Debt for Sale by Brett Williams

Author:Brett Williams [Williams, Brett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Poverty & Homelessness, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9780812200782
Google: IVvtm36MoyAC
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2011-04-20T02:53:36+00:00

Chapter 5

Pummeling the Poor

Will Harrison was a gifted designer, crafting exquisite compositions from living plants as well as the black and white silk flowers he arranged during our interview one Saturday morning. Born in 1945, he grew up on a small hog and vegetable farm on North Carolina’s coastal plain. His parents, sisters, brother, and he worked as sharecroppers, rising before dawn each morning to strip and process tobacco from before he was “even tall enough to reach the leaves hanging from the ceiling.” They earned 200 a year. He built up a healthy resentment of white landowners, but felt that these early lessons in working hard helped him work hard all his life. In the summer, kin and friends who had moved north sometimes returned “driving nice cars and wearing suits,” and Harrison finally decided that “there must be something better than this.” In 1961, along with his brother, cousins, and many other rural African Americans, he traveled to Washington to look for work in the expanding service sector. After staying briefly with his uncle, he lived in a series of apartments and worked at an array of restaurant jobs before encountering an established florist who took him on as an assistant, nurtured and disciplined the gifts that Harrison had cultivated as a farmer and then a gardener deft at wrestling stalwart greens, ruddy tomatoes, and lush grapes from the city soil.

Married twice, Harrison steered his two older children through a string of troubles. His oldest daughter struggles with different addictions. His son Kevin drove part time for Federal Express and did carpentry on the side before becoming disabled by AIDS. His third child completed college and has worked in television production, although her employment has been shaky because of the short life of new daytime shows. His wife, Mary, with whom he shared a small suburban house, works for the government. After the deaths of his uncles and his father, Harrison became even more central to a dispersed group of kin: his mother and brother (now back in North Carolina), his sisters in New York and Texas, and many cousins, mostly scattered around the Washington area. Harrison worked full-time, almost every day, with few vacations, for thirty-four years until both legs were amputated and he died of complications from diabetes. He once worked straight through the busy season with a dangerously swollen right leg, arguing, “I been hopping all this long, I can hop till after Mother’s Day.” Despite working hard, he was not able to make his business a success because of the debt peonage that stuck him with high interest and levels of insurmountable debt.

In 1991 Harrison’s employer died, leaving the business to his wife. Feeling pinched, and lacking the loyalty her husband had felt toward Harrison, she slashed his salary from 15 to 7 an hour. Although his daughter had worked at after-school jobs (on an ice-cream truck, in McDonald’s, and in a beauty parlor) since she was fourteen, and although Mary had a good

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