The Unwinding Read online

  It frustrated her to see the house on Charlotte, with the gable off to the right side and the brick chimney in back, where she had lived for twenty years. The house had been vacant since the mid-2000s, and the yellow paint on the clapboards was weathering bare. It would have been easy to push open her old front door or climb in through a hollow window and walk upstairs to the second-floor front bedroom that had been hers when she was little, but she sat idling the Pontiac and stared through the windshield. “Oh my God,” she muttered. She was afraid she would feel a little emotional if she went in. She knew the wiring and woodwork had been stripped, and her granny had worked so hard for that house.

  Granny was Tammy’s great-grandmother, her mother’s father’s mother. It was Granny who had raised Tammy from a girl. There was a lot Tammy didn’t know for certain about Granny. She had two birth dates, one in 1904 (according to Social Security) and one in 1900 (according to herself). Granny’s mother, Big Mama, might have been born near Raleigh, North Carolina, and sold off by her family to a white man in Richmond, Virginia, where Granny was born (unless she was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina), and Granny very well could have been a mulatto—she was very fair, with long straight hair. Granny’s name was Virginia Miller, but when she had a son he was given the last name Thomas because by then Big Mama had married Henry Thomas, Granny’s stepfather, and Papa Thomas and Big Mama raised the boy.

  Tammy tried to research the family history at the Freedom Center in Cincinnati, but a lot of it had vanished. Granny didn’t appear in the 1920 census, and in 1930 she was listed as a “niece” in the Thomas household, age seventeen, with a son, age five—so the census had her age wrong, and also her place in the family. The farther Tammy went, the more mysteries she ran into. There were other names in the 1930 census, great-aunts and great-uncles listed as Big Mama’s children who were not hers, which was normal in black families. “You took care of the kids,” Tammy said later, “and the kids would be raised alongside cousins and brothers and sisters. But it creates a lot of confusion because you really don’t know whose is whose, and they didn’t talk about it.” Granny never talked about these things, either, and now she was gone.

  One thing Tammy knew almost for sure was that Granny had had to drop out of school near Winston-Salem in the eighth grade and go to work in the tobacco fields. In the twenties she left the South and came up to Ohio, where she found day work cleaning houses, and later a job in the arc engraving department of the Youngstown Vindicator. During the Depression the rest of the Thomas household—Papa Thomas, Big Mama, various great-aunts and great-uncles, and Granny’s son—followed her north and settled in Struthers, across the Mahoning River on the southeastern edge of Youngstown, where there was a coking plant with a smokestack that shot out blue flames. Some of Tammy’s relatives got jobs in the steel mills, and the family owned several houses in Struthers. Papa Thomas brought his farming skills north and cultivated the yards. They had plum trees, an apple tree, a peach tree, a chestnut tree, and five cherry trees. Two of the neighbor women made jelly and swapped it with Tammy’s great-aunt for plum wine. When Tammy was a girl, she and Granny would visit their Struthers family on weekends. “To me this was living in the country,” she said, “and as I grew older I realized our family who lived up here kind of had it going on.”

  Tammy’s line of the family did not have it going on. Her grandfather came back from World War II with a heroin addiction. His wife became an alcoholic. In 1966, their daughter Vickie, a pretty, fine-boned seventeen-year-old, gave birth to a girl and named her Tammy. The father was a street-smart fifteen-year-old from the projects named Gary Sharp, nicknamed Razor. He and Vickie had no use for each other. She dropped out of high school, and soon after becoming a mother she started using. Vickie and Tammy went to live with Granny, who was approaching seventy and working as a maid, cleaning, cooking, and providing companionship for a rich widow on the north side for around fifty dollars a week. The care of the baby fell to Granny.

  They lived on Lane Avenue after the I-680 expressway came through Granny’s old apartment—Tammy, Granny, Vickie, and Tammy’s grandfather and his wife and children, while whoever else came in and out. When Granny was off at work, pretty much everyone in the household was using. Vickie also smoked, and sometimes she fell asleep with a cigarette still burning. As a little girl Tammy would try to stay awake until after her mother went to sleep, then take the cigarette out of her hand. From the age of three she was taking care of her mother.

  She loved sleeping in her granny’s bed, but sometimes—less often—she would climb in with her mother, and maybe because she never got enough of that when she was little, she kept doing it as an adult, especially when she wasn’t feeling good and needed comfort, just crawled into her mom’s bed, even at the hospital with the nurses telling her to get out.

  It was Granny who took Tammy to church on Sunday with the Thomas relatives in Struthers, and shopping in Youngstown on Saturday. They would put on their gloves and hats, and Tammy would wear her little lace tops and patent leather shoes, and they would ride the bus downtown to West Federal Street, stop by the shoe store where Granny’s sister Jesse worked, then have lunch at Woolworth’s, shop for household things at McCrory’s Five and Dime and meat at Huges’s, look at clothes at Strouss’s without spending, and buy a dress at Higbee’s. Granny kept her money at Home Savings and Loan, but she didn’t have a checking account, so they would also go downtown to pay the bills, stopping by the electric company, the gas company, the water company, the phone company.

  At home in the kitchen Tammy would be under Granny’s feet watching her cook collard greens fresh from the Thomas garden in Struthers. She loved being around older women and doing them little favors and listening to them. She realized from early on that they had wisdom to pass on to her. She wanted to grow up to be a nurse and take care of people.

  Granny performed day work in a lot of white homes in Youngstown, but the family she was with longest was the Purnells, and by the end she was spending weeknights there. Sometimes Tammy went with Granny to work and cleaned the glass doorknobs with something Granny put on a rag, or squirted the clean laundry in a basket under Granny’s ironing board. Once, when Vickie disappeared for a few days, Tammy stayed with Granny in the Purnell house, in her quarters up on the third floor. She watched Mrs. Purnell feed the squirrels out of her hand from the back porch, and Mrs. Purnell gave her a Mickey Mouse phone, and later a bedroom set.

  Tammy was too young to know it, but the Purnells were one of the wealthiest and most prominent families in Youngstown. Anne Tod Purnell was a direct descendant of David Tod, founder of the first coal mine on Brier Hill, which in 1844 initiated iron manufacturing in the Mahoning Valley just in time for the Civil War, when Tod was elected governor of Ohio. Her husband, Frank Purnell, was chairman of the board of Dollar Savings Bank and, from 1930 to 1950, president of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, the fifth-largest steelmaker in the country and the largest employer in the Valley. The Purnells lived in the upper-class district around Crandall Park on the north side, in a brick mansion at 280 Tod Lane, with seven bedrooms, four bathrooms, several fireplaces, a library, a ballroom, a conservatory, and a carriage house. They belonged to Youngstown’s industrial Protestant elite in the middle of the twentieth century, when the city was at its zenith, an elite that had controlled Youngstown since the Civil War—controlled it to an extent that was unusual even for a small, landlocked, parochial steel town—and that was already fading by the time a black girl with roots in North Carolina was born on the east side in 1966. And yet Tammy had a living memory of it, in the Purnell mansion.

  * * *

  From the 1920s until 1977, twenty-five uninterrupted miles of steel mills ran northwest to southeast along the Mahoning River: from the Republic Steel plants around Warren and Niles, through the U.S. Steel plant in McDonald and the Youngstown Sheet and Tube blast furnaces on Brier Hill, to U.S. Steel’s Ohio Works right in the middle of Youngstown, and on down to the sp
rawling Sheet and Tube plants in Campbell and Struthers. The blast furnaces ran twenty-four hours a day, and the wall of heat, the clang of metal and hiss of steam, the pervasive smell of sulfur dioxide, the smudged charcoal sky by day and hellish red glare by night, the soot-covered houses, the dead river, the packed taverns, the prayers to Saint Joseph the Provider, patron saint of workers, the rumble of train cars carrying iron ore and limestone and coal over dense networks of tracks through the city—all of it said that Youngstown was steel, nothing but steel, that everyone here owed life to the molten pour of iron shaped to human ends, that without it there was no life.

  The city’s industrial families—the Tods, Butlers, Stambaughs, Campbells, Wicks—made sure things stayed that way. They were the only elite that Youngstown produced, and they prevented other industries from taking hold and competing for its large immigrant workforce. Youngstown had two symphony orchestras, one made up entirely of steelworkers and their families. The city was prosperous and inward, isolated in a valley halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. And, neighborhood by neighborhood, it was cut off from itself—Italians from Slovaks and Hungarians, native-born workers from foreigners, laborers from managers, blacks from everyone else.

  Youngstown Sheet and Tube was the city’s largest steelmaker to remain independent and locally owned, with four blast furnaces at the Campbell Works and two at the Brier Hill Works just north of downtown. Sheet and Tube embodied the ferocity of industrial work in Youngstown—rapacious growth, brutal conditions, segregation of mill jobs by ethnicity and race, unalterable hostility to unions, constant strife. Frank Purnell started working at Sheet and Tube as a fifteen-year-old hall boy in the city office in 1902, two years after the company was founded. In 1911 he married Anne Tod, considerably improving his social position in Youngstown, and in the early twenties they built a grand house on Tod Lane. He rose through the ranks of Sheet and Tube to become president in 1930. In official portraits he wore the starched collar of his time, with a watch chain hanging from his suit vest—a hatchet-nosed man with a double chin, a tousle of silver hair, and the faint smile of imperturbable confidence that belonged to a secure capitalist class.

  In the thirties, the old order began to give way. In 1936, John L. Lewis, the volcanic head of the mine workers’ union and of the Committee for Industrial Organization, announced the formation of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in a Pittsburgh skyscraper where the steel barons also had their offices; he placed his deputy, a mild Scotsman named Philip Murray, at its head. Lewis and Murray’s aim was to achieve what no one had ever succeeded in doing: finally bring the workers of this giant industry under a union. Soon, organizers were driving into steel cities like Youngstown and talking with workers in ethnic clubs, churches, and meeting halls. But the thinking of the new industrial organizers was the opposite of parochial: they preached class consciousness above ethnicity, religion, race, and sex—not in the name of overthrowing capitalism, but in order to bring workers into the middle class, making them full-fledged members of an egalitarian democracy. Lewis’s tactics were radical, but his goals were entirely within the American system.

  In the spring of 1937, twenty-five thousand workers in the Mahoning Valley joined a national steel strike. Banned from the airwaves, they mounted loudspeakers on trucks and went neighborhood to neighborhood to announce the next meeting or picket. They also stockpiled baseball bats. Almost none of the strikers were black. In the past, black workers had been brought up from the South as strikebreakers, and for decades they were consigned to the dirtiest, most menial jobs in the mills, like scarfer—taking the defects out of the steel with a blowtorch. They shared a deep mutual wariness with their white coworkers, one that even the idealistic rhetoric of SWOC couldn’t overcome.

  It became known as the Little Steel strike. The organizers didn’t target the behemoth U.S. Steel, which had already yielded to labor’s economic power and recognized the union in March, having just the month before been given the object lesson of a successful sit-down strike by auto workers at General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan. Instead, SWOC went after a group of smaller companies, including Republic Steel, headquartered in Chicago, and Sheet and Tube. Unlike U.S. Steel, which was a national company with a larger sense of its role in a modern industrial society, the Little Steel companies were narrow in outlook and regarded unions with undiluted hatred. They kept the mills open by forming groups of “loyal employees,” and they set up heavily armed private forces that were resupplied by air on landing strips built inside the gates.

  Violence was inevitable. It came first in South Chicago, on Memorial Day, when police opened fire into the backs of a crowd of union sympathizers, killing ten men and wounding women and children. The following month it was Youngstown’s turn, and on June 19, two strikers were killed outside the gate of a Republic Steel plant. Frances Perkins, President Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, called for arbitration, but instead the owners asked for the mills to be protected by state troops. The governor of Ohio sent in the National Guard, the strike was broken, and the workers returned to their jobs. Altogether, seventeen people were killed in the Little Steel strike of 1937. The public began to turn against labor’s new militancy, and in the short run the companies won.

  But the defeat of 1937 led to victory in 1942, when the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Republic and Sheet and Tube had used illegal tactics to crush the strike. The companies were forced to recognize SWOC and enter collective bargaining. Youngstown became a solidly union city, just as World War II was beginning, bringing with it the economic security that workers had always craved—even, as the years went by, for black workers. The mill was hot, filthy, body- and soul-crushing, but its wages and pensions came to represent the golden age of American economic life.

  Frank Purnell continued to run Youngstown Sheet and Tube after the war, speaking the new institutional language of labor-management relations, while the old class conflicts remained alive. In 1950, he stepped down as president and became chairman of the board, and in 1953 he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. His widow, Anne, lived on for almost two more decades in the mansion at 280 Tod Lane—years when most of the other elite families sold their mills and left Youngstown for more cosmopolitan, better-smelling locales. The steel companies continued to keep out other industries that might have competed for Youngstown’s labor force. In the fifties, when Henry Ford II was exploring the possibility of opening an auto plant on a railroad scrap yard north of the city, local industrialists and absentee-owned corporations threw up enough obstacles to kill the idea. In 1950, Edward DeBartolo built one of the country’s first strip malls out in Boardman, and the growth of shopping plazas began to sap the commercial heart of town. White workers moved to the suburbs for work in lighter industry, opening up good jobs in the steel mills for the first time to the black workers who stayed behind. As transportation costs rose, the geography of American steelmaking moved to deepwater ports like Cleveland, Gary, Baltimore, and Chicago, and Youngstown’s steel industry stagnated while foreign competition began to catch up.

  Finally, in 1969, Youngstown Sheet and Tube—by then the country’s eighth-largest steelmaker, and the last one in the city to remain locally owned—was sold to Lykes Corporation, a New Orleans–based shipbuilding conglomerate, which planned to pull money out of its new acquisition, using the company’s cash flow to pay down debt and expand other operations, eventually cutting its dividend and dropping “Youngstown” from its name. So by the early 1970s, though no one knew it yet, the city was already in a state of decline.

  The Purnells had no children, and the widow lived alone, except for her sister, Lena, and also an aging colored maid named Virginia. After the sister died, and Mrs. Purnell fell and broke her hip on her way to tend the furnace in the carriage house, the maid began staying overnight Mondays through Fridays and became Mrs. Purnell’s companion. Anne Tod Purnell died in 1971. During the months when the disposition of the estate remained uncertain, the maid was brought to live
in the mansion as a caretaker, along with her granddaughter and five-year-old great-granddaughter.

  * * *

  Tammy couldn’t remember how long they lived in the Purnell mansion, but at the time it felt like forever. When they moved there, the tulips and rose garden were in bloom, and Tammy started kindergarten there, and they celebrated Christmas there. When they arrived, some of the furniture was being taken out of the house, and all the beautiful rugs were gone from the great foyer. Soon after that, the living room furniture disappeared, and at Christmas the dining room table was gone, and then someone tore out the chandelier that had hung in the dining room, leaving exposed wires, which outraged Granny. Piece by piece the estate was dismantled before the sale of the house. Mrs. Purnell’s driver was given her car, and the gardener and household staff, Granny included, received five thousand dollars each. Tammy’s mother kept Mrs. Purnell’s silver-framed mirror and silver hairbrush. At Christmas Tammy got a bicycle, and she learned to ride it in the empty living room.

  The house was bigger and fancier than anything she could imagine. There were so many places to hide, and flowers she’d never seen before in the garden, and a front-loading washing machine in one of the seven rooms in the basement, nickel-plated counters in the kitchen, and a buzzer on the dining room floor to call servants. Tammy, who wasn’t supposed to play in that part of the house, once stepped on it and scared herself when the thing went off. Her favorite room was Miss Lena’s old bedroom on the second floor, with a back porch. It was painted green, like the rest of the house, except for Miss Lena’s long bathroom, which had gold-colored tiles and a stand-up shower that was amber. They shared the bathroom with Tammy’s mother when she was there, but Vickie didn’t like being in the big empty house—she believed that it was haunted. Tammy found a hoop slip in an old trunk, with wire rings and ruffles, and she would put it on and twirl around the third-floor ballroom the way she imagined people dancing in an earlier time. She descended the grand stairway like a princess, and she performed shows on the circular patio for an audience of bushes. Granny kept her close to the house, forbidding her to leave the yard or climb the big tree, which she did anyway. On weekends they walked down to Crandall Park and fed the swans.