by Bryant Simon
The family that Ward’s father intermittently left became, for some, a statistic. But it was also a social fact. By 1980, single-parent homes were on the rise, especially in households where the parent still there, usually a woman, had a high school–level education or less, and this was especially true in the African American community. By 1990, women headed fully 40 percent of the nation’s black families. Richmond County followed the national trend. In Hamlet, women headed 34 percent of black families. As this number rose, in the South and elsewhere, poverty rates climbed. By 2000, women headed two-thirds of the nation’s poor families.50 It made brutal economic sense why single-parent households lagged behind two-parent households. With overall workforce participation rising and jobs in manufacturing plants and on the railroad disappearing, wages for working people in the United States fell across the board. One income, or one welfare check, simply wasn’t enough to support a family.
Given the absence of well-paying, steady jobs for men, women, observed Jesmyn Ward, “worked like men then, and raised their children the best they could.” That became, she thought, their “burden to bear.” “She could not leave,” Ward wrote of her mother, so “she worked and set about the business of raising her children.”51
Ward’s mother may have worked like a man, but the jobs she got cleaning homes and processing catfish didn’t pay like railroad work or work in an auto plant. As a result, her family, like so many families in the rural ghettos and other places where industrial work and union jobs disappeared, had to make ends meet on one salary, a salary pushed downward by a job market swelling with underskilled, undertrained, and systematically undereducated women of all races.52
Twenty-five people died in the Hamlet fire. Eighteen were women. Twelve of the plant employees who died were African American and twelve were white. The fire’s twenty-fifth victim was Philip Dawkins, the white truck driver for the Lance vending company, the one recognized by his firefighter son at the scene. This quick demographic profile of fire victims points to yet another dynamic of the rural ghettos of the 1980s. Twenty years after the protests in Birmingham and Selma, race still mattered in Hamlet and just about everywhere else in the United States. African Americans remained poorer than whites, and African American women remained concentrated at the bottom of the labor market. Most still cooked and prepared food, though not so much in other people’s homes as they had in the past. Now they were doing so in the small food-processing plants and slaughterhouses popping up along state and county roads across the Carolinas and other rural sections of the nation. At Imperial, somewhere around 75 percent of the line ladies were African American. But in every part of the factory white and black women worked side by side. The plant was, perhaps, one of the most integrated spaces in Hamlet. But while African Americans could get a job at Imperial and Family Dollar and go to the county high school and play football and baseball and attend formerly all-white universities in Chapel Hill and Raleigh, what’s clear is that many of the economic advantages of the post–civil rights era went to employers.
Imperial Food Products didn’t have to discriminate when it came to exploiting the vulnerable. Segregation had produced a divided labor market. Custom and law reserved some jobs, especially industrial jobs, for whites, and other positions, usually dirtier, lower paying work, for African Americans. As segregation-era statutes came off the books in North Carolina, poor whites, poor blacks, and poor Native Americans—Latinos had yet to move into the state in large numbers by 1991—now competed, quite often, for the same jobs.
In similar ways, the women’s movement added to the labor pool. Beginning in the 1970s, more women entered the workforce and they could apply for a broader range of jobs than ever before. But this progress also allowed a company like Imperial to equally underpay white and black women. To the Roes and those in their human relations department, anyone who filled out an application was, by definition, part of a cheap, easily disposable, and interchangeable labor supply. In other words, they were ideal workers to process chicken parts at fast speeds in dangerous conditions and keep quiet about it.53
When they took a job on Bridges Street, working outside the home was not new for Georgia Quick or Ada Blanchard or Lorrie Boyle. But without a husband around or a steady flow of money coming into their households from a second income, they had no choice but to take the highest-paying job available. They didn’t have the luxury of looking for clean work or getting paid less while they waited for a promotion. It didn’t really matter whether they liked what they did or not—it was a bonus when they did. They couldn’t pick a job based on safe working conditions; they simply hoped that employers valued their bodies and lives, but knew better and didn’t count on having anyone to protect them. With so few jobs available in their area, they couldn’t choose their boss or make him treat them right.
Work, of course, bled into home life. Imperial’s employees tried not to worry if they missed a parent-teacher conference or if they had to rely on the television as a babysitter after school and during the summer—they had to go to work. Even though most surely understood that preschool would benefit their children, they couldn’t afford any extra costs. This, of course, meant that their kids didn’t always enter kindergarten ready to learn, and that put them at greater risk, as a 1990s study by the Anne E. Casey Foundation revealed, “to experience academic failure and to drop out.” If that happened, the children joined the stream of cheap labor gathering in rural areas, helping to hold down their own wage rates and those of their moms and neighbors. As teens, the children of the working poor were more likely to get pregnant or run afoul of the law, getting caught in the grinding wheels of the emerging prison-industrial complex. If they did graduate from high school, they were less likely to go to college. Like poor kids everywhere, the least and moderately educated in rural towns faced long odds of economic success as adults.54
Imperial’s floor ladies saw the roads to poverty around them in every direction. But what choice did they have? As single moms relying on wages, not welfare, they couldn’t stop working, they couldn’t rest, and they couldn’t complain. It was hard to organize on the job, and most national unions bypassed people like Georgia Quick and places like Imperial in states like North Carolina because the odds of winning a contract didn’t make it worth the investment. Quick couldn’t quit or protest with her feet—not without a backup plan. Being a single mom, and that’s where Quick was headed, made choice an extravagance, muffled her voice, and cut her freedoms in half and then some. This combination of circumstances is what made Quick and her “super-exploitable” co-workers valuable—essential, really—commodities in the economy of cheap.55
The facts of cheap stared back at Quick every morning as she got up for work. She had to have a paycheck and she had to keep going, even if it meant trudging through pools of freezing water and enduring the insults and tirades of nasty foremen and the boss’s son.
Georgia Quick’s paycheck didn’t give her much of an upper hand over the welfare-reliant, and it didn’t insulate her or her daughter from risk. It didn’t protect her if her car broke down or if she twisted her ankle. It was, though, how she coped with the world of cheap.
Still, every paycheck came with possibilities. Georgia Quick and her co-workers Lillie Davis, Loretta Goodwin, and Annette Zimmerman brought home somewhere between $175 and $200 each week, more if they worked overtime on Saturdays and less if their hands hurt so bad that they couldn’t tie their shoes in the morning or if they had to rush one of their children to the emergency room and miss part of a shift. Yet their pay envelopes represented more than cash for boxes of cornmeal mix and paying down the electric bill. They purchased these women a sliver of independence.
Unlike many of her co-workers, Lillie Davis was married to a man with a decent job. He didn’t want his wife working at Imperial or anywhere else, but she insisted. She wanted money that was hers so that she had a say over what she picked up at the grocery store and the presents she bought at Christmas.56
&nb
sp; For Georgia Quick, a paycheck meant that she didn’t have to wait around the house to get money from her husband to buy a winter coat or pay the heating bill.
For Annette Zimmerman, the job represented a ticket out of the projects and away from the prying eyes of meddlesome caseworkers. During her years in public housing, government officials had come knocking on her door, grilling her about her wages and personal life. When she started to earn more money, working overtime and collecting time and half for these extra shifts, they had means-tested her and jacked up her rent. If someone spent more than two nights on her couch, they had wanted to know his name so they could put him on the lease. The whole complex where she lived had started to feel to her like a prison, especially after maintenance crews put up spotlights in the back and cameras in the front of the buildings. Working on the line at the Imperial plant provided Zimmerman with just enough money to rent a place of her own and gain a measure of privacy.57
Feelings of independence, however, never lasted long. Every paycheck also served as a reminder of the precariousness of the lives of Quick and Zimmerman and, to a lesser extent, Davis. A job for them did not mean financial security. It meant endless, unresolvable budgeting.
On average, Imperial workers allocated their weekly paychecks of $175 to $200 in roughly the following manner:
Housing
25%
Transportation
20%
Food
16%
Telephone
13%
Utilities
12%
For most, that left about $30 a week for health care and medicine, clothing, child care, toiletries, cleaning materials, pencils, notebooks and other school supplies, furniture, appliances, cable television, and going out to a movie and a meal at Hardee’s. Everyone had a strategy for getting by, but their plans inevitably revolved less around choices than around doing without and playing a perpetual game of catch up.58
When Georgia Quick started at Imperial, she was still married. As long as her husband kept his job, they lived rent-free in that house next to the cotton gin. Without help with housing, making ends meet proved difficult.
Elizabeth Bellamy built her family budget around rent-free living as well. After her husband ended up in a New York prison, she and her daughters crowded into her parents’ house in Bennettsville. What she saved on rent she paid in car payments and gasoline for commuting to work. And fuel prices, of course, were on the rise through the 1980s in response to ongoing tensions in the Middle East and the formation of OPEC.
Ada Blanchard had her own way of making ends meet. She put up with the monitoring from caseworkers and lived with several of her children in a non–air conditioned one-story, low-slung brick unit in a Rockingham public housing project. The father of her children paid no formal child support. She did, though, get about $80 each month in food stamps. According to state government tables, she earned too much to qualify for Medicaid. Imperial’s health care plan was an option, but in the months before the fire, Imperial, by then sagging under piles of debt from the Haverpride debacle and other missteps, cut its health care contributions. By the summer of 1991, “our insurance,” remembered one worker, “was $13.75 a week, and if you have children and wanted to put them on it, it was $73 a week.”59 “I didn’t have the extra money for that,” Blanchard explained years later about these health care costs that added up to a third of her paycheck. Without insurance, she couldn’t always immunize her children and had to pay for asthma medicine out of her own pocket. Mostly, health care for her amounted to praying every day that no one in her family got sick or hurt.60
Making a little less than $200 a week meant that it was impossible for Ada Blanchard or Georgia Quick to get ahead. Neither of them could put money away for a down payment on a house, afford to go back to school, or get the vocational training they needed to get a cleaner, healthier, better-paying job in a changing economy. It wasn’t easy when they hit a bump in the road. A sick child and a little extra for the doctor could easily bring the repo man to their door to collect the sofa or the car. The end of each month was the hardest. Sometimes the children’s father or another family member would help out, but sometimes no one had anything extra to pitch in. In their careful and extensive study of single women and low-wage work, sociologists Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein discovered that roughly a quarter of the people they surveyed, including people who processed and prepared foods for a living, went without a meal at some point during the year. Most mothers reported putting less on their plates so that their kids could have enough to eat. Ten percent said that they regularly experienced hunger. A third had their phones cut off, and more than half had no health insurance. Under these financial constraints, they often reacted to circumstances rather than planned ahead, and, all too often, this meant paying fees on late bills and bounced checks or skipping preventive maintenance on their houses or their heath that cost more in the long run and put them further behind.61
Most Imperial workers couldn’t afford to miss work, not even for a day or an afternoon, if it meant no pay. Yet it was hard to avoid mishaps. Imperial wasn’t one of those neat, modern, orderly factories where everything had a place. It was more like a cluttered and chaotic maze. Stuff was stacked and piled everywhere. Annette Zimmerman fell one day and twisted her knee trying to sidestep a sack of flour on the slick and greasy concrete floors. A co-worker took her to the breakroom. The plant didn’t employ a full-time nurse. The general manager, James Hair, met her and gave her a few aspirin and an Ace bandage and asked her if she was ready to go back on the line.
“No,” she said, “it hurts too much.”
It must have, because Zimmerman went to the hospital to have it examined. The doctor gave her crutches and told her to stay off her bad leg for a couple of weeks.
Fearful of losing her job, within days Zimmerman hobbled back to the line. She complained that her knee still hurt, but not to Hair or any of the other supervisors. Her co-workers listened and nodded their heads. They didn’t have to ask. They knew why she was there. “I needed a job,” Zimmerman said, “and there wasn’t another plant to go to.”62
“At the end,” Georgia Quick recalled, thinking about the months and weeks before the fire, “it got really worse. It was awful.”
She thought she could detect a change in Brad Roe’s face and movements and hear it in his voice. As the summer of 1991 drew to a close, he seemed to burst into the factory every afternoon, hollering about one thing or another. To Quick he seemed “volatile,” like he was coming apart at the seams. He yelled and cursed, she remembered, at everyone, including the foreman and maintenance crew. Some Imperial workers thought he was unhinged. Georgia wasn’t sure what the cause was, but she felt certain something wasn’t right with Brad.
The equipment wasn’t in much better shape than Emmett Roe’s son. “Things started to fall apart,” Quick noted. The maintenance men and mechanics had a “heavy load” at that time. She watched as they patched the machines together and rushed around trying to keep the line up and running. She sympathized with them and the pressures they were under.63
Quick dreamed about quitting. She wanted to leave the slimy floors, foul-smelling chicken, and yelling behind, but she couldn’t afford to make the move. By 1991, she and her husband had essentially separated. She was twelve weeks pregnant and living in a run-down trailer.64 “I was scared to leave,” Quick admitted, “because where else would I go? To me, this was a lot of money.”
The money coaxed Quick out of bed at daybreak on the Tuesday after Labor Day in 1991. “I really didn’t want to go to work,” she remembered. “This was strange.” She thought about taking the day off, something she almost never did, but she didn’t want to leave Alberta McRae, a co-worker and carpool companion, without a ride. “If I didn’t go, Alberta had no way to go.” And both of them, of course, needed the money. Money for rent, money for food, money for electricity, and money for doctors’ bills.
After their usual twenty-minute
drive, Quick and McRae pulled up to the Imperial plant. They walked in the front door, punched their time cards, and headed to the breakroom. They sat down, like they always did, to eat breakfast before the start of their shift. Danny Pate, one of the supervisors, came in and told them to report to the processing room, not their usual spots. The fryer, he explained, had been down all weekend and had just gotten back up and running. They needed to get caught up there. The mechanics were still milling around and tinkering with things when Quick and McRae got there and started to process chicken.
Twenty minutes later, Georgia Quick heard a loud bang, screams of fire, and then everything went “pitch dark.”
5
BODIES
An archivist for the state of North Carolina tucked the death certificates for the victims of the Imperial Food Products fire away in an ordinary-looking government building in Raleigh, not far from the state house and the governor’s mansion. The records are contained in a single gray folder. The only place to sit and go through them is at a clunky, heavy metal desk in a windowless room.
The names of the dead are listed one per page. Each report contains the information you would expect to find on a death certificate. Each lists the last known address. Each notes their age, marital status, how much schooling they had, and the time, place, and cause of death.
Though filled with dispassionate, clinical language and terminology, these records possess an eerie intimacy. They include a glossy headshot of the victim and a generic sketch pinpointing the spot of every scrape, pock mark, bruise, burn, and soot stain found on each body. The examiners discovered and noted needle marks running up and down both arms of one of the dead. He tried to hide his habit from his co-workers with bandages.