The Potatoland Diaries - Chapter 11

Afterward

In retrospect, I have to confess that my potato-strewn path of glory ended on an ugly note.

I was horrified when I realized that some of the people I was working with were racists. The truck drivers who took our spuds away to distant fields were sometimes Hispanic, and one guy was black. I didn't think much about it, of course. I thought so little, in fact, that it took me days to realize that I was amidst some world-class xenophobes.

I was working away on the conveyor belt, and something was said. At first it completely went over my head, because it was so unexpected, it just came to my ears as nonsense.

One guy, I think it was Barry, the guy who looked out for rocks on the rollers, occasionally shouted out, "I'm gonna get a whip." Busy as I was with potatoes, and as much as Barry chattered, I just figured he was giving Angela a hard time or something. I thought it was a weird, abstract thing to be saying, but I'd always thought he was a bit odd, so I just ignored it.

Then later in the break shed, something else was said. At first, again, it nearly escaped my notice. Barry and some of the other guys started talking about the truck driver, referring to him as "Sugar Ray" and saying something about him coming to work in his pajamas.

I hadn't paid much attention to the truck drivers. They were usually pretty far away, doing things I didn't understand to their big, scary trucks. But I had noticed that the black truck driver wore a black dew rag on his head and long red basketball shorts. That's not clothing you see every day in Bozeman.

If you don't live in Montana, you have no idea what it's like to live in a place where practically everyone is white. Bozeman and the surrounding suburban sprawl is home to about 50,000 white folks. Statistically, it's 95.3% white, 1.5% Hispanic, 1.4% Native American and 1.2% multiracial, which leaves people of African descent sharing the remaining .5% with everyone else who falls into the "other" category. In other words, the entire black population of Bozeman could probably fit in my house.

So Barry and a couple of the other guys were talking, and I realized, suddenly, that they were talking about this black truck driver, calling him Sugar Ray. It irritated me, but they have a culture of picking on everyone, so I lumped it with the way they called one truck driver Tumbleweed, because of his puffy hair. Then suddenly, to my nausea, I realized that when Barry had been yelling "I'm gonna get a whip," he hadn't just been having Tourette's outbursts. He had been taunting this truck driver. It all started to piece together and I realized that that, and other things I had been tuning out, were classic, shitty, cowardly racism.

Needless to say, the minute I put it all together, I felt like strangling Barry. Obviously, he was afraid to face the man and tell him "I don't like you because you're black," so instead, he shouted taunts under the protection of the loudly running conveyor belt. He followed up with the stereotyped nickname, and other little jabs that could be swept away with a two-faced "we're just kidding you, can't you take a joke?"

The worst part was that while Jim, the father figure in our Family Affair, gingerly steered Barry from the subject, he didn't send Barry packing. I wanted him to stand up and punch Barry in the jaw, like John Wayne. I wanted him to defend the honor of this isolated community with ways that I had worked so hard to respect, despite their strangeness.

Of course, it occurred to me that Jim might think Barry was an idiot and an asshole who did deserve a good John Wayne punch, but weighed that knowledge against the shortage of experienced potato sorters available. Still, there was a raw spot in my mind that wondered if Jim was actually a racist, too. How could it be? A man so deeply faithful... I don't know much about religion, but if I understand Christianity at all, it's not supposed to make people hate their fellow man. Granted, I know it backfires a good share of the time, but I had hoped better of Jim's clan. I still do hope.

Still, I was sickened and saddened. I felt unwelcome and outnumbered. I didn't know whether to leave in a huff, confront Jim and insist that he have a talk with the group about racism and set down some ground rules for appropriate conversation, confront Barry personally (possibly by busting his car windows), or just remove my personal feelings and continue a passionless observation their foreign ways. Worse yet, I didn't like what my wishy-washyness said about me. If I wanted so much for Jim to stand up and be a hero for my ideals, why was I too small and too scared to do it myself?

The whole experience stripped away the magic fog from Potatoland. I saw that ignorance is never so isolated that it is harmless. I saw it, but I still didn't know what to do about it.

So, to my shame, instead of standing up and being the person I wish I were, I took the easy way out. I quietly culled myself from the load. I'd like to think that I'm worthy of being among the heart shaped potatoes. But I'm not so sure.

The Potatoland Diaries - Chapter 10

The potatoland diaries eulogy, May 7, 2007

"What happened?"
The potatoland diaries were cut sort in their starchy prime. Sadly, I got a real job (sort of) so my potato sorting life, along with the free time that its takes to blog about other people's lunch boxes up and dried on the vine. But hey, eight days. That's a hell of lot of potatoes.