pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LILAC WINE AND PEACHES IN THE HEAT Nina Simone's Lilac Wine has been running through my head all morning, maybe because I wasn't paying attention last night and drank three glasses of red wine while editing that manuscript. That is definitely more than I should drink, and my head feels a little like someone stuffed a Brill-O pad into my sinuses today. •
QUESTION: Which one of these five things is least like the other four? Plum • Grape • Apricot • Peach • Cherry is it a peach (because it is the only one with fuzz skin) or grape (because it doesn't have a pit)? This question reminded me of the customer-service rep named Peaches who used to call my coworker Chris. Our offices were in a cool old renovated tobacco warehouse with something like thirty-foot ceilings, so individual offices had ten-foot-tall walls, but open ceilings. Every single time this rep. called Chris, he said "Well hello there, Peaches!" And this cracked me up. Every single time. (Where except the South would someone name a daughter Peaches?) And have I mentioned the word cain/t, as in "Cain't never could do anything" or "Cain't died in the war"? (Another Southernism.) And here's a Southernism that the Ginger's sweet Alabama grandmother said once: If you don't quit doing that, I'm a-gonna read you the second chapter of James backwards. (I'm thinking this involves a spanking.) Then there's that horrible peach shed where I worked for two summers before I was old enough to work at other places legally. (Yes, it is riffing on peaches time, y'all.) Okay. Imagine this. You find yourself in rural South Carolina in August, which means that it is probably 105° in the shade and so damn humid that you can practically cut the air with a knife. You sweat before you step outside your front door, before you walk down the porch steps, before you reach your car, and wait a solid five minutes after you roll down your car windows down—yes, this is back in the days when you rolled down car windows and stepped on a switch in the floor to turn your high beams on—before climbing into your hot, hot car. You are fifteen years old (which means you ain't got no car in the first place, and much less one with air conditioning), and working in the little town of Edgefield (the place where racist Senator Strom—we called him Sperm—Thurmond was born and raised) in The heat, the flies, and the mosquitoes are unmerciful, but you can't swat at them when they bite you because doing so indicates that you are not paying enough attention to your work. So you watch the flies and stare at the peaches—the millions and millions of peaches that roll all around you on conveyor belts These peaches were in the trees surrounding the building just this morning, before the migrant workers who live in low-slung buildings that lack screens or running water arrived by the worn-out school bus load to pick today's crop These workers poured bag after bag of these peaches into large white dumpsters that a man on a tractor then drove to the peach shed's parking lot. Then Dan, the preacher's son, lifted the container and placed it on one end of the machinery that snakes its way around the monstrous building before stopping at the loading dock, where boxes are put together by metal arms that then flip a switch and pour the peaches into the gaping boxes. The weight of these boxes sends them on a slow roll down a metal conveyor belt and into a waiting semi. (Incidentally, Dan the forklift driver is the same preacher's son who drove his forklift into the side of the owner's long gold Cadillac just weeks ago while playing around on the job. This accident left two jagged holes in the gold Cadillac door of the red-haired owner and the entire building went silent as the owner with the raging temper stepped out of his car, wiped his forehead with his dirty handkerchief, and said, "Son I am not firing you today because you gotta earn enough money now to pay my damn insurance deductible." (And that is a lesson. I guess. Sort of.) Creaking chains cranked the peaches up a lift toward a platform where a worker (who also couldn't swat at the ever-present flies or mosquitoes) pressed a huge black button that tilted the platform and sent the peaches barreling down a roller coaster hill. Two mechanical arms reached under the top edges of the container then and poured the peaches into a vat of filthy water. The arms swung wide after that and lowered the empty container to the concrete floor—where more than one person had gotten injured from walked under it. Then a forklift operator lifted the container and delivered it to a long tractor-driven trailer that held many other containers, and this tractor driver eventually returned the containers to the fields for their next load of peaches. These deliveries happened once a minute, non-stop, for as long as the peaches were running. Unless some machinery malfunctioned. Workers don't get paid when machinery malfunctions, but that doesn't mean you can leave the building. Nope. Instead, you must wait in the heat and finally swat those flies and study the welts on your arms and legs. Or you can join the long line queueing up for this unscheduled pee break instead of waiting for the next four-hour bell that announces when your crew can relieve itself. (Incidentally, I don't recommend wrapping magnetic Coke can disguises over beer cans so you can drink on the job as my friends and I did, since doing so makes it damn difficult to wait four hours for a pee break.) Working till the peaches are picked means that you don't know from day to day when you will work next or for how long. You simply work until the work was done, period. Sometimes this means you arrive at 7 and work till 2 AM before getting up to do it again, amen. No excuses. No vacation. But taxes and Social Security aren't deducted from your paycheck either and this job pays better than anything else you can find, so you get up every morning like a happy idiot and sweat and curse and struggle for the legal tender that keeps you stocked in Marlboros and beer and, if you're lucky, shelter somewhere other than your parent's home. Boys standing on platforms by the vat stay alert because T-shirts get caught in moving parts daily and pulling those branches from the bobbing fruit and shoving them into the gaping metal teeth that grind them up can and will pull off your fingers and stop the machinery for hours. The splashing water keeps these guys cooler than everyone else though. (I looked up once to discover my buddy Randy staring wide-eyed as he stood over the vat. I mouthed What?, then watched as his T-shirt stretched taut and his face went white and he struggled to remain upright as small, then large, holes pulled the fabric into the rusty gears, leaving only a ragged collar on him.) Drying peaches roll out of rusty chutes and onto a wide convey belt that rolls below three other moving belts. Graders stand along these belts and sort the peaches onto the ripe and firm and rotten moving belts. Ripe peaches roll through the building until they reach the station where they are loaded into baskets for local delivery. Firm peaches roll down another line until they reach the boxing station and, eventually, a waiting truck. The pungent rotten peaches roll along the lowest belt until they roll down a chute to you and five other workers, whose job it is to salvage what you can get away with selling and Gawd help you if you make the wrong judgment, because a foreman is waiting to curse you out for the oversight. The Cadillac-driving owners are smart and tell you on your first day there that you can eat as many peaches as you want on your break. This makes you happy for about a week, but you get sick of peaches quickly and see them rolling down a belt when you cannot sleep at night. And, even though homemade ice cream with red-centered August peaches is incredibly delicious, it takes you five long years before you can bear to eat it again. Receiving your weekly basket of complimentary peaches is a gift though, because it allows you and your friends to hang out your car windows and throw them by the carload at each other. And I KNOW that you would love to hear more about life at a migrant camp, but I have got to get back to my editing now so The End.
11:45 a.m. - 2005-06-23 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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