The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (2 page)

When Dean was a boy, tobacco grew fencepost to fencepost. From April till October
you could smell it all over Rockingham County. He was raised in Madison, forty minutes’
drive up Route 220 from Greensboro, and though the Prices lived in town, Dean’s real
life was spent out on the tobacco farm of his grandfather Norfleet Price. Norfleet
got his name when his daddy, Dean’s great-grandfather, brought a load of tobacco on
a two-horse wagon to Winston-Salem, where a man by that last name gave him a very
good price. Dean’s father was born on the family land, in a clapboard shack with a
front porch, at the edge of a clearing in the hardwood trees. A few feet away was
the tobacco barn, a cabin of oak logs cross-stacked with dovetail joints, which Norfleet
built with an ax. When Dean was a boy, during the late-summer days when the bright
leaf tobacco was primed and hung in the barn for flue curing, he would beg to be allowed
to stay there overnight with his grandfather and wake up every hour or two to check
that none of the tobacco leaves had fallen into the flames of the oil fire. Priming
was backbreaking work, but he loved the smell of tobacco, the big yellowing leaves
that grew heavy as leather on stalks four feet high, the way his hands were stained
black with sticky tar during the priming, the rhythm of looping the leaves through
the stringer and hanging them in bundles like dried flounder from tobacco sticks across
the rafters in the barn, the family togetherness. The Prices raised their own meat
and grew their own vegetables and got their buttermilk from a lady with a milk cow
down the road. School was delayed if the crop came in late, and in the early fall
the auction warehouses in Madison burst into life with the harvest jubilee and the
brass band parades, a celebration for families that now had their cash for the year,
leading up to the holiday feasts. Dean thought that he would grow up to be a tobacco
farmer and raise his kids the same way.

Dean’s best friend was his grandfather. Norfleet Price cut wood until the fall before
he died, at age eighty-nine, in 2001. Near the end Dean visited him in the rest home
and found him strapped to a wheelchair. “Hoss, you got your pocketknife?” his grandfather
said.

“Pa, I can’t do that.”

Norfleet wanted to be cut out of the wheelchair. He lasted just a month and a half
in the rest home. He was buried in the Price family plot, on a gentle rise in the
red clay fields. Norfleet had always worked two or three jobs to get away from his
wife, but the name Ruth was carved right next to his on the same headstone, waiting
for the body and date of death.

Dean’s father had a chance to break the spell of the family’s poverty thinking. Harold
Dean Price, called Pete, was bright and liked to read. Three blank pages at the back
of his copy of Merriam-Webster’s dictionary were filled with handwritten definitions
of words like “obtuse,” “obviate,” “transpontine,” “miscegenation,” “simulacrum,”
“pejorative.” He was a good talker, a fervent hard-shell Baptist, and a bitter racist.
Once, Dean visited the civil rights museum in the old Woolworth’s building in downtown
Greensboro, where the first sit-ins took place at the lunch counter in 1960. There
was a blown-up picture of the four black students from North Carolina A&T walking
out onto the street past a mob of white youths who stared them down—hot rods with
their hands in their pockets, T-shirts and rolled-up jeans, slicked-back hair, cigarettes
hanging from angry mouths. That was Dean’s father. He hated the defiance of the civil
rights people, though he never felt that way about Charlie and Adele Smith, the black
tenant farmers on the Price land who took care of him when Dean’s grandmother was
working at the mill. They were kindhearted and full of humor and understood their
place in the scheme of things.

Pete Price met Barbara Neal at a local dance hall and married her in 1961, the year
he graduated from Western Carolina College—the first person in his family to get that
far. Harold Dean Price II was born in 1963, followed by three sisters. The family
moved into a small brick house in Madison, around the corner from the Sharp and Smith
tobacco warehouse. Madison and its neighbor Mayodan were textile towns, and in the
sixties and seventies the mills had jobs for any young man coming out of high school
who wanted one, and if you had a college degree you could take your pick. The brick
storefronts on Main Street—pharmacies and haberdasheries and furniture stores and
luncheonettes—were full of shoppers, especially on days when the textile warehouses
held their sales. “Our country probably prospered as much as it’s ever going to prosper,
right there in that era,” Dean said. “They had cheap energy, they had oil in the ground,
they had working farms in the surrounding countryside, they had a people that didn’t
mind working, they knew what work was about. There was money to be made.”

Dean’s father went to work for the big DuPont plant that manufactured nylon up in
Martinsville, just across the Virginia state line. In the late sixties, he fell for
the era’s version of a snake oil salesman in the person of Glenn W. Turner, the semiliterate
son of a South Carolina sharecropper, who wore shiny three-piece suits and calfskin
boots and spoke with the bad lisp of a harelip. In 1967, Turner started a company,
Koscot Interplanetary, that sold cosmetics distributorships for five thousand dollars
apiece, with the promise of a finder’s fee for every new subfranchisee that the distributor
signed up. His followers were also lured into purchasing a black briefcase full of
Glenn W. Turner motivational cassette tapes, called “Dare to Be Great,” that went
for up to five thousand dollars, with a similar view to getting rich off selling the
rights to sell the program. The Prices paid for a distributorship and hosted rousing
“Dare to Be Great” parties at their house in Madison: a movie projector showed a film
on Turner’s rags-to-riches life story, then the prospects shouted Turner lines about
standing on your tiptoes and reaching for the stars. By 1971, “Dare to Be Great” had
swept through blue-collar neighborhoods across the country, and Turner was profiled
in
Life
magazine. Then he was investigated for running a pyramid scheme and ultimately served
five years in prison, and the Prices lost their money.

In the early seventies, Pete Price got a job as a supervisor at the Duke Energy power
station in Belews Creek. After that, he became a vice president at Gem-Dandy in Madison,
which made men’s accessories like suspenders for socks. Later still, he was a shift
supervisor at the Pine Hall brickyard, on the Dan River near Mayodan. But every time,
he got fired by a boss he considered less intelligent than himself, or, more likely,
he quit. Quitting became a habit, “just like a crease in your britches,” Dean said.
“Once that crease is there it’s virtually impossible to get it out. That’s the way
it was with failure to him, and you could not get it out of him. He thought it, he
breathed it, he lived it.” The crease started on the Price tobacco farm, where Dean’s
father received a disadvantaged piece of land that had no road frontage. Dean’s uncles
ended up doing much better in farming. He also suffered from little man’s disease—he
stood five seven and a half—and it didn’t help that he lost his hair early. But the
biggest failure came in the work that meant the most to Pete Price.

Decades later, Dean kept a black-and-white picture in a frame on his fireplace mantel.
A boy with a bowl of shiny black hair cut straight above his eyes, wearing a dark
suit with narrow pants that were too short for him, was squinting in the sunlight
and hugging a Bible against his chest with both arms, as if for protection. Next to
him stood a little girl in a lace-collared dress. It was April 6, 1971. Dean was a
few weeks shy of eight, and he was about to give his life to Jesus and be saved. During
the seventies, Dean’s father had a series of small churches in little towns, and in
each church his dogmatism and rigidity created a rift in the congregation. Each time,
the church members voted on whether to keep him as their preacher, and sometimes they
went for him and sometimes against him, but he always ended up leaving (for he would
get restless, he wanted to be a Jerry Falwell, leading a church that had thousands
of members) with hard feelings on all sides. Eventually he had trouble getting another
church. He would visit a new town and try out for the job by preaching a sermon, always
fire and brimstone, only to be voted down. There was one church in particular, Davidson
Memorial Baptist Church, down in Cleveland County, which he’d had his heart set on,
and after failing to get that pulpit he never really recovered.

From his father Dean acquired ambition and a love of reading. He went straight through
the family’s set of World Book encyclopedias from beginning to end. One night at dinner,
when he was around nine or ten, the subject of his ambitions for the future came up.
“Well, what do you want to do?” Dean’s father said with a sneer.

“I’d like to be a brain surgeon, a neurologist,” Dean said. It was a word he’d learned
in the encyclopedia. “That’s really what I think I’d like to do.”

His father laughed in his face. “You got as much chance of being a neurologist as
I’ve got to flying to the moon.”

Dean’s father could be funny and kindhearted, but not with Dean, and Dean hated him
for being a quitter and for being cruel. He heard his father preach many sermons,
even a few on street corners in Madison, but on some level he didn’t believe them
because the meanness and the beatings at home made his father a hypocrite in the pulpit.
As a boy, Dean loved baseball more than anything else. In seventh grade he was intimidated
by girls, and at ninety pounds soaking wet he was too skinny to play football, but
he was a pretty good shortstop at Madison-Mayodan Middle School. In 1976 there were
black and white boys on the team, and his father didn’t want him around the black
boys. To get Dean away from them, and to win points with his congregation of the moment,
Dean’s father pulled him out of public school (Dean begged him not to) and sent him
to Gospel Light Christian, a strict, all-white Independent Fundamental Baptist school
in Walkertown, a two-hour bus ride from the parsonage on Mayodan Mountain where the
Prices then lived. That was the end of Dean’s baseball career, and of his black friends.
When Dean was in tenth grade, his father started teaching American and Bible history
at Gospel Light, and it would have been easy enough for him to let Dean play baseball
after school and then drive the boy home at the end of the day, but his father insisted
on leaving school at three o’clock so he could go home and read in his study. It was
as if Dean was the competition in the family, and his father had the upper hand and
wouldn’t give an inch.

When Dean was seventeen, his father quit the church on Mayodan Mountain and moved
the family out to the eastern part of the state, near Greenville, where he took the
pulpit of a small church in the town of Ayden. It was his last one. After four months
there, Minister Price was sent packing, and the family went back to Rockingham County.
They had very little money and moved into Dean’s mother’s family house on Route 220,
outside the little town of Stokesdale, a few miles south of Madison. Dean’s grandmother
Ollie Neal lived in an apartment they had built in back, and behind the house was
the tobacco farm that his grandfather, Birch Neal, had won in a card game in 1932,
when Route 220 was a dirt road.

By then, Dean wanted only to escape his father’s dominion. When he turned eighteen,
he drove to Winston-Salem and met with a Marine recruiter. He was supposed to return
the next morning to enlist, but overnight he changed his mind. He wanted to see the
world and live life to its fullest, but he would do it on his own.

At the time Dean graduated from high school, in 1981, the best job around was making
cigarettes at the huge R.J. Reynolds factories in Winston-Salem. If you got a job
there you were set for life, with good pay and benefits plus two cartons of cigarettes
a week. That’s where the B students ended up. The C and D students went to work at
the textile mills, where the pay was lower—DuPont and Tultex in Martinsville, Dan
River in Danville, Cone in Greensboro, or one of the smaller mills around Madison—or
in the furniture factories down in High Point and up in Martinsville and Bassett,
Virginia. The A students—three in his class—went to college. (Thirty years later,
at his high school reunion, Dean found that his classmates had grown fat and were
working in pest control or peddling T-shirts at carnivals. One guy, a career employee
at R.J. Reynolds, had lost a job he’d believed to be secure and never got over it.)

Dean never applied himself in school, and the summer after graduating he got a job
in the shipping department of a copper tube factory in Madison. He made damn good
money for 1981, but it was the kind of job he’d always feared ending up in—the lifers
around him with no ambition, spending their days talking about drinking, racing, and
fucking. Dean hated it so much that he decided to go to college.

The only one his father would help pay for was Bob Jones University, a Bible school
in South Carolina. Bob Jones barred interracial dating and marriage, and in early
1982, a few months after Dean enrolled, the school became national news when the Reagan
administration challenged an IRS decision that had denied Bob Jones tax-exempt status.
After a storm of criticism, Reagan reversed himself. According to Dean, Bob Jones
was the only college in the world where the barbed wire around the campus was turned
inward, not outward, like at a prison. The boys had to keep their hair above their
ears, and the only way to communicate with the girls on the other side of campus was
to write a note and put it in a box that a runner would take from dorm to dorm. The
only thing Dean liked about Bob Jones was singing old hymns in morning chapel, like
“Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow.” He stopped going to class and failed every
course his first semester.