NCWN

Every time I go to the dress boutique at Hunter Ridge, the sales clerk thinks I’m trying to steal something. I can’t blame her. I look suspicious—but I can’t help it. I like to window shop after I get off from Franklin’s Barbecue, and I always smell like chicken and pork grease and stale coffee mixed with a hint of dampness. Seems like there’s always a ketchup stain running down my sleeve or bit of barbecue sauce on my collar. Or maybe it’s A-1. Looks like I’m slowly oozing blood. Death by condiments.

I have an hour to kill before Jim picks me up, and he’s always late. Always. I don’t like waiting on a dark corner for an hour like some washed-up, middle-aged whore. So I cross the street to the boutique and watch for him out the window.

Every time Jim arrives he reeks of cigarettes and stale beer, wearing that gritty odor like a badge of honor. Ever since we had to sell my Toyota, Jim acts like he’s part of some invisible underground revolution that only he can see and hear, and I have to nod my head and play along and pretend I see what he sees, just like I did when my three-year-old niece had that imaginary dog named Duke. I try not to give Jim a hard time about it, but all I can think about when I’m placing take-out orders is how many of my overtime hours he’s been drinking away.

I shouldn’t let him drive me home, but I’m afraid to take the wheel. You never know what men are made of—I mean psychologically—until you try to take the wheel. Some of them just can’t handle it; they feel like they’ve lost control of everything in life except their truck and damn if they’re going to let someone take that from them. I’m afraid Jim will just break into pieces and float away on the wind to join his imaginary revolution.

Of course, I never buy anything when I go in the dress shop, and maybe that’s why the clerk hates me. As I enter the shop, she glares at me, convinced I’m going to cram the latest Liz Claiborne into my pocketbook and bolt. She watches me the entire time; I know because I feel a sharp tinge at the bottom edge of my shoulder blade like she’s drilling a hole through my skin. I call her Bea, although I’m sure that’s not her name. It’s probably something more like Beatrice or Belinda or something that has at least three syllables. Bea’s makeup is always perfect, and her deep coffee complexion looks like she was sculpted from dark marble. Her nails are perfectly manicured the way I used to have mine done every other Thursday. I stuff my stubby nails into my pocket—they won’t allow us to have long nails since that guy in Conetoe found a fake fingernail in his fried chicken livers and sued. The policy came down from corporate, and if it came down from corporate, it might as well have come down from Mount Sinai.

I have $40 in tips crammed into a wad in my pocket. I nervously pass my stubby fingers over the dollars because I’m afraid if I stop touching them, I’ll forget where I put them.

I used to hate Bea for her pulverizing stares, but now I realize I can’t blame her. I would feel the same way if I had to walk a mile in her $85 heels.

Before I realize, I’m in the hat section. All kinds of hats. Black women know their hats; at least, that’s what Mamma always told me. Every Sunday when I drive by the Mount Zion AME church, I see the ladies cascade out of the sanctuary wearing these beautiful, elaborate hats—hats with lace, hats with feathers, hats with beads, hats with sparkles, hats with pins, hats without pins, hats that match dresses, hats that don’t match dresses, hats that cascade down from heaven like Jacob’s ladder. The hats remind me of the head scarves featured in the line drawings of biblical matriarchs plastered all over our Sunday school walls. Ruth. Deborah. Sarah. I swear the Technicolor glory makes me hear music.

I always wanted a bright pink hat with a fake stargazer lily on the crown and one of those velvet, forty-dollar hatboxes to store it in, the same kind of hatboxes you see folks carrying for the Queen of England whenever she goes on diplomatic visits and has to keep all of her hats looking perfectly fresh. 

“Can I help you?” Bea slithers silently beside me.

“Yeah, you can help me.”

She tries to hide her surprise, but her overly mascaraed eyelashes clap together awkwardly. Today I’m getting a hat.

“Is there something you’d like to try on?” Bea is a good foot taller than me, like an ebony Amazon daring me to put any of the crisp, silk creations on my sweaty, $5.99-buffet hair.

“Do you have one of those pink hats with the stargazer lilies on it?”

“If it’s not on the floor, we don’t have it.”

“Do you have any plain pink hats?”

“If it’s not on the floor, we don’t have it.”

I pick up a bright yellow hat with a daisy and black lace. I want to put it on my head, but then I catch a glimpse in the mirror of my greasy, blond strings falling out of their braids. I want to gently pull the strands behind my ear with my stubby, plain fingernails and settle the hat onto my head like a crown and see how it looks against my pasty, pale skin. Instead, I hold it up to my cheek, seeing if the yellow was so bright it would suck out what little blush was left in my tired cheeks. I can feel Bea exhale with relief when I place the hat back on its stand. There’s a black pillbox hat that makes me think of Jackie Kennedy, and for a moment I picture myself sitting in the convertible in Dallas, holding on to my husband while the world erupts in madness.

“Try this one.” Bea hands me a light green bucket hat with a subtle and shy yellow ribbon. “It would bring out your eyes.”

Maybe Bea isn’t afraid of me. Maybe she’s afraid of becoming me. I can’t blame her. I don’t want to become me, either.

I put on the hat and look in the mirror. It does bring out the gray and green flecks in my eyes—flecks that, to be quite honest, I’m surprised are still there. It’s $55 but is 40 percent off.

“I can return it, right? I mean, if it doesn’t fit or it doesn’t go with my outfit.”

“Of course you can return it if it doesn’t fit.” She nods and plays along. She knows I don’t have any intention of wearing it at all. She knows I’m going to take it home, feel guilty, and return it the next day. But for a few seconds in the boutique mirror, I am one of the biblical matriarchs … Mary. Lydia. Rebecca.

I pull the wadded-up $40 from my pocket—two tens and four fives. 

I hear the croupy cough of Jim’s pickup. I hand Bea the hat, which she returns to the display. I leave the store and settle into the passenger seat beside Jim.

“I almost bought a hat today.”

“You don’t need one. You don’t look good in hats,” he says.

“I don’t think so either.”

We take a shortcut through an unfinished housing development budding with naked plywood. The muffler hacks again.

“Jim, we need a new muffler.”

“We need a lot of things.” He laughs the way people laugh when nothing is funny anymore.

I shove my fingers into my pocket and rub the cash again.

When we get home, I do the dishes from last night while he checks out the sports scores.

I take a shower. He brushes his teeth. We crawl into bed.

We start to make obligatory love, but we both lose interest about a third of the way through.

Tomorrow, I will do the same thing.

“Corner of Martinsville Road”
By Marilyn Wolf

Red earth, upturned,
ravaged land
greets me every morning where
an old patch of trees
used to stand,
overgrown and quiet,
a tiny spot of wildness
between two busy streets,
watching over passing traffic,
shade while waiting for the light to change,
refuge for city birds and urban squirrels,
homeless now.

That patch of trees,
older than any councilman,
commissioner, or developer
who stood jury and judge
over its fate,
is gone now, chopped
down, roots dug up.

Nothing left but red,
raw earth,
a wounding near the heart of town,
waiting for retail space,
to erect itself
long before
any healing can occur.

I could sense the outcome as soon as I pulled into the town of Butner. “No BioLab” signs dotted the roadside, the orange circle and slash now part of the local lexicon. The parking lot of the Butner-Stem Middle School was full. TV news vans, antennas erect, hugged the drop-off lane.

I was here to cover a public hearing on the proposed construction of a National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility, NBAF (pronounced “en-baff”) for short. In the wake of 9/11, the federal government realized we are extremely vulnerable to an act of bioterrorism. There are a number of diseases which, though not necessarily fatal to humans, could devastate our agricultural industry. The government’s biodefense lab at Plum Island, New York, has exceeded its lifetime and is in dire need of replacement. The mission of NBAF would be to provide a spacious and secure facility where researchers could conduct tests on large animals (pigs, cows) and develop new vaccines.

The Department of Homeland Security was charged with siting and building NBAF. They had narrowed their selection down to five possible locations: Athens, Georgia; Manhattan, Kansas; San Antonio; Texas; Flora, Mississippi; and Butner. Butner was reputed to be high on the list because of its rural setting, available land, and the support of scientists at North Carolina StateUniversity’s School of Veterinary Medicine and the NC Biotechnology Center, among others. Butner was already home to a federal prison housing some of the nation’s most dangerous inmates and a state mental hospital. Surely, the people would be willing to consider a research lab, albeit one housing dangerous viruses with no known cure.

At the entrance to the school, a tall man dressed in a mock hazmat suit fielded questions from a TV news reporter. His tone was agitated, his accent distinctly Northern. The phrase “not from around here” popped into my mind. But not from around here doesn’t mean what it used to in North Carolina.

I can remember when Granville County was as rural as anywhere in this state. If you drove through the county seat of Oxford, you were likely to end up behind a tractor hauling a wagonload of tobacco. The town had been the scene of fiery civil rights demonstrations in 1970, but had since gone back to its quiet ways. Now, ex-hippie friends who worked at Duke University and ResearchTriangle Park were building “intentional communities” in Granville County. I didn’t know if their ilk was behind this, but clearly the rhetoric and tools of the sixties protest movement had arrived.

Beside the hazmat guy, a group of children were singing “Glory, Glory Hallelujah” with the chorus changed to “We don’t want your dirty biolab.” Mom, who had no doubt scripted the song, waved a baton over their heads.

Inside the lobby, I was greeted by a heavyset woman wearing a black and orange T-shirt emblazoned with the letters GNAT, an acronym for Granville Non-Violent Action Team. The back of her shirt read, “Whatever It Takes.”

“Are you a reporter?” she said, eyeing my notebook and camera. “You’ll want a copy of these.”

She handed me a sheaf of flyers trumpeting the organization’s opposition to NBAF and urging people to sign an online petition. “They say if an infected mosquito were to get out of the lab, they’d have to shoot all the deer,” she told me. “Good luck with that.”

I thanked her and made my way to the gymnasium. The room was thick with GNATs, senior citizens, and a handful of suits (university admins? DC consultants?). Police officers scanned the crowd for potential troublemakers. Clustered behind the podium were the speakers from homeland security. They had the hangdog look of prisoners awaiting execution.

I read through the flyers. Some of the concerns seemed reasonable—all buildings/systems are subject to failure, researchers can intentionally or accidentally carry viruses off-site, quick evacuation of prisoners and patients from the federal correctional institute and John Umstead Hospital would be impossible. Others bordered on the absurd. Referring to the infamous Tuskegee experiment in which the U.S. Public Health Service secretly infected illiterate black sharecroppers with syphilis, one flyer stated that if NBAF were built in Butner, “the entire WORLD will reasonably suspect the US para-military and other agencies will AGAIN be tempted to use adult & underage Black captives as human guinea pigs for biological warfare research. Why else would a Biological Warfare R&D lab be built at the highest-risk site surrounded by thousands of mostly ‘non-Aryan’ prisoners and mental patients?”

A moderator called the hearing to order. She briefly described the procedure for the hearing, then introduced the NBAF program manager. A thin man with a small face took the stand. Jamie Johnson turned on his PowerPoint display and scrolled through a summary of the one-thousand-page Draft Environmental Impact Statement. He cited the potential benefits of NBAF—new biologic knowledge, added jobs, and enhanced health and safety. Under normal operation, he said, NBAF would have “negligible” or “minor” adverse impacts on the chosen community. Should there be an accidental release, say a mosquito infected with foot-and-mouth disease, the consequences could be “significant.” Millions of animals would have to be destroyed (FMD is not transmittable to humans) and U.S. tourism, trade, and agriculture would be devastated. But, Johnson said, the chances of an accidental release were extremely low.

The moderator opened the floor to the audience. A woman approached the microphone. In trembling voice, she demanded to know how many accidental releases there’d been from the government’s Plum Island lab.

“There was one accidental release in 1978, thirty years ago,” Johnson said.

“The appendix to your report lists nine.”

“The others were cross-contaminations of animals within the facility.”

A bearded man identifying himself as a family physician questioned the trustworthiness of the Department of Homeland Security. “This facility will no doubt be run by a contractor. Who oversees the contractor? The Department of Homeland Security is a political organization. We don’t trust the Department of Homeland Security.”

The audience erupted in huzzahs.

A woman wanted to know how the pathogens would be transported to the facility.

“Agents from overseas are shipped by airline,” Johnson said. “We greet the package and transport it through customs. They are transported to the NBAF by courier vehicles monitored by GPS.”

“What happens if the plane crashes?”

The hazmat guy, headgear removed to reveal a long, gray ponytail, strode to the fore. A policeman edged toward the podium. “Your report says NBAF will employ between 300 and 350 people,” Hazmat fumed. “But Appendix D says the facility could provide space for up to 600. Just how many people are you planning to bring down here?”

Johnson looked confused.

“Have you even read your own report?”

I stopped taking notes. It wasn’t that the questions were all unreasonable. But the hostility of the speakers was unsettling. No one voiced a word of support. Where, I wondered, were the scientists from NC State whom I’d heard talk of the boon this facility would be for the area? Where were the appeals to patriotism? I wondered what these speakers, many of whom said they worked for the federal prison or the hospital, would say if the government tried to locate those facilities in Butner today. Bring the most dangerous prisoners into our community? You must be insane!

But who could blame them? North Carolina’s rural areas and small towns have been stuck with all sorts of enterprises—landfills, hog farms—that have made life unpleasant and ruined property values. I’d made a career out of writing articles warning people of such dangers. Now, suspicion once reserved for nuclear power plants near big cities had spread to incinerators, asphalt plants, wind farms—you name it—anywhere in the state.

A few weeks after the hearing, I called a reporter who had covered the public hearings in each of the towns selected as finalists. I wanted to know what the public reaction had been.

“The Georgia crowd had a lot of debate back and forth,” Bill said. “They were about half for and half against. The Kansas crowd was about two-to-one in favor of NBAF. Mississippi and Texas were strongly supportive. Butner was the only place that was uniformly opposed.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. “I wonder what it is about us?”

“The BANANA syndrome,” Bill said.

“Banana?”

“An extreme case of NIMBY. Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody.”

AIRSTRIKE

 

Follow
where it goes

where it ends up
beyond

the wings
in the wind turning

the blistering
speed

screaming
eyes                                               

taking hope
hostage

into the cracked
center

that justifies
everything