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Chapter One excerpt from the novel:
A Southern Tragedy, in Crimson and Yellow
The population, which might have seen flying saucers and then skinless, red aliens walking toward them, saw, instead, human forms as soot black as dark chocolate. At the same time, they heard nothing from anyone inside. As quiet as the crowd was, as quiet as air and as breath, they heard nothing.
Buildings had burned before. Rosin-rich pine lumber burned scarlet and yellow and orange, and in the nighttime skies, before streetlights and electricity and automobiles, the flames of those old buildings were clear and lovely and terrifying for 20 miles. People did not burn that beautifully.
The town once had an opera house. Caruso sang there. That building became the movie theater just after the second world war. Children who later grew up to work and die in the fire at the chicken plant spent all day in that theater, years before they had to figure out a way to earn a living.
The fact that before television, opera had been a popular musical medium enjoyed by rich and poor was surprising to the generations brought up on television and fast food.
"Opera? You mean Oprah?"
Quick cuisine was now the main product of the local poultry enterprise. Capital Foods supplied not cultural delights of the past such as drama and music, but chicken delights, boxed presentations of legs, thighs, breasts, and wings that neither sang or danced or nurtured or inspired, except on the chemical and commercial stage. Food had replaced the opera as pastime.
Want to go hear Puccini? It's in town I'm told.
Naw. Let's go to KFC.
Or better yet-How about the new Aaron Copeland special at Burger King, the Appalachian Burger with Spring Fries and Simple Gifts child's meal.
Unemployment was just under 11 percent in the county in 1991. It was the chicken plant, or nothing.
Many people loved the small-town life. Some didn't, however, and left. Hamlet was the hometown of John Coltrane. Tom Wicker, born the same year as Coltrane, 1926, was from Hamlet.
In early September of 1991, at the time of the tragedy that would distinguish Hamlet forever in a new way, Bill Clinton was running for president. George Bush the father, would, in a little more than two months, carry Richmond County but lose nationwide.
The chicken plant building where Ellie McCorkle showed up the day of the fire was mostly brick. It had a concrete floor. It covered 37,000 square feet, almost an acre. Seen from above, without the roof on it, the way an architect's model might have been viewed with the top lifted off, the building contained rooms for processing, marinating, cutting, mixing, trimming, and cooling, two freezer rooms and more. Lots of rooms.
It was a dangerous and illogical maze with partitions added over the years as needed and doors that led nowhere, a fire trap that no one thought could burn. How could brick and block and concrete burn?
Old mills were built on large dimension wood joists with three-inch-thick floorboards. It was the lumber from these old mills that made the expensive re-sawn flooring for custom houses today. Standing and working on a wood floor felt different than working all day on concrete. Concrete crushed your bones, went right through your shoes, up into your heels, up your spine, into your brain, and made the day headache long.
The building that became Capital Food Products was founded on cement, lime, rock, and sand. The concrete for that floor would have been mixed on site in 1921, and then spread wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow and floated and troweled and finished by hand.
Six thousand cubic yards of concrete were poured eight inches deep. Old wheelbarrows held an eighth of a yard and weighed three hundred pounds loaded to the top. They had steel wheels. In a true act of hard labor, they were pushed and dumped 48,000 times before the floor was complete.
Concrete could be poured in the rain. It would dry anyway. It gave off heat when curing. On hot days, sweat dripped off foreheads and arms and mixed with the water evaporating across the top and made a speckled, freckly looking surface. The concrete dried white, or gray-white, depending on the mix, and took a couple of weeks to reach strength.
Concrete lasted centuries, longer than people and longer than the buildings above it. It would not burn. It remained. The Romans invented concrete. Thus the Ruins.
The building had been a Buttercup Ice Cream plant before it processed chicken parts. In the South, concrete pouring and finishing, masonry and tile work had traditionally been done by black men. Carpentry and electrical and plumbing mostly by white, but bricks and mortar and tile, black.
The men gathered together, however, and did their jobs and built the structure. People from all stations in life joined up to provide other people with places to work, where more people came together and made ice cream cups or skinned chickens or whatever was asked of them. Within the buildings there formed a congregation of sorts, all temporarily believing in what they were doing.
They talked to each other while together, creating the simple language of work not based on the eloquent delivery of theory and analysis, but based on the common language of shared faith, despair and hardship.
All that mixing and pouring and finishing work, then, done seventy years earlier, remained, and provided the foundation and boundaries of all the work yet to come, defined, then, the sense and reach of the job, hard, unyielding, stained with product and human effort, poured into place in the town, and therefore into the lives of thousands of people, an act originally of monumental human toil just to pour the concrete on the ground, to cover the earth in that one spot that then limited and ordained that one place on the planet where people would gather and do what was asked of them.
With all that heart and soul and belief, they gathered together and became, for a little while, the same. That was the nature of work.
They were doing the best they could at that moment in their lives, choosing to make a statement they themselves did not understand by working there in the world of processed chickens, but mostly just surviving to the next day and working, simply working, like all the people who'd been on that slab before them, working and surviving and trusting that some good would come of it.
They showed up for work each day and they had faith. The gift of faith worked best by keeping it unopened, talking about it, and manufacturing belief, which is what the work at this chicken plant actually did in its most sublime few moments each day.
It processed not simply parts of the two-legged winged beasts, but people, a place where they came together as they had in the ice cream days and before that in the construction of the edifice, not an ark of worship, but of work, which was, for people who made for themselves pieces of hope out of pieces of bird, a similar collective experience.
Ice cream and chickens.
Black and white skin.
Owners and workers.
Hot and cold.
Lips and beaks.
Blood and milk.
Flesh and bone.
And breasts. Lots of breasts. The mythic remnant of nurture and desire and safety, the iconic shape and texture, the bosom of feathery motherhood now simply paddled along in rivers of heated grease, the breaded, eviscerated gland of feminine identity, torn loose from the birds' bodies by women workers, cooked by them, packed, frozen, boxed, shipped, and then consumed. Whether the chicken or the egg came first was moot when it came to meat. The breast was queen for the kings, the legs, the thighs, the wings, princes in the royal ritual of feed.
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