If You Came This Way by Peter Davis

Author:Peter Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497682122
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

The kind of work the underclass does most faithfully is the work of simply surviving. Survival without training or money requires a dogged diligence and jungle alertness that the middle class is likely to exercise only as a lark, however worthwhile, in a program such as Outward Bound. A former food merchant was the first Oakland citizen I met, a baker who was, like me, watching schoolchildren through a cyclone fence. I had come upon Jeremy Holland during my pursuit of underclass children. He had told me then, almost as an introduction while we watched children in a school playground, that he had killed a man. This was not delivered menacingly but plaintively, as though the killing were Jeremy Holland’s misfortune nearly as much as his victim’s. He hung out at a neighborhood pizza joint in West Oakland and told me I could find him there most afternoons if he wasn’t working.

The next time I was in Oakland I found Jeremy Holland at the pizza joint as surely as if we’d had an appointment. He finished his beer, stuck an Oakland A’s cap on his head, and we walked through the neighborhood he’d returned to, on and off, all his life. “Draws me back, the old plantation, no matter how far I roam,” he said as we passed battered old houses that still had friendly stoops with kids playing on them. His reference to a plantation was both sentimental and ironic; it was what he had for a past. “Plus I can generally get me a job of some kind of work here.”

Jeremy Holland is a short, wiry, middle-aged man, able to pivot easily on his feet, on which he wears beat-up Nike running shoes. His face looked traveled. It could have been a roadmap of the west, displaying his 15 years in Colorado and Arizona, his Los Angeles decade, his return to Oakland six years ago. Yet only his eyes looked tired. The rest of him was still ready for any shift of fortune. He wasn’t working steadily now, having been fired from his last job, as a cake and pie baker, for hitting his foreman with a mixing paddle. Though he had also been an upholsterer off and on for 30 years, he hadn’t been able to land that kind of work lately. But he still did pickup jobs, and he was not looking for handouts. “I’m not on welfare because I got my pride, man,” Jeremy Holland said. “I do odds and ends for people, fix a car here, paint a fence there, pick up bottles and cans and turn them in. It is not necessary to be humiliated for $200, $300 a month from welfare.”

This man who described himself as having too much pride for welfare had also been convicted of murder. He saw no contradiction. It may have been his pride that cost him his last job. As Jeremy Holland tells it, the foreman in the pastry kitchen knew he had done a stretch in San Quentin for murder.

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