Prep Kid in a Factory: What a Multi-Cultural Experience Gave Me

Race by itself is not a culture. Race was, however, a starting place for me in my teens to see limits of my own cultural experience. The gateway was Dad's chemical factory near downtown Atlanta, where I worked summers during high school and college.

Before then, I was a child in the suburbs of midwestern cities -- Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago. Mom and Dad taught the word prejudice and said it was bad, but I got a different message from my experience, as I wrote recently in a poem, "Behind Prejudice" (from my online collection First Verse)

The few black men I ever saw
in my childhood were these:

men behind counters, mops, or mowers
in aprons or dungarees;

in darkness behind the gaping windows
where, driving, we locked our doors;

on TV, muscles gleaming behind
white coaches or explorers;

Cosby and Satchmo, behind wide smiles,
their comic drawls and whoops;

behind beleagured Doctor King,
men hurling bricks at cops.

So when a dred-locked thickset man
in shorts behind a stroller

grinned to see, toddling ahead,
his giggling little daughter,

behind what segregation taught me--
like bulls, they're docile or mad--

I confess I felt surprise that he
was just like a regular dad.

I first worked alongside black men in 8th grade when my father started his business and paid me by the hour. I worked mostly in the air-conditioned lab, but many times I was in the heat and humidity outback with black men Henry, Leroy, Zion, and others. The jobs involved heavy lifting, teamwork, 100-pound bags of powders that choked you if you breathed them, and 55-gallon drums of caustic liquids that burned when you touched them or breathed their fumes. We wore boots to walk slippery ground, rubber gloves, sometimes goggles and masks. When the work wasn't dangerous, it was tedious: to fill and cap hundreds of bottles, paste on labels, and box them up for shipping.

The men tuned the radio to R&B stations, so just a few seconds of anything by Al Green or The Stylistics takes me back to those days. I enjoyed the banter between the men, though I didn't understand much of it.

I worked mostly with Henry, a burly bearded man. I probably was in the way, but he always made me feel like he needed my help, and he hovered close to protect "Doc" Smoot's boy. So I was shocked when Dad told me Henry had done time for killing his co-worker at a previous job. "It's ok," Dad said. "The guy came at him with a knife." But I understood that all of the men had spent time in jail before Dad hired them, and sometimes Dad left work on a Monday to bail someone out.

I most admired Leroy, a veteran, straight-backed, broad-shouldered, soft-spoken. When he brought samples to me for testing in the lab, he stood "at ease," head up, feet apart, hands joined at the small of his back. I'd hand him the result, and he'd go back out into the heat. One time he paused at the door to say that he and the guys were all wondering, why did I add a little cross to the number 7? That's how Europeans do it, I said. Suddenly, I saw myself as this prep boy with affectations from book-learning.

After college and a year of teaching at a prep school, I visited Dad at work. He said the men were on lunch break and that they asked about me all the time. I found them playing checkers like I'd never seen it before, one move following the other, rapid-fire. Later, from memory, I sketched the scene.

(L-R) Zion, Leroy, and Henry, sketched from memory the day I last saw them, August 1982

Dad pinned the group portrait to the bulletin board. That's old Zion standing, by that time too rickety and blind to do much work, but Dad kept him on for the sake of the family Zion supported. There's Leroy. When he died a couple of years later, Dad made sure he got the full military honors that he deserved -- Leroy's daughter was stunned and grateful. And there's Henry, scowling at red powder scum on his fingers. That was my thank-you.

Through these workers, I got my first sense of life on the other side of town, of the kindness and family concerns of men whom I might have otherwise perceived as threatening, and a strong sense of my being sheltered from financial insecurity and from work so strenuous and sticky.

That's something I've carried with me to college and beyond. Other men my age never had such an experience. Once, I convinced Dad to give a week's work to a prep school friend of mine who wanted to earn some extra cash, but the guy lasted only one day. When I sometimes described my factory work to my middle school students, they'd ask, wasn't that child abuse? To them, hard physical labor is inherently demeaning.

I hated it at the time, but now, for that work, and for those workers, I feel only gratitude.

[Written in response to a prompt from the program Education for Ministry: "Share experience(s) with other cultures that have contributed to your sense of self." See my EfM class blog. For a related blogpost, see The Privilege is Mine]