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CounterPunch
December
14, 2002
Jolene
by MARSHA CUSIC
I once worked in a factory with a girl named Jolene.
We were 17 and had lied to get hired; we couldn't legally work
in the plant for another year.
She was white, from "Taylor-tucky",
a name that mocked the southern roots of the many working class
whites of Taylor, a suburb of Detroit, where I live. Without
the factory we'd never have met.
I was black, I still am as a matter of
fact; we were young and shapely then, which now I'm not, I don't
know about Jolene. She had just been hired and like they say
it is in prison, you depend on those who know the lay of the
land, even if it's a day more than you.
The factory was a mechanized hell of
extreme temperature, convoluted steel, and people at all levels
with power, the wielding of which never did bode well. Women
wore hairnets for "quality control", but mostly to
prevent decapitation; the long-haired guys wore them too. I wore
braids to my waist, both old-fashioned and long before it was
fashion again; the specter of hair and heads caught in rolling
gears was so horrific we all wore the ugly nets in willing resignation,
one more theft of our outside, normal lives.
Jolene and I circled each other with
cat-like territoriality, two girls used to inhabiting the center
of any attention; then we relaxed in the knowledge that our appeal
could be divvied up without threat, there were plenty of male
eyes for the both of us. We became friends, revolving around
each other like planets, the type of friendship that burns too
hot to last.
Jolene was blond, the type of blond that's
white in childhood, that leaves a fuzz of white on the arms and
brows white as snow--what they call tow-headed. She had high
cheekbones from a Nordic ancestor, or some long ago blood of
Native America that gave her face hills and valleys in all the
right places to made it perfect.
She had a mole near her mouth and perfect
teeth and she laughed all the time at everything when she wasn't
mad about something. She was as beautiful as the mod girls in
my teen magazines and proof that good looks were not exclusive
to the rich and high class.
Ours was a work-hours friendship, walking
our fast, hip-rolling walk down the cement runways of the packing
lines, lithe and nubile. We flaunted our tiny waists and drum-tight
thighs at the high senior ladies with tired feet and eyes who
had left their younger bodies back in some other lifetime.
We ate in the lunch-room, laughed and
drove men crazy and pretended we didn't know. We held court with
the tradesmen and machinists, flirted our way through the long,
hard days. Even so I was dead serious, in ceaseless examination
and contention with my surreal, hard surroundings; Alice fallen
onto the wrong side of the looking glass, wanting to know just
where and why I had landed.
I was forced into the blue-collar world
by pregnancy at 16 and a hard-headed refusal to return to school,
my sixties-style protest against formal education and yes, the
humiliation of too-young motherhood--these were the days when
there was still shame in such things.
The prospect of the factory met with
the dismay of my businessman father and my mother, who had never
worked a day in her life except in his employ, not returning
to work after motherhood til she was widowed in middle age.
Mine was a first black family amidst
bankers, salesmen, doctors--solid middle class--in the days when
that term didn't apply to blue collar folks, before proletarians
had stock options and portfolios. My peers were preparing and
poised for success in the form of a piece of the professional
American pie.
The bottom line is, working in a factory
was not exactly what was expected of me.
There were a handful of blacks in the
plant, among them Miss Loretta, a bashful, hard-working woman
who where we worked a "plant-ation"; Indiana, small
and yellow, who could work faster than anyone but fell behind
so they couldn't her wear out like the machines.
Fast Freddy dressed like a techincolor
pimp before he changed into his uniform each day, and years later
had a 6-page spread in GQ; Edna, bright and funny, with sad eyes
blacked from a husband fists; Tie-tongue Bob, big, sweet and
"slow" never missed work, and a woman so inclined could
take his money; fine Lynnette, who looked like Pam Grier and
knew it.
The blacks were an island in a sea of
white, they kept their eye on me, lest I be too smart and fast
for my own good or theirs, causing trouble with my brick shithouse
body or rebelling against the way they'd learned to live.
I was unaccustomed to the whites of the
working class and eyed with amazement these new folks at the
plant, the clear majority--Willadean with a Tennessee twang and
black-dyed hair, who knew the most important thing one could
have was a good man and good work shoes.
Men from towns Down South that aimed
dogs and hoses on dark girls like me, bikers in full regalia
with long chains on long wallets holding long money and Zig Zags,
for long days of work and long party nights.
There were engineers and machinists,
exacting and smug in the security of their skills, who more or
less looked out for all of us--the machines and people--and we
grudgingly looked up to them, even if some of them spent hunting
season with supervisors.
I managed a wary co-existence with all
my new co-workers at first, then settled into the realization
that they were all "just people". Eventually, I became
their leader. But that's another story.
Jolene was a young mother too; for me
young and unwed meant not reaching my destiny--for Jolene, not
escaping hers. For if work in the plant was for me the fall from
grace, for her it was the height of good fortune, the key to
a future other than trapped in a trailer home.
***
We wore skin tight, high-waist Levis,
denim corsets that noosed our torsos into tight circles small
enough for a man's hands to wrap around and touch fingers front
to back. Even childbirth could not destroy our strong, young
curves; motherhood gave us more of what got us in trouble in
the first place.
Our jeans had threadbare wear in all
the right places that implied rubbing against all the wrong things.
We were locked together in beauty and failure and rebellion.
We never buttoned our uniforms; the white
lab-coat hems flew behind us as we sashayed down cinder block
halls. We raced past women with wisdom and seniority to get to
the source of real attention, guys we looked right in the eyes
as we smoked cigarettes on the loading docks, letting them think
they were smarter than us and might have a chance, never letting
on they were wrong on both counts.
Bra's burned on TV and we didn't wear
them, proud that no one could make us, and mostly, because they
stood quite nicely on their own. A supervisor, Phil, had his
eye on us and when we'd burst into his office to report a mishap
on the line or stomped about some new imposition, he'd sit up,
unable to tear his eyes away from us at breast level.
He called us "High Beams" as
if he was being original, and we'd roll our eyes and swivel back
to our machines, letting him know that whatever he was thinking,
it was out of the question.
When the line broke down or shut down
early, we jumped in cars and hit the gravel road behind the plant,
and flew to the bar where we'd we stay til last call. If we got
there too early, by closing time we'd be knee-deep in beer and
Southern Comfort and 7-Up; if somebody else was buying, Jack
Daniels with a Pepsi chaser, back in the days when I still ruined
my liquor.
By closing time we'd be sloshed and stumbling,
the bar full of eye-lined, hard-drinkin' women and wanna' be
cowboys chained to assembly jobs and wives reading Harlequin
Romances. Sometimes we'd sing, drunk and off-key:
"You picked a fine time to leave
me Lucille, With four hungry children and a crop in the field.
I've had some bad times been through some sad times But this
time the hurt it won't heal. You picked a fine time to leave
me Lucille"
The jukebox was full of those Kenny Rodgers
songs, ballads of Elvis and Patsy Cline. The barmaids took no
shit, could fight you like a man and sawdust and sickness lined
the bathroom floors.
I know I was watched by some God I didn't
believe in at the time, on those nights after last call--a drive
home cold drunk on a coal black highway, hand over one eye to
keep the center line from blurring into two.
That I didn't die or kill I attribute
to forces miraculous.
***
It was June, suddenly summer, I'd been
at the plant 6 months. The weather turned glorious and I left
it outside each day while I went in for the afternoon shift at
3. Day after day I was missing the summer, getting off work at
midnight, or 2 or 3 a.m. I should have been graduating and here
I was punching a clock.
In an awful epiphany, it occurred to
me that there was no more "summer vacation". You might
get off a week or two but not a whole summer, like year after
year since kindergarten. This revelation was a bad surprise and
hit me very, very hard.
Jolene and I were working in separate
departments, and the summer heat combined with the inferno inside
turned the plant into a sauna. Grease oozed from the gears of
the conveyor belts and even up out of the bricks in the floor,
both working and walking were a dangerous proposition. We toiled
in a steam bath of production quotas, eight, ten, twelve hours
a day.
Some vomited in the heat, some passed
out, the supervisors handed out salt tablets. From the catwalk
waves of heat could be seen quavering over our steaming heads;
In the flat and flickering fluorescence light the sweating, moving
limbs and machinery were a vision of a different kind of hell.
Angry conflicts spit into the air at
the smallest provocation or supervisory order. There was talk
of a walk-out but no one dared to face the wrath of the company
and union both.
Still, in the parking lot on breaks and
lunch, parties sprang from trunks of cars and station wagons;
8-track tapes played Willie Nelson, Bowie, Marvin Gaye; the beer
and weed hidden from security guards.
In this cauldron of heat, rage and music,
love affairs bubbled up among single and married alike, furtive
grapplings behind storage rooms and rows of stacked wooden pallets,
full-blown trysts during the midnight shift in motel rooms that
line the roads on the way home. The next day was still hot and
you still went back to work.
***
One day, during a break-down on the line,
I slipped away. Not far of course, for the line would start up
and I'd better be there, or else. I hid behind boxes and machines
to furiously read a page or two of Flaubert, Hegel, Hershey.
Not just me, for in the plant were real
scholars, some discuss issues of the day like career diplomats
from their designated spots in the lunchroom, others study in
silent, desperate reading, their brief and hungry moments of
escape.
I looked for the best route to dodge
the foreman and slipped through the back of the line, careful
on the oil-slick floors; past the press where a lady lost two
fingers--one on one year and one the next, past the maintenance
tool shed, over a skid of supplies and past bins of packing boxes,
around the hi-lo shack. Finally, drenched in sweat, I reached
my destination, the railcar dock.
Away from the suffocating heat in the
plant, it was a fine June day, hot and bright new summer. I blinked
in the clean, clear light, I could smell the hay used to pack
equipment and the blue wildflowers and wheat that grew along
the tracks. The plant was built on old farmland and there was
still a rural beauty to anything that had escaped the industrial
maw.
The dock was a massive barn, high and
open ended so train cars could be maneuvered in and out on tracks
embedded in the floors. A car would be uncoupled and unloaded,
emptied of raw materials, then days or weeks later, hitched up
and rolled back down the tracks.
The train was a mammoth thing, wheels
higher than the top of my head; a sleeping mastodon of black
steel. Sometimes a car would be bright red or yellow depending
on the cargo, or huge tankers filled with oil.
Young guys they too restless and trapped
in the plant on a hot day, would climb up the sides and smoke
a joint on top of the car, twenty feet high, unseen by hunting
supervisors or worrisome chicks. I listened closely, I was lucky
today, all alone. I walked the length of the car and snatched
off my hairnet, to feel the breeze blow cool through my braids.
A beam of sunshine from a vent in the
roof made a square on the floor ahead of me, I watched the motes
of dust and grain float in a tube of light from the sky to the
floor. I walked over and stood in the patch of sun, as if that
square of light held the last vestige of my long ago life.
Suddenly, reality and self-pity swirled
around me snow in a globe--my ruined life, friends at proms and
graduations, summer parties before going off to college. I was
a teenager with a child who refused to let parents or welfare
help too much, now paying the price for my young lust and pride,
defiant and rebellious, tying my fate to those who labored.
I looked into the light but the sun held
no answers, I let the sweet June heat replace the steam-bath
that I had left on the line. I saw myself, movie-like, from outside
myself; a dark, lonely seraph in a column of light and defeat.
Well, I would stick it out a while longer, then decide what to
do.
A dozen summers later I was still there.
***
I started out telling you about Jolene.
Actually there's not much more to say; we stayed friends for
a while before she was fired, her pretty smile didn't make up
for her smart mouth after too many beers.
She started going with a man, the kind
you couldn't be with and stay beautiful, you had to turn brittle
and hard and ready to take an ass whippin'. I wonder if her face
got that punched up look of too many schnapps and bar-fights,
if her pretty teeth were gone; if she added many children to
that first one, if she met up with crack cocaine. I don't know
what happened to her, after that first year or two of seniority
I never saw her again.
It's been three decades since we met;
but when I see a woman of means, wealth I think sometimes of
Jolene. If her life were different she would have been a lady,
with a cultured laugh and cheekbones and white-blond hair. In
my memories she's still young, raw and beautiful as the hills.
Maybe I told you about her so that I
could tell you about me. For looking back of course my life was
not near over, my factory days were clearly no defeat; just another
row of pieces in the puzzle of my life, a long stop in my journey
of years.
Maybe I just wanted you to know that
once I was young with a waist so small a man's hands could fit
all around, with thighs like congas and hip-length braids that
blew in the wind, once upon a time I had another life.
I once worked in a factory with a girl
named Jolene.
Marsha Cusic
moderates the Belles Lettres forum of ThePuristS.com, a connoiseurs
site dedicated to "The Best". She is writing a book
about growing up in the sixties in Detroit. She can be reached
at: lingting2000@yahoo.com
Marsha Cusic, Copyright 2002
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