, another, though slightly more down-market, North Carolina–based retail chain. They
hired her as an assistant manager, and promised her a promotion if she worked hard and followed the rules.
“At the time,” Georgia commented, “You didn’t see many blacks as managers.”
Not long after she got the position, however, Georgia’s store started to experience what her bosses labeled as significant “shrinkage,” or theft. No one accused her directly of any wrongdoing, but a supervisor ordered her to take a polygraph test. Nervous, perhaps, about sitting in a room with all of those wires and with a white man in a tie, she apparently didn’t pass. Now, she was out of a job, and out of an opportunity to climb out of the rut of small-town, low-paid, dead-end labor.4
By this time, Georgia had car payments to make every month on top of everything else. Needing a job right away, she headed to the employment bureau; they sent her to Marley’s Engineering Products, a firm specializing in heating and cooling parts, located in Bennettsville, South Carolina, twelve miles away from her house. There, as she put it, she “separated threads for minimum wage.” One of her co-workers there told her about Imperial Food Products. The company paid $5.50 per hour, and that, Quick recalled, “caught my attention.” She also heard that the plant offered benefits, holiday bonuses, and a few paid vacation days each year. Her friend told her that, in addition, the company sometimes had overtime work available and paid time and a half for the extra hours. “The reason I went to Imperial,” Quick said, “was it was paying more than anywhere.”
During her job interview, if you can call it that, Imperial officials didn’t ask Georgia too many questions, though they probably did ask her if she had ever felt any tingling in her wrists and hands. As one supervisor explained, the company had one essential criteria for employment. It tried not to hire line workers with a history of repetitive-motion injuries.5 Quick must have told them that she felt okay and didn’t have any nagging aches or pains. She got hired at Imperial on Valentine’s Day 1989. “This,” she declared years later, “was the best a black woman with a little education could get.”