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I grew up in the heart of the Rust Belt at the height of its economic decline. Steel, auto and even furniture manufacturers fled south (often to Virginia and North Carolina and typically in search of cheaper labor), and factory jobs became scarce. Workers were left with little leverage and I watched my father give over so much of his life to a family that owned a series of factories. He treated the owners like royalty (unbelievably, their name was “King”), and I watched him both grovel at their feet and rise above them with a genuine care and respect for his fellow workers that the owners could not muster. For years he saved the job of a brain-injured coworker by covering for his deficiencies. He also befriended the sons of the “royal” family (Was this economic survival strategy? Altruistic concern for the floundering? Both?) as they battled various addictions. I watched all of this happen with a growing disbelief in the power and respect granted to owners who deserved, in my view, little of it. Furthermore, I witnessed the misery of the factory life. The machines’ grinding noise, the oily grime, the economic gloom, the palpable boredom. The poet Antler, in Factory, his booklength poem about his own factory experience, wonders, “Is it too late to ask — ‘What good is it if we’re immortal / when we’re bored with eternity . . . .’” In other words, are we sure this kind of factory life is worth saving? Macy documents the temporary survival of a fading way of life, but who really misses unimaginative furniture made with substandard products, company-owned towns, cheap labor and soul-draining factory work? The global furniture industry, as currently constructed, moves around the world in constant search for the cheapest labor in the most unregulated countries. It was once America. I’m sure there are books to be written that long for the lost coal-mining jobs in West Virginia or the lost lumber jobs in Washington State. What’s lost becomes romanticized until we forget its real cost to the environment or to workers’ lives. Beth Macy paints a complicated picture of John Bassett III, and each of us will make our own decisions about him after reading Factory Man. For the people of Galax, Virginia, who had jobs preserved or had stores remain viable because the factory stayed vibrant, he may very well be heroic. What would my own family have done without my father’s sacrifice in the oily dark of his factory job? I’ll let the poet Antler answer that question with another question from Factory: “What was I born for? What was I born for? / Is this a factory I see before me?” OH Brian Lampkin is one of the owners of Scuppernong Books in Greensboro.
22 O.Henry
August 2015
The Art & Soul of Greensboro