The Hamlet Fire

by Bryant Simon

  The same film crew that Cannon had spoken to about being put on standby status interviewed a rail-thin, unnamed, twenty-something African American man from Hamlet. With the burnt factory in the background, he told them a story about a woman, he said, who was pulled from the plant during the fire but was not given any oxygen for twenty minutes. Without prompting, he said, “she was black.” To him that was the most salient detail about her.

  Most of the firemen, he added, again without prompting, were white.

  “They were trying to help,” he said, “but I guess there weren’t that many.”

  Before the interviewer could get out a follow-up question, the man continued, “They got a black fire department over here, they didn’t even call . . . it’s all black, they didn’t even call. . . . That was on the news.”

  “The fire chief said they didn’t have enough experience,” he went on, talking about Hamlet’s David Fuller.

  “The way I see it, if they didn’t have experience they won’t be firemen at all. They had to have training and stuff.”

  “As a matter of fact, they were the closest ones. The ones in Dobbins Heights.”15

  He left it at that.

  Ruth DeRosa, a white researcher from Duke University, who came to town to study the after-effects of the Imperial tragedy picked on what that African American man told that film crew. In her conversations with locals in the winter and spring of 1992, she noted a surge in “racial tensions,” as she called them, swirling through Hamlet, Dobbins Heights, and the nearby communities. As she listened to African American laborers and their families reflect on their lives, she heard them mention again and again the “fire house incident.” To the people she talked with, this wasn’t a decision about competence—it was about race.16 The supposed brushoff of this fire crew shaped how black people made sense of what happened that September morning in 1991, what truths they believed and which ones they didn’t, and how they would live with the fire and its deadly consequences. Mostly, though, the supposed snub of Ernest Cannon’s men rekindled a sense of distrust in Dobbins Heights’ and Hamlet’s black communities, where faith in government and city officials was always in short supply and was running especially low in an age of cheap where some lives seemed to matter more than others.

  In the first days and weeks after the fire, Hamlet seemed to come together as one community. The city council declared a thirty-day period of mourning and flags in town were flown at half-staff. Mayor Abbie Covington worked day and night to cope with relief, the media, and what to do next.17 Local businesses and community groups chipped in where they could. The City Limits nightclub in South Hamlet held a pig pickin’ to benefit survivors. Members of the American Legion put together a free quasi-taxi service, driving Imperial families from their homes in Hamlet and Bennettsville to supermarkets, funeral homes, and hospitals. The Salvation Army distributed clothes and toys, while the Red Cross and the United Way handed out bags of groceries and coupons for meals at local Chinese and barbecue restaurants.18 Florists donated funeral floral arrangements, church members baked sheet cakes for wakes, and beauticians did the hair of mourners without charge.19 CSX, Coors, and Pepsi donated money for relief. The Masonic Lodge #532 of Hamlet and the Women’s Aglow Chapter of Rockingham made contributions. Local churches stepped in as well. During the first three months after the fire, the Hamlet Ministerial Alliance raised and dispersed more than $58,000 to victims. They bought new beds for orphaned children and paid outstanding utility bills. They helped others with money for car payments, rent, and taking care of the mortgage. They provided travel expenses to families visiting wives, sons, and daughters in intensive care units in Charlotte, Durham, and Chapel Hill. As Berry Barbour, the pastor at the downtown United Methodist Church, remembers it, Imperial workers would come in and ask for something and they left with a check, “no questions asked.”20

  Outsiders pitched in as well. In December 1991, the City of Hamlet, with the help of the Lost Santa Project from Raleigh, held a Christmas party and passed out gifts wrapped in colorful paper and decorated with bright bows to children whose parents were killed or hurt in the fire. Stanley Tools of Charlotte canceled its annual picnic and gave the money it would have spent on the event to Imperial families. The White Oak Grove Baptist Church of Greensboro adopted a few local kids and sent them money for food and clothes. Churches from Lenoir, Pittsboro, and Pineville sent checks and good wishes. Handmade condolence cards and small contributions came to Hamlet City Hall from schoolkids and their parents in Logan, Utah; Lancaster, South Carolina; and Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, as well as Pittsboro, Raleigh, and Roanoke, North Carolina.21

  “The people were lucky it happened here,” Mayor Abbie Covington said more than twenty years after the blaze. “People wrapped their arms around them. The community cared. I have never seen so much caring in my life.”22

  State worker Martha Barr came to share Covington’s assessment of the generosity of Hamlet residents. Two decades before the Imperial plant went up in flames, the Baltimore native and graduate of Mary Baldwin College in Virginia moved to Raleigh. Over the next twenty years, she became a specialist in worker’s compensation administration, holding jobs on different occasions for lawyers on both sides of the issue. In 1990, she took a position with the North Carolina Industrial Commission, the agency that oversaw the state’s worker’s compensation program. Twenty-four hours after the fire, she rode in a car with her bosses, commission head Judge James Booker and safety director Ned Vaughn-Lloyd, as they headed south from Raleigh to Hamlet.

  Prior to opening its North Carolina plant, Imperial had compiled such a woeful and shaky safety record in Pennsylvania and Alabama that it couldn’t find an insurance company willing to write it a worker’s compensation policy, which it had to have in order to do business in the state. That put the company in what was called the assigned risk pool. In order to write worker’s compensation policies in North Carolina for stable and safe companies, insurers had to pick up a few of the risky firms that no one else would to take on. As Martha Barr explained it, “No one would willingly go into assigned risk. Your premiums would be higher.” But Imperial’s past cheapness gave it no choice, so it ended up in the assigned risk pool. Liberty Mutual Insurance Company didn’t have a choice either. In order to get other worker’s compensation business in the state, the firm got some business it had never solicited or wanted, Emmett Roe’s included.

  Not long after Martha Barr and her bosses got to town, they ran into the adjusters from Liberty Mutual at the factory site. The insurance company representatives were trying, with somewhat mixed success, to get the information they required from Imperial officials and city leaders so they could fill out the forms that survivors and their families needed in order to qualify for worker’s compensation benefits. The adjusters assured Barr that they would get the information and that their company would honor all claims. Barr promised them, in turn, that she would do whatever she could to help.23

  Barr also learned that other state officials and Hamlet city leaders planned to open a Victim’s Assistance Center at the city library to help Imperial families get the support they were entitled to and the advice they needed on Monday, September 9. Once she heard the date, she remembered right away that this was the first day of Rosh Hashanah. Barr hesitated for a moment about returning to Hamlet and missing services on one of the holiest days on the Jewish calendar. But she decided that coming to the aid of the anguished town and its grieving people was the right thing to do, an act that honored both her faith and the holiday.

  Barr stayed in Hamlet from early Monday until late Thursday of that next week. She tried, as she later recalled, “to cut every bit of red tape.” She laid out for families the state’s worker’s compensation rules and showed them what boxes to check and where to sign so they could get some money to help pay their rent and not fall behind on their car notes. Barr explained to husbands, wives, and children of the victims that they would be eligible for a death benefit equal to two-t
hirds of the deceased’s weekly pay for four hundred weeks. She let them know that they were entitled to a $2,000 burial benefit as well. When the survivors, burned and bruised in the fire, approached her table, she let them know that they would receive two-thirds of their weekly pay as long as they were medically disabled and that the state would help with the bills from their doctors and psychologists.24 Each day she was there, she didn’t leave the Industrial Commission table until she answered every last question and made sure every one of the people who came by filled out all of the forms correctly. On her way out of Hamlet, Imperial workers thanked Barr; they blessed her and held her tight in their arms. They hadn’t expected this much from a government official, and while they knew that two-thirds of their paycheck plus a little more from donations and Social Security wasn’t much, it was better than nothing, and maybe it was just enough to get by on until the plant reopened or other work became available.

  Those four days in Hamlet, the “bravery” of the town’s people, and those teary-eyed thank-yous, stayed with Barr. She identified with their struggles so much that she developed, as she put it years later, “my own grief.” She dealt with it by writing. During the first winter after the fire, she composed a cassette tape’s worth of songs about Hamlet and its people. She celebrated the spirit of collectivity generated by the fire that to her melted away divisions in the town. In “A Love Song to Hamlet,” Barr described Hamlet as “Just a southern town that’s sleepy.” “What really showed what Hamlet was made [of] and all about,” she wrote, was how “friends and neighbors help each other” and how “the folks” of “this dear town rallied to give aid and succor to people who were down.” “No one,” she proclaimed, “went hungry or was homeless. To this the folks of Hamlet saw.”25

  Ruth DeRosa arrived in Hamlet for the first time several months after Martha Barr made her initial visit to town. At the time, the Nashville native was enrolled in Duke University’s PhD program in psychology. Her supervisor, Susan Roth, specialized in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Teaming up with colleagues at the Triangle Research Institute, well known for its work with Vietnam veterans, and the University of North Carolina, Roth applied for and received a grant from the National Institute for Mental Health to study the fire’s trauma impact. Juesta Caddell of the Triangle Research Institute coordinated the adult portion of the study while Lisa Amaya-Jackson of UNC oversaw the child study. The project team hired DeRosa as a research assistant and sent her to town to collect data in the field, data she later drew on for her dissertation.26

  For the next twenty weeks, DeRosa traveled to Richmond County just about every weekend, usually staying at the same Rockingham motel, often in the same first-floor room. She came and went with such regularity that one of the night clerks assumed that she was having an affair with a local married man, not interviewing fire survivors and their spouses in their homes or at the project’s rented office not far from Hamlet’s Main Street.

  While conducting her research on the impact of the fire, DeRosa met countless Imperial workers and their widowed wives and husbands and orphaned children still haunted by the sights, smells, and sounds of September 3, 1991. Recalling the smoke, the sound of those terror-filled calls for help and divine intervention, and the noxious odors of burning chicken fat and hydraulic oil, some felt alternatively jumpy and detached. Many couldn’t sleep. Others couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. Almost everyone touched by the tragedy experienced some combination of sudden flashbacks, recurring nightmares, and other symptoms from mild to severe associated with post-traumatic stress disorder.

  For months after the fire, Pearlie Gagnon, maintenance supervisor John Gagnon’s widow, didn’t feel like eating and she couldn’t sleep. One afternoon, unable to hold her head up for another minute, she dozed off, only to be woken up by nightmares. She dreamed that someone was redoing her yard by digging a huge hole in the middle of it. At the bottom of the pit, there was someone screaming over and over again, “Let me out.”27

  The boom of thunderstorms and the crack of lightning frightened others. Fall brought the familiar smell of burning leaves and triggered new anxieties. So did the sticky waves of heat that rolled through the southernmost parts of North Carolina in summer.

  Many survivors and family members avoided small rooms and tight spaces, including cars. In a place like Hamlet without any public transportation, this turned them into virtual shut-ins. Before the fire, nineteen-year-old Teresa Ellerbee had planned to go to college. Just a few months later, she had given up on that dream and rarely left the house. “I can’t work now,” she whispered to a reporter. “It’s too hard.”28 “The fire has taken my peace of mind,” lamented another former first-shift worker, “Since the fire I don’t want to go anywhere.”29

  A number of survivors and family members got hooked on painkillers and prescription drugs. Some drank too much. Some overate. A few overspent on funerals, cars, and going out, and faced (new) financial challenges.

  Some felt shame. They hated the way the papers portrayed them as chicken thieves. “When it first happened I felt dirty, nasty,” one Imperial worker told Ruth DeRosa. Another added, “I don’t want to tell anyone I worked there because a lot of people said it was the employees’ fault because they should have reported the doors being locked to the board.” Others battled with survivor’s guilt. One woman would down a few drinks, get into her car, push the pedal to the floor, and try to crash. “I was mad at the Lord for not taking my life,” she said. “I’ve had a real problem with faith,” a former Imperial worker confessed to DeRosa. “I’ve been calling my minister . . . about why they got killed and I didn’t.”30

  Some couldn’t explain their behavior, even to themselves. A few months after the tragedy, one woman was doing her laundry when her iron caught fire. “I just stood there,” she said. Another woman won’t bring anything flammable near her house. Another constantly checked the locks to her doors, fearful that something might happen to her children. Yet another survivor scorched the lawn in front of his home because he worried that the grass might catch fire and burn the place down.31

  It wasn’t just the survivors or their widows who were hurting. On the morning of the fire, neighborhood children had heard the blare of sirens and scurried over to the plant. They had watched as rescue workers carried soot-covered and lifeless bodies out of the building. Afterward, they, too, couldn’t shake the event out of their heads. One Hamlet teen told a member of Ruth DeRosa’s research team that when he closed his eyes he saw his aunt sitting crouched and shivering in the cooler before her death. When he shut them even tighter, trying to make her go away, she was still there. Some kids felt guilty. One elementary school student worried that his mom had almost died because he didn’t eat his cereal that morning. Mary Alice Quick’s twelve-year-old son, Terrell, got kicked off the school bus and then suspended from classes. “My momma is dead,” he announced. “I don’t have to listen to anyone.”

  “The hardest thing for me,” explained a Hamlet teacher, “is to get them in studying mode. I want them to know that life goes on and you need an education.”32

  A few neighborhood kids took their anger out on the building. After dark, starting the night of the blast, teenagers chucked bottles at the Imperial plant and set random fires on the grounds, revenge, perhaps, for what had been done to their parents, aunts, and cousins.33

  As Rosa DeRosa and other psychologists noted, a lack of trust can trigger some of the anxieties and behaviors associated with PTSD. Rightly or wrongly, fire victims and their families felt betrayed by the Roes, government officials, and the refusal, as they saw it, of local leaders to mobilize all available resources on their behalf on the day of the explosion, as symbolized by holding the Dobbins Heights Fire Department on standby. Many felt sharp pains and constant aches for months and then years after the tragedy and wondered if the doctors at Hamlet Hospital and at Duke and UNC, where airlifts had taken some of the hurt and injured the day of the fire, had given them the correct tr
eatments and medications. They worried if they would ever be able to trust their bodies and their minds again. Some felt abandoned by God and even by their husbands, wives, and children who were consumed by the fire’s deadly fumes. Many felt numb, isolated, and alone. They couldn’t connect with people and so they avoided the emotional and physical intimacy on which trust depends and can be built anew.

  “My boyfriend tells me I’m totally different,” Gloria Malachi told a reporter in December 1991, “like I’m trying to push him away or don’t want to be bothered.”

  You’re “grouchy,” Malachi’s boyfriend told her.34

  Family members didn’t always understand the daily, unexpected traumas fire victims experienced. Spouses and children encountered the sometimes chilly emotional distance of their partners and parents and felt rejected. Some lost their patience. Others tried tough love. They told their wives and daughters, sons and neighbors to snap out of it. But this only made the dread, the shame, and the survivor’s guilt worse. And it kept trust, that key to recovery, at a distance.

  Black and white foremen, line workers, and fire and rescue personnel all mourned and grieved and experienced trauma after the fire. But the pain may have been more intense for some in the African American community. Members of Ruth DeRosa’s Duke University–Triangle Research Institute–UNC team discovered that the African American children and adolescents of Imperial employees registered higher levels of post-traumatic stress than did their white peers.35 Maybe this had to do with trust—that crucial factor in recovering from PTSD. Maybe the wariness started with the first time they heard a racial slur thrown their way or the first snub they felt at a store. Maybe it began on Hamlet’s athletic fields, where black students got steered away from playing tennis and from the quarterback position. Maybe it had something to do with tensions on the street and a distrust of the sheriff’s office and of local police and the fire department. Or maybe it had to do with how relief workers treated their parents and relatives. Some African American survivors felt like white workers received larger relief funds than they did. When they attended job fairs for unemployed Imperial workers, some felt like white co-workers got interviews for office jobs and factory positions, while they got steered toward domestic help and restaurant work. “As a black woman,” Annette Zimmerman believed, “they only thought I could cook or clean.”36