28 July 2020

Dearest Fazal,

In my hands, I hold the portrait of a woman laborer in South Africa. She is sitting on a bed with her arms outstretched, both hands gripping the blanket that covers the mattress. The woman wears a white knitted cap pulled over her ears and hair. She is dressed in a short-sleeved white blouse that is well-pressed and loose trousers. A light-colored apron with shoulder straps protects her clothes. It is torn at the hem that covers her knees. Her ankles appear to be crossed, though her feet are not visible, outside of the frame of the camera.

The wall in the room she inhabits is bare, with the exception of two nailed pieces of paper and a horizontal wire bowed by three hangers, one empty and two supporting articles of clothing—a large vest and a dress unhemmed.

On the floor is an oil drum, a cardboard box, and something like a rolled mat. It is a lean setting that serves as a still life.

I don’t mean simply to re-describe the photograph you have taken. I do mean to retell the visual story you have created. For in the retelling of any story, there is an opportunity to deepen and even prick the conscience of the community.

To labor. To exert one’s body and mind. To labor. To work or toil for wages on behalf of an economic system. To labor. To deliver. To produce an object, a service, a child. To labor. To worry excessively over details. To labor. To be forgotten, exploited, and unseen.

One of the positive outcomes of the harrowing outbreak of Covid-19 has been determining what is essential, including essential workers. These laborers in our society who we have taken for granted and have remained largely invisible include the frontline health care workers, grocery store clerks, warehouse and delivery workers, and pharmacists. Those of us who are working at home are discovering what it means and feels like to be non-essential except to our friends and families. Not long ago, I called a fellow writer and asked what she was up to. Ever wry, she said, “Just contemplating my irrelevancy.”

I see the woman in this photograph as an essential laborer. Time is not to be contemplated but used to make a livable wage to support and feed her family. And in so doing she is keeping the economy moving forward, providing a service that helps others. It may not matter the kind of work that she does, but that she does her work with pride and skill. This is the ethic we were taught by my father. All three of my brothers were ­laborers with a shovel in hand digging the trenches where waterlines, gas lines, and sewage lines would be laid and covered creating the infrastructure that makes it possible to turn on a faucet, turn on your stove, and flush your toilet. My brothers were essential workers and largely unseen, until a gas line would leak, or your sewer backs up, or you have a break in your waterline.

The essential workers are also the vulnerable workers. My brother Hank almost died from the coronavirus in March. He traced it to another worker in the trench who had just been hired from working in a crew in California. When the State of California went into lockdown, he was laid off. He came to Utah. He carried the Covid virus with him. He became sick, left the crew that my brother was on, and was hospitalized. Three of the other men he was working with came down with the virus shortly after he left. It was early on in the pandemic and so nobody really knew what was happening until, in my brother’s case, the doctors realized this illness was something different. My brother survived as did the other crew members. But the worker from California disappeared. No one knew what became of him—whether he lived or died.

Not long ago, I was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, home to the Smithfield Foods Pork Processing Plant, one of the largest clusters of Covid-19 cases in the United States. I was in Sioux Falls as a visiting writer at Augustana College. I had some free time in the afternoon and found my way down to the Big Sioux River. The physical beauty of Sioux Falls is juxtaposed with the stench from the meat processing plant, so vile, so foul, I had to wrap my scarf around my nose and mouth.

Sitting by the Falls, with the intent of looking for birds, I met two men from Iraq, one fishing for carp, the other telling me stories of the war; of his wife who can no longer speak or stay in one place for long because of the horrors she witnessed associated with Abu Ghraib; of his four children scattered as refugees: one in Dubai, one in Egypt, one in New Zealand, and his son in northern Iraq who refused to leave on principle. He showed me pictures of his six grandchildren. We both wept.

These two brothers, Fazal, one a doctor and the other an accountant, now recent immigrants in America, were both working at Smithfield Foods Pork Processing Plant. “Grim, disgusting, inhuman,” were the words they used to describe the working conditions. But so were words like “grateful, temporary, and it won’t always be like this…” They spoke of encountering the world within the factory, how most of the workers were from elsewhere, struggling to survive.

“Name a country at war,” I remember one of the brother’s saying. “And I’ll name you someone I am working next to from that conflict zone.”

We ended up taking a walk together. On one of the rocky outcroppings that appeared as an island in the midst of the Falls, I noticed two exposed eggs, large and cream-colored on the quartzite stones. I asked the brothers if they knew what kind of eggs they were. Not only did they know they were Canada Goose eggs, but they had watched the pair make a scrape in the sand between the rocks, a week or so ago, and kept coming back to check on the eggs on the days they made it to the river.

On April 15 of this year, I thought about those brothers who worked at the meat packing facility in Sioux Falls when it was reported in the news that there were 1168 cases in South Dakota, one of the hot spots in the United States for the coronavirus. Nine hundred and thirty-four of those cases were in Minnehaha County, the location of the Smithfield Foods plant, 644 people with connections to the plant were infected, including 518 employees.

I went back and reread Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle.

…preventable diseases kill off half our population. And even if science were allowed to try, it could do little, because the majority of human beings are not yet human beings at all, but simply machines for the creating of wealth for others. They are penned up in filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery, and the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all the doctors in the world could heal them; and so, of course, they remain as centers of contagion, poisoning the lives of all of us, and making happiness impossible for even the most selfish. For this reason, I would seriously maintain that all the medical and surgical discoveries that science can make in the future will be of less importance than the application of the knowledge we already possess, when the disinherited of the earth have established their right to a human existence.

Amen.

Thank you, dear Fazal, for your soulful portrait of this day laborer. I feel as though I have been in conversation with her. I recognize her as I recognize my own brother as a laborer, a working man. And as he continues to remind me, it is never us versus them—even within our own families.

It makes me so happy that you and Hank met each other over Thanksgiving, and a shared extended stay in Castle Valley. We still laugh over your exuberant determination to transform simple cream into whipping cream that instead only created mayhem after the dogs lapped it up when we weren’t looking and when we did look, we wished we hadn’t.

What followed was a labor of love with laughter and dry heaves. Forgive me, I digress.

I saved this recent note Hank wrote to me after we had a contentious political discussion. He was in his work clothes, caked with mud after working a ten-hour day in a rainstorm followed by 100-degree heat in Salt Lake City:

“Terr, it’s not left or right, us or them, it’s we—talk about we. Please talk about we. Do you know how sad it is to be cynical, to not believe in anything or anyone because whatever or whomever you believed or loved walks away or dies or is insane? Terr, it’s so hard, it’s so hard. I’m just glad I’ve got my dogs and a screech owl sings to me every night outside my bedroom window, sometimes I go out and shine a light on her and she still keeps singing in the dark.”

What is essential, Fazal, is that even though we may think what we do doesn’t matter, I believe it does. I believe art is also labor. Your photographs, my words, the stories we tell and retell through the art of living is how we sing in the dark. And why during this pandemic when we have all been brought home to isolate and quarantine and social distance with our masks on—it is the music we hear, the books we read, the paintings we recall that move us, the films we watch and the photographs we seek—these works of labor continue to keep us connected to what is real and true and terrifying and good, reminding us what it means to be human when the world goes dark.

The woman who stares at me now, I see her differently. The empty hanger above her head has become a halo—I do not mean to say I see her as an angel with wings, but as a guardian of labor, to deliver and bring forth something of yourself day after day after day.

With love,
Terry